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!

Slime Cave Entrance

We are really really close to having a demo testing version ready. We just need to do a bit more level editing and add in a few more cutscenes (and one boss).

Here is the entrance to the slime cave along with a small new tileset which consits of grass that looks like it is covered a little bit in slime that you see leading up to the entrance of the cave.



We actually have a ton of new stuff since the last update. Brand new enemies and fun stuff for the slime cave, so I might post them up in the future. We will be finishing up the slime cave level editing and then adding in the slime boss real soon. More updates to come!

Companion Menu

Finally got around to adding in the companion menu system. We wanted it to look like an actual system that Jack would use to log the different creatures he finds, so we made it look like a notebook with sketch-like drawings of the different animals.
I'm really happy with how this turned out, especially because I have been dreading making it for awhile now. It turned out that it only took about 3 hours to code into the game and everything worked perfectly according to plan the first time. That's not a common occurrence! It was also nice coding something new into the game, since I've been doing a ton of tweaking for a very long time now.

We are also thinking about adding a log of all creatures, in addition to your companions, to encourage the player to explore more and try to find all the creatures in the game. For now though, we will have to put this idea aside and focus on the core gameplay, additional features can come later if we still have the time. Because if we work on a game with zero pay for too long, we may end up finishing it inside a refrigerator box along the street somewhere, and I don't know how long my computer is going to last if it's plugged into a cardboard cutout of a power outlet.

We also (mostly) finished the first boss in the grasslands. I spent a lot of time, and still am, tweaking his moves and stats and that type of thing. At the moment he is still way too hard for people who seem to not be me, because I get way too good at the game from all the testing I have to do. So I need to make sure the boss is not too hard but still provides a challenge for the player. I wish there was some way I could get really bad at the game. Maybe I'll slam my fingers in a door or something.

Getting very excited about level design again. I added in a few new sections yesterday and am just about ready to start work on some different areas. We should be working more on the slime cave in the next coming days, as soon as nate puts together the tile set. The first dungeon should be coming up very soon too, and most of the tilesets are already complete for that area. All I need is to add in a little bit more level designing and some cut scenes and the beta test demo should be ready to send out to those of you who would like to play it and give us some feedback.

Our current goal is to get the demo ready by the end of the month, so I think now would be good time to start to take some signups for beta testing. If you would like to do some testing and haven't told us yet, make sure to leave a comment or send us an email at team@sharkarmstudios.com.

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.

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.

Grand Feather

Finally we have a name for our game...


With awesome new art by our good pal, Gutter. We have been working a very long time on coming up with a good story for the world the game is set in, and we finally made one that we are both really happy with. The name Grand Feather has to do with the main story line, and the history of the game world. It refers to the majestic birds who live on and protect the island that Jack, Roger, and the 3 peg-appendage Captain land on at the begining of the game. They originally are forced to land there when Roger (Jack's dog) jumps out of the airship after a bird that flies by. They eventually get mixed up in the middle of events that are taking place on the island and eventually do enough things to make a game about. Don't worry there is way more story and a lot less generic events, but I do not want to explain all of it before we have more of the game completed.

We also have a new video.



Yeah, it is still the same grasslands area, that we have been working on, but almost all the graphics have changed since the last video and I thought that there should be a video of what the game currently looks like. We pretty much have all the graphical components of this area done and are moving on to the next ones, which are way more interesting.

So the game is really coming together, and now that we have a complete story in our minds for this thing, it no longer feels like the development of this game is going to come with us to our retirement homes. We have been working a lot on it recently and have been making a ton of progress so keep checking back for more updates! (And don't forget to drop us a comment!)

Friday Night is for Partying?

Wrong. Friday night is for working on video games. For the second Friday in a row (and probably more to come) we have been having game jam sessions from about 5pm to somewhere around 7am of almost pure non-stop game development madness. I keep coding until I get so tired that I start making stupid mistakes and would probably do more harm than good to the code.

Me around 5am. Mmm I miss all of that food I don't have anymore because I ate it.

And we also have a new SharkArm work station, which is pretty much the same as our old one but rearranged.

Those long hard flat things on four legs are 'tables' and we use them to set things on.

So lot's of new stuff being added to the game. We have been working on the story and main design of the game a whole lot recently, which I will go into more depth probably next post. I've also been coding in the cutscenes, which has turned out to be a very very time consuming process because we have been tweaking them so much to get every scene perfectly the way we want it. It's a lot of fun though, and I highly recommend it to anyone who programs for SharkArm. They are turning out really well so far for the most part, and I even almost released a video of the opening cutscene. Then I realized that it needed to be changed completely so I'm going to pretty much scrap the entire thing and redo it differently.

My favorite part about programming these huge projects is when you realize that huge portions of code that cost you hours has to go. About a week or two ago I was facing a problem that had to do with the draw order of the front tiles and the entities on the screen. Whenever a front tile was placed on a solid tile you can jump through, the player's graphics would be shown in front of the solid but behind the front tiles and it would look strange while in the air. Like this:

I don't really know if you can tell what I mean from the picture, it's a bit hard to explain, but in order to solve this problem I wrote this sorting algorithm for sorting all the entities based on their Y values and the tiles so that they would be drawn correctly and the front tiles would only be draw in front of the player when they are below the player's feet and did all this complicated stuff to get this one small problem to work right. It took about 6 hours. Then, the next day I figured out an insanely simple solution to this problem and fixed it a lot more efficiently that way, and threw all the work I did the day before in the trash can. You have to know when to part with code, even if you put a lot of hours into it. Same thing with your dog after you realize training him to fight in a kickboxing tournament would not score him a lead role in the next Air Bud sequel.

Yeah, ok he's a dog that plays basketball, soccer, and beach volleyball, but kickboxing
is too unrealistic? Get real Walt Disney, a dog roundhouse kicking a 300lb fighter
could totally happen, and would sell more tickets than you could ever dream of.

We've been trying to add in a whole lot more companions to the game, so we can see what kind of different gameplay elements we will be able to add in to each of the levels. And because it's totally awesome. I also just put in our first rideable companion, Rake, who can suck things in and blow things away. He is used for pulling in and pushing out blocks, to make bigger jumps and that sort of thing. I suppose he would be good for helping you blow out your birthday candles as well.

Jack riding Rake. Arif the fire bird and Roger the dog following. Tree.

Alright so there will be a pretty big update real soon, where a long awaited announcement will be made? What could it be? You'll have to find out. And I'm going to have another video out really soon because I realized how long ago that last one was made and how much different everything is. Almost all the graphics have changed and there are actually enemies in the game and things that move!

Oh yeah!

Stay tuned for updates. Real tuned.

Upcoming Designs

Oh how the time flies by and no posts are made to this blog, such a sad thing. Well heres a new post. Some concepts for the game and one of those concepts realized into pixel art (not going to show you the animation or explain him yet though)

I started working on some ideas for housing for the creatures who inhabit the island. We are trying to stay away from any kind of cliche designs, and if we do use a common game convention we are working hard to make it unique.

These are some quick enemy designs I drew out tonight. Im trying all different kinds of shapes and trying to stay away from common enemy designs.
And one of the concepts colored in and already in a pose holding an innocent rabbit by the throat.

Another Grasslands Tileset Change and Background Update

Well, this is about the 4th time we've changed up the looks of the Grasslands tilesets, this time the ground fades to black. We are pretty happy with the looks of it and will probably keep this one, at least for awhile. The background layers have also been updated with more detail, but they are not 100% finished yet. Here's a shot:



All of our screenshots for a while now have all been relatively the same with the same tiles, but hopefully we are about finished with this zone and will move back to some fresh new interesting locations that we haven't worked on for a while.

The new tiles make the tiling system a bit more complicated when making the levels with the editor. We have to select the correct tile so that each ground tile transitions smoothly now instead of just having one ground tile that we can just paint over everywhere. There are also a lot of different situations that a different tile is needed and it is difficult to create every single tile needed. I'm debating whether it would be worth the time to edit the level editor so it will auto-tile the ground, select the correct tile for each situation based on the tile types around it, or just continue to do it manually each time.


Another big thing we are working on right now, still, is the main story. We are coming up with different backstories for the locations and different characters and trying to put together a complete, well thought out, story for the game. We've been brainstorming and pushing around different ideas for awhile now and I think its starting to finally come together nicely. Who knows, we may even come up with a name for the game soon!

Bug Fighting: Part 2 and Massive Work Session Update

Alright well, there hasn't been an update in a long long time, but we have accomplished a lot since the last post. We had a three day working session where we worked on the game pretty much non-stop from wake-up till sleep-down. We were trying to get a demo version of the game done to get to some testers so we could get some feedback on what we have so far. Everything was going really well and we made a ton of progress on the game and came so very very close to finishing the demo. The big problem came when designing the levels in the game. I was reintroduced to what soon came to be known as my mortal enemy, a small little bug where the game crashed when loading a different level in the game about once every 20 level loads. It was a very uncommon occurrence so whenever i ran into the glitch earlier i just decided that i would fix it later or that it would magically disappear or something. Well, I figured the time has come to finally get in there and fix this glitch before we released this demo for testing, and that is when the development of the game came to a screeching halt. Well, it was more like a screeching halt, and then smashing into a guard rail, and then flying over the guard rail off a cliff, and then landing on some big pointy rocks, and then having the car explode, and then waiting for the paramedics to come pull us out of the burning car, and then having the paramedics beat us senseless. We went from the most productive times in the game's history to the least productive times.

I better not catch any of you guys stealing this source code and selling it to Blizzard.

Yeah, so this glitch was bad. It was like the Adolf Hitler of bugs. I don't want to go into too much detail because that would require me to relive trying to fix this thing, but it had to do with memory corruption, which is the worst kind of glitch to fix. Luckily, I do not have to deal with this all that much since I am very careful with this type of thing while coding it, thanks to lots of ugly experiences with these types of problems in past games. Memory corruption can have some really wacky effects in a game and it is really hard to pin point the problem in the code because often the symptoms do give you a lot of information as to what is causing it. For instance, memory could be corrupted early on in a program but you may not feel the effects of this until later on when that memory is accessed again. This one crashed on level load. Rarely. Very rarely. Probably once every 20-30 level loads. This was the worst part because it was so hard to replicate and gather data as to why it was happening. There were times that I found some sort of piece of code that looked like it may have been the problem, and then once I fixed that I would have to play the game for about 20 minutes to see if would still crash. That was the most time consuming part. It would never crash until the exact moment I said to myself 'Well, its not crashing, I guess its fixed,' and then BOOM crashed again. I spent a lot of hours trying to fix it and ended up going over most of the code in the game checking for errors, which turned out to not be a complete waste of time because I was able to fix some other problems that I didn't notice before.

Anyway, this glitch thing was very demoralizing for me and I tried to take a break from trying to fix it and work on some other stuff, but every time I started to work on something I ended up on a mad hunt trying to find it. After about a week and a half I was finally able to end its reign of terror terror when I finally used the debugger. I never really use debuggers too much and pretty much forgot about it, but when I ran the game with the debugger, an error window appeared each time I switched levels even though the game didn't crash which allowed me to find out if my fixes worked without wasting a half hour of running around the game world waiting to see if it still crashes.

This is what the game looks like now. Some tile updates (which are just about to get reupdated soon)
and some little flying birds.

As for the updates in the game since last time, we added in a whole lot more enemies, some friendly creatures like birds and rabbits, and a lot of other tweaks and little details. We also have a general idea of where the story is going and pretty much everything that is going to happen at the begining of the game down.

We are still planning on having a closed demo finished soon that we will send out to those of you who would like to help us test the game. If you would like to be a tester, send us an email or leave a comment down below. We could really use your help!

We'll probably have another update in a few days, with some screen shots, new graphics, and made a video or two.

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

Practicing Level Design and Development Video 2

Ok so the game is moving along nicely. We've been getting some serious work done. I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to run out of things to program in to the game, which is why I've started to design some test levels using what we have so far. It is hard to come up with everything that needs to be done when we haven't created an actual world for the game yet. Up until now, all of the levels created were to test an enemy or some sort of specific game mechanic, so I decided to put my level editor to work and practice creating an actual world similar to the one that is going to be made. As of the plans right now, you are going to start out without your trusty dog side-kick and will be all alone. Your first task will be to find your dog and rescue him from whatever peril he may be in. In this first practice world he is just stuck up at the top of a cliff, but we are planning to have the player fight some sort of mini-boss first in order to save him (we are still trying to come up with ideas for a boss since the players main way of attacking enemies is by using your dog.) There are also no enemies yet since we are currently working on designing, drawing, and programming in the enemies of the Grasslands. This part of the game should be a lot more difficult (and interesting) once they are implemented into the game.



I've also run into some snags along the way. The biggest one is probably the sound effects, which I was using the OpenAL library for. While adding in some sounds to the game to spice things up I realized that I was only able to load a few sounds into memory due to a major screw-up I made when implementing OpenAL into the game engine. I probably should have tried to completely understand openAL instead of following a few tutorials on playing simple sounds. I'm still to lazy to do that (and hate learning how to use new libraries) so I decided to use the SDL Mixer for sounds since I'm already using it for music. Unfortunately, when playing sounds with the mixer, there is a delay in the playing of the sound. While trying to decide which would be easier and quicker to fix, my headphones randomly decided to not work anymore so I had no sound on my computer. After this event I just decided to give up on the sound for now and save it for some other day. Since I'm not having the best luck in the sound department, maybe I should just have closed captioning for sound. There can be a little black box with white letters at the bottom that describes the sounds instead of actually playing them. This way our hearing impaired players can also enjoy the rich sound effects in the game.

We added in a new companion, who we are currently calling Birdster. He is a bird. He flies. Flies behind you. He allows you to double jump by catching the player in the air and throwing him up higher. Here is a picture of him. He is a bird.



Up next one the to-do list:
-Enemies for the Grasslands
-Special Effects
-Storyline Writing
-More Level Design Practice

Now that we are getting to the point of actually designing the world, we will probably be releasing a version of the game in the near future to those of you who would like to test our game. So if you would like to do some testing for us, make sure you let us know!

Upgraded Graphics

Finally starting to get some of those disgusting temporary graphics replaced with some polished work. Just about finished with the tiles for the dead woods and theres a lot more tiles than what is shown in just these two screens.

First Video

I have recorded the first video of the game. It's not much, only about 15 seconds, but it took a lot longer than that to create (at least twice as long!)

The video shows off one of the awesome environments that Caliber did, because just a screenshot would not do it justice. I think it looks awesome with the scrolling backgrounds.





Currently, I am working on the cut scene engine, the life bar (vine and fruit at the top left of the screen, which can be seen in previous screenshots), and different ways to trigger events throughout the game.

Let us know what you think or if you have any suggestions!

Artwork

Were working hard on the game, especially now that we have much more free time with classes out for the summer. I am currently working on doing a painting of the main characters of the game Jack and Rodger. Lynn did the line art while I, Nate, painted it in PS. In other news, our other artist Lynn Wang, is currently in Burbank,California working as an Intern at Cartoon Network! Congratulations Lynn!


Here's a little sneak peak at some of the graphics that I'm working on. I almost have a fully complete tile set for the water temple and lots of partly finished sets for other sections of the world. Plenty of finished and unfinished enemies and characters as well!



Thanks for all the comments as well, readers. It's really encouraging to get feedback, so let us know what you think in the comments section, anybody and everybody!

-Nate Kling (Caliber9)

Large Update

Hello all! Sorry for the long dark period without any updates but hopefully I will be update you all on the news (this is going to get very emotional so keep your tissue box close).


First of all we went through a bit of a name change. Our team will now be know as Shark Arm Studios (if you haven't been able to figure that part out yet.) The name change was almost as maraculous as the Saul->Paul change, but instead of a falling off a horse to a booming voice we just decided we wanted to change our name.

Along with our name change we also have a new team member, Lynn:


Don't worry, Peta, it's not real fur (but on an unrelated note I did hit two deer with my car in the past year.)

Lynn is going to be doing some additional graphics work so we can pick up the pace of the game-making. She is also responsible for the awesome SharkArm logo at the top there. And also one of the new enemies:



We have been working onthe game as much as possible and even pulled a few all-night game working sessions but we have been too busy with school for the most part to get as far along as we had hoped by this point. We are moving forward though, and we recently had a surge in progress as we were trying to prepare a demo for the New Media's art display, but we ended up using Bravehorse instead.


See, we have been working on it.

As for the game we have added in a ton of new content like enemies and tile sets. I am almost finished with most of the game engine work so we are almost to the point of adding in all the content of the game. And that means we should have some videos out soon and probably a beta version of the game for a select group of testers to tell us what they think about our progress so far (so contact us if you'd like to help us out!)



We will be working on it as much as possible but development should really pick up once the semester is over so check back soon for updates!

New Art

Here is some new art from caliber:

Apparently the main character is a lot smaller than I originally thought if he can fit like that on the back of a turtle.

-hcr