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Post news Report RSS Capsa - Development Update #1

In this first development update article we discuss animations, notably seamless sitting, be it on the ground or on a chair. We also talk about Capsa being recently accepted onto Steam and our ideas for a funding campaign for requested features.

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Capsa was Greenlit!


Progress getting onto Steam?

Firstly I want to first talk about the progress of getting Capsa onto Steam. For those of you who were not aware or just missed it, we ran a Greenlight campaign a couple weeks back that received a great reception, thank you to everyone who voted, it was enough for us to pass through the Greenlight process in just over 1 week.

I'm unable to go into the specifics about the following process of getting onto Steam, due to signing non-disclosure, but I can say that we have since completed it and have been accepted into Steam Partners. We have a steam app ID, and are in the process of setting up our store page currently.

There is nothing visually to see yet, but when we have the store page we will let you know.

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Sitting Animations


Something I tackled over the last week was Sitting animations. Specifically we wanted the process of where an avatar can seamlessly sit down from standing, be it anywhere on the ground or in a chair. The ground sitting, virtually anywhere within reason, was a requested feature by a few of you, and its certainly something I wanted to accomplish, as not many games have this feature.

To accomplish this process we used Unreal Engine 4's animation blending, we effectively have 3 separate animations - the idle standing, the stand-to-sit and then the looped sitting. After ensuring the animations sourced have the same root rotations and offsets, we managed an early, functioning build of it - and this is what I want to show off in the video below :)


Do bare in mind this is early alpha build footage, and certainly a long way from perfect. I just wanted to show that we had this feature working at an early development stage.

But with this early setup we can swap out the standing idle or switch to different sitting poses and it should all blend together nicely. I would like for players to be able to sit virtually anywhere (thats possible), or sit on various furniture placed around.

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Funding Campaign?


Over the last few weeks we've had a lot of requests to bring the game to Linux, Mac OS X, and Steam OS, as well as whether we can support other VR headsets such as Oculus Rift. Plus a lot of questions about whether we would support localization for a particular language.

Most of our replies have been that while we would love to, but as we are just a team of 2 working on the project we do have our limits on what we can complete for launch.

However, something we've been looking at is instead of simply saying no because we don't have the resources, is the idea of running a funding campaign (as of writing this likely on Indiegogo), so we can we can obtain everything we would need to support all these things you want us to support.

We have 4 stretch goals in our funding campaign, the exact targets are still being drawn up but what they include are as follows:

  • Improved localization support. Additional funding will pay for translators as well as the time of having the game translated into a total of 25 languages. If your language is supported by Steam then we won't just do our best to translate it ourselves (or through automated tools), but use funding to reach out to professional translators and get it done.

    In alphabetical order, English aside, this would include support for Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Romanian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian.

    Naturally under normal circumstances there is just no way the two of us could accomplish that level of support, and if we did, it would be at a quality of an automated translator, which can be quite terrible. But there is also the issue of post-launch support, so expansions and addons to the game also needing to be compatible with all these languages, so its a big task. But basically if we can get the necessary funding we will ensure all these languages are supported within 6 months of launch and funding go towards paying a professional translators to ensure the game is properly translated.
  • Extended Device Support. For this we will look into other VR devices like Oculus Rift (and possibly OSVR, which I admit I don't know a whole lot about at the moment) as well as ensure various control devices are supported correctly. We will also look into PS4 gamepads, and setup the game to work with them as well as have in-game controller button icons switch to match your Square, Triangle, and so on setup. Most of this will be hardware costs as VR headsets and any supporting hardware doesn't come cheap.

    We would also like to look into supporting Razer Chroma, Alienware FX, and Logitech G - as well as any other of these sorts of setups that may be out there. The hardware bill for these devices specifically isn't much (we actually own a few of these devices anyway), but it will take time to reach out to each of the manufacturers for their SDK's and ensure they continue to work as hardware updates happen.
  • Extended Platform Support. We would love to bring the game, via SteamPlay with cross-platform multiplayer to all these operating systems. The costs will notably be hardware in the case of having testing machines for Mac OS X, as well as a build that closely resembles the recommended minimum Steam OS specifications. But beyond this it will also help with support, where when we run into technical difficulties we can reach out to developers who know a lot more about the ins and outs of these specific operating systems and have them on hand to get the job done.
  • Game Expansion? Should we happen to hit a high funding stretch goal beyond what we need for the sake of support then we will put funding to work on developing a free expansion that will release around 6 months later. This will include new map areas such as completely new Biomes (we like the ideas of a Japanese Garden theme, as well as also liking perhaps one of those volcanic islands). We will also draw up a list of possible ideas and let the community vote on a new feature or perhaps mini-game to bring to the game as-well.

We aim to make the funding process fun, by giving copies of the game away at a discount, as well as some other really nice rewards. So for most users it will be a form of pre-order with perks, but at the same time let us do what a lot of you have requested :)

I will talk in more detail about this process in next weeks update as well as what perks will be on offer.


Follow us for regular updates!


If you want to be kept up to date with this project then follow us on here, as well as on our Greenlight page here. I will be aiming to publish an article at least once a week going forward talking about what we've been up to in regards development over the past week, so you can see things progressing forwards. If you have any questions by all means ask away and I will try my best to respond.

In the mean time I leave you with a night-time fly-through video above, the full sequence we cut and used in our Greenlight Introduction video, and if you missed it, below is that introduction video.


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