Bit Shifter

BIT SHIFTER

Bit Shifter is a 3D Arcade Strategy game where you must save Bit World from infection by an Evil Virus. You play Flash Bios, pilot of the S.S. Scandisc, delivering virus cleaning robots called Bits to infected ares of bitworld. You must fight off nasty creatures that spawn from the virus, protecting the Bits, but watch out! If the virus reaches the Data Stream it's all over!

Plastic Games was formed when programmer Paul Dana met the art team of Jason Sharp and Kirk Alberts. Prior to meeting we had already become proficient in Torque engine technology and we wanted to put that skill to use and form a game development studio.

Bit Shifter (later renamed to Flash Bios after the main character) is the first project Plastic Games worked on. We worked on it from April of 2003 until October of 2005. During this time we received an increasing number of offers for contract work and eventually stopped work on the game to do contract work fulltime.

Play the Game Yourself!


To checkout the game download this zip file . To see the depth of this game you need only play the tutorial and the first level.

What We Learned

We learned a lot about how to make games during the two plus years we worked on Bit Shifter and even more about how not to make games.

We learned that the first and most important thing about a game is the feel of the control object. If the control object does not feel just fabulous to interact with then the game right off is no fun. Our control object is a spaceship as you see above and we made and re-made the flight model for Bit Shifter endlessly. We must have gone through six revisions and one of the last things we were working on when we stopped was the flight model.

We learned how many different details affect the feel of the control object beyond just the physics, from camera lag and camera tilt to supporting details like thrusters that rotate in the direction of thrust and impact rotations when the object is hit.


Above you see how the ship rotates to show impacts when hit with enemy fire. The image does not do this justice, you need to play the game really appreciate the detail that went into making just flying this ship around fun.


Above you can see that, in addition to rotating under an impact the ship would start to spew smoke and the cool neon blinking areas on the ship would go from blue to red as it took more and more damage.
This kind of detail extends to the rest of the world as well. The nasty creatures that spawned from the virus would bob up and down slowly but that would increase and they would start to spew smoke and fire when hurt. When you hit them they would rotate from the impact: infact you could get them spinning like crazy it was a blast.


The very terrain was a character in the game. The Data Stream represented the circuits flowing through Bit World. Each level would represent a part of those circuits with the Data Stream flowing in one side of the level and out the other. All the elements in the game from Bit Makers to Health Generators were "powered" by the Data Stream. We wrote custom rendering code to show the flow of power through the Data Stream and up the "Zor Paths" that brought power to the game ekements.


As areas of the terrain in Bit World got infected they would turn an animated turbulent red to show the presence of Virus using more custom rendering code. When the Zor Paths got infected they would turn red as well and the Virus would spread quickly down the Zor Paths. If the Virus reaches the Data Stream then the level is over!


A Team Was Born


After two plus years of effort we did not have a complete game. What we did have was a vast appreciation for the effort it takes to make a quality game experience and the skills to acheive it. Best of all we had become a team.

Since that time we have been further honing our skills working on contract projects. For details on our availability please contact Paul Dana paul@plasticgames.com or Jason Sharp jason@plasticgames.com.