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Today I’m supposed to talk of the way I work on the sound effects of the game (that’s what was planned if you remember my last article on this forum), but it will be for next time. I think that, after talking for so long about the technique of development, writing so much text about the production stage, and receiving few (but precious) feedback, I am allowed to share my state of mind. You know I’m human, I make mistakes, I get tired, sometimes I’m not happy, sometimes I should better shut my mouth close (maybe today?). And sometimes, my human feelings wake up during the development of the game. No, it’s true, I’m not an alien working from a distant planet of the Solar System, and I admit that the life of a small indie dev is difficult! As a result, please allow me to make a point on the current development of Catyph. Right now. And then, next week or so, I will talk of the sound effects. Promise, I won’t come back on my mere person later, it’s only for today. Thank you!

I’m sure that the development of Catyph must seem very slow, and that some of you are starting to wonder when the game will release and what’s happening. But I’m also sure that you understand how difficult and exhausting it is to create a game alone, at home!

The truth is that the development is going very well, but I’ve been a bit tired lately. After some small health problems, I have to be more careful and I think the game will be delayed to 2015. This is not official yet, I still need to see how the project will progress in November, but it’s more likely I won’t make it this year… The production of the graphics, in particular, is taking much more time than I expected. Moon Tytaah is much more vast than the Ark in ASA, plus there are video transitions between your different moves within the game. As a result, it takes me longer than I thought to build everything.

Also, Visionaire Studio is a great engine to develop adventure games (because it’s not expensive, and doesn’t need a single line of code), but it has some interface problems that make the workflow very slow, compared to Adventure Maker that I had used to create A Space Adventure. Finally I expect to lose a lot of time on the localisation process, because working on texts is always complicated. I hope you understand.

All these reasons are, in my opinon, a proof of quality: better gameplay, HD graphics, 5 languages, a vast world to visit… I prefer to take more time and work carefully, in order to make Catyph the game that we all expect, even if it means releasing the game later. So please don’t be disapointed if I ever delayed to 2015. On top of that I may have other surprises to share in the meantime. And hey! don’t forget that I’m working with no money on Catyph: it’s an homemade game, it’s very difficult to work in these circumstances

If you are interested in Catyph and can’t wait for it’s release (really? Thank you so much! Let me know by email), I’m sure there are different things you can do actually:

Read the Catyph Making Of
which is starting to be quite complete, and that you are lucky to have published before anyone else, here on the Adventure Gamers forums.

Visit weekly The icehouse
where you can follow my different works and other artists’. The icehouse is a collective I have co-founded, so I’m very active with them. And maybe you could even subscribe to our Newsletter?

Download the prototype version of Catyph
which is an early playable version of the game, even if it’s very short and limited!

Check the videos
of the game, such as the short film or the trailers, or maybe my other short films? There are 25 on Vimeo.

Read the beginning of Mon Village est Magique
that is a cooperative comic book in progress. I’m sure you saw MVEM somewhere if you played ASA!

Wait for my surprise regarding ASA
Indeed, don’t forget that the game was Greenlit on Steam, so it should (re)release soon. I have finally received an EIN number that allows me to sell on Steam. It was difficult!

Now as you can see I am working on many different things. All I could add is that I am very happy with some of my ideas of puzzles, and I’m sure you will love them too (or hate them!). So now let’s wait a little while and maybe I will know more about the exact release date of the game?

In the end, do you feel it’s important that the game releases as soon as possible? What do you expect from a game like Catyph? Are you curious and waiting to play it? Let me know what you think!
And that is all, I have finished for today. I came in peace, and I now go back on my little planet Catyph. Farewell!

Simon_ASA - 18 October 2014 10:08 AM

Wait for my surprise regarding ASA
Indeed, don’t forget that the game was Greenlit on Steam, so it should (re)release soon. I have finally received an EIN number that allows me to sell on Steam. It was difficult!

Well done!

Keep up the awesome work, dude!

Thanks, it’s good to read some comments here! At least I know that there are 4 or 5 people who may be interested in the game ^^
The most difficult when developping a project is that you want to show it to everyone but you can’t - and I’m afraid to spoil some important details when I share pics.

Hey theo, I didn’t notice that you are the developer of The Journey Down! This is a game with good designs and the demo was excellent. Are you making it on your own?
It’s probably not the good place to talk of it, so is there a thread somewhere on AG that tells me which engine you are using? Is it Visionaire?

Thanks for the kind words, man.

Discussing TJD is probably better suited over in this thread as to not confuse people to much regarding what game we’re talking about. Feel free to drop a line there, I’ll happily reply! I love rambling about our development.

Vairon - 20 October 2014 10:17 AM

Congrats for the Greenlit on Steam!! Really great news!

Thank you Vairon! I thought I had announced it officially long ago - the game was greenlit in April. It’s startting to get old now, but I had a lot of difficulties to retrieve the EIN number required to sell a game on Steam from France (and other countries). It has only been possible thanks to the manager of The icehouse collective (http://www.theicehouse.fr).

I just realise that I should continue the Catyph Making Of. I’m supposed to talk of how I work on the sound effects… Can we pause the time, so I can have more than 24 hours a day?

Last time, I wrote a kind of summary of my progress with Catyph. It’s time to come back to the Post-Production stage of the development. I will talk of the Sound Effects in Catyph and ASA, and I think it will put an end to this whole making of, which takes a lot of energy to be written. There are probably many other subjects related to the development of the game that would need to be explained, but it’s better if I write a few lines later when I feel ready, or if people ask questions.

To understand the importance of the sound effects in a game like Catyph, it’s easy: just have a look at a static picture, and ask yourself how you could make it more lively. It will immediately become obvious that sound effects will be as important as the picture itself. In the word “Audiovisual”, Audio is placed before Visual! Once you have that in mind, you realise that in a game, you’re not only sharing pictures with your public, you’re also sharing sounds. Sound Effects can be even more important than music for the ambiance. An horror game/film can frighten you without a single piece of music, by showing you a completely black screen, with just a very creepy sound.  Of course Catyph and ASA have nothing of an horror game, but still, I’m sure you understand the comparison in order to explain the importance of sfx (sound effects).

Can you see the frogs in this picture of region Saad? No?

Of course, without the sound of them, you cannot imagine that there are frogs around!

Have you ever played Riven? If the answer is yes, you know how important the sound is. It is so much important, that Cyan (the developers) have added several options in order to setup your audio device correctly and benefit of the best experience possible in the game. When a door opens, when an animal cries, or simply when the waves roll on the rocks, you have in Riven a very realistic and beautiful work on the sound. This is something I wanted to try to reproduce in ASA and Catyph.

The sound of the balls in Riven was very important. The sound of water was very relaxing!

I have worked with Stélian Derenne (stelian.be from Karreo), who was also the music composer of ASA. The process was not always easy for the both of us, because I had to send him a lot of pictures and descriptions of the sounds that I had in mind for the scenes. We were working distantly, so you can imagine the difficulties.

Happily, Stélian was very happy to experiment sound design, as it’s not really his original job (he does music)! To create the sfx for the videos of the game, I just had to send him the 3D animations, and he worked on the videos directly, adding sound effects of his creation, or from a libray. Then he sent me back a single wav file (audio) for each video of the game, and I just had to mix them together (audio + video). It’s the process that is used more or less to add sound to an animation film: it’s quite easy because you work directly on pictures, it’s something concrete, you see where a sound is needed. 

It was more difficult to work with ponctual sounds: many sfx in the game were isolated sounds: you push a lever, you press a button, a door opens… In these cases, there were no videos to work on. I contacted Stélian and I gave a [description + screenshot] for each sound. And he had to imagine everything! My role was limited to making a detailed list of my needs. He did all the job.
For example, when I asked him to create the sound of rain in the region of Kynan, he needed to know that this rain is incessant, made of ammonium, that it’s not a violent storm, and that it falls on the helmet of the hero.
These explanations need time to be shared correctly as there are a lot of sounds to manage in the complete game.

Can you hear the rain?

There were several hundreds of sfx created for ASA and Catyph, and each of them had been thought carefully for a specific situation…

That was the main part of the job: using sound effects and link them with pictures. But how were these sound files created? We used 2 different ways. The first thing we did is purchase the Sony Pictures Sound Effects collection, which contains a lot of sounds with profesional quality.

However, this library is very limited despite its price! It’s good when you need a sound of button or door, but as you know, ASA and Catyph are SciFi games, where all kind of sounds can be needed: alien devices, engines of the Ark, birds and insects… Most of these sounds cannot be found in the Sony library, so Stélian decided to record them on his own. That was the funny part for him. He took his microphone and recorded the sound himself.

The wind on Kepler? Stélian blowing into his mike.
I still remember when he told me: “I put the microphone under my car in the street and recorded the sound of it. My neighbors were wondering if I had become mad!”

But these efforts were worth it! Remember: 2013 Aggie Awards, Best Sound Effects category. Runners-Up: BEYOND: Two Souls, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Papers, Please, ASA: A Space Adventure. Even though we didn’t win, we realised the quality of our job, it was very encouraging.
Maybe next time we will win an Aggie with Catyph?

This concludes the sound effects job, and also the Post-Production stage!

It is the end of this Making Of. I think I have described most of the process for developing a 1st person slideshow adventure game like ASA, Catyph or any other Myst-like. Thank you for reading and following me. I will continue to come on this forum and add more infos and screenshots of course. Some of you maybe still be waiting for an exact release date!

All this work on the Making Of will be shared as a free bonus with the final game, in a PDF file. I also plan to release a self-published book with all of it + more pictures and details. It will release later on http://www.theicehouse.fr, so if you’re interested, please follow my work on their blog!

Now I will focus on the game only, as there is still an awful lot of work!

Thank you Vairon, I’m glad you liked! I’m quite happy with the rain effect, but it’s just a looping sequence of frames.

Alors, it’s not a demo, it’s a prototype I prefer to insist, because when I will release a demo, you’ll see the difference (real puzzles!). In the prototype there’s nothing to do, and there are probably graphic and technical issues. I hope the future demo will be better.

Catyph has ben greenlit on Steam! Thanks a lot for your support on Adventure Gamers. It’s not too late to read the Making Of, so please have a look at the previous pages again
Happy New Year everyone!

Congrats, man! That’s great news. Keep up the good work!

Hello everyone! I’ve not been very active lately on any forums and worked very hard this Summer (I just got back from holidays, and they were really needed), but I thought I could just slip a word to say hi, and also confirm that Catyph is still in development and going well.

I have finished a playable alpha demo of about 3~5 hours featuring the 3 first regions of the game (over 8 in the final release), and I am comfident that the adventure will be long and exciting enough for all Myst and ASA fans. This playable demo will soon be sent to the press for preview, so hopefully you will have the chance to read a few articles here and there before the end of the year?

Catyph is still planned to release by the end of 2015 or very beginning of 2016 and I see no reason to delay it again, unless I have some problems of compatibility with Windows 10 or a negative feedback regarding this demo. Who knows?

Even if Catyph is not a direct sequel to ASA and doesn’t require from you to know my previous game, they are both part of the Black Cube series, and Catyph is somehow an “ASA 2” (= Another Space Adventure, ok?). So I really hope that all ASA fans will like this new game, which is the exact reason why it takes me so much time to release it and make it as great as possible.