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[TheCleft]

      

Formats: PC/MAC (and Linux eventually too, naturally)
Release Date: OUT NOW on Early Access

**-- STEAM STORE PAGE --**

**-- NEW LAUNCH TRAILER  --**

**-- REVEAL TRAILER  --**

**-- EUROGAMER VIDEO INTERVIEW --**

Engine: Unity 3D
Website: www.TangoFiesta.co.uk
Team:
Andrew J Smith, Designer (me)
Andrew Roper, Coder
Ewan Brock, Artist
Gavin Harrison, Audio

         

John Strong running & shooting on the beach                       Macmillan showing off his Assault Rifle & Shotgun

What is Tango Fiesta?

Tango Fiesta is a top-down 4-player co-operative arcade shooter which pays deep homage to 1980's actions movies and videogames.


Story:

Every single 80's action movie ever made actually happened in real life.... to one man. John Strong brought down dictators, travelled through time and space, fought aliens, terrorists, mutants, corrupt politicians, robots, ninjas and the rest. He saved the world on countless occasions, but when he returned to his own time, nobody would believe his outrageous story...

...nobody but those greedy Hollywood executives. They stole his story, split it up, and made millions without ever giving him the credit he deserved.

Tango Fiesta shows the truth of his amazing adventures as you and up to three friends blast through them.

The 4 playable characters we have in the current version; John Strong, Macmillan, Miller and Bionic Cop

Core Gameplay:

Tango Fiesta is, at heart, a top-down two stick shooter. But we want to bring that classic genre up to date in every way we can, as long as it serves to make it more fun! you can sprint, but you have a recharging stamina bar limiting you. You can aim before you shoot, but if you backpedal expect a movement speed penalty. Guns have knockback, sprinting lowers accuracy if you choose to shoot, and guns have limited ammo (as well as ammo clips). You have limited health, but can pick up health packs dropped by dead enemies (and ammo is recovered like that too).

Current Features:

• 4 player co-operative local play
• 4 player characters to choose from
• 2 worlds - Island and Jungle
• 6 weapons - Uzi, Machiengun, Shotgun, Sawn-off Shotgun, VCR, Grenade
• Melee attacks
• Sprinting, stamina, knockback, reloading
• Health & Ammo pickups
• Objectives - Destroy the Spawn Huts
• Fully destructible scenery
• 7 Enemy types (including Predator-style invisible alien)
• Procedurally generated levels
• Lighting system
• 2D Graphics & gameplay

Controls (as for 360 pads):
Left Stick: Move
Right Stick: Aim
Right Trigger: Shoot
Left Trigger: Sprint
Right Bumper: Throw Grenade
Left Bumper: Melee Attack
X: Swap main weapons
B: Reload

The thing is, we also have a pretty deep system running these stats for each player character. So some will be less affected by heavy weapon knockback, some will be able to sprint for longer, all of that good stuff. Plus you'll be able to level up between levels.

Miller showing those bad guys who's boss!

So then, what's next? Well, we're deep into coding the online co-op portion. It all works brilliantly locally, but 4 players online is the key for us. We'd really hate to launch without that. So while that gets programmed up, we're also spending some time on bosses, weapons, enemies and environmental polish.

Planned Features:

• Bosses - 1 per world/environment
• 6 worlds/environments
• 3 levels and 1 boss fight per world
• Progression - traditional 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 1-Boss structure
• XP system - awarded for kills, spent in-between worlds to upgrade character stats
• Cash system - dropped by bad guys, spent on permanently unlocking new weapons, toys and equipment
• Allow players to change their weapon load-out between worlds
• Vehicles
• More enemy types
• More guns
• More grenade types
• More everything!

And finally...

I do try to keep everywhere up to date, and plan on doing at least a weekly update on this thread. We do a very regular video dev diary too which should be interesting (I hope!)...

First episode here.
Latest episode (#52) [http://youtu.be/-wH9cZwHlDk]here[/url].
The full playlist is here.
(if anyone can tell me how to embed, that'd be great!)


Please do ask me questions, I'll endeavour to get the whole team on here eventually, we want to be as open and inclusive as we can be regarding the development!

Thanks!

[TheCleft]

Thought I'd share some of the latest development!

We're planning and designing our first Boss character, Gordon. He's our homage to Bennett from Commando.

There's a video of his creation here but here's a sneak peek at it to jazz things up :D



Every boss in the game will have their own 'level' - introducing them as a character is important, and it's fun to have a short animation that builds up excitement in the player.

Gordon enters by posing - he's the consummate Villain's villain, the poster boy for badness and as such a little vain - and removes his glasses before engaging the player at range with a pistol.

After he's been beaten up enough by the player, he'll throw his pistol away in disgust and rip off his trenchcoat to reveal his trademark chainmail vest! He then whips out a giant knife, and comes right for the player, charging and then swiping.

Finally, his last phase is to get really pissed off and rip off his chainmail vest, pretty much exactly like this:



The idea is that a man does not simply own a chainmail vest - but a whole ensemble including chainmail pants and socks!

So his final phase is to then grab an even bigger knife, and he'll become a whirlwind of knife swipes, and the player must avoid his path until he runs out of puff, and shoot him before he engages in another whirlwind.

Then he dies, of course with an over the top death animation.

Fingers crossed he's as fun to play against as he is to design!

[TheCleft]

Thought I'd post a bit about how we make levels, environments and rooms today with our tools!

We've written a World configuration editor, as well as the Room Editor show below. We've aimed to make the procedural generation of our levels follow enough rules that we can inject variety and surprise, without losing the identity and familiarity that people expect from games... not to mention the careful management of the game's difficulty curve. I'll post a bit about that down the line no doubt.

Mainly, we define a room's size (which is read into the World Configuration editor and given a weighting - chance to appear) and the place tiles down to define the contents. So far so normal.

We have split the 'rooms' into 'layers' too, essentially just groups defined by purpose, and mostly just to help us keep them organised sensibly. We have a layer for the player's spawn room (it's nice to make this a little special), the Objective tiles (ditto, these are a bit more special than the rest), then Buildings, Open Ground, Cover, and more. We can always add more as we go too, of course.

Here's a variety of the rooms from our Island tileset - sorry for the scrolling but this way you can see all the good stuff!

In fact most of it is pretty similar to most editors. Each tile has defined collision for player & enemy movement and bullets, while also can be flagged as an 'obstacle' for pathfinding to go around.

We also have a rang eof properties that we flag - health being a pretty standard one - that ensure we have a variety of fun things for players to take into consideration during play. Is the object cover (interrupts bullets)? Is it a wall? Does it only interrupt player movement? Does it affect friction, or can it be destroyed? If it's destroyed, can it respawn? How long does it take to respawn? All that kind of goodness.

Anyway we've been having fun with the basics - phase 1 if you like - and post Early-Access release we're going to add some really exciting features. We've already got explosive and flammable flags... that's just the start!

[knifeySpoonie]

Hey.. this was a game started at the CA game Jam at Rezzed wasn't it?

[TheCleft]

Hey.. this was a game started at the CA game Jam at Rezzed wasn't it?

Yes it was! Were you there?

Last year's Rezzed show in Birmingham, to be precise, and Creative Assembly ran their first gamejam. We didn't win, but we eventually ended up with a publishing deal :D

We went back this year to demo it in public for the first time, and we even did a talk about how we went from the gamejam to 'coming out on Steam'... that's here.

[knifeySpoonie]

Ah that's brilliant, yeah I was hanging round the game Jam a fair bit looking over shoulders when I wasn't on the floor. I missed this years though

It's great that it's got going like this  I thought your entry was the one I'd be most likely to play myself out of all the entries that year. It's nice to see it continued.

[TheCleft]

Haha that's great to hear - and very kind of you to say so! Between the team we jokingly say we won second prize, and the audience's hearts

Sad to hear you couldn't get to this years' show, it was a good one for sure.

We're really excited to show how far it's come too, and so far every time we've taken it to shows we've had loads of smiling players. Here's hoping that continues!

[TheCleft]

I've added the game's Steam store page link to the main post (here) and to celebrate here's some more gif-based fun from the game!



That one is running at twice speed (gif issues!) but you can see four players having a bit of fun in local co-op. Local will be different from Online in many ways, but the most obvious is that in Local you won't really be able to run off separate from your team mates, while in Online you can pretty much go wherever you want. We hope!



This is Miller having a bit of a muck about. You can see the Sawn Off Shotgun he's using (quite different to the normal Shotgun) with the huge knock-back kick, and the Uzi9mm. Miller's quite light on his feet, so you can see the Sawn Off moving him quite a lot. Bigger, burlier characters will be able to handle it a little better. You can also briefly spot the 'reload' prompt (more relevant on guns with clips) as well as the 8 cartridge casings that drop. That's a bug, it should only really be two :D

[WilliamG]

This looks super fun, I can't wait to play. Game Jam + Multiplayer + Talent = I'm excited.

[TheCleft]

This looks super fun, I can't wait to play. Game Jam + Multiplayer + Talent = I'm excited.

Haha that's great to hear, thanks! 

We're keen to impress, it's our big chance to make a splash as a team and I know everyone's doing their best. I hope we live up to the opportunity!

[gambrinous]

Really like this gif showing the progress on the boss art. Cheers for sharing!

[TheCleft]

Really like this gif showing the progress on the boss art. Cheers for sharing!

Thanks, really glad you like it! We'll be sharing a lot more stuff like that in the future too, as more enemies, player characters and bosses get put into the game. Also we'll probably do some for environment art - why not :D

[TheCleft]

Just a quick post because the video interview we did with Eurogamer is now up for everyone to see right here.

It's a good place to get the lowdown on the game, I feel.

[TheCleft]

We're prepping the game's Early Access launch trailer at the moment, so I thought I'd share some of the artwork Ewan's been creating for it, and talk a bit about the thinking behind them.
 
 
JOHN STRONG
 


John's the game's main character. He's the one who all the crazy stuff happens to, that fuelled all those crazy 80's action flicks. He's also the 'Ryu' of Tango Fiesta, with pretty average state across the board. He's fun to play as, but isn't remarkably faster, stronger or tougher than any other character. His cigar-chomping ways will always mean he's special to me though!
 
 
MACMILLAN
 

 
Macmillan is John Strong's oldest and best friend. They've fought too many battles together to count, and saved each others' lives more than either one would care to admit. Macmillan is the 'Ken' of the game, to John's 'Ryu'. Again, average stats. We do plan on introducing character-specific skills though, and these will differentiate them. I prefer Macmillan's hair over anyone else's.
 
 
MILLER
 

 
Miller is the man whose exploits inspired a certain Mad Australian Road Cop. He's rough, tough, but scrawnier than John and Macmillan. He's faster and less tough, but that extra speed combined with the Sawn Off Shotgun he totes in all the footage means he's a force to be reckoned with. I've seen many players master his aceleration to dodge enemy fire really effectively. He's currently the closest thing we've got to a close combat character... but we've got plans for that too! His look has changed a fair bit from the first in-game implementation. He's got thinner in the face and body, plus his expression - and those eyes - are a bit darker. Not to mention his previous uber-quiff has been scaled back a bit! I genuinely prefer playing as Miller over anyone else at the moment.
 
 
BIONIC COP
 

 
He's actually not even slightly robotic in our fiction, nor is he a cop. He's kinda impersonating both, and doesn't seem to care that at least one of those two acts can get him arrested! He's slower than the other guys, and tougher, but will accrue experience at a slower rate (experience you say? More on that later in dev I guess...). His current weapon is a Viper Combat Rifle, which destroys people and buildings with wanton abandon. My most recent tweak has actually switched it down a few notches. Previously it shot explosive rounds, but now they're just super powerful non-explosive ones. You have to be accurate, but if you are then the bad guys are in for a bad day.

That's it for now, hoping to post more stuff like this if you guys like reading about it?

[Cakeypigdog]

All looking great mate! Glad to see you start a devlog here these things give such great visibility to a project !

[TheCleft]

All looking great mate! Glad to see you start a devlog here these things give such great visibility to a project !

Here's hoping - and thanks :D

[TheCleft]

Wahey! We've got a brand new trailer, and a launch date. I've updated the whole thread and first post to reflect this, but here it is too:

BRAND NEW TRAILER

[joechessum]

Hey Andrew,

I've been following the development of this game since watching the first EGX game jam video they posted online. I gotta say that I'm seriously loving everything you've showed about the game so far and can't wait to play it!

Keep the DevLog videos coming as I love seeing the progress you guys make and keep up the good work!

[TheCleft]

Hey Andrew,

I've been following the development of this game since watching the first EGX game jam video they posted online. I gotta say that I'm seriously loving everything you've showed about the game so far and can't wait to play it!

Keep the DevLog videos coming as I love seeing the progress you guys make and keep up the good work!

Thanks so much! It's always great to have a (potential) fan pop their head above the parapet - we've been quiet on the vids recently due to trailer work and online functionality, but hopefully we'll get back up to speed soon. Should have a new one today - and seriously thanks so much for the kind words it's the most encouraging thing ever to hear!

[TheCleft]

Right, an art update!

These here are our pickups. They do the job! From left to right we've got Health, Ammo and Money.



That said, they weren't very shiny or even very 'gamey', and we had a lot of players fresh to the game not even noticing them when they spawned, which meant they'd often die or run out of ammo without even realising.

So, we made some changes today! They're not brand spanking new because that'd be a waste of time and effort. What we have done though is add an outline so that they automatically pop out from the normal background and level props, as well as adding that classic animated arcade white shine.



I think it's safe to say they're way more obvious and just plain better than before, so Ewan's work is done! Let's hope the players think so too :D