You are the Codex, an Artificial Intelligence in a small construction ship, desperately arming yourself with a customizable array of devastating floating weapons platforms and trying to reach Earth to warn of an impending invasion. 

You choose where to place the weapons relative to the ship, the angle of their attack, and can upgrade them in a branching tech tree. These platforms can then be fired manually or given over to AI control and dropped around the map to grant strategic control of the environment.

What is Archive?

Misfit Children and Hypermetric Studios are proud to announce our flagship title, Archive, Memoria Technica. The game is a top-down dual-stick shooter in the tradition of Robotron:2084 or Geometry Wars, coupled with the strategic customization of a tower defense game.  

 

Players can customize their ship's weaponry, choosing from an array of weapon types, and toggle them between AI control or manual fire, controlling the map and your resources. 

Replayability is a key feature in Archive, and so in addition to the huge number of combinations of customizable weapons you control, our adaptive AI enemy spawning system ensures that gameplay feels freshly challenging in your first or fiftieth game. Rather than building levels with fixed enemies and waves, we were inspired by Left For Dead's AI Director and built our engine to act similarly. It reacts to how you play and adjusts the enemies to provide the greatest challenge possible. Combined with our adaptive music system, it ensures a fresh feel to each game.

The game has an Indian/Hindu theme, and its story is inspired by a fascinating Hindu text called the Bhagavad Gita. This two and a half thousand year old poem is a discussion about the morality and nature of death and war. Almost everyone knows at least one line from it: "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds". 

The fundamental question of Archive is this: after you die, which is more valuable? A perfect record of your life made by a stranger, or the imperfect memories you record yourself? 

What is left to do? 

Well . . . a lot. 

Will and I have been working off our savings for the last couple of years of development, and now we need help for the final 6 months of dev time to get the game completed. 

There is a lot that needs to get done to get the game across the finish line. So far gameplay is feeling good, and the reaction to our game so far has been great! We have shown it at Toronto's Gamercamp Festival, Boston's PAX, and San Francisco's GDC, where popular reaction to the game was solid. 

. . . But we need more content. We need to finish up the campaign levels, set up the gauntlet modes for competitive leaderboard play, add more music, enemies, weapons, and bosses, and really polish the hell out of this thing.  

There are also some more techy things we need to do, like get our online back-end up and running for the leaderboards and forums, and finish tweaking the AI spawning system. 

We are optimistic about finishing things up in about 5-6 months, but we can only put in the hours to make that happen if we have something to live on. If this game feels like something you want to play, please help us make it a reality!

What about the Reward Tiers?

For the folks who believe in our game, we have some awesome stuff planned. We have a limited number of 1/2 price copies of the game up in our first tier, and each reward after that comes with the game, as well as exclusive backer's avatars for our forums and leaderboards, and at the later stages stuff gets really nifty. 

The Rewards we are most excited about are the ones that are going to get some lucky backers working with us to create new content for the game! 

First up is the invitation to join our Beta testing team, which will see you playing versions of the game before anyone else in the world gets to see them! 

Our highest level Rewards are what we are really jazzed about. We want to give you the chance to create names and ideas for our enemy types, new player ship designs, and even new levels! We will work with you to make your ideas into an awesome reality, which you will then get to play in the official release and see your name in the credits as Creative Consultants and Designers!

But WAIT there's more!

What is this wonderful game you might ask? (Ya I will just tell you) Partnered with our sister studio we bring you Electronic Super Joy!

"Electronic Super Joy is a brutally hard plat former set in a world of pulse-pounding electronic music. Run, jump, smash & fly your way through 45+ weird & different levels, with low-gravity, world rotation, giant monsters & swarming missiles. Described as "The Unholy merging of Super Meat Boy & Super Hexagon! "

Where is the Money Going?

The bulk of the funding will go towards wages for the team, so that we can put full time effort into the project. Other expenses will include getting more music and animations, and bringing the game to the public at awesome events like PAX. 

So, Who are we?  

Misfit Children Games

Misfit Children Games is a new studio which has joined forces with Hypermetric Studios to produce Archive, Memoria Technica. Founded in 2012, the studio’s focus is bringing innovative design and gameplay to the fore, and producing titles that are as much fun to make as they are to play.

 Randy Orenstein- Lead Designer

Hi! My name is Randy Orenstein, lead designer for Archive, Memoria Technica.I’ve been working in game development for the past 4 years, and trained as a 3d Artist. 

Before going full-indie, I worked for BigPants Games (winners of the Audience Choice Award, IndieCade 2011), Pathways To Education, and Michael Todd Games (Creators of Electronic Super Joy). I then worked in QC at Ubisoft Toronto on Splintercell Blacklist for a short time. 

Last year, I quit Ubi to pursue full time indiehood, which has allowed me to spend more time on something very important to me: the game development community. I’ve volunteered for all kinds of things, and am now a Steering Committee member for the Toronto IGDA, a voting member of the Hand Eye Society, an official Organizer for TOJam, and co-run the Toronto Global Game Jam. 

I also created a community in Toronto, Toronto Skillswap, through which I have been running weekly and bimonthly educational events for game developers for over 2 years. 

Giving back to the community for the support and feedback they have given is something I value very highly.

  Will Carducci – Lead Programmer

Will Carducci is our programmer, and this is his second major project. Previously he worked on Electronic Super Joy for Michael Todd Games, and has only recently started programming for games. He has volunteered with many local events, and it was through volunteering for DigiFest Toronto that he and Randy met. He is also a pretty private person, so that was all he wanted us to say.

Final Thoughts

Our game has been in development for over two years, and at the last hurdle we have to ask for your help to get us up and over. Archive is a lot of fun so far, but to make it what we think it should be we have a lot of work ahead of us. Please support us either directly, here, or by spreading the word about us using Indiegogo's sharing tools, Facebook, Twitter, and any other means you have!

Keep posted to the campaign as we will be rolling out new content, new reward tiers, and more as the campaign progresses!

Thank you!