Quick Shout-Out: Dev Night is tonight from 5pm to 1am. Bring a laptop with Unity installed. Have Sculptris installed too if you’re participating in the artist initiative.

So what’s next at Cipher Prime? We have a few projects on hand actually. While Dain and Andrei are in the process of wrapping up the iPad version of Splice, Will and myself have been working on two other side projects as we gear up for Auditorium 2: Duet.

The project I’m working on right now is really a way to help familiarize myself with the Unity developer environment, as well as the studio’s production pipeline. It’s a game called Feedback.

We have another project planned that will actually lead into development on Auditorium 2 : Duet. It’s a multi-player, arcade-style shooter that we’re currently calling Intake. The project will last exactly four weeks, and will help us establish development roles for each team member while building out the framework for Duet. Intake should serve as a pretty good test run of our new production pipeline as well as the framework. What we learn with Intake will go a long way in helping us with production on Duet.

Among the features we’re testing include multi-player mode and matchmaking, leaderboards, achievements, cross platform support, and cloud saving. Splice supports some of these features, but much of it was implemented late in the dev cycle, leading to a number of setbacks. Having the architecture for it from square one with _Duet _will give us more time for creative development.

If we are able to pull together a polished game in just four weeks time, Intake will be released through the Cipher Prime Store. If not, well, it’ll get placed on the back burner for a while, but we will have learned some valuable lessons from the effort. Our focus from there will be to get the level editor built for Duet.

This road to Duet is an eventful and exciting one for sure!