Cris Game

Hi everyone! Koriel here. Just a quick update since we have a lot we are trying to get done right now! Update John has been off in music land these past few days (working on a bunch of sweet tracks for the game). The new music pouring in is getting us all pretty excited. :D James is working on integration for VR platforms. There are still a lot of adjustments to be made to get everything feeling right on the Rift, the Vive and PSVR. I've been mostly working on getting into better shape, improving and creating some art assets, and finishing up some in-game text. Mixed Reality Photos Some of you may have seen our fun Mixed Reality photo posts over the past weeks, so I thought it would be nice to put them all together in a post. In these photomanipulations, using both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, we try to capture the wonder and thrill of playing XING: The Land Beyond in Virtual Reality. We still have more to come, but here are the newest two, plus all the other posted so far! Be sur...

***Before I launch into the post proper, I just wanted to say that I still have some promo codes from  Audible which allow me to gift copies of my audiobooks for free. Thus, if anyone would like a copy of the audiobook of  Sensation , please send me your email address and whether you prefer the Audible US or Audible UK store. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ So here's something cool I just learned how to do. As many of you may know, Audible (which is the Amazon subsidiary that handles audiobooks) offers a free 30-day trial membership, including two credits for free audiobooks.  However, it appears that you can actually customize the page showing the trial offer so that it features your audiobook.  For instance, here's what I did with  Sensation : As stated, it's a customized Free Trial Page for Audible featuring Sensation !  Pretty cool, huh?  And it was actually pretty easy t...

Welcome back to another XING Development experience. John here - it's been a while since I wrote on the blog, so I figure I'd update everyone on some of the work I've been up to. We are returning from a few XING related events this past week, namely the annual IndieCade (this year at USC) and the biennial Steam Dev Days in Seattle, so I'll give a quick recap of our travels as well. Steam Dev Days Going to events like Steam Dev Days feels like one of the most effective ways to refresh our development and keep us looking at the big picture. Despite our best efforts, we are still a relatively isolated company and can sometimes find ourselves working in a vacuum, so getting out and socializing with a ton of developers, seeing talks about gamedev, and having in-depth meetings with our partners can really help revitalize development. Arriving in Seattle Keynote about to start! The Main Session Room Lunch Day 1 After Party/Mixer hosted at the Convention Center by Valve Staying...

James here for our weekly development post! This last week I was fortunate to attend Oculus Connect 3 at the San Jose Convention Center in the center of Silicon Valley. Having grown up in Santa Clara, a mere 15 minute drive from San Jose, I felt very much at home attending this conference. This meant that I knew to head to a Philz coffee before heading to the conference. They must use magic beans to make coffee that good! VR Software is Leading the Way The underlying theme of the event seemed to be proving that great software experiences are eminently important to helping VR go mainstream. The hardware across many VR platforms is stupendous, and now it is up to us developers to make experiences which sing on those platforms. While improvements and optimizations on the computational and SDK side are going to allow developers to push more impressive graphics over time, we have only scratched the surface of what kinds of experiences are possible on existing hardware.  In between talks...

I've mentioned several times in recent posts how enamored I've become of the audiobook market. I'm having fun releasing audio versions of my books, and I appear to be discovering an entirely new audience for my work. In fact, over the past few days, I've had a number of conversations with audiobook listeners, and one of the things I've discovered is that many of them - especially those who "read" almost exclusively via audio - are spending far more for audiobooks than they should. In short, they aren't aware of Whispersync. Basically, Whispersync is Amazon technology that lets you switch back and forth between reading the Kindle version of a book and the audio version, without losing your place.  So if you're on, say, page 102 of an ebook and about to head out for your 1-hour morning commute, Whispersync will allow you to start listening to the audiobook right where you left off reading. Neat, right?  The only drawback, one would think, might be th...

Hi All! So for those who have been following us, you may have noticed our dev blog update posts have become fewer and more far-between over the past year. This is partly because we were working so hard on development and trying to finish the game that we aren't scheduling time to make posts, and partly because as we get closer, we were worried about spoiling any parts of the game trying to look for things to post. A New Calendar for Posting Online However, we recently hired a great guy to help us out with PR and Marketing named Alex Payne. He laid out a posting schedule and plan for us for the coming months to follow, so that we can be more transparent with our followers, and connect more with everyone who is interested in the game! He's given us a lot of suggestions about things that we can post that will be mainly spoiler-free: things like cool in-game assets we have made to display and showcase, holiday-themed posts, sharing images and technical achievements on Twitter, and ...