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[MsTei]

A Quiver of Crows is a twin-stick shooter/shmup about crows who fight demons in order to restore peace in a land bewitched by a sinister darkness. During the journey, the crows obtain an arsenal of great magic to battle their foes. Some of the environmental elements can be used to your advantage in defeating the enemies.

Features

• 26 stages of fast-paced action
• 360-degree twin-stick chaos!
• Local / couch co-op so you don't have to go it alone
• Upgradable weapons, bombs, and shields
• Unique environments and physics not common in shmups
• Play using controller or keyboard & mouse
• Windows / Mac / Linux
• The song "Better Days" by Laura Shigihara (Plants vs Zombies composer, composer/singer of "Everything's Alright" in To The Moon, Singing Sunflower from World of Warcraft)
  

Releases October 19, 2016 on Steam

Videos

Animated GIFs

Hi everybody! I am one of the developers and the composer for A Quiver of Crows. The game is inspired by traditional shmups as well as twin-stick shooters. We love these genres and have been playing them for years so it was natural for us to come up with the gameplay for A Quiver of Crows. We noticed a lot of shmups are set in space and feature rigid bodies (spaceship, robots, etc), so we wanted to create a shmup with a unique theme.

WEBSITE | DEVLOG | TWITTER | FACEBOOK



Screenshots

Our Steam Page.

About us
We are a small team of three, and this is our third game. We started with mobile games, but it's getting harder and harder to get noticed. Nowadays it's getting harder and harder to get noticed on Steam as well. This is our first game for the PC, and as far as we know, our last game we'll be making.

Thank you for your time!

[Boreal]

I really like the wind turbine blades!

[Gamedragon]

I love the name! And holy shit that looks pretty!

[bdsowers]

I'm assuming you know that a group of crows is called a "murder" and passed up on that opportunity for the title...

This is pretty. I worry that your silhouettes are a little hard to distinguish in the madness, making your player a little hard to find in big fights.

The announcement trailer was really well put together. Good luck guys!

[Ticebilla]

Yep. I need this in my life. Following.

[MsTei]

@Boreal - thank you! We believe in using renewable energy resources

@Gamedragon - thank you! I'll let the artist know. We went through so many iterations of names (see the next response)

@bdsowers - we WERE going to call it A Murder of Crows! But there is a card game with the same name that we didn't want to infringe on. An Unkindness of Ravens didn't have a nice ring. For a while, it was going to be A Murder in the Sky, but a Google search on that name would return horrible air line stories that we didn't want to be associated with. We went through so many iterations, until we decided to come up with a group name of our own. Quiver implies arrows -> shooting/shmup, and a quick friends test later, we had our name. I will pass on your valid concern about distinguishing the silhouettes.

@Ticebilla - haha, thank you!

[MsTei]

We are totally focused on marketing our Greenlight campaign right now. Steam does not give you a lot organic traffic these days, so we have to work harder!

More screenshots

Co-op Mode:


Eat lasers, skull!

We got a mention on Destructoid - A Quiver of Crows looks lovely... which was surreal!

[MsTei]

More screenshots

Homing Quills: Very difficult to convey through a screenshot!


Another co-op screenshot:


Please vote for us on Greenlight!

[MsTei]

We've had a bunch of people ask us if we use Unity to make A Quiver of Crows. The answer is no. 

Here's a list what we use to make this game:

Cocos2d-x - open source framework. I had a Java background and had to learn C++ in order to use this. The performance is great, and the documentation is decent, but it is code-heavy - it does not have an editor out of the box.

RUBE - stands for Really Useful Box2D Editor. AQoC has gravity and simulated physics. This editor allows us to apply physical behavior to the objects. It is also our level editor.

Spine - instead of frame-by-frame animation (which is quite painful and takes up lots of space), Spine lets us assign a skeleton and tween the animations, exporting a .json file. This is very handy and has saved our artist's sanity. Look at the 3-headed crane at the end of the trailer. What a beautiful piece of work!

Cakewalk Sonar - for the music with Garritan Personal Orchestra for the orchestral sounds.

This is the condensed summary of what we use. For a more detailed list, check out our Gamasutra article.

Please vote for us on Greenlight!

[MsTei]

A Quiver of Crows has been Greenlit!

Thanks to everyone who has voted, tweeted, written about, and supported us in any way. We are so humbled and extremely grateful!

Aaaaand it’s back to work for us. Please follow us for more updates!

[MsTei]

Hi everyone, long time no update. In February my dad got into a car accident and needed several operations. I've been caring for both parents as well as handling their affairs, so it's been stressful. Development for A Quiver of Crows has continued through that despite my random schedule.

Here are some updates to our game since then.

Danny, the artist, with some concept screen and colors for the remaining stages.




Several iterations of our HUD


Videos:







Dreamcatcher and fire - this is our level restrictors.


Visual damage indicators


The death screen...enjoy getting chomped!


That's it for now. Hopefully life will calm down more for me *knock on wood* so I can focus on this more. It has been difficult the past couple of years.


Follow us:
@AQuiverOfCrows
A Quiver of Crows Steam Page

[jamesprimate]

this looks pretty badass 

[MsTei]

Thank you James!

We're going toward a grim/morbid theme. I'm trying to figure out sounds now - electric lazer pew pews just don't match, you know?

[MsTei]

Steam Page: A Quiver of Crows
Twitter: @AQuiverOfCrows

Music on Youtube



Composed by yours truly. I wanted the song to start off melancholic but end up being hopeful. In the game you are rescuing other trapped crows.

Finalized HUD

The claw represents your weapon and the # of upgrades you can get. We are planning to have five upgrades in our games, but we currently only have two.
The circle on the lower left represents the # of bombs you've picked up.

Upgrade orbs

Bomb ammo will be scattered throughout the stages, so they will always be in the same place.
Weapon upgrades will depend on the # of monsters you kill. It will be dynamic, probably not happening in the same place each time. Want to upgrade? Keep killing more without getting hit. Getting hit means downgrade!

Tutorial through billboards

We're experimenting with billboards so that it is integrated with the theme of the game. What's that? I should spit seeds at cages?

Video of Level building using RUBE



We don't have an in-game editor. We are using Cocos2d-x and would have had to code it up ourselves (meaning we deal with potential bugs in our editor), or work with an external editor, which is what we ended up doing. We are using RUBE (Really Useful Box2d Editor) which has really cut down the time for us.

That's it for updates today!

-------------------
Steam Page: A Quiver of Crows
Twitter: @AQuiverOfCrows

[MsTei]

Steam Page: A Quiver of Crows
Twitter: @AQuiverOfCrows



Music on Youtube
[

]
This is the song from the trailer with a smoother intro. It started off as a song I imagined for the death screen - something sad, perhaps poignant, as the player reflects upon the crow’s death for a brief moment. The song calls for quiet determination and resolve, and to try again! Hence the song title

Dawn Level



Some light and bright screenshots from our Dawn level. There's a time theme in the game, where you start the game at Dawn and end the game at night.



Skelecrane Boss's Physics



Skeleton frames enabled in order to help troubleshoot the physics system. Currently when an enemy is killed, it ragdolls and falls to the ground. With our new feature, a boss enemy can stay alive while parts of its body ragdolls – all the better to make them even more uniquely spooky.

Rescuing Crows


We've added caged crows to our game - they will be scattered throughout the stage. Rescue enough crows to unlock the dreamcatcher and advance to the next stage.


Thanks for reading. Until next time!
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Steam Page: A Quiver of Crows
Twitter: @AQuiverOfCrows

[Squize]

That's looking awesome mate, the swings grab is a thing of beauty ( I was just googling about Greenlight tips and saw your post on Gamasutra and then seeing this post, it's a small world ).

[MsTei]

Thank you Squize! It is a small small world. =) Hopefully our post helps you!

[GrumpyGiant]

Love those road signs!

[MsTei]

@Kayamon - Thank you very much.  We wanted to "embed" the tutorial into the surrounding environment.

[MsTei]

Dev Video Update #1
We're trying something different. This is an action shooter, so still images and animated GIFs don't do it justice. We've shot a video where we showcase what we've been working on and talk about it. This is unscripted, and we're a bit awkward, but hopefully it helps showcase the game.



In the video we (Alice and Chad, developers) talk about

• Weapons and their differences
• Dawn environment and inside tree stages
• Map with fog of war
• Boss with partial-ragdolling - coolest part of the game, I think. Boss has 3 heads, you kill a head, it dangles limply.

Animated short video
[Of battling and getting an upgrade]

Map View

In our game, you have 360-degree range of motion and can explore any part of a stage in any order you want. We now have fog of war in the map view so you can see where you've been, but not the places you've yet to visit. When you hit the map button, all the enemies are frozen in their spot on the map.

Interview
Danny and Chad had an interview with Obsolete Gamer. We're working on improving our public speaking and ability to speak on the fly. From this video I've learned one tip - ask the interviewer for the list of questions beforehand so you have time to prepare your answers.
Interview with Obsolete Gamer

That's it for now. Thanks for reading!


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Steam Page: A Quiver of Crows
Twitter: @AQuiverOfCrows