Reintroducing Osmos for Android!
Many have asked – and so we’re happy to announce that Osmos has returned to Android! Some may ask: Why did it disappear in the first place? Well, back in 2011 we worked with a company called Apportable to bring the mobile version of Osmos to Android. They were great to work with, and the […]
Physics-Based Animation in Gibbon: Beyond the Trees
Gibbon: Beyond the Trees, a game I’ve been collaborating on over the last few years with the awesome folks at Broken Rules, came out on Apple Arcade a few weeks ago. It’s an endless-runner style game in which the player controls a gibbon that can swing, slide, and somersault their way through the jungle, and […]
Osmos, Updates, and Floating-Point Determinism
We just released Osmos 2.4.0 on iOS – our first release in almost 4 years. Why the long hiatus? Was it because 2.3.1, our previous release, was perfect? No, though it was solid and stable, and we were happy with it. Rather, it was due to our reliance on “floating-point determinism” for multiplayer. And for […]
Karmaka’s Art Lived Multiple Lives: Part 1, The Cards
I’m Marco Bucci – I painted the cards, box art, and banners for Karmaka. I’ve been part of the team for two years. As I write this, the game is just weeks away from its kickstarter release. We have high hopes for this thing. But instead of looking into the future, I’m finding myself going back through Karmaka’s many lives, reliving […]
USD! USD! A Kickstarter Request
We plan on running a Kickstarter campaign soon for a game in development. We also live in Canada. That means our pledge prices will all be listed in CAD (Canadian Dollars) rather than USD. Creators in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand are similarly bound to their country’s currencies. Let’s face it: the majority of […]
Tabletop Resources for Videogame Developers
Dave and I are relatively old hands in the videogame industry. Between AAA and indie projects we’ve each been at it for over 10 years. But, aside from some hobbyist design, neither of us knew much about the tabletop game industry until we got serious about publishing Karmaka. Over the last 6 months we’ve done […]
ᐊᑕᓇᕐᔪᐊᑦ (ᐅᖃᐅᓯᖅ ᐊᑕᐅᓯᖅ ᓈᒻᒪᔪᐃᑦᑐᖅ)
Last year, Ryan Oliver – a developer from Nunavut – reached out to us. While playing Osmos he had noticed an achievement we named “Atanarjuat”, earned for completing the game’s “Chase” stage. This was a nod and a reference to a wonderful Canadian film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, based on an ancient Inuit legend. (yup, […]
What we’re up to…
Things have been fairly quiet on the Hemisphere blog recently. The last year saw us busy on: Osmos Multiplayer, which we released on iOS this Summer, and updated soon after with voice-chat. This is where we spent most (read, a lot!) of our time. The Android port, released at the beginning of the year. A […]
App switching and graceful music handling in iOS
We post few dev/technical pieces on our blog (I’d love to do more), but we ran into an issue recently that seems to plague many iOS apps on the store: Music not always playing on app resume. It’s not catastrophic when it happens – and can often be fixed by hitting the home button and […]
Smoothness
Smoothness. If there was one aspect of Osmos that we were psychotically obsessed with during development, it was smoothness. Just like driving on freshly laid asphalt, skating on a rink just after the Zamboni has gone by, skiing through light untracked powder, gliding down a trail on a mountain bike with 10 inches of suspension, […]