Game Title: Fins & Flippers

Fins & Flippers is the title we came up with for our scuba diving game. We have a mostly complete version of the game we've been play testing a lot and showed off at our school's art event, Arts Crawl, which was a major success (more about this next post.)

For now, I just wanted to post a few more pictures since I haven't said too much about this game recently and it's been coming along so quickly.

Sign in screen:



GIF Shark Attack:

Since the game is best played 4 players with controllers, we thought it would be best to make it into an XBox game. So that is where we are planning to take this next. I'm still deciding if I want to release a PC version online at this point.

There's a bigger post coming up with some more content.

Get 3 Coffins Ready

Or maybe just one for now.

Chicken Bandit Update #5

Wow I haven't posted an update in a while. I took the last week off, because I had to do some other stuff, but other than that I've been getting a lot of work done. The first world is pretty much complete, gameplay wise, besides a few things for the boss. We've decided to add in a few more levels for each world, probably 5 each, but they will take a shorter amount of time to complete. After doing some gameplay testing we decided it was better to not have huge chunks of the actual gameplay without a break in between. Since it will be played on a mobile device, players may not want to invest a large chunk of time into the game, so it's better to have more stopping points. It will also give the player more opportunities to purchase items and buy upgrades.

Here are some more changes since last time. It's been a while since the last update, so I might miss some stuff:

-Main Menu added in
-Transition between different game 'screens'
-Options Setup
-Different profiles
-Main Map level unlocking
-Different items: shotgun, power shot, chicken agility
-Fishing Rod enemy
-New trail tile set and background for World 2 (Desert)
-World 2 train generation (3/5 complete)
-Menu to edit cards in 'hand' before starting train robbing sequence
-World 1 balancing

We have also been working with pgil again, who did the music for our last game, City of Doom. He has been doing some insanely awesome western style music that compliments the game very nicely. Here is an example of one of the world's music:



I wanted to send the game out to testers by this point, but there is still a little bit too much place holder graphics in place for now to do that. Probably sometime within this next week I'll be asking for some help on the play testing side of this, so if you are interested, stay tuned!

Oh, and we also need to think of a name for this game soon!

Train Tile Sets and Breakable Doors

We decided that we would use tilesets to create the trains instead of full images. This allows us to have lots of different types of carts without having to add many more images. I've also rolled out my good old trusty Chainsaw Level Editor to take care of things once again:

The carts look similar at the moment, since we only have one basic tileset complete so far.

We also added in the final graphics for the breakable windows and doors. I copied the same tile breaking system I used for City of Doom:

Development is moving along very quickly! Leave a comment and check back for updates!

Chicken Bandit Checkpoint 3

I reached my 3rd programming checkpoint a couple days ago. The checkpoints get kind of loose from here so I think I'm going to have to go back and re-evaluate them and set new deadlines.
The 3rd checkpoint stuff:

-Windows and Doors on the trains
-Doors open up when shot enough
-Specific spawn points for different type of enemies/items
-Arm movement (spinning to the angle shot)
-Lasso graphics
-Text wrapping and typing out in store

I added in a feature before to take screenshots as well as "animated" screenshots (multiple frames combined together in a gif) as I did in Grand Feather. The only problem was that it ran too slow on the device while recording, so I couldn't make a very good video. I spent a long time trying to optimize it and finally got it to run at a somewhat playable speed, 2-8 fps! Here is a sample:

Most of the graphics there are placeholders, besides the enemy and the main character, and the train background. The red rectangles represent windows, and the green represent doors that you have to shoot off. The player can lasso the safes on the train to pull down for bonus money (the lasso animation is not yet in.) You also might notice that the Chicken Bandit currently shoots backwards by twisting his arm back and firing without looking. Now that is a pretty impressive feat (especially for a bandit with no formal training in gun slinging) but there will eventually be an animation of him turning around to fire behind him.

I have also been spending a good amount of time doing the designing for what the final game will be, but I will talk more about that in an upcoming post.

The next step is adding in sound and music to the game engine, which probably should have already been done by this point.

Grand Feather 3D?

Though, this may be just one too many D's.

City Of Doom

I think that it is time for an update. Since last time, we worked on Grand Feather a little bit, but mainly we have been working on another Action 52 remake, City of Doom.


work in progress title screen.

The original City of Doom features a man climbing up a giant building that is so tall that it eventually leads into space. He is attacked by bugs that he must fight off with his spray can. He also has to dodge what appears to be bowling balls that fall from the sky. And that's about it. Here's a video of the original:




We are taking the basic concept of this game, but also making a few changes:

-we are using the gameboy color pallete.

-instead of using an aerosol spray can to fight off enemies, you use a gun (we thought it would be more enviornmentally friendly that way.)

-the bugs you have to fight are bigger and more alien-like.

-you can fire in 8 different directions

-we are trying to make it fun

Here is a mockup of what it might look like once all graphics assets are in:

The graphics have actually changed a lot since then, but you get the idea. Here is a small animated screen shot to show what the game looks like in its current state:



We are not too far away from finishing this small game so make sure you check back soon for updates.

Inside the Walls of Slime

Been working on the insides of the slime cave recently. I always forget how long it takes to create the levels after I haven't worked on a new one in a while. I haven't made any animated screenshots in a while so I'll post some of those!

Some flying eyeball guys and an immobel slime monster who will eventually have slimey veins that connect to a door that will be open when you kill it.

One of the tunneling monsters who lives in the slime caves. He is so scary that I can't even work on parts with him unless it's during the day time.

We also finally got in some of the real graphics for the 'life bar' that you can see at the top of the 1st picture. We tried to make the health system unique by using different foods that you find throughout the world for your health. Different foods give you different amounts of health, like the apple/tomato type food shown here can only take 1 hit, but getting a banana would give you 3 extra hits. You will start the game with 3 slots for health and you will be able to find plant seeds which will allow better food to grow in the 'safe gardens'.

That's it for now, keep checking for updates! I think nate's going to be doing another interview real soon, so come on back!

Semester Ends, Time to Really Get Some Work Done

We were forced to take some time off from working on the game the last 2 weeks due to the semester ending. We had to focus most of our time on finshing up projects and taking tests and that kind of boring stuff. I wasted about 3 full days working on a 'Toll Booth' programming project in java for one of my computer science classes. The worst part about doing programming projects for classes is that you have to put a ton of work into it, and then when you are finished, you don't even have something cool. You just have some stupid worthless program that isn't even fun for anybody. But it may come in handy if I'm able to somehow fulfill my wildest dreams of becoming a toll booth operator (the ability to open and close a little gate, I can feel the power surging through my body just thinking about it.)

We were able to sneak in a few hours of working on the game though, and there are still some updates that I haven't talked about yet since the last post.

The coolest update is probably the new ability for Elkwood. We have given him about 4 different powers now, but keep changing which one we want him to have. Since he is a main character and you get him near the begining of the game, we want to make sure his ability is useful, but not too powerful. He is now able to make the player dash, by pulling on his shirt. This gives the player a short boost of speed and also allows him to dash-jump, so he can jump farther distances.

And, you do an awesome flip whenever you dash-jump.

The other abilities that we had Elkwood doing before will most likely go to other companions that you will get later in the game.

I also just finished the story document that is the closest thing to a design document that we have so far. I wanted to write out in detail all of the scenes and everything that needs to be known to fully understand the story. I'm glad that I'm finally finished writing it, it was drug out for about a month (and it's only about 14 pages long.) I don't really like writing this stuff down too much because we like to have the game sort of develop itself as we go along. At least now we have the main points written down and other people (such as a musician) might be able to get the idea of what we envision the game to be.

Did some more level editing too. Going to be working on a different section soon, hopefully, and most likely they won't take as long.

Fixed up and finished most of the cutscenes for the starting part of the game. I spent a lot of my time tweaking and trying to get them to look exactly as we envisioned them. It takes surprisingly a lot of time to do this though, but it will be well worth it. We still haven't come up with a good starting intro cutscene for the game. I spent a couple of hours making one before, but didn't like it, so we decided to axe it completely and start over.

Here is a shot of one of the scenes. It also shows the new text system with a new font that nate made (a few fixes have been made in the font since this screenshot.)


So now we are on break so we will hopefully be able to make a ton of progress on the game. Next up to work on is the companion menu system which will allow you to equip/unequip different companions. We are also about to add in the first boss soon. Really soon. Like I am just about to start working on him after I finish this blog post.

And that means that we are going to want some testers to do a run through of what we have of the game so far. I mainly want to make sure that the game runs well on other computers, as well as get feedback on what other people think about it so far. So get your testing fingers ready!

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.

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.

Time for Some Serious Work

HandCraftedRadio and I have began a very strict working festival where we will stay up and work on the game for an inhuman amount of hours. I am attending this years SIGGRAPH conference which will be displaying the latest in digital arts and luckily even a section featuring indie games (HORRAY!) Anyways, I am going to be leaving for there friday and HCR and I want to have a demo done and ready to be passed out to attendants to the conference. So here we go wish us the best of luck and pray we dont die... or worse... die then somehow come back to life but then die again in an even more painful manner.
Anyways, the above is a picture I painted up in photoshop for the game. Ive been doing alot of animations and spending alot of time on each individual animation making sure we have smooth and interesting animation quality. I wish I could share some of my best ones but I am restricting myself so that there is new stuff to be found in the game, otherwise what fun is that?
Also a big thanks to the Moldering dev team for giving us a spot in their blog. Their game is looking really great and we hope to get in contact with them and maybe talk and learn some stuff from each other. Check out their development log at http://devblog.projectmoldering.com/ , some seriously good work going on there! Thanks for visiting and don't forget to tell all your friends (and your enemies too)

PS heres a bunny



-Caliber9 (Nate Kling)

Bug Fighting

I am very happy right now, because today, I went head to head with a couple of my old glitch buddies that I shoved off to the side to come back to later. Well that later turned out to be today, and I'm very proud of myself, because I took those annoying little buggers to school on a bus full of pain. What I'm trying to say is that I fixed some really annoying glitches today.

First of all I got rid of openAL because it was just giving me a headache, and decided to only use the SDL_Mixer. The SDL_Mixer bug mentioned in a previous post, where there was a sound delay, was easily fixed when I realized I was using the wrong version of the SDL.dll file (after a couple hours of troubleshooting). Fixing this then spawned another glitch with the level editor crashing randomly when using it. I'm not sure why the new dll brought this glitch out, but it was caused by a memory problem that I missed in the code, so I guess it was a good thing that it happened.

I fixed a problem with pushable objects in the game from way back in the beginning. Somewhere between the friction levels of each tile and the way the entities update their velocity, an object on top of a block being pushed would not 'ride' it correctly. It would slowly move to the side. This was the worst glitch to fix of all and gave me a major headache and I'm probably going to have nightmares about it tonight, so the only thing I'm going to say is that I fixed it. Ok? It's fixed so let's just move on.

This is probably what I'm dreaming about right now, except in my dream this scene takes place in hell and the devil is poking my brain with little needles.

I also discovered a small glitch in the original platforming code, also something I haven't touched since close to when the project first started (besides slight modifications). I don't like messing with this stuff to much when we are this far along (mainly because one wrong move could mess everything up!) and I thought it was going to take a very long time and be a nightmare to fix but it actually turned out that I was able to fix it in a very short amount of time with not too many problems. So I thought that turned out to be pretty cool and I also awarded myself 100 programmer bonus points for doing such a good job.

So I'm pretty pumped right now about this. The one thing that was very helpful, and I would recommend anyone who is working on a large project to do, is to keep a log of every single time you change something or add something new to the game. I have been doing this for the past couple months and it is very useful when it comes to fixing glitches. A lot of my glitches come from changing something and not realizing how that change affects something else, so when I discover one of these types of glitches, I go back to the last version where the glitch wasn't there (since I make backups of the game and all source files almost every day) , and look through my log to see what I changed since then to see what may have caused it. (Now I'm just hoping the changes I made to fix these glitches didn't cause new ones!)

In other news, we are still working on the Grasslands area we've added in some enemies and are prettying it up a bit more. I'll probably update the video of rescuing the dog once we get the enemies in. Stay sharp!

-hcr

New Graphics

We Are Currently Looking For A Composer/ Musician to Compose Music For The Game. If you are one of those and you think your music may match the game well, please contact us.

Brand Spanking new graphics right out of the oven for you.....

HCR is finishing up the level editor. As soon as that is complete our progress on the game should speed up. Stay tuned for more sneak peaks at artwork and possibly some video!

New Game

So instead of doing multiple small games we decided to do a medium sized game that hopefully will not take that long to make (if it doesn't become bigger than expected). I finished my OpenGL engine and it's working a lot better than the old one, so far. We probably should have still went with the small game practice stuff, but we were excited to get this new project moving along. We don't have a name for it yet so I'm just calling it Chainsaw at the moment (it doesn't have anything to do with chainsaws, I just make up random names when creating a new project.)

The new game is an exploration platformer type game where you are a guy on an island who has animal companions to help him. You cannot attack enemies directly, but you can attack by using your animal companions. This will hopefully make the game a bit different from other platformers like it.

The story is still a work in progress, but it starts out with the main character, Jack, and his dog riding in an air balloon. The dog jumps after a bird or something and falls to the island, and so Jack lands his balloon there. You then have to rescue your dog and then can choose to leave the island or follow a different path by helping out the creatures you found on the island. We want the story to change a little bit depending on the player's actions.

Development has been moving very quickly, Caliber has a lot of the art done and the coding is well underway. I rewrote another platforming engine once again, and I'm really happy with it so far. Everytime I rewrite it, it gets a lot better. There are no slopes this time but I have already implemented movable blocks, which I had never done before. I also have been practicing better code organization which has helped speed up the coding process (most of my problems came from lack of organization!)

I'm currently working on the AI for the first companion you get, your dog. He follows right behind you and does a basic bite attack where he jumps through the player and attacks the enemy in front of him, so the following has to be almost perfect for it to work. I am almost done with the dog's AI and am very happy with how it is turning out (I'm pretty sure I got it close to how a real dog would act in that kind of situation.)

We will be working hard on this in the next couple of days and will try to keep the blog updated. We are also looking for someone to join up with us and write music for the game (you can help with the designing of the game also if you want!) , so please leave us a comment or send us an email (admin@can-games.com) if you want to be part of this game.

- HCR

Bug Beasts Attack!

The game is coming along slowly but surely. Once the level editor is finished it should pick up very quickly as it will allow us to stream line our production. Heres a few graphics I've been working on, not all finished they all still require a bit more polish.
-Caliber9