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[Alec S.]

What are those flickering white squares supposed to be? I don't get it. The water looks nice.

They're supposed to be splashes of rushing whitewater.  I could probably make it more readable...

[Alec S.]

Screenshot Saturday

[Alec S.]

Jetpack Fight

[Alec S.]

Uploaded some gameplay footage of the first stage of the game:

[Alec S.]

Work continues on the game.  This week I'm working on getting the last few levels that still have missing elements finished, or at least a rough pass on them finished.  I'm also working on the last optional mini-boss.  I don't want to give too much away about it (although if you look through the thread, you might find an early image of it somewhere...), but it's a fun one!

[Alec S.]

[Alec S.]

[Alec S.]

Waterfall

[gamesthatcouldbeworse]

I like the fog. Reminds me of Turok 1.

[Alec S.]

Just finished the final cutscene of the game.  Just have a few loose ends to clean up and the game will be basically content-complete and playable from start to finish.

I'd also like to take a moment to announce that the official release date (barring unforeseen circumstances) will be January 11th, 2017.

[Alec S.]

Cold Vengeance is now available to Pre-Order from the Humble Store.  Preorder and get 33% off.

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/cold-vengeance

[Alec S.]

Decided to rework the appearance of explosions a bit

[Alec S.]

Update 11/17/16

I've been whittling away at my ToDo list.  In the past month or so, it's gone down from around 10 pages to 4 pages to just about 2 pages.  Of course that list can also easily grow, and probably will with testing.  My hope is to have the game basically in a state by the end of the month where I would basically feel comfortable releasing it.  I will then spend December on last-minute gameplay tweaks, doing another pass on boss battles especially, and getting everything ready for Steam.


In the mean time, here's some Fern Animation

[Alec S.]

[Alec S.]

Playing through the game to figure score and time rankings for each level (and, in the process, finding a bunch of small bugs to fix).

[Alec S.]

My current task in working on Cold Vengeance is figuring out Score and Time rankings for each level.  It’s an interesting challenge for a few reasons.

When making games, it’s generally a safe assumption that you, the designer, are going to be significantly better at the game than most players.  Thus when you’re designing levels and such, if it feels like the right difficulty for you, it’s probably too hard for most people unless it’s the very end of the game or a special hard difficulty mode.

But, conversely, as the designer, you’re not necessarily a master at playing your own game, and your own skill ceiling comes into play.  So if you’re making an optional challenge for skilled players, it can be difficult to figure out what a good challenge level is.  And the problem if you’re making something that is too difficult for yourself to accomplish, you still need to know that it’s possible to accomplish.

In Cold Vengeance, an A-Rank score is generally obtained by killing most of the enemies you run into, choosing an enemy rich path, and (most importantly) maintaining your combo as much as possible.  An A-Rank time should basically involve maintaining forward movement as much as possible and quickly clearing out locked-areas.  It also needs to be possible to get an A-Rank in both Score and Time in the same run of a level, so an A-Rank time has to allow enough time for the player to defeat most of the enemies they come across rather than avoiding/running past them (which leads to some situations where there are levels where it would be somewhat trivial to get an A-Rank in Time if you don’t care about your score, but that’s kind of built into the game, so oh well).

These are pretty easy for me to figure out for early levels, where I can basically run through each level without getting hit, but for the later levels has proved (quite rightly so) a challenge.  I’ve never really designed anything before for theoretical players who are better at my own game than I am, so this is new territory.  My options are to retry the levels until I can get a really good score/time and use that as the A-Rank, or make myself invincible to simulate high-level play.

[Alec S.]

[Alec S.]

[Alec S.]

The two main types of homing projectiles: Rockets and Missiles





Rockets have a (mostly) constant forward direction and velocity, but can, in addition to that, move left/right and up/down in towards the player.

Missiles, on the other hand, actually turn towards the player.  Missiles also usually have an initial velocity which then goes down to zero, before speeding up again towards the player. 

Missiles then are subdivided into a number of other projectile types, which function on the same basic logic, but differ in various ways such as speed, friction/acceleration, and whether or not they can be destroyed by player projectiles.

[Alec S.]

Bug Testing