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[Xion]

this is looking super excellent. I love that the levels seem to have their own landmark areas and such (like the red-lit corridor, and half-full container in the upper-left) And the glowiness is just great.

[eigenbom]

spunky!

[DanFessler]

By the way, we're theme 3 level complete as of tonight!  woo!  from here it's just wrapping up a bunch of little things

[phubans]

Finally 

(Note the time of our posts)

[Esti]

Hey guys did you use Spriter?, I recall seeing your game on a spriter demo video or something.

[DanFessler]

I gave a video review for spriter which is featured on both the Kickstarter page and the BrashMonkey website.  I showed clips from the game in that video, but no we did not use it for this project

[Rumrusher]

So will this have a hidden unlockable gish character? Or that for the bonus map pack?

[phubans]

Nah, it won't. While that might be an appropriate unlockable, I've never played the game! Plus, we still need to work on getting what unlockable characters we do have skinned! They only exist in functionality, this is pretty much the last step left before our game is ready to go... But now there's just the matter of negotiation with publishers.

Also, we should have a release preview trailer very soon. I need to put that together, but I'm no dab hand at video editing. I'll see what I can do, though.

[DanFessler]

character redesign time!






I also found some of our original ideas we were tossing around for a main character when we first started:

[caffeine]

Dannyboy that art is amazing. And is that some sort of steampunk steamtank?

[DanFessler]

Dannyboy that art is amazing. And is that some sort of steampunk steamtank?

Thank you sir.  Yup it's something like that - we were exploring some sort of steampunk theme for the game to retain the old "Spuck" title (steam-puck)

[caffeine]

I am very interested to see/hear about your work flow on these tiles and sprites. I'm guessing they're painted in a bitmap program like photoshop. And then shrunken down to the appropriate sizes.

[DanFessler]

I am very interested to see/hear about your work flow on these tiles and sprites. I'm guessing they're painted in a bitmap program like photoshop. And then shrunken down to the appropriate sizes.

That's exactly right.  I paint in photoshop using fairly standard brushes at roughly 400% the resolution of our lead device (the windows phone).  I save the art as scaled down smart objects in PSDs so I can scale up the image while retaining sharpness for any other resolution we need art for.


In other news - We just finished the character redesigns as well as the unlockable characters.  Now each character has a series of facial expressions they show in various contexts.  It definitely gives the characters more personality   We also found a way to play SWF files inside XNA.  We'll be using this to add some quick pseudo-animated comic book style cut scenes.  We're basically adding all the back-burner polish while we're talking with publishers. 

[phubans]

Yep! Almost there! It's exciting... I'm tempted to post the art of all the new character skins, but I really don't want to spoil anything since they're hidden unlockable content You'll just have to see them for yourself! But yeah, I'm going to record some voices for the unlockable characters today to really finalize their uniqueness. After that, I'm going record some new video footage of the game for our release trailer, which should be up sometime this week! Stay tuned...

[caffeine]

I'll be eagerly awaiting the new trailer.

[phubans]

Wait no more!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm2oz0lGdbA&feature=youtu.be

[Seiseki]

Sweet trailer!
You should make the ghost into an actual ghost, that would be awesome

[blinkok]

wow!downloading ghosts is a fantastic idea. brilliant!

[ponchou]

Yes! So much yes. Loved the feeling I got watching that trailer. <33
It looks so polished! And quite addictive.

Please tell me that the tune in the trailer will be in the game, or at least the same style of music.

Also seconding the idea about the ghost being an actual ghost. Would be adorable! C:
But as the game seems to be mostly finished, maybe that would be too much work for such a small thing...

[phubans]

Thanks guys! Glad you like it

As for ghosts being ghosts, I think that is a cute idea, but I'm not sure we'll use it since we might want to message which playable character the ghost represents. We'll see; as it is we're trying to be ship-ready and Dan's list of tasks seems never-ending!

I think the biggest thing we want to add at this point would be cutscenes. An opening one, an ending one, and one in between themes. That might end up being a post-relate update patch depending on how soon we're published, though.

And yes, the music you hear in the trailer is the title theme, done by a fella named Dan Rogers. His music is featured throughout the game Fun fact: I wrote the original title theme and this version is his adaptation of it.