Upper Byte Around The World

Hi everyone!

Hell yeah, we are still here and still rocking. After our incredibly hectic last few weeks, we're eventually taking the time to make a small recap of our last trips!

IndieCade 2012

Wooden Sen’SeY was an IndieCade 2012 finalist last month in Los Angeles. We made the trip to meet the US indie community for the first time! We got a chance to meet a lot of absolutely great people, pros, hardcore players, or just people passing by wondering what was going on. These were 4 awesome days, we hope to get back there soon.

Pitch My Game

We made a short trip to Paris to show the game in a small event called Pitch My Game. We met players from France for the first time, made a small pitch (obviously) and answered some quite interesting questions. You can see some pictures here, and there is even a video for the ones able to understand French.

Photos: Jean-François Renauld

Pitch My Game #3 - Jeu 1/4 par Prelude666

We're here to stay, so is Wooden Sen’SeY, we are not forgetting you and have (once again) some nice and warm cookies cooking over here...

And we need your thumbs! Please vote for us on Steam Greenlight.

Stay tuned!

-- The Upper Byte Team

Wooden Sen'SeY gets a release date, preorder, and a demo!

Hi everyone!

We have some big news about the game: finally, a release date! So get ready, because Wooden Sen'SeY will be available by the end of the month: on August 24th. You will be able to download it on Desura, you can even preorder today:

We are currently tweaking the latest additions, such as the achievement system, which George is currently testing.

A demo version will also be available on release date, so you can try the game for yourself and slice a bunch of monsters with your axes :D

See you soon, stay tuned!

-- The Upper Byte team

Back from China

Game Connection Asia was great! We had a lot of meetings and Wooden Sen'SeY got a pretty good reception.

Indeed, the advisory board, which includes guys from Sony, Microsoft and Konami (no stress at all) awarded us for the game! Congratulations to the other competitors for their work and actually for being cool, interesting and interested during the event.

While George shows off with the trophy, we are working hard at polishing the game and preparing distribution, so you guys can play as soon as possible.

Both of us in front of Pudong Expo...

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

Us with the guys from Onipunks

Onipunks' pixel art Legos!

See you soon for more infos! Stay Tuned!

-- The Upper Byte Team 

How well does it run?

This week we'll scratch the surface of the game a bit and show you some tasty details of Wooden Sen’SeY. You've seen the videos and screenshots, and probably asked yourself: how will it run on my machine? Well, we're nice guys, so the game will run on most computers.

All the game images we've shown you were taken in real time (we don't cheat at Upper Byte!), on a less-than-high-end-we-don't-have-the-cash machine. To give you an idea of how the game will be rendered on your computer, here's a snapshot of the quality modes:

Quick mode, for old machines

Normal mode: fluid on a fairly recent machine

Fantastic mode: fluid on recent and powerful equipment, Bwahaha!

The most obvious differences are the precision and size of the textures. The game also has two lighting modes: a dynamic mode, with nice shadows for the character and game objects, and a static mode, with pre-calculated lighting for fluid rendering on old machines. Lots of other parameters are also configurable, like texture filtering, water quality rendering, image effects, shadows, animations, etc... which means you can pretty much end up running the game anywhere!

Well, hey, it's great to have different levels of video quality, but where do the graphics come from? Glad you asked. Just to satisfy your curiosity, here's a quick 'making of' two levels in images!

Music !

This has been on the boiler at Upper Byte for several months, and we just can't resist the temptation to talk to you about it and to introduce the composer.

So, you ask: Who on earth would be so crazy as to work with those two lunatics?" Someone at least as crazy as us, that's who! And this person has a name (it's true, promise!) and the name is... Maxime Ginolin!

He’s a composer we really like a lot, and we’re really happy to have worked with him. He’s an independent musician, composer, and plays rock music. He has two careers, music and cinematography (yep, we said he was nuts!), one with his real name, the other with the pseudonym “MagiCJacK”.

What would a concert be like without sound? And here you go! There're still a few things to polish on this track, but it gives you an idea of where things are headed!

Goro: the village chief!

Surly, violent, and partial to SeY, he's also the character you'll be playing! Despite looking like a wino, if you've got ten talented fingers he can be impressive :) We're not going to say any more, you'll have to judge for yourself:

You noticed how gracefully he jumps and spins? OK, fine, he tumbles around too, but for the right reasons! We'll show you his specialty: axe-throwing! Once in the air, he can throw his axes to the ground and anything that is in their path is... slightly deteriorated, shall we say:

This also lets Goro jump higher to reach places filled with bottles of SeY!

In addition to being able to go helter-skelter, Goro can also use his axes as grapples. This lets him whirl in the wind to avoid falling into space, reaching out-of-reach areas, and striking an enemy up high with his axe. But be careful! The grapple can't catch on everywhere. It may be highly effective on wood, but totally useless with stone and metal!

Finally, for delicate situations that call for precision, he can use shurikens, which are both fast and sharp. And when it's time for massive destruction, he pulls out the heavy artillery: big, fat, powerful bombs! We'll let you mull over the delicate carnage in this next clip!

Wooden Sen'SeY

Wooden Sen'SeY

The platform game that’s a real blast!

A page out of history 

SeY invigorates the inhabitants of the village. Unfortunately, there isn't a drop of SeY left. All the flasks have been stolen!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help Goro, the village chief armed with two axes as big as him (and his thirst for SeY). You can jump anywhere, grapple, slice, squash, dice... anything within reach of your blade!

We have been working to give you a cocktail of astonishing and captivating adventures with the subtle chemistry of an original universe, great gameplay and fantastic graphics!

Whew! Took us a while to come up with that sentence... : )

Upper Byte is an indie company: the two of us are developers who love our profession and hope Wooden Sen'SeY will be worthy of your time!

It will be downloadable for PC/Mac, and not expensive. A release date? You'll be the first to know when we have one!

To continue with the presentation of Wooden Sen'SeY, here's the game trailer for you:

And a few screenshots to spice things up! ; ) Don't settle for a few pictures, take a look at this gallery on the official Wooden Sen'SeY page!

See you next week, we will tell you more about the game !