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[JMickle]

looks like there is a heck of a lot going on!

maybe when you kill him all the other enemies on screen also die.

looks v cool

[andy wolff]

Also, I'd like to request a PC build. In fact, I demand it. It is of vital importance.

I'd love to. I intend to talk to some people about what might be causing this not to run on windows machines other than my own. If I can get it to run consistently on windows, I'll definitely at least let people play this on their computers (though Steam or Desura would be cool).



rough mockup for the "Some kind of Monster" midboss for the Dunes. Each head can act independently, which includes spinning around and targeting nearby players and enemies before spitting death at them. I don't have any lasers in the game yet, actually, so maybe it'll have some kind of beam attack.
You shoot the greenish sections until they are destroyed, at which point everything drops down one. Heads severed like this might be able to move around a little and continue attacking you until you kill them, I haven't decided. Heads severed like this will move around, and if one runs into a cactus, it'll infect the cactus to make another one of these monsters. Something special might happen if it takes over a poisoned cactus.
I also want more stationary enemies, and this is really the only one left which could be stationary, so it won't move.

[andy wolff]

Bandit Party was officially accepted into the Boston Festival of Indie Games, so everyone in or near Boston should definitely come by.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle because you can't actually distribute the xbox binaries without the source (I think), and my Windows build was working on neither the curators' computers nor their xboxes. However, I managed to find and fix the biggest source of the problems with running this game on the PC. So, PC distribution is looking slightly up compared to last week.

The problem was simple to fix, though I probably would never have found it without reading random articles regarding xna windows compatibility: Any reference to GamerServices on a windows build will cause that build to require a full installation of the XNA development stuffs. This is why the game worked fine on my computer and on computers outfitted for XNA development, but not on any others. It's now fixed.

[andy wolff]

Hey

The Boston Festival of Indie Games was a lot of fun. I met some cool people there, and a lot of folks seemed to really enjoy this game. etc

I hacked on some crappy keyboard controls the other night. They work for one player, but have a number of problems I still need to iron out.

I've been sneaking in an hour here and there to work on the giant cactus enemies. Got a first pass done tonight:

They can generate themselves and spawn random heads. The heads act on their own, though I may add some sort of head-to-head communication for stuff like avoiding obvious overlap and synchronizing shots or something. I have to write some newfangled shadows code for them. Because of the way they're put together, the normal shadows stuff appears as an ugly bunch of overlapping parts. This actually happens with the snake and the chain as well, but it looked fine with those so I haven't had to deal with this until now

Also I finally tried using virtualdub for turning a screencap video into a gif, and it was really easy and quick. It certainly beats copying a screenshot of every frame into photoshop, hitting 'make frames from layers', and fiddling with the 'save for web' settings.

[Cellusious]

I've been sneaking in an hour here and there to work on the giant cactus enemies. Got a first pass done tonight:

 

[:^)]

seriously dude. make a PC version and greenlight this sucker. I would be all over it, I'll tweet and facebook the heck out of it.

Love how the cactus enemy seems to be one wholly animated character. Kind of reminiscent of Lucasarts adventure game characters of yore.

   

If you fixed some of the overlapping issues I'm sure it would make it even more awesome.

Probably my favorite project at the moment.

[Recs]

sorry if it has already been said, but reading the first post I'm not sure if you are planning on releasing this game on pc as well.

[pluckyporcupine]

I will be seriously bummed if this never makes it to PC.

[andy wolff]

I actually have a working PC version with hacked-on keyboard controls which I've been having various people test for me. I don't think I've had any major compatibility problems with the current version, but it may be a while before I release this on PC. My main focus is and has been to get this finished and up on XBLIG, but lately I've been toying with the idea that after that, I'll play around with adding netplay to the PC version and release it somewhere. Probably not greenlight unless the XBLIG version sells pretty well or greenlight somehow becomes a more attractive option for me. Without having really looked into what it would take to do it, I like the idea of selling direct.

Also, don't tell anyone, but (so far) everyone who's emailed me (andy/superghosts.com) asking for a demo has received one.

[pluckyporcupine]

Without having really looked into what it would take to do it, I like the idea of selling direct.

Well, Desura takes a cut, but it's an option. Indievania too. There's a lengthy discussion on portals I just read about somewhere around here.

Selling direct would be relatively easy though, thanks to the APIs provided by Paypal and Google Checkout. At least, that's the impression I get. I don't sell anything, so I don't really know.

Thanks for the hint.

[andy wolff]

It's been a while since I've been able to work on this much, but I just finished some stuff:

You can now kill the cactus monster piece by piece. The heads still don't crawl around yet, though

This weekend I spent a whole bunch of time restructuring the way character selection works so that I can have unlockable characters/skins, a screen which tells you when you've unlocked the characters, and the potential for selecting/unlocking enemies to play as in duel mode. I added 3 more skins for each character as placeholder to better test this.



here's a shot of the unfinished character unlock screen (it pops up when you end the current session by restarting or leaving the level). it will tell you the name of the character you unlocked and what you did to unlock it.

[DrDerekDoctors]

Woo! Glad to see it's still being worked on. Is that new dude a zombie or something?!

[andy wolff]

Thanks, doctors. That's a placeholder gold skin for Poncho Ninja, who happens to be the titular character to a game I abandoned long ago.


Today classes were cancelled because of Hurricane Sandy. Because of this, I had some more time to work on this.

I figured out exactly how I want each character and skin to be unlocked. As of now, there will be 50 skins to unlock. 4 skins for each character will be relatively easy to unlock. There will also be a gold skin and a black or special skin for each character. The gold skins are unlocked by completing things that can accumulate over time, like collecting a total of X gold. The black or special skins are unlocked by completing a very difficult task once, like collecting 100 gold in one life without firing your weapon.

I finished the unlock display screen and began implementing the characters. Right now I have about 6/50 fully implemented and working, including incorporation into the save file (so when you load the game up again, it remembers what has been unlocked).


One thing that's nice about the way I've implemented the character unlocking is that if you unlock multiple characters in the same round, it just displays them sequentially.


Note that some of the skins in this gif are still placeholders, and the colors are a bit off because of the gif compression.

I'll polish this up some more later with some additional motion here and there. It's a bit lifeless now.

I think I should make it so you have to press a button to confirm you understood the unlock message, though. Right now it just displays the unlocks without any concern for player input. What do you guys think?

[Franklin's Ghost]

Looking nice and think the player having to press the button to confirm is a good idea cause I hate it when screens pop up with information and you don't catch watch it said in time. Will the different skins have any effect on the characters?

[andy wolff]

As of now, the different skins are entirely cosmetic. I might make one or both of the rather hard-to-unlock skins for each character have some sort of effect, but I don't really feel like it would fit in with the general design of the game. Although, it'd be fun to use the skin effects as an excuse to experiment with the game mechanics, like making you always shoot backwards, slightly modifying the movement, or replacing the gun with a short-range melee attack. I just don't want to break the game. We'll see.

I don't really have anything visually interesting to show for it, but I spent much of today continuing to implement the various character unlocks. About 2/3 of them are in and seem to be fully working. Overall that's around 35 out of 50 different skins.

A basic outline of my schedule as I currently see it:
   - finish skin unlocks
   - finish cactus totem and final boss
   - work on level individuality
   - consider doing ghost mode (though it's looking like I won't yet)
   - boss rush level (though with only 5 bosses it might not even be worth it)
   - sound effects
   - final debug, polish, and extra heavy playtesting
   - put up for peer review on xblig and do some marketing (my goal is to do this some time in December)
   - release (hopefully before the end of the year)

[andy wolff]

Today I finished all the skin unlocks except those related to stuff I haven't written yet, like finishing the last two bosses. I still have to test a lot of them, but they're in pretty good shape


I started working on level individuality a bit:

   - First I drew some more variations of the cracks images that are randomly placed on the levels, and tuned the sizes to specific levels. I also tuned the amount of grass on each level.

   - I added wind to the second level (it just blows you and enemies to the right a bit, and causes the grass to spaz out more rapidly).

   - I added a fireplace to the indian village, and changed the way the chief spawns. Now, archers dance around the fireplace for a little while before the chief spawns. You can interrupt them but they'll get rather angry. I should probably animate them better, but it's functional:

[pluckyporcupine]

  - I added a fireplace to the indian village, and changed the way the chief spawns. Now, archers dance around the fireplace for a little while before the chief spawns. You can interrupt them but they'll get rather angry. I should probably animate them better, but it's functional:

That looks fantastic.

It'll also add a bit more personality to the indians.

[egoitzOsa]

@Andy Wolff, I didn´t have time to write here before (allthough I´m suscribed via mail to this topic ) but I´m really hiptonised with this fantastic looking game (and casually, as you know, our projects take place in the same enviroment allthought they are totally different ).

Every update you post, I feel more in love with it. I can not wait to try it .
Congrats for your work!!

[amidos2006]

I am happy that the game is coming our nicely andy I adore the art style a lot, Hope you can finish it soon as I can't wait to play it looks amazing

[TNERB]

I'm dying to play this beast already, I hope u can get it out by the end of the year, then it would be a truly great christmas.