[Warning, long post approaching! No refuge!]
Thank you, btw, to everyone who has dropped by with a kind word or suggestion. It is appreciated! It can be hard working on a project in a vacuum for 1.5 months, and it is always nice to hear peoples' feedback and thoughts! (Even if I'm being a terrible tease and haven't even given you guys a demo. Sheesh, what's with me?
)
Anyway. Updates!
First off: This is apparently the week in which I discover that I have doppelgangers! Or maybe that I'm a doppelganger for someone else? Don't know, but it's been funny. Or is that creepy? No, mostly funny so far.
Consider!Exhibit A:I have been calling my studio "Paper Dino Software", and set up
PaperDino.com, etc. This week I discover that there is already an award winning studio called
Paper Dragon Games. Huh. That's eerily close. Apparently I'm not the only one to have the idea of naming my game brand after my hobby of creating folded paper reptiles? (Funnily enough, I even considered Paper Dragon as a name, but dismissed it after discovering that
www.paperdragon.com was taken by someone doing toy dragons.)
ATTENTION PAPER DRAGON GAMES, I AM NOT TRYING TO RIP YOU OFF, CAN WE STILL BE FRIENDS?Exhibit B:Today I came across
this game. I've seen other things by this author before. He does neat stuff! He's one of the few places I've seen people use post-processing in Flash, other than my own stuff. (Actually how I found his stuff in the first place - after I figured out how to do it, I went out actively looking to see if anyone else was doing it.) Anyway, I had a moment of panic when I saw the
description for his game on the indiegames blog, but it turns out I'm still ok - we made very different games. Still, it was rather eerie to discover that just as I prepare to start getting ready to release, that there was
another game that just came out, that was an inversion of a traditional Shmup, which used nifty flash post-processing effects to do blurs on a simple, geometric style. (For the curious, his is a game in which you control the waves of enemies during a shmup level, while mine is [as you've probably gathered by now] specifically focused on the boss fights.)
Crazy world!
Anyway, enough about other peoples' games.
Let's talk about mine!I am REALLY happy with how the backgrounds turned out. Like most of my art decisions, they were heavily weighted by the "what would take the least amount of effort and disguise the fact that I can't draw?" rule. Even so, I'm fairly pleased with how well they came out.
But don't take my word for it! For lo! I am making good on my threat! My threat... of
screenshots!!!.... at the end of the post, that is. Because they take up lots of screen real-estate.
Side note. It's still a humbling feeling, when you are bested by your own AI. There have been several times this project where I've made some new bullet pattern, and said "this is pretty. Too bad it's clearly unfair. There is no
WAY the computer can dodge this. And then I do a playtest just for fun, and the computer runs circles around it and laughs. And I'm like "well, cool, I guess, that it dodged.... what, 6 times now? I wrote a good AI, go me, I guess?" but that is still inadequate balm for the raging feeling inside of me, which goes something like "DANGIT, LITTLE PEST! WHY.. WON'T... YOU... DIE???!?" Anyway, picture 3 is one such pattern. I liked it, but figured there was no way it would be balanced. Huh. Turned out it was. Tenacious little bugger. (I nailed him in picture 1 though. Hah!)
I feel if I have captured nothing else, I have adequately captured the frustration that a video game boss must feel, at being so mighty and possessing so many amazing guns, but still, in the end, being unable to stop the tiny mosquito-like pricking of that one dude in a ship who's village you torched or whatever. And even if you do kill him, he probably has lots of quarters. Sigh.
Anyway. Onward! Hopefully I'll get audio this week and can put this thing to rest. While I've had a lot of fun polishing this week, I'm getting ready for it to be done.
(And fear not, as soon as I have a demo up that is playable, the problem won't be getting me to tell people. It will be getting me to shut up about it for 5 gosh-darned minutes.
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-Montoli
[Screenshot time!]