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[Greg Sergeant]

This is cool and funny 

mad progress from you dawg 

[I_smell]

I don't even know where to start on how exciting it was seeing this come together on MY OWN VERY SCREEN!!!!
Cos I've always been half-good at art and we had to reach out n find someone to make some good looking stuff for the last game. I was super excited about that, cos I finally got some pro quality art for one o my doofy slapdash games.
So slowly making progress with this Photoshop stuff I've bin doin recently has been awesome.

Oh and also I guess I should just record this:



Long story short, 3D animation is difficult and I'm rusty at it. This has been improved in terms of modelling and animation since I recorded it.

[davidp]

this game looks freaking amazing
cool videos and stuff, keep up the good work!

[Destral]

Hmm, I totally missed this somehow.

I'm not a crazy shoot'em up fan, but I did love UN Squadron/Area 88 back in the day, and haven't been enthused that the genre seemed to go to Bullet Hell and never came back. So this is something that looks interesting

I look forward to seeing where you take this!

[I_smell]

I just exported it to the Unity web player and what the fuck it runs perfectly... I remember it running terrible a few months ago...

Maybe that was exporting to Flash player?


...Anyway, playing it at perfect framerate in a web browser was so exciting, cos now when it's out I can put the first couple levels on Newgrounds for free (which will probably be testing Unity games by then)

[tacograveyard]

I just read through the thread and watched the latest gameplay trailer. I laughed a half a dozen times, so that's a good sign. I really like the title art. Looking forward to playing this and checking out your devlog.

[Haga]

Played this and it was amazing.  Combat feels very satisfying; your FX and Animation work are top notch.  I only have a few comments, and these are picky:

+ The smoke clouds after the explosions have a lot of contrast, which dominates the composition.  This sticks out since the rest of your FX are generally low contrast.

+ I love your mixture of 3-d and sprites, but some of your textures look like they're being mipped pretty badly or something, especially in the explosion.  You can fix this by changing your texture in unity to "Advanced" and turning off mip mapping.

+ Have you considered using more geometry for your FX?  Here's a geometry and dual texture approach for the ring in the explosion:



It's taking _MainTex:
adding the RBG value of _MainTex2
multiplying the A value of _MainTex2

[I_smell]

Thanks man! Someone pointed out to me recently that I don't think about composition or focal points or smart use of contrast or anything. You can see it in the image above, if you're an art person. I NEVER even thought about that, so yeah I'll adjust some things.

I am also brand new to 3D games! So anything you point out to me on that front is valuable and appreciated, thanks.

Generating things on numbers is something I'm used to, I've made Flash games til now and those are all vector graphics. Right now those rings on the explosions are an animated sprite sheet, which- you're right, that's hilarious, I'll use this. Thanks for drawing this.

...That was a really useful post.
I'm in the middle of taking a break on this game, I'm working on other stuff for a week or so.

EDIT- HAhaha! Oh man, I just came back to this thread after reading a certain facebook post and thinking "Have I seen this avatar somewhere before?"
Jeez. Small world!

[I_smell]

Third week having not gone back to PUNCHgunner! ...!
I just I've had this iOS game I have to make, and I didn't expect this job would land on me. I'm dieing to get back to it!

I drew some concept art today, but I'm not very happy with it. Long story short it's not as chunky and blocky and smashed-up as I was aiming for, so I'll be drawing that same thing again from scratch soon.

A hundred things have flashed through my head while I've bin away from the game. Here's some stuff I've wrote down in my lil book:
MORE POSSIBLE NAMES FOR THE GAME-
SLASHFEST
GUNGARR SLASHNIK
SMASHON GUNGARR
GUNGREED SMASHON
GUNBRÄDA GRENÄDA
DOMINGO ROTURA
E-X-X-X-OSKELETON
SUIT-UP!
BITE DOWN HARD
Totally just the ravings of a mad man, right? They're just almost-relevant things that I would like to say out-loud a lot.

LOCATIONARY IDEAS (some) -
METAL ROBOT-PLANET
O'NIELL CYLINDER (look it up)
BENEATH THE MANTLE OF A SPOOKY GROSS BEEHIVE PLANET
ORBITAL SPACE-GRAVEYARD ON THE RINGS OF SATURN (I think this is off Red Dwarf?)
DORMANT LIVING MOON-CREATURE (the moon is it's coccoon, or the moon IS the creature?)

ENEMY IDEAS-
Ninjabot who teleports behind you to attack, or smoke-bombs away when you get close?
Forms a coccoon shield around himself and heals?
Gross alien who leaves acidic damage-trail behind wherever he goes?

CAPSULE IDEAS (Capsules are the weapons and buffs you can collect and equip on yourself. I actually wrote the GiantBomb wiki entry for this last week in Budokai 2, the ORIGINAL CAPSULE CRAFTERS)
Make all weapons freeze/burn enemies (expensive!)
Drain health from enemies (should this be its own weapon?)
Getting weapon damage charges up your next melee hit
A weapon that acts as a counter or parry, that you have to trigger right as the enemy strikes
Slash -pause- Slash Slash Slash should do an alternate combo with a different use (Should I just dive in and create a combat-enhancement capsule? Should that be a mandatory upgrade?)


A TASTE!!!!! -of things I've written down over the passed month. Can't wait to jump back into this, and I'm sure it looks much worse in real life than I'm remembering it in my head. I see a tonne of amazing art on the internet, but whenever I open Photoshop I just smear my naive fudge-hands around and spend hours producing a boring, squiggly, foggy drawring. and when I open Unity: JEEZ! It's all slidey boxes and flash-animated gifs! Genuinely thinking of giving this game to an artist at some point.

Stumbled onto Ben Ruiz' beat-em-up analysis blog today, and I'm feeling really energized after reading it. Finally, someone who GETS Devil May Cry!
I CAN'T FINISH THIS IOS GAME FAST ENOUGH!

[I_smell]

Sad update: I've sadly not had time to work on this game lately
I've sadly got a regular paying job as an animator where I get to decide what I work on and work my own hours
I know! Your sympathy is much appreciated!

Just to show that this project is still very much alive though: I prototyped a new weapon!
WHAT UP, BIG BO!


Big Bo is a bow n arrow that you pull back and release. The further you pull back, the more damage it does, and it also freezes the enemy after a certain torque! I should re-make the freeze effects.
Maybe it should set them on fire instead?
Anyway: The further you pull back, the longer it takes, and the harder it is to aim, naturally, because you'll be further away from your target. Oh also: The arrows stick in the enemies! That was kinda the main inspiration for this weapon if I'm completely honest :/

It's prototype art, so everything's white cubes.

Also I re-made that concept art!



Man am I ever happy about my art these days. I'm still kind of an idiot: It's too messy and flashy and the composition's a little standard n boring, BUT!!!! This is way better than what I would've come up with this time last year.
Here's the original attempt at this. Not as good.

New enemy type: The Scarab Guard


This guy is still in the concept stage. I've been thinking about having a bigger enemy onscreen. Does that betray the vision? Does that make things more complicated? Will his animations be too big to comprehend as binary hitboxes and make the game feel boxy and slidey? There are risks involved.

I got the idea for this guy from Dark Souls. He WILL attack you, and you MUST dodge. If you swoop in for a hit without thinking about it, you will get cut clean in half. Dodging and counter-attacking is key.

...is egyptian robots in videogames played out? Is Halo doing that? Are my attempts to make a big cool videogame backfiring and just coming off as generic and boring?

[achild]

If you can pull it off it'll be well worth it. It's always a nice feeling to beat up someone bigger than you. Especially if they realistically whip your butt if you're not careful.

[I_smell]

I am not feeling confident about basing the earth-robots technology on ancient Egypt.
I'm finding a tonne o shit I don't know about that already does that: WarHammer, Star Trek, Evangelion, Starcraft... I've got a SLIGHT worry in the back of my mind that some of this has got a bit too boring and serious, and being more creative on this point could be a big help.

It's JUST ABOUT not too late to switch art directions with these guys. Just neeed to decide on something I'm happy with. Something that's interesting and deep enough to mine concepts from...
Who knows, I could be stuck on this for a while, lol! I'm keeping the idea that they're all mass-produced, un-manned robot drones. That's fun and helps with the "I'm not too good at modelling" angle, cos it keeps details down to a minimum.
Not really come up with an art direction for the aliens yet (purple team) apart from like... gross centipede bugs. Which I could probably refresh aswel.


EDIT!!! Maybe they should be based on police? They ARE blue, use electricity a lot, have a lot of guards and defense-based bots... hhmmmmm...

[hapsi]

When i click the web link: "ERROR — No such dump exists."

What is this?

[crazysam]

Just saying man... you are on a roll. Don't let it fizzle. At the same time, congrats on the job, let it fuel your cells so you can put them to good use :-P

[I_smell]

When i click the web link: "ERROR — No such dump exists."

What is this?

Oh, the post on Page 1? I uploaded a Flash prototype a long time ago, but I guess it's not there any more. The game's nothing like that now anyway.
I keep wanting this to get moved to devlogs, but I guess it's stayin here :/


Anyway, since people are posting, here's me transitioning to a different art style for they space-egyptians.

I landed on space-cops.



The bottom half are of the small generic fighter enemies, which aren't pictured cos I guess I never drew concept art of em.
Really liking this new direction, and it really vibes well with what that whole team's about. Kind of daunting, re-designing all the enemies though. The idea for the first boss is kind of a full refresh.

This doesn't help the fact that I have the no-game blues right now over not releasing a new game since November 2011

-oh incase you're wondering what the hell some of these concepts are: I started off at Robocop, and then basically made it more triangular.
Then I got frustrated that all police technology was this big fat bulky stuff that never looks cool, so I looked at the FBI instead.
Then I realised "Space FBI" is basically what the Men In Black is.
Then I thought "what police-man sihlouettes can I referrence in these fighter drone bots?" and landed on stuff like a belt, a gun holster, lots of white n blue, maybe like a security-camera for a face? They were already electric-based, so now maybe everything's a tazer? And that's basically how that idea evolved. It took a while.
EDIT-- Oh maybe their face-hole should be a megaphone or like a fire-alarm or something. Do I wanna commit to them making annoying noises though? ...still not finished, I guess.