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[Montoli]

Quickie update:

Mostly boring bugfixes, followed by being sick over the weekend and accomplishing nearly nothing.  Bleah.

Wrote a boss pattern, intended to be the final phoenix/dragon part of the fight, but an not terribly happy with it, so it will probably end up being tossed and redone differently.  (My original plan for the phoenix/dragon fight was for it to start off with the dragon relatively tame, and with the phoenix doing most of the work while the dragon was passive, and gradually ratchet it up to where the dragon was attacking the phoenix more and more violently, making it more and more hazardous to the player.  Now that I actually see it in action though, I think that it is too confusing having the dragon actually shoot projectiles, so I think I will just keep him at the mid-level of biting things.)

Moderately frustrating when a set piece doesn't work as well in practice as it did in my head, but so it goes.  Hooray for rough prototyping at least - better to find this out now, after about a few hours of scripting than later, after more work has been sunk into it.

In other news, feeling very happy with the homing shots.  Have been playing with them since I put them in, and I think they are pretty close to exactly where they need to be.  They do a good job of offering interesting tradeoffs:

• They give you a way to attack an enemy without sitting directly below it (normally a pretty dangerous place to be)
• They offer a good risk/reward incentive to actually GET below it if you want full damage.  (Relying just on the homing portion means you are doing around half damage.)
• They're interestingly distinct from the water gun also, since several bosses spawn sub enemies, which tend to distract the homing shots, meaning you often end up doing less damage than you might want.  (Whereas the water gun lets you focus entirely on whatever is straight ahead.)

So overall very happy with the new gun.  Will probably put in the fire gun soon too.  Now if I could just get the fire LEVEL (and associated boss fight) finished, I'd be quite happy.

[Montoli]

Well, rewrote the final fire boss attack.  It probably needs a bit of tuning, but at least it looks pretty now!  I think that thematically I like the penultimate one the best, but this one is solid.  Or at least it will be with some polish, I think.  And hectic.  Definitely hectic.  Now to just shore up the rest of the fire level and I can move on to something else.  (Feel like I've been working on fire all month.)

Tweaked it a bit on the bus on the way to work today, and decided to reorder them.  (Putting the one I like best last - it fits better thematically too)  Wrote up a real end-level cutscene too, since the previous one was just a placeholder.  Feeling pretty good about this level now!  (Now I just need to throw a few new more enemies into the level itself, so that it has more than just two. )

[Montoli]

Updates!

First and foremost, I am happy to report that I have passed the most important review I had scheduled.  The dreaded Mom review.  Since the game was started, my goal was "I want a challenging bullet-hell shmup that I can play with my Mom and that she can still have fun with, in spite of not usually playing things more exciting than windows solitaire."

I had her play some games with me, and after some confusion on the first round, she was flying around like a pro, and VERY HAPPY with the whole "you mean I get to help play and block things from hitting you and don't have to worry about dying or anything?" aspect of the game.  After the first round, she had the idea down.  After the second, she was being legitimately helpful.  And (while it's hard to tell sometimes, because as a mother, she's contractually obligated to like everything I make no matter how hideous) she seemed to be having fun?

So...  Success so far!  And I've already played it with my more bullet-hell-loving friends, so it seems fun on both ends of the spectrum.  Which I'm very happy with!  So asymmetric multiplayer is working well!

Other minor victories this week...  Fixed some random crash bugs related to switching screen resolution, tweaked the fire level a bit, and programmed some volcanoes.

I am fairly happy with the volcanoes.

[Montoli]

Quickie update, before the weekend.  (Which sadly will be taken up more with out-of-town relatives being in-town than skyrim-binges or all-night-coding-sessions.)

Fancy Text is Go!

It sounds boring, but it turns out that writing a text renderer that can handle all the crap like changing fonts or color or whatever mid-line is less trivial than I had hoped.  It's done though, and a new class "FancyText" now graces my library.

Now to put it to some use!

[Montoli]

More stuff!

Finally got around to making my weapon-select menu.  So you don't have to change constants and recompile to change weapons, etc.  Much improved!

So to celebrate, I spent sunday making a new weapon!  Finally got around to writing the wind gun.  It's fun!  The basic shot is a super-wide spread. (although pretty weak on damage, unless you get up in their face and "shotgun" it)  The focus mode is the fun part though.  Your spread drops dramatically, but you get to summon giant tornados.  Which mostly stay where you put them, although they'll try to slowly follow you around.  They're a lot slower than you are though, so you can leave them someplace (like right under something highly dangerous) and run away, and they'll keep hitting it for you.

Oh, and they're piercing too.  (i. e. can go through enemies.)

It's a fun weapon!  I ran through the existing levels and bosses with it for some testing, and was pleased with how it made me play totally different.  The spread is probably the best gun so far for dealing with casual level spam.  The tornado itself though made for some interesting boss fighting though.  (The ability to not sit under the phoenix during his "sacred fire" attack made it pretty neat, but the fact that I had to run back in to replace it from time to time, [as well as the fact that it does less damage if you are only hitting with the tornado part] made the fight challenging in different ways.

So.  Fun stuff!

[RCIX]

Very nice work you have here, looks like a nice change of pace from Negative Spacecraft! A (belated) welcome to XNA as well, I hope you find the platform powerful.

No download of a demo or anything though? this makes me a sad .

[Montoli]

Thanks!  I am indeed enjoying XNA quite a bit.  (Spent the first month or so just giggling and saying things like "OMG I can have AS MANY BULLETS AS I WANT OMG OMG!")  Had forgotten how much I love having hardware acceleration and more direct hardware access.  (Yay, shaders!)

Demo will probably happen at some point, but while the screenshots look all pretty, they cleverly hide just how much basic user infrastructure is still missing.   I'll almost certainly do one once I get a little further along, but it's not quite to the point where I feel like that would be useful.  (Would like to get another level or two done first also...)

But Soon! (tm)

[Montoli]

Updaaaaate!

Up with friends for thanksgiving, and their family lives on a mountain, as it turns out.

There is snow here!

Also, I made [2/3 of] a new boss!  People who played Boss Rush may recognize him - He's fairly similar.  (He was in Negative Spacecraft too, come to think of it.  I think he's becoming my version of the DopeFish.)

Anyway, it was snowing here, so perhaps not entirely coincidentally, this boss is weather themed.  Astute observers may notice that there is a new background in these pictures as well, such as one might use if one were, say, designing an air-themed level or something similar.  To pick an example at random.

Anyway, most of the rest of the changes this week two weeks are back end things, such as fixing support in my asset loader for loading things with a hit-radius smaller than the bitmap.  Well, and designing a bunch of enemies for a wind-themed level.  They all have crappy placeholder art (ovals at the moment) so I'll probably wait until next week to bother with screenshots for them.

Anyway, onward!  Feeling good about this update!  At this rate I'll have a 3rd level soon, and maybe actually bump up my "%-done" counter on the thread by one.

[Montoli]

Updates!

Mostly involved with making new bosses etc, but still.

Let's see.  First off, I made the last and final attack pattern for the cloud.  It's the one where he shoots lightning bolts.  Unfortunately the pattern is not terribly photogenic.  Mostly it is about running around while the cloud chases you with lightning.  Also, the lightning looks way better in motion.  But here is a crappy screen grab of it at least!



Updates!

Mostly involved with making new bosses etc, but still.

Let's see.  First off, I made the last and final attack pattern for the cloud.  It's the one where he shoots lightning bolts.  Unfortunately the pattern is not terribly photogenic.  Mostly it is about running around while the cloud chases you with lightning.  Also, the lightning looks way better in motion.  But here is a crappy screen grab of it at least!




Moving on, I also started working on the actual final boss of the wind level.  Two attacks done on him, so he's about half way finished.  I'm sure I'll end up tweaking them later.  (My usual boss work pattern seems to be to rough out the pattern while I'm on the bus to work, and pretend it's done, and then gradually fix things that bug me about it as I play it.)

Anyway, here's the wind boss, a dapper gryphon.



Anyway, that's all for this update.  Onwards!

[mokesmoe]

Does Mr. Cloud summon a rainbow at any point? That was a pretty cool attack.

[Montoli]

Sadly, the cloud has lost his rainbow-generating powers as part of his demotion to mid-boss.  Partly because I'm trying to keep the midbosses down to a manageable number of patterns (3 is the goal) and partly because there is a different boss that may be somewhat rainbow themed and I'm trying to avoid overlap.

But who knows!  My current plan is to have unlockable "challenge fights" where you can go fight bosses you've already seen, but with them using new attacks.  There might be rainbows in the cloud's future yet.

Mostly I figure that's a bonus goal for me, which I'll play with once I have the basic game levels fleshed out and more workable.  My aim is to get 4-5 complete, playable levels finished, and as well as the bits of gameflow that aren't done yet, and release that as a demo for feedback, while I work on the rest.

So tl;dr version:  Cloud rainbows - not yet, but maybe!

[laxwolf]

This looks awesome! I love the style, but the book interface doesn't seem to match.

Good luck,
Laxwolf

[thatshelby]

Love the style of this game. Refreshing.

[Montoli]

Love the style of this game. Refreshing.

Thanks!

This looks awesome! I love the style, but the book interface doesn't seem to match.

Good luck,
Laxwolf

Also thanks!  Yeah - I've had mixed results with the book framing + paper-cutout art.  Several people have gone "oh neat, I love how the world is all paper and it's all in a book!"  But you're also not the first to say "neat, but why is the frame a book, I'm not sure that fits."

Not sure what to do to make them fit together better, other than making the book frame look more cartoony/paper textury?  Dunno.  If anyone has any good ideas, I'm open to suggestions here!




Anyway, random update!  Had a good week of productivity on the trains.  Managed to average about one new attack per day, except for the day when it was too crowded for me to take out my laptop.

Also tightened up some of the existing attacks, and got everything in a better order, to boot.  Wind level is actually super-close to done now.  Just needs some tuning/tweaks for the actual level itself and some minor code for a unique level mechanic.  After that... Woo!  I can mark that level done, and increment my "percent done" counter up by 20% or whatever.

So yeah.  Here are some screenshots.  They look better in motion, but so it goes:

[Franklins Ghost]

Game is looking really great, nice job with it.

One suggestion for the book and art is to put some sort of framing device to blend the game in with the book a little more. Some sort of border transition so as to not make it such a contrast. But have to say am loving the look of the game.