Castle Story News

News
==February News==

Your weekly dose of info: Our plans for the future
Hi everyone! We have a lot of subjects to cover, so I’ll go straight to the point. There should be something interesting for all of you, so scroll away! Kickstarter rewards form reminder Last week we sent out email forms to every backer who was eligible to receive a physical reward. We would like to Read More
 * Saturday, February 16, 2013

Dev diary number thirty eight: Radial menu
Hello! For those of you who come read regularly, you may have noticed that we’ve been laying low for the last weeks. We have our reasons: basically we were laser-focused on releasing a new gameplay video, and vowed to make our new blog about it. Unfortunately, we were hit with several delays, some related to Read More
 * Sunday, February 10, 2013

==January News==

Dev diary number thirty seven: Almost…
Here’s the story about how we almost had something interesting to say this week. You see, usually around Wednesdays or Thursdays, we gather to make a list of what we could talk about in the blog. The idea here is to filter out the mundane and only keep the stuff that’s interesting. Something noteworthy doesn’t Read More
 * Monday, January 21, 2013

Dev diary number thirty six: A happy new year
We’re back! It’s been a while since the last blog isn’t it? I hope the holidays have been as good to you guys as ours. One thing is certain, we needed a break. We’ve been working full time (at least one of us working) non-stop since last January. So you can guess the fatigue accumulated Read More
 * Saturday, January 12, 2013

==December News==

Happy Holidays from Sauropod Studio!
Hey there! Sauropod Studio is closed until January. We parted ways last Friday after moving in our new office (Yay!). More about that once we come back. After all, the holiday season is best enjoyed with friends and families, so even though we’re all close friends, I cannot report anything because we are spread out Read More
 * Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Dev diary number thirty five: Rewards sneak peek
Good evening ladies & gents! This week was a bit more chill. Aside from an epidemic of gastroenteritis that struck our studio Thursday, forcing the rest of us to work at home, a lot of interesting things have progressed. We’ve found a solution to our online auto-patching solution for the Beta release. This is some Read More
 * Saturday, December 15, 2012

Dev diary number thirty four: Fieldtrip
Hi there! This week was a welcome change for some of us: We did audio recording with FX for many important parts of the game. On Monday, we did a session of voice acting with a friend of ours, Maxime Carignan-Chagnon. He proved us that he was the best choice for the voices of the Read More
 * Sunday, December 9, 2012

Dev diary number thirty three: Ups and Downs
Hello! So the month of November is over. Mustaches have been shaven and money has been donated to cancer research. We gathered a whopping 80$(!) total, including one 10$ from a non-sauropod, and total stranger. Thank you Casey Braastad, you are hereby awarded 10 Karma points! You may now kill a kitten without any consequences! Read More
 * Monday, December 3, 2012

Dev diary number thirty two: Mobevember
Hi everyone! A pretty standard week just passed. Nothing especially mind-blowing happened. It’s starting to get cold here. And I’m slowly reminded that we are getting close to Sauropod’s first birthday. I distinctly remember working on the first video and the website at this time of the year, last year. It seems strange to see Read More
 * Sunday, November 25, 2012

Dev diary number thirty one: Meet the team (part two)
Hello! This week started out pretty awesomely. We attended MIGS (the Montréal International Game Summit) Tuesday and Wednesday, and had a great time. We got to listen to great talks on a lot of subjects. So many in fact that we had a hard time choosing which one we should go to. Important and impressive Read More
 * Sunday, November 18, 2012

Dev diary number thirty: Interlude
Hi everybody! So the prototype is released, patched and functional (enough for the moment). We’ll be attempting to fix the mac build so that it works for more people, but aside from that, we’re somewhat satisfied with how things went. This means we can now start thinking about the future. This is pretty much the Read More
 * Monday, November 12, 2012

Get your prototype patch right here!
Oh hai! So the time is up. We did a thorough sweep and fixed most of the bugs we could possibly fix in a two week period. We also had time to come up with a few solutions to patch the game. For now, we will have a small file available for download that Read More
 * Friday, November 2, 2012

Dev diary twenty nine: First Aid Kit
Hello there! This is going to be a short blog. In comparison with the last few weeks, it seems we don’t have much to talk about. We spent most of the week fixing bugs and preparing the terrain for an upcoming patch. We will be releasing this patch really soon, and hopefully it will remove Read More
 * Saturday, October 27, 2012

Dev diary number twenty eight: Oh, what a wonderful disaster!
Wow. Just wow, you guys. Have you ever seen a blog explode so utterly under the weight of its own users? I’m starting to think that this website is becoming entertaining not just for the content we post, but for how often it falls apart. I mean, seriously? Is this for real? The picture to Read More
 * Saturday, October 20, 2012

Information for before and after the prototype release
Hello everybody! In preparation for the release of the prototype next week, we decided that it is really important to answer some questions. However, instead of hiding this information in a regular blog, we want to make sure that the information is as clear as it can possible be. Next week there is going Read More
 * Saturday, October 13, 2012

Dev number twenty seven: Yarr, steady as she goes!
Ahoy Mateys! I’m currently on a sailboat, writing this blog. It’s the thanksgiving holiday weekend here in Canada, so me, François and his wife decided to go sailing with my dad on the St-Lawrence river. (At the time I was writing this, we didn’t have access to wifi, it took us until late Sunday to Read More
 * Monday, October 8, 2012

Dev diary number twenty six: Hey mom! I’m on TV!
Hey there! Wow, the month of September is almost over. Time is going by so fast when you’re working hard it’s scary! We thought we would get a breather once the Kickstarter ended, but it’s not the case at all. During the Kickstarter, we bascially had nothing to lose, so the pressure was there, but Read More
 * Saturday, September 29, 2012

Dev diary number twenty five: A well-oiled team
Howdy! Another productive week has passed and we’re slowly landing on our feet after the post-Kickstarter chaos. Our new team members are fully integrated and everyone knows exactly what they have to do. It’s quite a beautiful sight to see a well-oiled team such as the Sauropod team (I should say well-coffied though, in our Read More
 * Saturday, September 22, 2012

Dev diary number twenty four: back in the routine
Hey there! This week’s blog is going to be rather short. Since we already posted a blog last Tuesday explaining most of what we did this week, we think we should bore you by explaining yet again the same subject we covered. If you’re curious though, you can read last’s Tuesday’s blog; it answers a Read More
 * Sunday, September 16, 2012

Newsletter and User Account Registration
Hello! Most of you might have noticed that you received a new email yesterday or this morning about user account registration. This is the result of an ongoing process that started the day our Kickstarter ended. For those of you who are not interested in reading the whole thing, here’s the short version: Basically, Paypal Read More
 * Thursday, September 13, 2012

Dev diary number twenty three: Hey, get back to work!
Hi fellow Bricktrons! YES! We are back on track with regular dev diaries! This means news about the actual game development, soundtracks of the week, and a pinch of humor for extra seasoning. Lots of things have been done this week. In fact we had trouble fitting everything in our schedule. We’ve been running left Read More
 * Saturday, September 8, 2012

Kickstarter diary number six: The aftermath
Good evening ladies & gentlemen This is the final Kickstarter diary. Don’t worry this is not the last you hear from us, because starting next week we’ll go back to our regular (more fun to read) dev diary model. But in the meantime we still have a few issues to adress. Before we do that Read More
 * Saturday, September 1, 2012

Kickstarter diary number five: Hey pal, Paypal!
Hello friends! We are now in the final days of the Kickstarter. The final sprint has begun and we’re now scrambling to get everything done before the end. Unfortunately, we miscalculated the final hours of the Kickstarter, so it will end on Sunday at 10hAM EDT. Kind of a bummer that the campaign will be Read More
 * Thursday, August 23, 2012

Kickstarter diary number four: Credit Island
Hi everybody! So we are entering the final week of our Kickstarter! Things seem to be going ginormously well since we already reached 500,000$! *Gasp* This week, we’ve focused on organizing the final stretch. We’re adding space in our Premium and Elite backer tiers; we talked to our plushie expert, and she told us she Read More
 * Saturday, August 18, 2012

Kickstarter diary Number 3: Half way through
Hi there! We are precisely half way through the Kickstarter and things are going great! This week we hit the $400 000 mark. Now that’s something! Making a video game can be expensive and we are still not planning to buy a truck full of gummy bears, but at this point, we are definitely going Read More
 * Saturday, August 11, 2012

Kickstarter diary number two: Days to come
Hi folks! We’ve spent the week getting back on our feet, after a pretty eventful weekend. Bascially, sending emails to dozens of people, answering hundreds upon hundreds of email, and deciding what we should do in the near future. Speaking of which, we would like to take some time to answer a number of recurrent Read More
 * Friday, August 3, 2012 

Kickstarter diary number one: This was a triumph!
I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS! Ahem, yeah… We don’t really know where to start. We were preparing for a long, grueling campaign in which we’d have to fight for every dollar, while in fact it went down pretty much like [this], over before it even started. But now that we look back on Read More
 * Monday, July 30, 2012

The official Kickstarter countdown has started
Hi Internets! This is not a dev diary. Why you ask? Because we have not been working on the game this week. Rather, we’ve been working really hard preparing our Kickstarter campaign. You see we got approved by Kickstarter during the week, so we can launch whenever we want. Which means that yes, the Kickstarter Read More
 * Saturday, July 21, 2012

Dev diary number twenty two: Screenshot Saturday v2
Hi everybody! I’m having a lot of trouble editing the blog today. Might be my DNS or something else, i’m not sure. Menekis, our benevolent and almighty webmaster is looking into it. But in the meantime, i’m going to keep this blog short. ahem… Yeah, the project has been officially submitted to Kickstarter. It should Read More
 * Sunday, July 15, 2012

Dev diary number twenty one: Dice rolls and imaginary pikemen
Hi folks ! Let’s start by a quick update on our kickstarter journey. We received confirmation from Amazon that our account is valid and that our Kickstarter account is now linked. We also finished filming all the scenes for the trailer and entered post-production tonight. We still have to get Kickstarter’s official approval for our Read More
 * Saturday, July 7, 2012

Dev diary number twenty: Brix & Storyboards
Hi there! This week has been very intense. All of our legal papers are now sent. All that is left for us to do is wait for AmazonPayments to confirm that everything is in order. Hopefully… hopefully monday. Then, we’ll be in Kickstarter’s hands. Yeah, I hate bureaucracy. The most recent horror story: We needed Read More
 * Sunday, July 1, 2012

Dev diary number nineteen: : Short & sweet
Hi everybody Ok, so this weekend is national holiday here in Québec. We spent all week cooped up in our office, suffering through the latest heatwave without air conditioning. So we will be parting ways to go see friends and families, celebrate the Saint-Jean Baptiste, scream in the streets against our government just a bit, Read More
 * Saturday, June 23, 2012

Dev diary number eighteen: Drawing Lessons
Helloz! Things have been going smoothly again this week. We finally got our american business bank account, so this means another step in the legal side of things has been done before we can make the Kickstarter. Game wise, we are still touching up the game for the trailer. Here’s a few things we did [www.sauropodstudio.com/dev-diary-number-eighteen/ Read More]
 * Saturday, June 16, 2012

Dev diary number seventeen: Bitwise Tilemapping
Huh? Woah. Friday already? Seems like I was writing last week’s blog yesterday. Geez, time really has a way of sneaking up on you. We spent this week very focused, touching up several bugs mostly, and working on the trailer. Here’s a list of what we did this week: Tile mapping basics I was in Read More
 * Saturday, June 9, 2012

Dev diary number sixteen: Saturday night at the movies
Howdy! Yeah so, once again, a technical problem prevented us from posting our blog on Friday, namely barrels not exploding anymore and ragdoll heads separating from their bodies. We had to debug this instead of writing this blog. But no worries! I think it paid off because we have another animated GIF for you this Read More
 * Sunday, June 3, 2012

Dev diary Number: Fifteen AI basics
Hi folks Germain, our usual blogger, is out for tonight, so I will be writing the blog this week. This week was pretty much the same routine as the other weeks of the month. There is still no sign of our pterodactyl pet which escaped last week but we keep our hopes up. We spent Read More
 * Saturday, May 26, 2012

Dev diary number fourteen: Screenshot Saturday
Hi! So we spent this week trudging along. Nothing extraordinarily exciting happened (I’m not sure I should be saying that actually…) Ahem… yeah, so this week, we found a dinosaur egg in Benoît’s backyard and it hatched. We found out it was a pteranodon. We called him Alex. Unfortunately, I left the window open so Read More
 * Sunday, May 20, 2012

Dev diary number thirteen: GWRD
This is a poster that happens to be in our office. It has been created by =PoX=, a friend of ours. Ahoy! So yeah, last week was pretty morose. As you might have read in the blog, we suffered a few setbacks that prevented us from running the Kickstarter as soon as we wanted. Well, Read More
 * Friday, May 11, 2012

Dev diary number twelve: Bug reports
Hi there! This week’s blog will be shorter than usual. The current situation here at Sauropod is in a state that makes writing blogs a bit harder than wer’re used to. We have lots of tasks that are unrelated to the actual game development that occupy a good part of our time. Tasks such as Read More
 * Saturday, May 5, 2012

Dev diary number eleven: Cake story
Hello Internet! So yesterday was François’s birthday. There was much rejoicing, and some incredibly talented friends of ours created one of the most awesome cake I’ve ever seen in person. Combine that with the birthday of François’ wife, Julie-Édith which was earlier this week, our workspace was filled with so many people that writing Read More
 * Sunday, April 29, 2012

Dev diary number nine: Skybox shmybox
Greetings earthlings! Our imaginary Kickstarter deadline is coming up inexorably, as we scramble to get everything done (we will announce it very soon). OMG sooo much things to do and not enough time! As for the game, we got lots of little things done this week. Nothing huge, but together they amount to large changes. Read More
 * Saturday, April 14, 2012

Dev diary number eight: Ballistics and projectiles
Bonjour! Another week has passed, and brings us ever closer to the Kickstarter. We can’t reveal the exact date, but rest assured that it will be soon, and that if you read this blog, you will know a week in advance. This said, this week has been very productive. Many important features and assets have Read More
 * Friday, April 6, 2012

Dev diary number seven: Bricktron behavior patterns
Hi there! Phew, that was a tough week! I’m glad it’s over so we can take a break. François, Benoit and I all hit tough task requiring deep debugging, long testing sessions and leaving our comfort zones. Here’s what we worked on: *** WARNING: THESE PICTURES ARE NOT IN-GAME GRAPHICS *** New weapons and new Read More
 * Saturday, March 31, 2012

Dev diary number six: Walk cycles and wood blocks
Ahoy Internets! How was your week? Ours was pretty ordinary. As ordinary as a week can be if you take into account the fact that we’re living our dream making games for a living. We’re not complaining. Aside from working really hard, we took part in an epic 200,000 people manifestation right here in Montréal Read More
 * Saturday, March 24, 2012

Return on the Q&A Session
Just wanted to thanks again all the people that worked hard to make it happen and all the people who joined the IRC session yersterday, it was really fun. Here is the list of questions that was answered and thx to the people who logged it :P. (log from user Gijs) ________ First question round. ________ Read More
 * Saturday, March 17, 2012

Dev diary number five: Redesigning the Bricktron character
Hello! It’s been a slow week. Combine bad weather, an outbreak of flu among the team, and the fact that we’re all starting new tasks, nothing concrete really got finished this week. We’re definitely not procrastinating though, here’s a list of what we’ve done: Redesigning the game character So a few weeks ago, we decided Read More
 * Friday, March 16, 2012

Live Q&A Session: Friday 8pm
Remember, we have a QA session Friday march 16th at 8pm Eastern Time (what’s my timezone?). It will be on the Castle Story community IRC chat, you can log on with the webapp located at: http://castlestoryonline.com/pages/irc/ or with your favorite IRC client on: server: irc.ospnet.org channel: #CastleStoryOnline To avoid our answers getting lost in countless Read More
 * Friday, March 16, 2012

Dev diary number four: Barrels, pies and other goodness
Howdy, Internets! It’s friday! The week’s over! Time to get wasted and act like idiots! *Ahem*… But before we do this, we need to keep you up to date on what’s been going on over here. Here’s a list: We made a video to demonstrate all of this. Narrated by our very own François: Castle Read More
 * Saturday, March 10, 2012

Dev diaries will be on Fridays from now on
Hello! We are changing the day on which we will post the dev diaries. Starting this week, we will post our Dev Diaries on Friday instead of Sunday or Monday. Since we changed from working part time during weekends to full time during the week, it makes no sense to post our updates on Sundays Read More
 * Tuesday, March, 6, 2012

Dev diary number two: Hasty Iconography
Hello everybody! I am officially out of a job now! Let’s hope this gorram game is worth it. This week was a bit screwy. François being out of town, and me being sick all week. We had very little communication going on. Nevertheless, we got some pretty cool things done! Here’s a list: I deliberately Read More
 * Monday, February, 20, 2012

Weekly development blog number one
Good evening! So this week we’ve been kicking it up on the high gear. Being the first week that I had a few days off to work on he game (I’m progressively quitting my job, I’ll be virtually unemployed after next week) we decided to go ahead and tackle the really nasty stuff : systems Read More
 * Monday, February, 13, 2012

Timelapse Video
Hi Everybody! We’re a bit late this week; we’ve been overloaded with all kinds of stuff, some game-related and some in RL. But we didn’t forget you! We received many request to show some of the features that weren’t shown in the demo video. The reason we didn’t is that they didn’t look very good. Read More
 * Wednesday, February, 8, 2012

How to make a voxel based game in Unity?
Disclaimer – This is a semi-technical blog-post. Some of you might not be interested by it’s content while some others might find it incomplete. I made a compromise between accessibility and depth. Later, if people seem interested by the subject, I might make a more complete tutorial. – François So we got that question a Read More
 * Monday, January, 30, 2012

Castle Story 101: Bricks
Hello everyone! This week, we decided to go over the very basics of the game. Castle Story is not a regular voxel based game because in our case every voxel is bound to a few rules that changes its behavior. These behaviors are what allows you to build complex structures. This is a brick. It Read More
 * Sunday, January, 22, 2012

Whats ahead of us
Good evening fellow Bricktrons! Some of you might have visited Sauropod Forum since we launched it Sunday, if not, we strongly encourage you to go check it out and meet the cheerful bunch happily chattering away over there! However, we would like to inform you of several changes that are going to take place during Read More
 * Sunday, January, 15, 2012

CastleStoryOnline.com, the official community forum
Good evening fellow Bricktrons! Some of you might have visited Sauropod Forum since we launched it Sunday, if not, we strongly encourage you to go check it out and meet the cheerful bunch happily chattering away over there! However, we would like to inform you of several changes that are going to take place during Read More
 * Tuesday, January, 10, 2012

Forum and FAQ online!
Our forum is finally online. We’ve been setting it up for the last two days with the help of our friend Thierry Bégin (aka. Menekis), who will be our forum moderator for a while. Check it out! [FORUM] Also, in a futile attempt to answer all of the questions we are getting. We’ve set up Read More
 * Monday, January, 9, 2012

Holy Cow! Big thanks to everyone!
Phew! What an amazing last few days it has been. Less than a week ago, we were still unsure about what kind of success our game would have. We knew we were taking a risk: François avoided getting a job in order to work more on the game and was slowly running out of money, Read More News Archive
 * Monday, January, 9, 2012