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.