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[Andy Wolff]

mesas so far

notable: baby bushguy who pole-vaulted onto the mesas and giant asshole demon with a hammer



also: LEVEL 10 yay

[08--n7.r6-79.84]

I like your style. It very-very unusual.
Tell me truth - are you inspired by atmosphere of Castaneda's books?

[Andy Wolff]

Any chance for a video log or something any time soon? I wanna see this game in action.

Ah, sorry I didn't respond to this:

Maybe; I said I would do a video log if anyone asked, but then I started doing all the art for the game. I suppose I should show you videos of what I have already and voice some of my plans for the rest of the game. I will do that if I get around to it. If not, you can definitely expect to see some more videos and maybe hear me talk about the game a bit after I've finished this art crusade I'm on. It'll be easier for me to talk about stuff I'm currently programming and answer questions then. I have a nice crappy microphone and typically bad screencap software, so I know I can make videos of at least dubious quality

If you missed it in the first post, there is one video already of the snake boss, though it might be a little out of date now and I'm rather unhappy with the video quality. For some reason, the video recording seems to have cut about 2 of every 3 frames or something

I like your style. It very-very unusual.
Tell me truth - are you inspired by atmosphere of Castaneda's books?

I haven't had the pleasure of reading that particular madman's writings, so nope. I'm glad you like my wonky style. I really like yours.

Actually, I'm not really sure where I get my inspiration for this stuff. It's probably an amorphous blob of influence from:
 - All the art I look at on the internet (my google reader art folder always has like 5000 unread items), especially the comics like Gunshow and Cucumber Quest
 - Animation from folks and places like Ghibli, Studio 4°C, Otomo, Gobelins, Disney, and tons of other places and folks
 - All the books I've read (more recently: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Asimov's I, Robot stories, and Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun, as well as hundreds of books long ago)
 - Various other game devs, like lazrael, frankie, connor, basically everyone with a devlog here, and a lot of folks in the industry
 - All the mad science I do (robotics is a surprisingly rich source of inspiration)
 - Being otherwise crazy and enjoying life

For this particular game, a lot of inspiration comes from what I've heard about the craziness of Don Quixote (without actually having read it) and what I've watched in old western movies, mixed around with various ghost and fantasy kinds of things

[Disasterpeace]

The aesthetic of this project is absolutely brilliant! Can't wait to see more.

 

[happymonster]

Are you going to add sleepy desert towns?

[Andy Wolff]

@happymonster: The original plan was to have a level called the Saloons, but I've been trying to keep the scope small. That's one of the things I cut out. I'd love to have sleepy desert towns, but I don't think I have time for it

The aesthetic of this project is absolutely brilliant! Can't wait to see more.
 

Hey, thanks! I love your music. Actually, you're one of my favorite musicians.


In the interest of actually finishing this project, I'm cutting the Ruins and the Streams until I program in what I've already drawn. Hopefully it won't take as long as I expect it to, and I'll be able to add those later.
Anyway, this means I've returned to programming.

It turns out that my screencap software is better suited for gifs than videos. The colors and framerate are still pretty bad, but here's a thing:

I'm messing about with indian chief magics. I don't think I showed you the indian chief yet, but there it is. This isn't final; I'll probably tone it down a bunch and make it more predictable, but it's fun to see the black magics go about the screen.

I'll make more of these gifs later

[happymonster]

Wow! Looks awesome..

Perhaps you can release it with one or two areas, and then add the rest if you have motivation and enough people are interested?

[Andy Wolff]

Thanks

Yeah, that's the plan. I'm definitely going to finish at least the Cracks, the Dunes, and the Mesas. If I'm finished with that before May, I'll probably add the other two before releasing it. If I haven't yet finished the three levels by May, I'll release it as soon as I do, then I'll consider adding the other levels as updates.

It's just that there are rather a lot of other, possibly more exciting projects I'd like to start working on once I finish this one, so I'd like to minimize the amount of time I spend on it

[happymonster]

It does remind me of a super modern version of Atari's Outlaw for the VCS...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq67jB9Yios

[Franklins Ghost]

That's an awesome gif, really like the look of the chiefs magic.

[Andy Wolff]

Atari's Outlaw looks pretty awesome, though you won't see people bouncing bullets off the edge of the screen here.

Just now I wrote a pretty versatile system for state events which will work much better for enemy spawning than the way I've been doing it, and will allow for other cool stuff to happen more easily. Every enemy type has an integer difficulty value which I'll use to enumerate the events so that it enemies won't be spawned if they would set the sum of the enemies' difficulties above a certain total.


awww yeahhhhh

exempli gratia. ignore the red underlining Event, my Visual Studio is being a bit senile and it won't recognize that the error which was there has been resolved.

that last line is the important one: something very much like it and one more line for shuffling the event list will entirely replace my enemy spawning function (and more)

Look at this messy, as yet uncommented code. Isn't it wonderful? I'm very happy with it. I've still got to enumerate the list of events from what I currently have, and implement the system which executes and shuffles the events list, but I think it will be very nice and save me hours of time in the future.

[Andy Wolff]

still working on this

the first level is nearly done, though I'm considering making a somewhat large change: I might allow the enemies to kill each other. We'll see

Here's a video. The quailty is still dubious, but it's a good bit smoother than the last one
1 and two:

[Franklins Ghost]

Awesome footage, loving all the different characters and the way they have their own unique movement. Game is looking great 

[Ashkin]

Awesome!
You should definitely experiment with some enemy interactions, fo' sho'.
Maybe the player should be given a white outline or something to make him stand out, since the camera doesn't lock on him or anything?

[Carrie Nation]

I feel like the player needs to shoot in more than 4 directions what with the faux 3d of the space the character is moving in and the fact that enemies can shoot or attack in more directions.

Of course I haven't played it but it looks awkward in the videos.