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[Theophilus]

I wanna know how a monopod lives with one buttcheek.

Looks like a great game so far. I wish I could donate.

[ambinate]

i am digging that lantern a lot!

and monopod tipping looks like a grand ol time

[Bones]

Theo: they poo from their belly buttons.

Worked on some achievements/experiences, the bold ones are in the game so far.
Tell me if you think any of them are redundant or stupid.
None of the names of the achievements are final either, I just couldn't think of anything good at the time.

Comparing N+, Limbo and SuperMeatBoy each have 12 achievements for xbox 360.
SuperMeatBoy for steam has 46 achievements, Aquaria has 27, but a lot of them are "accomplished a level in the game"

• Automatic Acid : Fire 1000 bullets
• Top-Gun : Fire 5000 bullets
• The Baby is Evil : Die to a baby Drill-pig
• Crunchy : Get a Drill-pig to kill a Fall Brick
• Tip-Time: Tip over 25 mono-pods
• Excavator: Destroy 10 tons of ground
• Ricochet: Ricochet a single bullet 5 times
• Ricochet v2: Ricochet a single bullet 10 times
• Creationist: Create 1000 trees
• Exterminator: Kill 100 worms
• Ace shot: Shoot a grenade out of the air
• Explosive Hoarder: Carry more then 50 grenades
• Going out with a bang: Kill a boss with an explosion
• Demolition Man: Kill 10 enemies at once with a grenade
• Hot Stuff: Die in lava 15 times
• Know Thy Enemy: Kill every type of enemy
• Speed runner: Complete a timed level in half the expected time
• Cowboy: Kill a creature while riding another creature
• Bone-yard: Create 500 bones
• Death is fun: Die 100 times
• Death is for the weak: Die less then 5 or 10 (undecided) times
• Flawless Victory: Kill a boss without losing any health
• Speed Demon: Beat the game in less then 30 minutes
• Tempus fugit: Play the game for more than 5 hours

If you can think of any more to add I'm all ears.

Basically I'm trying to avoid creating any achievements that you would get just by going through the game, such as completing a chapter isn't worth an achievement because you would do that anyways.
I do agree that achievements ruin the immersion a game can have, and so that's why the achievement tells you what you have done so that you don't have to go out of your way to find it.

I'm also wondering if achievements should give out increments of cash so you can upgrade your guns and buy more grenades.

[PowRTocH]

Achievements for dying sort of seems counterintuitive to me.

[Bones]

The death achievement was based off of the only N+ achievement that wasn't "you beat levels"

Practice Makes Perfect
Die 1000 times in Single Player mode.

I find the achievements to just be there for people who like stats and for people who like exploring outside the norm. Sometimes achievements are just there to giggle at how much you sucked while playing.

I naturally expect people to die over a hundred times or more in my game.
The game plays off of N+ it had lots of dying.
If you don't die, that's the true achievement right there.

I hope the lava in my game can claim 25 kills, if people want to go ahead and leap into lava because they are told to that's fine, if a friend told you to jump off a bridge would you?
But if lava just happens to kill you 25 times while your playing, would you not laugh at yourself for dying to lava so much?

I'm sure psychologically people are going to see an achievement and want to do it.
But I guess that comes with the territory of telling people they can do things.

Anyways, I'm not going to worry about achievements too much right now.
They are in that's all that matters. :B

[Bones]

I've made

.
You get crushed if you're caught inside it's regeneration.

[Bones]

Yappy dogs are implemented.
I'm pretty sure their design was based from something very similar I saw a while back in a game prototype.






They are much more spastic then the monopods.
So far they don't really like water and kind of hover above it which is not what I want.

Also, should the monopods swim or sink?


Edit* their sound pitch has now been lowered so that they sound more like dogs and less like mice.
They are still just about as annoying but at least the sound isn't death on your eardrums anymore... ^^;
The video shows the old sound effect it's a bit squeaky.

[sergiocornaga]

ATTENTION MUSICALLY INCLINED TIGers!
I am currently looking for any musician(s) willing to help out with this game.

Did you try contacting OverCoat? Given that The Sky is Never Dark Anymore EP was made in one day (I think) he might be willing to come up with something.

[Bones]

@Sergio - I contacted him on youtube, he said he'd try and make a few tracks he also gave me access to his archive which has plenty of similar tunes.
I've also been contacted by a few musicians and the game will probably feature 2-3 composers maybe more.

@Gabriel - Thanks man, I need all the encouragement I can get I'm about to work on the graphics portion of the game...



I realized my backgrounds were lacking in some hd pixel graphics so I thought I'd start there.
This is inspired by this.

[Bones]

Thanks man.
Bleh... It seems my image host is down and all my development images have disappeared.  
I'll upload whatever I've got left on my hard drive and at least update the first post with some images again...

[Bones]

A wild tech demo has appeared! (19.77 MB) the game has a lot of objects made for it, just lacking levels and tunes, my estimate for release size is around 25-30MB when all the music is included.
Check it out, if you don't have any sounds playing there is an included readme explaining how to fix your sound problems.

Please tell me if you experience any major issues with the game within the first 10 or so levels. The rest I know are failures.

For testing purposes atm you press Q and E to switch rooms, E is next room / Q is previous room
If you run into an error, you should be able to ignore it and the game will go on.

There are roughly 10-12 levels that are just test levels.
Most levels contain about one enemy each so I could test them out (not all enemies have their own room yet)
But at least now there is a demo that can be play tested again.

Also you can press F4 to view the achievements, this button will likely change in the release.

Current issues I'm aware of:

The player sprite isn't correctly drawing at all times, sometimes two sprites are being drawn when only one should.

Dying to Anti-Atom will crash the game because the player does not exist so his arm has nothing to point at, therefor it crashes. Easily fixable.

EarthWyrm collision is a little fucked up, they aren't colliding properly with solids at the moment.

When lava touches a tree the entire game slows down because of all the fire being created, because fire touching a tree also creates fire; so it's creating things it collides with whoops.

[DrDerekDoctors]

Woo! Grabbin'!

[Bones]

Feels great to play. I absolutely love the ambience in the first couple rooms too.

Can you actually defeat the giant flying sword?

Cheers  

Yea you can kill it, spoiler below

Try and find some water to lure it into... maybe I should add a bit more throughout the level to make it more obvious.

I'm going to go to my local zoo today and do some sketching, hopefully I'll come up with some cool birds and stuff like that.
Thanks for the feedback though it's good to know if things are obvious or too hard.

[Bones]

Wow great feedback man this is exactly what I needed from releasing this demo to a few people I'll need to ask some questions obviously for some bugs so that I can attempt to repeat them myself.

- Fire sword movement
Yea, I tried making the fire sword move differently then the homing missiles I have in the game (they aren't in any levels)
They are based on the N+ missiles that kind of circle around you if they miss rather than move_towards_point

- Yea, this has been an issue since I made the whole swimming in water thing.
I may end up just removing it and sticking with standard mario type swimming with jumping rather then following the mouse. ^^;
I think the issue is from you aiming down so your moving towards your mouse downwards rather then getting out of the pool of water...

- Thanks, I want it to be very surrealistic so ambiance is important I feel in order to emerge the player in a strange world which has been the funnest part of making this game to be honest. It's been exciting to see and hear things sycnronizing and working together.

- Semi frequent bug crashes?! Not good, first off are these when you begin roaming beyond the first 10 levels? Or are you experiencing crashes within the levels that are in working condition? I should just delete the rooms that don't work. There error I know of that sometimes crashes is when I don't have a checkpoint in a room with the player.
Which occurs in the rooms of the fail realm.

- Youre being damaged when shooting into terrain?
I have not been able to replicate this, can you tell me where your doing it?
The outer ring is the health, the inner circle of the HUD is your gun overheating is that what you mean? Or is the doughnut actually losing health?

- Sure thing I'll increase the friction a smidge.

- Yea those pick-ups are still temporary I haven't quite decided how I plan to distribute the points, and because of this I'm not sure how to distribute the guns other then a shop which seems kind of lame.

- Haha I'm glad you like the snail guys they are the reason many of the level beyond 10 don't work because I had to change the origin of all my solids so the snails would collide with them properly.

- Thanks, I thought that would be a neat way to make killing it difficult but the thing is super overpowered with it's laser and you can't actually kill the tentacle boss right now.

OH Also I forgot to mention!!! When your outside fighting the Firesword Press SHIFT and you will activate rain and wind.
The effect sounds, and looks stupid in-doors so just shut it off when your inside.
(The rain effect sucks right now but the lighting is pretty neat)
I really just enjoy seeing the trees rotate back and forth.

[jeffrobot]

Can't play this cuz I'm on a mac, but it looks siiiccckkk.

[Bones]

Oh my Hieronymus Bosch you sly dog you, thanks for the concept art bud.



Oh hey imgjoe is back with all my images, now my devlog isn't empty.

[Xion]

H. Bosch fuck yeah

[BattleBeard]

 Amazing...this is actually the best tech demo I've ever seen for the Game Maker platform in my life.

[Bones]

I've updated the EXE in the RAR, so if you'd like to play around with a few more enemies I added a larger level with a few fallbricks, and mountable enemies and the rams and regenerative block.

I also fixed the swimming, I hope.
I changed it so its not based on the mouse position anymore but the player still spins around.
Walls are a bit glitchy underwater you can kind of rocket jump off a wall, but so far that's the only issue I'm finding.

I tried making the firesword less homing, but it's a little glitched sometimes now it kind of just circles around aimlessly.

I forgot to fix the friction as Gabriel had suggested so I will do that now and it will be in the next update.

Enjoy and have fun, please paste any errors you recieve if you get one in any of the first 10 levels.

Tech demo download

[Bones]

Working on some mini-boss sprites.


Of course I've seen Princess Mononoke.