The Law is Against Us

So we got locked out of the building that we have our studio in one day when we were trying to work on the game. Apparently it was Thanksgiving and people don't go in to work that day or something stupid like that (but apparently the guy who walks around with the key and locks people out of buildings was there bright and early that morning.) It wouldn't have been that big of a deal but we were working late the night before and left our computers and all of our stuff there that we needed. And even that wouldn' t have been that bad but we also accidentally left a space heater, which was very very old and not-safe looking, on the night before, and didn't realize it till we got home. And I mean, that heater was old, it looked like it may have been the same space heater Abraham Lincoln used to heat up his room when he was writing the Gettysburg Address, and the power cable gets so hot that we usually have to wear gloves to unplug it. So we were kinda scared that the place might burn down and tried to get in there early the next morning in order to save the studio from burning down, and more importantly, the harddrives which contain all our work on the game. So we had to get a police officer to let us in the building, to take armfuls of computer equipment. He was suspicious of us 'long-hair hippies' the whole time, he kept his one hand on his batton.

Ok so back to the game. I've been working on the next section of the Grasslands, which is going to be a lot longer than the first part, with a lot more variety of enemies and landscape. We also decided to add an optional 'Slime Cave' which will be infested with slime monsters and even a giant slime boss:

He's some sort of big bear creature covered in slime with a fish, birds, and some other creatures stuck inside of him too. We want to make him have sort of a split personality with the fish, being wild and only wanting to kill, and the bear, being more calm.

I also recorded a timelapse video of me making some of the grasslands sections with my level editor:


There is also a section in the middle where Nate and I take a break to play Block Towers, the awesome game by JLJac.

Also, added in the ability for Elkwood:

He has a spins around the player like a shield and can defend against the attack. There will be a better animation soon, the current one is a place holder.

Water Temple

Thought I would update with some teasers of some graphics. The first is a little section from an area currently titled "the water temple".

And a work in progress preview on an enemy priest from the area:


Thats all for now.
-Caliber

Animated Screen Shots

So I think it's time for an update, it's been awhile so I'll have to dig through everything we did since last time.

I made my own built in screenshot taker for the game which outputs ordered bitmaps to a file. And along with this, I was able to make it record each frame so that I can compile them into an animated gif of the actual gameplay of the game.

So we've been adding in different gameplay elements for the grasslands area. I can't believe we are still working on this same area, we are itching to get into the more interesting areas, but we want to make each part of the game as good as we possibly can. Anyway here are some of the new things:

A pretty basic new element is the bouncing blant, which isn't anything too new to platformers but a basic part of platforming.

A turtle-like creature who walks around and blows wind out through a hole in his back.



A new enemy.

And a funny glitch that I decided to record. When I was adding in the ability for the bird to shoot pellots out of his mouth, I accidently made him shoot out other birds! That's just crazy! Birds don't shoot other birds out of their mouths! Believe me, I know, I watch Animal Planet.

The other thing that has taken up a lot of time recently, has been rewriting the entire companion system. Because the original game idea has changed so much and the companions were one of the first things I put in, they were long overdue for a reworking. I managed to get most of it finished and back up to the state that it was in before, but this time a lot better. So now the dog follows you a lot better and hardly ever misses a jump, making 'teleporting' back to you less common. Flying companions following you now looks a lot more naturual and not as jumpy as before. I'm still going to work on some tweaking of the companion AI but for the most part I am done with that.

So I moved back to working on the cutscenes and the actual game content. I started building the next section of levels a little bit, I plan to do the whole rest of the grasslands next week. I also added in the next couple of cutscenes, which are very time consuming to create, and realized that we needed a better way to organize the story and map out the game. For the most part right now we are remembering it all up in our brains. So we decided to write out a document that has an outline for all the characters, every cutscene, and every area in the game we need to create. I started working on it today and got a solid 4 and a half pages done so far. Unfortunatley it only leads up to about five minutes in gamplay (though a lot of it was history of the story before the game even starts.) So this document is probably going to take a while, but it will be worth it.

Hmmm what else did we do since last post? Oh yeah this!


Another awesome piece of work by Gutter.

Ok well I think I'm going to leave it at that for now. There will be more updates soon.