Hi Guys, Original Atmosphir Dev Here!
Posted: December 9th, 2014, 1:06 pm
I stumbled upon this site by chance, and I'm glad to see that despite Atmosphir's demise some years ago, the community still loves the game, as I (and many others) poured our hearts into it.
I was one of the two main original Atmosphir devs (together with Ariel Manzur), and we made the first version of Atmosphir. We got into the project as consultants in around 2007.
The company in charge of development (Sabarasa, now RIP) had already licensed a game engine called Vicious to do the game, so we were supposed to use it. Unfortunately this proved impossible , as that engine ended up being a sort of glorified Game Maker.
At the time, Unity was a baby engine and only ran on mac, so it was not an option, and the alternatives were terrible (Torque3D).
The game originally had really high requirements, it had to run on any computer dating back to 2002 (as in, GPUs that did not even support shaders), and it should support hundreds of thousands of little blocks floating in space, props, etc.
Being unable to find any existing engine we could use, we used a custom-built one of our own that we were developing since a while. Development of the game only took a couple of months (around 9 months). The resulting game was very efficient rendering wise, and we even got it to run on PSP in an internal build.
After this, Minor split from Sabarasa and Ariel and I remained as consultants, but we did not do any further development in the game itself.
Eventually, out of the desire to run the game in a browser (Kongregate and similar web-based sites, as well as social gaming was beginning to boom at the time, so browser support was very important), it was decided to migrate the codebase to Unity, which was considerably more mature at the time. The Unity version was not as optimized as the original custom-engine version (because of it being a more general purpose engine), but allowed new features such as multiplayer, running in a browser plugin, etc. By this time about 3 years passed since we began working on the project, and we went to work on other stuff.
The original engine used to make Atmosphir was used for many other games, and eventually was open sourced at the beginning of this year (though nothing much remains of the original engine, most of it was rewritten), having gained popularity quickly. We are some days away from launching the first stable release:
http://www.godotengine.org
Also, here is a picture from the PSP port, this is the best bug I ever had while developing games in my life, so a big hug to all of you!
I was one of the two main original Atmosphir devs (together with Ariel Manzur), and we made the first version of Atmosphir. We got into the project as consultants in around 2007.
The company in charge of development (Sabarasa, now RIP) had already licensed a game engine called Vicious to do the game, so we were supposed to use it. Unfortunately this proved impossible , as that engine ended up being a sort of glorified Game Maker.
At the time, Unity was a baby engine and only ran on mac, so it was not an option, and the alternatives were terrible (Torque3D).
The game originally had really high requirements, it had to run on any computer dating back to 2002 (as in, GPUs that did not even support shaders), and it should support hundreds of thousands of little blocks floating in space, props, etc.
Being unable to find any existing engine we could use, we used a custom-built one of our own that we were developing since a while. Development of the game only took a couple of months (around 9 months). The resulting game was very efficient rendering wise, and we even got it to run on PSP in an internal build.
After this, Minor split from Sabarasa and Ariel and I remained as consultants, but we did not do any further development in the game itself.
Eventually, out of the desire to run the game in a browser (Kongregate and similar web-based sites, as well as social gaming was beginning to boom at the time, so browser support was very important), it was decided to migrate the codebase to Unity, which was considerably more mature at the time. The Unity version was not as optimized as the original custom-engine version (because of it being a more general purpose engine), but allowed new features such as multiplayer, running in a browser plugin, etc. By this time about 3 years passed since we began working on the project, and we went to work on other stuff.
The original engine used to make Atmosphir was used for many other games, and eventually was open sourced at the beginning of this year (though nothing much remains of the original engine, most of it was rewritten), having gained popularity quickly. We are some days away from launching the first stable release:
http://www.godotengine.org
Also, here is a picture from the PSP port, this is the best bug I ever had while developing games in my life, so a big hug to all of you!