Hey all, Jason here with Etherframe Games.  We’re currently working on a dialogue-driven game tentatively titled “They Beep”.

The premise of the game is that you’re an average-Joe office worker going about your job when you receive an email that changes everything.

“Someone at this company is secretly a robot.”

With this new revelation you embark on a quest to discover who this robotic infiltrator is, all the while trying to avoid creating too much gossip about how much of a weirdo you are.

Above are some of the concepts for the characters that will be in the game, drawn by the talented Jesse.

Hey everyone, Jason here of Etherframe Games.

Travis. Director of Human Resources’ Assistant

We’ve been making steady progress on our game (They Beep) after a quick introduction to pixel art. Art, code, writing and sound are all on time and on track to be finished by the end of the Jam. Last night before going to bed we finalized the design of our protagonist, Travis. Earlier today Jesse created an excellent walking animation for our hero.

So majestic.

Hey everyone, Jason again with Etherframe Games!

We’ve got the whole cast for They Beep done and have created a title screen to show them off.

They Beep

They Beep is a dialogue driven game about a normal office. One of Travis’ co-workers might secretly be a robot. But probably not.

Jason of Etherframe Games here,

A true miracle occurred nearly a half-hour ago. I was able to submit our game with mere seconds to spare. The file was taking forever to upload to Dropbox and it wasn’t being uploaded on my computer so I couldn’t get the link. Somehow it finished uploading with something like 5 seconds left on submissions, so I quickly copied and pasted the link and hit submit. I’d like to say I prayed a little too there, but I don’t think there was time.

Many errors cropped up in the last two-hours before submission.

Post-mortem to come, but for now it is playable, but lacks some polish.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=35100

We’ve learned a lot.

We fell too in-love with the humor and flavor of the game and I kept adding planned features and depth to the game mechanics before we had anything done.

We had to change art styles halfway through, and our artist had to learn pixel art and how to develop game art assets on the fly (which he did fine, GJ Jesse).

Our programmer Alec said he got really hung up on the architecture of the code.

We had a font issue that prevented the words from rendering. This issue presented itself at the eleventh hour, forcing me to madly go back and edit all the text to use Arial.

We probably won’t be using Flash again just because it has a lot of weird interactions (like the font issue).

This is now a game about finding yourself.

All in all we were extremely fortunate to be able to submit a “playable” game in the first Ludum Dare, or even Game Jam we entered.

-Jason, Etherframe Games

Good Night Sweet Prince