Dare Blogs – Team iso

We are team•iso from Barcelona and our game for Dare to be Digital 2012 is IsoChronous.

IsoChronous (which means “at the same time”) is a two-player strategy action game with time layering for PC and Xbox 360.

The game mechanic is based on the one seen in the last levels of Braid where you can reverse time, see what you did and then interact with your previous actions. In IsoChronous that mechanic is brought to strategy games.

In a battle two players play against each other with an army of a king and two mighty warriors. Each battle has four time layers. In each time layer a new unit is added to the battle and it’s controlled by the player. When the time layer finishes after 30 seconds, everything rewinds and the battle starts again.

The movements that the players do are recorded, so with each new time layer their previous units repeat exactly the same motions as before. The fourth time layer is the decisive one, so the player left with a king with more life is the winner.

Dare has been really great. My favourite part has been working next to the other teams, talking with them and sharing problems and opinions.

In Spain we don’t have degrees in video games so it’s rather difficult finding this amount of amazing people wanting to make video games.

Also it has been very useful being able to receive the help of mentors visiting us in Abertay University. Working all day on your game can make you skip some details that new people can discover easily, so mentors have been a great help.

I have learned a lot since I had not done anything related to video games before. This is my first time working as a 2D game artist and it has been a rich experience which has let me see my art come to life thanks to video games. I have seen that the last units I have designed for the game are much better than the first ones.

Now I am aware that character design has to be related to the game – my first designs didn’t take care of our camera view so I ended up making units which were not very differentiable.

After learning from my initial mistake, all the units have been designed to benefit as much as possible from the camera angle we have.

I hope all the visitants can enjoy IsoChronous and see smiles in their faces at ProtoPlay. We have worked a lot in order to deliver a great experience and hopefully we will achieve this.

The obvious ambition is seeing IsoChronous released for Xbox Live Arcade. We have had so much fun playing IsoChronous and we would like to reach as many people as possible to make them also enjoy it.

Also since right now I am unemployed it would be awesome to find a job related to video games.

Follow team•iso on Twitter @team_iso to learn more about their game.

Dare ProtoPlay and Indie Fest takes place between August 10th and 12th in Dundee, with all 15 Dare student games on show, as well as indie games, conference talks and much more.

www.dareprotoplay.com