We’re baaaack! After taking some much-needed time off to recover after the madness that was our failed Kickstarter campaign (we seriously fried with doing everything we did), it’s finally time to continue the work. As we stated earlier, since we didn’t make our goal for the Kickstarter, we have had to abandon most of the plans we had, and turn our attention on doing a hand-cobbled “one off” port of Midnight Stranger to HTML5 to get it out the door (still free, like were planning). When that’s done, we’ll see if we feel up to giving the same treatment to [MODE] or whether we are going to take some other path to move us closer to our medium terms goal of its port to HTML5. The good thing is that once we’re done with Midnight Stranger, we will have most of the basic runtime functions coded and will be in a better position to look at more generic ways of moving forward, at doing some new productions, and giving people some tools to try their hand at it themselves. Our goal has always been new material, but the Midnight Stranger port has been our path to that end. While we didn’t manage to Kickstart things, we launched with nearly zero momentum but were seriously energized by all the amazing support we got from people that wanted to see it happen!
So what’s new? New development work, that’s what!
Jeff has been working on making the story and interactions flow better than they did with the original (Midnight Stranger was the first of its kind), but still using all the original material. He is also mulling over a “director’s cut” where new scenes would be shot that would provide more of the details of the story and people that he had wanted to include in the original, but couldn’t because of limitations in how much a CD-ROM could hold. Whether it is just him talking about what he wanted in that spot, or whether we get some actors to roughly perform the scenes in place of the original actors, we don’t know yet.
James has restarted the software development work needed to finish the full proof-of-concept demo that he had started on before the Kickstarter. Coded entirely using HTML5 and Javascript, it originally aimed to prove that the basic idea was sound and that it was possible now to run this sort of application in a purely web-browser-based cross-platform environment. It was, of course, since that was necessary to show before the Kickstarter was launched. The current work is now focused on finishing the code required to implement all the features needed to roll out the completed port of Midnight Stranger. There are three major stepping stones to get there, the first of which was to allow it to be run on mobile platforms with touch screens. The reason for this update is that a touchscreen interface has been developed and can be tried out! Click the image below to give it a try (there are release notes describing in gory detail what’s what):
It has been tested with Chrome and Firefox on Android mobile devices, Windows PCs, and Linux PCs, but we have very limited access to a range of devices, so this has to be considered “alpha grade” code and very likely won’t work on a lot of devices (if not most of them). We finally tried it on an iPhone and were horribly disappointed to learn that prior to iOS 10, it insists on opening the video in its own full-screen player. This completely ruins the intimacy of the interactions, but it did at least run. There are ways around it for earlier iOSs and some changes that need to be made to get it to run with embedded video on iOS 10, but that will come in time. We haven’t tried it yet, but from what we read it might run okay on iPads. It still runs like a charm on PCs (we haven’t tried it on a Mac). Feel free to let us know if you have any success or failure at running it on a device or platform.
If you would like to be kept up to date on progress, send us an email at
listmaster@obeing.net and we’ll add you to our mailing list for general (and infrequent) updates on major milestones or new projects. If you want to be tuned in to the nitty-gritty of what we’re up to with development and testing, the best way is to follow our Twitter account.
Here are some other links:
Listen to Jeff and James being interviewed on CBC’s All In A Day (March 8, 2016):
http://www.cbc.ca/player/AudioMobile/All+in+a+Day/ID/2685006477/
Watch Jeff Green live streaming a Midnight Stranger playthrough (March 8, 2016):
https://youtu.be/FX3NLVPsNyM
[all the crazy fun videos Jeff did for the Kickstarter are on YouTube too!]
Watch supergreatfriend‘s truly amazing, expertly curated and edited, Let’s Play he did
for [MODE] several years back that attracted hundreds of participants:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[…]
or the amusing and (brutally) honest signal boost he did for the Kickstarter
(the comments people make as it goes is Internet gold at times):
https://youtu.be/DyFF8Nne2ZE
Or give us a vote on GOG’s Community Wishlist for [MODE]:
https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/mode