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[Tryzna]

Hello everyone! After lurking through this forum for about half of the year i decided it would be nice to finaly start a dev. log recording progress of my new project i started working on about two months ago and progressing steadily since then.

Concept:
Nothing too original, but definetly something i am missing nowdays. Game is about gaining reputation and game currency by fighting to the death in arena-like levels, shooting everything that moves and collecting everything that might have some value. Player gains experience and levels up during each fight picking talents(perks)to customize his character to fit his actual taste.
During the mission the game generates random objectives player can complete for additional score and experience. Objectives are quite simple like defeat a miniboss, kill certain number of enemies, get data from main computer, blow something off and many others depending on the location.

To keep player moving there is number of powerups scattered through each level, be it simple medkit, ammunition boxes or ability enhancers. They respawn afters some time same as the enemies as i wanted to force player to be running around like in deathmachmatches of quake or unreal tournament. This combined with endles tide of enemies should ressult in intensive action.

Enemies are constantly respawned and their types and numbers are controled by simple phase mechanism lets show this on example: When you start the level the phase is set to "1" and game is spawning just basic enemy soldiers, they follow you through the level, trying to get line of sight on you and then they try to shoot you.
After certain ammount of time phase is switched to "2", game starts spawning additional type of enemy called sarge. Sarge is bit tougher than basic soldier, hes firing in bursts and when he loses the line of sight on you, he ll throw grenade to the location he seen you last time so playing a peekaboo with this type of enemy is not a good idea.
After some time the phse is switched to "3" and i think now you allready got my idea how the game is getting harder and harder as time progresses.

Gameplay idea:
Each level is played till you die or exit the level through emergency exit. If you die, you die. You keep your score, reputation, cash collected and you lose your experience as every time you start a new level you start again as lvl1 with no perks. Emergency exit is something you may pick instead of next perk when leveling up everything remains the same as in case of death but you receive a score and cash bonus for getting out alive.

Between the missions player can use money he/she earned during the mission to purchase persistent upgrades for his characters or unlock new ones. These persistent upgrades enhance basic atributes and the level of upgrade is capped by most experience earned with given hero.

Controls:
As simple as possible WSAD, ARROWS and SPACE(sure these can be rebinded). What these buttons do differs hero from hero. WSAD is always used to move arround while the rest can serve differen purpose.
For example first hero implemented in game uses arrows to shoot in given direction, wsad to move around and space to activate rapid firing mode consuming his energy(mana-like).
The second hero uses wsad to move as well, arrows to quickly dash around and space to slash her sword in arc in front of her.
Really nothing that special, but i ve seen many great games, whitch were screwed by sloppy controls and i belive this simple concept serve its purpose very well.  
Am i going to implement mouse aim? Nah, the player is able to shoot in 8 directions and levels are designed with that in mind, all turns are 90 degrees so there should be minimum aiming issues and these whitch remains are part of the fun.



Graphics & asthetics

Im drawing pixel by pixel however im not sure i can call that what i do pixel art as im using gradients for shading and not limiting my clour palete. In addition im cheating a bit as all game sprites and tiles are drawn in dimensions of 16x16 and then i resize(using nearest neightbour) them to 32x32 before animation. Basicaly my pixels are 2x2 sized whitch allows me to make smoother animations and add tiny details time to time, however have to be careful with theese as they can become disturbing really fast, distorting whole impression.
Im using this "double size" cheat as my abilities as artist are really limited and while im sure animations of characters can be done the same or even better without this little trick i think its better to confess where my limits are at the moment and use workarounds instead of fooling my self.



Engine:

While i used Stencyl for my first project Awaken:Underwater Odyssey whitch just got released on Desura last month and for sure its really good tool for someone with 0, minimal or outdated(my case) coding experience like my self I decided to switch to game maker for this project. The reason for that were terrible compiling times in case of Stencyl as waiting 10 minutes or more every time you want to test even little change to the game when the project got bit bigger than average flash game is not fun and i belive i spent half of development time waitng till the game compiles.
The second reason was game performance as for first month i ve got this game both in game maker and stencyl as i was still unsure whitch tool im going to use for this project and in game maker game performed much much better and in current state the game sits on 700 fps in average and thats a lot of space for visual quality improvements like more particle effects and stuff.

First week after transitioning to game maker was harsh but my 15yrs old programing experience helped a lot and now im working even faster than with stencyl after year of experience working with it. Still there might be some issued i did not touched till now, like pausing or saving game, but i belive these will not cause any trouble.



Music:

I hoped i ll continue my cooperation with Develop Device as he provided stunning tunes for my previevous game, but as the pay was not good in that case(awaken earned just to pay it self and not really much extra)i feel like i left him disapointed. I operate with little to 0 budget so i think i ll probably have to purchase soundtrack from envato unless someone volunteers for this task.  

Release date?

Im trying to keep this game as small as possible as i dont want to spend year of work on something that dont work like in case of Underwater Odyssey. Im planning to start releasing the preview builds in following weeks to see how the game and ideas behind it are received. Right now im working on simple game with simple concept, but if players ll like it i ve got ton of stuff i can add like mission hub, your own pirate submarine interiors, more heroes, more levels, more everything! So it all depends on how good the game preview build ll be. If the game ll not be as good as i imagine, it ll be finished probably by the end of summer as free to play game and i ll try to get some money back by selling its graphics as top down shooter kit on envato like in case of Awaken.
However i hope for oposite case and then i ll be able to spend more time on polishing the game and adding content, maybe even try steam green light and work on the game until all my ideas ll be implemented.


Thats all for today, in next update i ll try to describe you the game world after great civil war on Neptune, introduce you the first two playable character, enemies and hopefuly show you some progress.

Thanks for reading!


  
  

[Tryzna]

Leveling & Augmentations

Hello Again, almost whole week passed so its about a time to write dev. update and show you the progress on the game and explain the leveling mechanism and its concept.

Leveling

In Abyss Raiders each time you start a mission, you pick a crew member you think suits best the given task and start as a level 1. Yes, you start over each time, but dont worry, you can level up really fast by killing enemies or completing numerous objectives randomly generated at the mission start and during it.



Missions in Abyss Raiders are about killing, looting, gaining reputation and staying alive as long as possible. Sounds quite simple right? As you allready know waves of enemies are getting stronger and stronger as the time progresses however your hero is not going to give up easily as your basic atributes gets stronger each time you level up. In addition, reaching higher levels is rewarded by unlocking implant slots whitch gives your character pernament upgrades, but we ll wont talk about these today.

Augmentations

Augmentations can be compared to talents/perks you might allready know from famous rogue-like games. In AR your are awarded chance to pick one each time you ding a new level and they are more powerfull then usual in simillar games and whats more important, their offer to the player is not randomized and each playable character has his own set of possible augmentation for each level.



Some of the augmentations fits certain situations and missions more than others and there are some strong synergies whitch may be used to players advantage and thats why i decided AR wont have these randomized whitch is common habit.

Instead of that, i decided to offer player more than ussual number of playable characters and interesting "talent paths" to discover new strong "build" every time new hi score appears on online leaderboard.

[Tryzna]

As a lot has happened during Abyss Raiders development i feel like its about time to write at least a little update.

Concept changes

Many things changed based on further playtesting of previevous build. Main and most notable change is absence of augmentation whitch you could pick every other while, every time you leveled up during the mission. While i liked this concept years ago for example in Crimson land I found out it does not work with Abyss Raiders as enemies dont come in waves but between whitch would be perfect time to pick additional augmentation/perk. Instead of that enemies are comming in constant and increasing stream providing fast and intense action whitch is a good thing, but unfortunately pop up window whitch pauses the game every time you level up feels like disturbing element and had to be dealt with.



Pernamence

Now, the system changed a bit. You gain experience much slower and it takes some time to level up, but instead of losing everything when your character dies you keep all the experience and can spend it on pernament upgrades for your character in form of talent points, shaping "build" of your hero to fit your needs and play style.


Different builds

Lets take a games first playable character, Boris. He is easy and straightforward character to play, armed with his machine gun and ability to rapid fire his weapon when needed. The talent trees in AR are quite simple with level cap 10, but they should provide enought customization and dillemas when progressing through and chosing your path.
For example brawler tree branch for boris provides a lot sustain with ammo and hp regeneration  and if you ll advance even further you can empower these abilities with exosuit and by unlocking final talent you replace rapid fire ability with shoulder mounted missile launcher. Sounds cool? But there is second branch called "Commando" whitch provides significant damage output boost, more damage bonuses for killstreaks and automatic gun drone as a final talent.



With just 9 talent points you cant have everything and my goal here is to create that never 100% sure struggle between choices.


Light engine

Yes! It took a lot of brain power, few hours full of intense thinking, anger and headache, but i feel like it was worth it as game finaly have some sort of "light engine". It enhanced visual quality of the game greatly and while its not true dynamic light system it suits my needs perfectly. I can assign objects light and its properties really easy now. The lights can pulse, flicker, have different colors, can even adjust darkness and light intensity any time, even during the level and all that with minmal impact on performance as the game still sits stable at 500fps.



You can click youtube link below to check how the game looks with the lights on in motion.




Thanks for reading and hope i ll see you by next update as things are getting interesting!

[Tryzna]

Hello everyone! Time for another "what happened during weekend?" update!

This time i ll try to be really quick as i spent most of the time working on boring "technical" stuff like proper saving and loading, tweaking performance of lighting engine as i added ton of light sources to the test level whitch created more natural looking feel, but everything cost something so i had to optimize things a bit to keep the game above 400fps at all time becouse i like to have that extra performance as a buffer in case i will want to add more complicated stuff later.

Dynamic entry!

Yes, i found a time to add tiny little details like this scene you can see when you start the first mission. Scenes like these are not important to gameplay but it took less than a hour to implement it and time to time its refreshing to add somethink just for fun, especialy if the game you are working on is your free-time project.




Gameplay

Finaly enemies drops "creds" whitch is ingame currency you can use to purchase new heroes or upgrades and buffs for allready unlocked characters. Enemy ai been worked on as well, basic soldiers chase you around the level. Sarge have his unacurate grenade throw every time you try to take cover in attempt to dodge his burst attack, time to time creating funny moments like on gif below.

   

Sounds

Oh yes, i finaly managed to add few sounds. Even most of the sounds i added is still temporay they added more atmosphere  and i really like how the game, even in this state plays allready. If you want to taste how the game with sounds on feels just click on this youtube link:



To do list

As i noticed im starting to run in circles i had to create "to do" list and start working towards my current goal whitch is alpha version release to gather some feedback. Current list looks like this:

- mission objectives system
- two more levels for first mission
- item drops and inventory
- add second playable character
- add talent descriptions within talent tree and make them affect your character

Still a lot of stuff to do but i allready see the light at the end. Sure game ll be still far from finished but at least core ll be there and i ll have something to share with ppl and further build on.

Rename incoming

Sadly, i ll probably have to rename the game as some chinese developer decided to rename his game to Abyss Raiders just few days before steam release. Its sad as i check google every second day searching for Abyss Raiders and this morning i found this not so nice surprise. It does not make sense to me to rename your game just three days before release, but im probably not going to argue here, im just sad the dev does not even bothered to email me.

[BanzaiBrigade]

Looks excellent. Everything from the explosions to the gun-screenshake looks nice and weighty, which I think is one of the most important things in arcade shooters. So great job on that.

One thing that you may want to look at is having a nice body-bullet collision sound. It was the one thing that sounded missing from the sound vid.

[Tryzna]

Looks excellent. Everything from the explosions to the gun-screenshake looks nice and weighty, which I think is one of the most important things in arcade shooters. So great job on that.

One thing that you may want to look at is having a nice body-bullet collision sound. It was the one thing that sounded missing from the sound vid.

Hi BanzaiBrigade! Many thanks for the compliments! Hope the nice feel you have from video ll confirm it self when alpha version ll be out as i am aware there is ton of top down shooters and if i want to stand out a bit everything must feel smooth and polished.

Thanks for the sound reminder as it currently missing in my list. Im planning to to record some of the sounds upcoming weekend as i ll be home alone so nobody ll be anoyed when i ll start making strange noises in front of the microphone;-)

[Tryzna]

And another dev. log entry is here! Its a wonder i managed to mark at least one thing from "to do" list i posted last week as workdays were quite bussy, but at least i had time to think about the project during my everyday 4km long hike to work in the morning and did some "theoretical" preparation for implementing the most feared item from to do list.

Loot & inventory system



Thanks to time i had to think whole thing through in advance it was not that complicated(yeah, i know im still noob when it comes to game maker). The whole process from item drop, to equiping and applying item atributes to character goes like this:

Item drop chance:

Each time an enemy is created it perfoms "loot roll" when it randomly picks random number between 1 - 100 to be used upon enemy death. When enemy dies, right before self destructing it self and spawning corpse it compares "loot roll" with assigned loot table. If enemy object finds match it creates corpse, assigned item, tells its spawner its dying to trigger cooldown for spawning his replacement and then it self destructs to save your cpu bit of computing time.

Item creation:



All right, the item has been created, its rarity and type (head/chest/trinket) has been allready decided by its spawner. What happens next? The item checks "item_level" variable, whitch is different for each level. Then the item chose its appereance, rolls its atributes, tells the light controler to create coloured glow around themselves based on item rarity and periodicaly checks how far away the player is from the item. If player is near enought the item displays its name in desired color(white/green/blue/purple) below the item and above are displayed the atributes.

As game is fast and hectic, the decision to pick, or not to pick the item have to be made fast. The item helps player by displaying its attributes in three different colors. In green if the atribute is higher than same atribute in occupied slot. White if they are same, and red it attribute is lower.

If this is still not enought player can perform quick check by holding ctrl key and atributes of equiped items ll appear above the item bar in lower right corner of screen.

Equiping item:

If player is near enought item ll start flashing "E" icon indicating that player ll pick it if he/she ll press E key. What happens next? Lets say we are picking the helmet, all attributes assigned to the helmet slot are ereased and new values are assigned based on item we just picked up. When values are assigned, item is destroyed.

Note i decided not to spawn item we had equiped before we picked up the new one. This is becouse game is about fast action, not about careful theorycrafting and loot and items are in game as a little enrichment and gameplay is not centered about item drops. However this might change in the future after first wave of public testing if players ll feel it should be that way.

Easy right? And i was so worried about it. Still, i learned another lesson that sometimes its better to think things through in advance instead of hammering code without plan in mind.
         

[Tryzna]

Hello Everyone!

Its monday morning again and that means its time to sum up additions and changes that happened during last week. First, and most important change is game name. Im still sad about rename, but just had to do it as its not good if there would be two games with the same name. I know, my game took the name first, but instead of arguing i decided to rename my project and continue with work instead of exchangin emails. Wats new then?

Boris the gunzerker talent tree!



Brawler branch is about sustainability, be it bigger max ammo capacity to begin with, then we continue through ammo & energy regeneration. On third line there is interesting and important talent, the "exo suit" not only the boris encased in exosuit looks cool, but exosuit reduces the knockback of your weapon whitch is represented ingame by reduced movement speed of your character while firing. Then on forth line we have Protein Enhancer whitch give you flat 10% max HP bonus and while its not that interesting choice in the begining, the HP growth from this talent grows more significant as you level up as your base HP grows with your level providing bigger pool for talent and increasing the HP gain for its effect.



The last talent in the Brawler branch is Typhoon missile launcher. What Typhoon does? It replaces your rapid fire ability with ton of missiles whitch uses your energy instead of ammo as resource.



Commando branch is about damage and resource regeneration through killing enemies. We start with obvious increased crit hit chance, then we have pair of talents whitch regenerates your ammo and HP through killing enemies. Target assistant talent represented by laser sight in game and providing small damage boost. Increased crit damge increasing crit damage from 150% to 200% and very interesting choice.



Gundrone companion! Gun drone orbits the player and firing at nearest enemy it has line of sight on providing additional fire support. Gun drone acts on its own and dont drain your ammo so its welcome support you might need while crawling throug Void Raiders dungeons.



Last talent in commando branch is Twin-linked rapid fire and it does exactly whats in talent description, it doubles your firepower when using rapid fire ability!


Additional changes & reinventing wheel

As you might allready noticed i added mouse aim to the game as i was forced to make this step under the weight of concept changes since the project started. Original concept counted with Space Hulk - like levels with narrow corridors and 90 degree turns and i thought i would be cool to forgot the mouse aim and let players mash more buttons, however the level design changed quite a bit and i implemented 8 directional aim. It was quite cool for a while but as i started designing more levels i found this way of shooting really limiting when considering level layout as i wanted to eliminate the moments of frustration when you just cant find an angle to shoot at the enemy right in the begining.

Thats why i made the decision and implemented mouse aim. Basicaly same thing like while developement of my last game happened, i have that "wheel reinventing" feel.
I must admit the game plays much faster now and its more...lets say "dynamic" however the game became easier.

What i did next is proper path finding implementation and now the enemies wont get stucked at the corner. In addition i boosted speed of the enemies when they are not on screen. I decided to do that as there were blank moments during the gameplay when you killed everything in sight and it took too long until more targets arrived and i did not like that.
In Void Raiders i want to force player to run around as when you ll stand still for more than neceseary i want you to be swarmed by tide of enemies. I must say giving basic enemies ability to sprint towards you through level and then slowing them to their intended speed when they arive on screen really helped to create desired momentum.

[Mya]

Gawddammit this looks amazing.

Can't wait to have a go on this (and probably die repeatedly)

[Tryzna]

Gawddammit this looks amazing.

Can't wait to have a go on this (and probably die repeatedly)

Thanks for kind coment! Dont worry about dying too much, death will not be pernament and you ll keep your level and items. However some exp penalty is under consideration.

And as a little bonus here is another gif of Typhoon missile launcher in action;-)

[Tryzna]

Hiya all!

Another week passed and im back with now traditional monday update. This week will be kind of boring as i dont have new weapons and exploding corpses to show you.But still, this week addition is really important for the game as it ll enrich gameplay greatly with feature thats pretty much standard in nowdays top-down shooters.

Random dungeon generator

Yes! Now game can generate unique dungeons every time you play it, following patterns for given area. While generator is not yet finished and there is still a lot of work left, its in the state you ll encounter in first public test version of the game. While implementing of this feature delayed the test demo by at least a week, I belive its feature worth waiting for.



Gameplay impact

Before implementing random dungeons the plan was to place place player in to premade "arena" like levels to face endless tide of enemies while trying to acomplish mission objectives. When objectives were completed, boss was spawned, you killed the boss, grabed the loot and tada, mission complete.

With random generated dungeons i had to rethink whole concept as in previevous case i had all enemy spawners and powerups carefuly placed to force player moving around like for example QuakeLive players are running in circles around map to collect powerups as soon as they spawn on the map. Obvious difference in Void Raiders was you were almost constantly swarmed by hordes of enemies and you were trying to survive while acomplishing the mission in order to spawn boss.



New concept is still based around endless tide of enemies, however without ability to carefuly place the spawners i had to rethink whole respawn - thing a bit.
At the start of the level floor objective is generated and placed in to the room farthest room from exit. Be it getting eye of security officer to be used later at the retina scaner, grab the simple keycard, hack security keys, blow up generators. Or non-room related objectives like killing certain amount enemise, killing miniboss...you know, the more or less ussual stuff.



The game continues to spawn basic enemies whitch follow you around a map, trying to shoot you in the face. As now, the spawners are not placed carefuly i had to give them little cheat, the sprint ability whitch is trigerred when they are not visible on screen. Its very important as this keeps the player bussy and we can still force player to move around and keep him/her under constant pressure.



In addition there are enemies whitch are spawned in each room of the dungeon during building. These enemies are not actively seeking player and ll roam around their room guarding powerups and other valuable stuff,

The result

Final impression will be up to you to judge, but in my opinon the game is less intense now, however much more interesting and while random objective generation is still not implemented(next week, i promise) I think the trade of premade arena like livels for unique dungeon each time was well worth it. dont you think? Let me know!

Oh and if you are in to technical stuff you can check dungeon carver in action on video below!:-)

[Tryzna]

Hello again!

This time, i ve got some interesting things to show and tell you. Not like in case of last week boring level generation.

Ton of minor upgrades

I spent last week mostly by polishing and optimizing of whats done allready and while i ve been encountering slow downs time to time with last week build now the game sits on steady 400fps in average again and that leaves us room for future upgrades or adding more meat for the grinder in form of more weak, but strong in numbers enemies.



Mission objectives

Finaly, i ve been toying with this for couple of days and after many more or less successful attempts i made decision for not-randomized mission objectives as randomized objective generation is just too much for me at the moment when paired with random generated level map. Let me explain how it works on first mission:

Floor 1: objective is to collect random number of Void Cells whitch are scattered around the level and then reach exit room. Void cells placement is randomized each time.

Floor2: objective is to disrupt enemy chain of command and your task is to kill all the enemy officers spawned around the level and then again, reach exit room.

Floor3: kill the boss and grab the loot.

As you see the placement of all objectives is randomized every time level is generated for you(well except boss as he ll always be in boss room) however the objective will be always the same for given floor. In begining i thought this is the compromise between what i would love to do and what iam able to do, but in the end i realized it ll alow me to have more control over gameplay and ll lower the chance the game ll generate level whitch sux totaly.




Enemies spawning

If you read last week update you probably noticed i was worried about spawning and respawning enemies properly in random generated environment. The solution was simple and again leaving headphones at home before my every day morning hike to leave my "thoughtflow" undisturbed by listening to audibooks helped a lot.



Basic enemies still keep respawning to force player to move around constantly or he/she risks running out of ammo soon. I finaly figured out how to avoid "fail train" effect as enemies whitch were chasing player around whole level did that pretty often.
These basic enemies are now backed up by their stronger mates and another batch of basic soldiers however these are not chasing the player around, but they are guarding the rooms and mission objectives. These ll respawn only when you fullfill the mission objective as i dont want player to be bored while heading to exit door as basic "chasers" are no match for player when faced alone.

In short, the combination of diferent enemy behaviors was key to success to make my vision of gameplay true. You can check and let me know what do you think by yourself as gameplay video of second floor is waiting just for you!:-)



Music

Yes, yes, yes! Game finaly have proper music! Big thanks Boc_Uma for undertaking this task! There is little preview below and please beware its still work in progress as we agreed on cooperation just couple of days ago. We think we allready have some nice fiting tunes allready but there are still bigger things to come in near future.

https://soundcloud.com/boc_uma/void-raiders-soundtrack-wip-preview


Thanks for reading! Hope you are excited about the news same as we are and hope you ll visit this profile next week. Cant promise anything but i strongly belive i ll finaly have public alpha version release date!

Have a great day!

Tryzna

[Tryzna]

Hello everyone! What a busy week it was! But i hope everyting was worth it as Void Raiders are finay going public ALPHA;-)

It took about four months to reach this stage and since now, im planning to release updated build every time there is new content added in to the game. There are not many changes since my last update as i spent most of the time since then by polishing the game, fixing bugs and adding little details.

Hope you ll find couple of minutes to try Void Raiders and let me know your opinion as its the only way i can make this game a enjoyable experience.
Current version contains one playable character, and whole first mission(2 dungeon floors + boss level).

Thanks for your time!

Download:

Steam workshop(if you have game maker): http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=456899076
indieDB: http://www.indiedb.com/games/abyss-raiders/downloads/void-raiders-alpha-ver031

[BanzaiBrigade]

Fun demo. Firstly I've only had a chance to play up to level2. So apologies if this

I liked alot about it, so I'll just write about what I didn't like and give a suggestion or two.

1.) Lag. I wasn't playing on a laptop and I was getting fairly major slowdown any time more than a couple of enemies were firing (I tried the demo on my main PC and it ran fine). I apologise if this sounds rude, but I think it's fair to say that the game isn't exactly graphically intense enough to lag to such a degree.

I'm not sure if you were aware this was a problem on low end machines or have/are already fixing it. I suggest commandeering a low end laptop from somewhere and pinpointing what is causing the lag, as there are usually only one or two causes. Maybe certain particle effects, or perhaps the sounds of guns firing? And once you find it stick an option in the settings menu to turn it off.

2.) Is the game speed tied to the framerate? Any time I lagged the game would go to slowmo mode. Very annoying (I'm not sure how easy this is to fix in game maker).

3.) And now just a suggestion. The game does a very good job of making you feel like a badass, however neither the items nor the level up perks do much to add to it. For example, while I am doing more damage with an item, it doesn't look like it. It'd be nice if for example, bullets started off small, and got bigger the more damage you do (maybe change colour/sound also). A similar thing could be said of the perks, crits are good, but when all they reward you with is a bigger number, doesnt really feel that great. You could perhaps have an over the top blood explosion anytime a crit hits.

4.) Add a crappy melee attack. I ran out of ammo a couple of times, and couldnt find any ammo on the ground. It seemed a bit silly that I had to just go kill myself. Even a crappy melee attack would be just enough hope to try to carry on.

5.) A dodge/dash button would be nice (with a cooldown ofcourse).

Overall, alot of fun. Difficulty is very well placed for me, nicely challenging without being frustrating. Also feel free to ignore anything and everything I say, I know nothing.

[Tryzna]

Hi Banzai! Thanks for reply and suggestions! And sorry for such late reply, i missed it at first 
The good thing is that most of the issues were fixed or improved to bearable degree!;-)

[Tryzna]

The time has come! Yes, game is now on steam Greenligt! But before anything else, please accept my apology for not updating this dev. log for some time I dont want to make any cheap excuses and will hope my apology will be accepted and hope we can move on:-)

Game evolved a lot since last time i wrote update about it, but there was so many changes that instead writing walls of text i ll show you fre gifs as they are worth thousand words.

Second playable character:
 



New dungeon:



And right now i am working on another dungen and another playable character:





There was lot of work that cant be shown by animated gif, like optimalization, gameplay and difficulty tweaks based on testers feedback(hello gamejolt ppl!)and lets play videos.To name a few: Bladedancer rework, Boris rework, items hightlight, equipable item sheets rework and much more.

As you can see a lot happened, and much more is planned for near future, but to make it happen i need your support and im sure you heard it milion times, but every vote counts!;-)

If you like the game you can download latest build from its IndieDB profile: http://www.indiedb.com/games/abyss-raiders/downloads/void-raiders-alpha-ver035

Or if you are willing to help this game a bit, cast your Greenlight vote over here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=501392201

Thanks for your visit, support & feedback!

[BanzaiBrigade]

New character is alot of fun, as is the next set of levels. Nicely done!

[Tryzna]

Thanks for testing! And another character along with another dungeon will be added to the game hopefuly next weekend. Still working on the boss encounter and hopefuly i will have couple of days left to do some polishing work before release.

[Tryzna]

Hello everyone!It took just a little less than a month since last release, but waiting is over and you can finaly download version 0.4 and enjoy Neon Gardens dungeon! Birth of this build was painful as I did couple of design mistakes during the process and had to rework the content at least three times, but i belive ressult was worth the effort and cant wait to hear your opinons about this release. Lets check 0.4 in more detail.



v0.4 Changelog
- Neon Gardens dungeon is now aviable
- Tina the "Bounty Hunter" now aviable
- Void sargeants dont throw grenades anymore
- drop rates of ammo and medkits increased
- Big bad guy now always drops chestarmor with regen atribute
- Some effects and objects were optimized so game performance is now better
- Boris wall clipping bug was fixed
- Boris & Gudrun attacks now calculate crit chance properly



It does not look like that much, but most of the time as spent on creating new content whitch is always hard if you dont want to deliver something that feels "half - baked" or unfinished. Optimalization took some time as well but ressult was worth effort, at least in case of first two missions. Neon Gardens can get bit slower time to time couse my very simple rain effect but i promise it ll be replaced with proper particle system with next release.


DOWNLOAD

http://www.indiedb.com/games/abyss-raiders/downloads/void-raider-v04-neon-gardens


Hope you ll enjoy version 0.4! As always, let me know your opinions, suggestions and dont forget to report bugs!

With regards & thanks for reading

Tryzna