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.