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You can purchase your Pre-Order on Desura for the price of 19.99$/17.99€/14.99£.

To Purchase The Game, Go Here:

Support our game and the Brain Candy team by preordering Fray!

With this preorder, you will gain access to our weekly Alpha builds, our special community features and also receive a free copy of Fray, to share with a friend!

This is a limited time offer during our Alpha, so don’t miss out!

> Preorder Fray on Desura.

Hey guys!

We have (finally) set a release date for Fray’s Pre-order Alpha. So set your calendars to stun to:

The game will be released on DESURA, and when pre-ordering Fray, you will get one free to share with a friend!

We wanted to work out as many bugs as possible before releasing Fray
for you to play, and we are confident that this version is good enough
to allow you to enjoy the game as it is (mostly) intended.What can you
expect in the Alpha:

• 2 two-player maps
• 2 Corporations (Aros and CronaCorp)
• 6 Classes (Assault, Sniper, Medic, Support, Tank and Shadow)
• Over 20 different Weapons and Equipments
• Our appreciation  – yay! o// -
• A damn good time!

The game will then be updated each week to include new maps, weapons, animations, textures and sounds as dev progresses.

What we would love is player feedback to balance the game the best way possible to make it a great multiplayer game!

So if you want to help us and our team in making Fray a great experience, sign up here and join the fun on February 8th!

See you soon and remember, Make War, Not Love!

Hi everyone, this article is the second of three parts introducing you to the different classes you will get to choose from in Fray. If you have any questions regarding the classes, just shoot away in the comments and don’t forget to subscribe and vote for us if you enjoy what we are creating!

In Fray, you control a squad of 4 combatants, to whom you will issue orders on the battlefield. You must choose these characters within a pool of 6 classes (Sniper, Assault, Medic, Tank, Support and Shadow) and each has its own specializations and weaponry.

Today we will be presenting the Tank and Medic classes, two dedicated roles that can change the tides on the battlefield.

Continue reading »

David Jeanne, our Lead Designer has been working on Fray’s core design and interface for the past year and wanted to share how the design process for the interface was undertaken. He has written this article to show you our approach for Fray’s Interface, and how this has in turn brought new elements to our gameplay. He’ll focus on explaining Planning Phase’s interface design, leaving Resolution Phase for a further article.

Interface Concept

The interface would naturally fit with the desired concept for Fray’s gaming experience. We thus started our design process by extracting all interface constraints based on our game design and desired game experience.
The interface should be able to withstand the following:

• Ensure that order definition during Planning Phase was fast and stressful, it is the moment of strategy and the interface should be a tool that allows players to optimize their choices. The Resolution Phase should in turn convey relevant information, players are watching the resolution of their choices and the interface must support them in taking knowledge of the different outcomes and in thinking about the next round of actions.
• Quick access to a wide variety of weapons, equipment and stances for each class to build a variety of efficient situations with each character, without stifling the battlefield’s visual space.
• Minimize the noise induced by irrelevant material so that players can think on the essential, and focuses on few elements to learn: character classes and their status.
• Allow to quickly establish a tactical reaction without slowing the game’s pace
• Be minimal to allow the player to take a look at the state of his squad and the possibilities offered by the current game situation
• And of course be consistent with game world’s context.

More after the Jump!

Continue reading »

In the recent weeks we have gone a bit dark on the development, but it was for the best as it allowed us to refine our gameplay mechanics, redo some code and create more assets and props for the game. We have started unveiling our work through an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, in which we discuss the gameplay, how we intend to keep the game fast paced and our thoughts on Frozen Synapse.

I would also like to announce that Brain Candy has gotten a little bit bigger, with Lea joining us full time as game designer, as well as Abel (animation) and Sarah (3D Artist) reinforcing our graphics team as interns for the summer, bringing our merry little band up to 11 people.

In today’s news we will share with you some new screenshots of the game, our interview with RPS and the approach we have taken for level designing our Paris map.

Right now the game is still in pre-Alpha state, but we are slowly getting closer to a true Alpha. We are hoping to release a beta version around the end of September that will be fully playable, albeit not content complete. In any case, we are planning on some video releases in the newt few weeks, with gameplay demonstration and explanation, so that you can see what makes Fray tic.

Read the rest after the jump!

Continue reading »

Hello boys and girls, long time, no speak!

We have taken the past few months to work in depth on the gameplay and graphics, fine tuning everything so that the game experience will be as smooth as possible. We will be unveiling our work in the upcoming weeks (after the E3 chatter calms down a bit), with new screenshots showing our progression, presenting our Paris environment (we have come a long way since our GDC tech demo), but more importantly, we will focus on the gameplay of Fray, explaining how a turn in Fray takes place, what kind of orders can be issued, the arsenal at your disposal and how to set up a team.

For now I would like to talk about creating advertisements for our Paris level.

The level’s setting is in a dystopian Paris, where a civil uprising has gotten out of hand. Unable to maintain order on the streets, the local government has purchased the services of worldwide paramilitary corporation AROS to assist them in quelling the riots. But the situation has gotten out of hand, and a military coup has allowed the corporation to set its roots in downtown Paris. Now, the riots have transformed into a full resistance and players get to relive this experience on the tense streets.

When imagining this environment, we wanted a recognizable area of Paris (without sticking to the cliché of the Eiffel tower), that also fit our gameplay needs. We decided to set the scene on the Champs Elysées, a very famous and touristic zone of Paris, but completely revamped to fit in with Aros’ military domination and the expected look and feel of a sci-fi game.

Since the area is a commercial/touristic zone, we wanted to emphasize on the advertising and luminous billboards that surround the area, having the zone almost exclusively lit by these ads. We wanted them to be a cross between current real life advertisements (beauty care, fashion, perfume, food/beverage …) and more advanced stuff, from Cronacorp’s Cronalabs and other high tech products. We are still creating new advertisements (specifically animated ads), but here are some of a few we want to include in the game.

Also, as the zone is a militarized zone, we wanted to have some AROS propaganda and some resistance messages and Tags around the area, to liven the place up, and create a historical setting.

AROS Propaganda

Aros Recrutement

I hope you enjoyed these, we will be showing more very soon!

Howdy everyone!

I hope you didn’t miss our shenanigans too much, and if you did, well… We are back with a vengeance!
We have just returned from our trip to the USA to present Fray for the first time, to the press and other nice people. And their reactions have been overwhelmingly positive, confirming that we are on the right track in creating a great strategy game!

So here is the first part of our GDC tour debrief, full of joy and worries, as we travelled from the West Coast to the East with Fray in our luggage.

Before leaving for San Francisco, we had worked on a tech demo that would showcase how we modified and pushed the Unity Engine to fit our view for the game, adding a new Ambient Occlusion system, Volumetric Fog and Screen Space Global Illumination, just to mention a few. It was tough to cram everything in there and we had quite a few sleepless nights, but it was worth it.

Raw output from Unity 3

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

Screen Space Global Illumination

Final Output in Fray

Laptops packed, Press Kits printed, DVD’s burned and our pockets full of candy, we were off to San Francisco, giddy as schoolgirls. Well, sleepy schoolgirls anyway.

Max sleeping at the boarding gate.

After an 11:30 hour flight (not so long if you sleep ¾ of the way!), a few movies, bad in-flight food and good hard liquor, we were finally there! US of A! Land of huge cars, oversized hamburgers and Homeland Security! <3

San Francisco!

Time to check in to our hotel room, have a huge breakfast and we were ready to roll! The game still needed some work to look as planned, so we decided to grab a huge American breakfast before getting back to work. We invested our hotel room with all our tech, using the 40″ flat screen as a secondary monitor and turning the place into a secondary office. I think we scared the housekeeping ladies a bit.

Nice and greasy american breakfast. Yum!

After a few more hours of coding, we were finally ready. The demo was complete, and we were anxious to show the game to the world for the first time. When you have spent such a long time working on something internally, even though you think that you have something cool, there is always the risk that you are just too deep inside it to realize that you are doing something wrong, and this would be our undoing… Luckily, this wasn’t the case.

Hard at work in our hotel room.

But things just had to go wrong before we would realize this.

You have probably heard of Murphy’s Law. It is typically stated as: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. Well our first day of presentation was exactly that.

We arrived at Triplepoint at 8:00 AM, to prepare for our first 9AM appointment with Shacknews.

Triplepoint, our PR partner, has an office on 1^st Street in San Francisco, just a 5 minute walk from the Moscone Center, where the GDC was held, and was perfect to present the game. They had prepared a room just for us, with a TV, a few seats, some coffee and of course, candy. All we had to do was come in and hook up our laptop to the TV. Easy, eh?

Our presentation room at Triplepoint SF

That is when things started to go awry. When we plugged in the laptop with the demo, a spark flew from the power adapter and fried it. This was 15 minutes before our first interview and we had about 40 minutes of battery (our Clevo laptop is a power hungry beast of a computer)… OK, that’s enough for 2 interviews. Sam (our PR Rep) tells us they have a great gaming PC they can lend us, so we are a bit less worried, but when they actually show us the machine, with parts over 3 years old (core2duo, 2gigs of ram and a 8800GT), we knew that wouldn’t work out with our uncompressed textures and un-optimized geometry.

Sam, our PR rep (right) and myself (left) enjoying some fresh air

We first set out to rent a computer, but with the GDC show there, every gaming PC had been rented out long ago… Only solution, go buy a new one. So while I was doing an interview with the AFP without having an actual game to show, David (our lead GD) and Max (lead 3D) went to Best Buy to try to get a new PC.

They had to go to 3 Best Buys and finally found an OK gaming rig, if you changed the graphics card. They bought a GTX460 to put in the computer, as the one onboard had only 256 megs of RAM (my 5 year old laptop has more than that…) they come back half an hour before our IGN meeting and we decide to plug it in… Nothing. We check the power supply… 250W. Thanks HP! My electric toothbrush has more power than that piece of junk. Oh and to make matters more fun, the USB drive on which we had our source code was not recognized by the computer, and we had to send 8 gigs of data over Wifi… Fun times!

Robert about as low as our morale at this point.

So they were off, again, to buy a new power supply, while we were presenting the game at 5fps on a shitty piece of hardware.

So the first day was fun… But once we got the computer together, we had a solid framerate and managed to show the tech demo at a solid 40FPS.

We were able to present the game to IGN, PC Gamer, @Gamer, Gamespot, Games Are Evil just to name a few.

Everything ended up well and we treated ourselves to a HUGE dinner at Lorrie’s Diner, and acted like tourists discovering the tableside jukebox.

Brain Candy team enjoying a fine selection of 60′s music.

You can read some preview impressions here on Gamespot: http://gdc.gamespot.com/story/6301736/fray-first-look-preview or here at Shacknews: http://www.shacknews.com/article/67778/fray-first-look-preview

This concludes part 1 of our GDC trip round up, next time, we will discuss the rest of our San Francisco stay, and our trip to New York.

Take care !

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Don’t forget to follow us on our website for insider updates, goodies and future beta invitations:

www.fray-game.com

Hi all,

Our teaser trailer is finally out !

Enjoy!