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[SpooderW]

I suppose I'll get the links out of the way right away:

Website: CodeAvarice.com
Youtube: CodeAvariceGames
Twitter: @SpooderW

In Eris, you find yourself on an alien planet, with your only way to get off being the alien mother ship secured in a heavily fortified alien base. The base is being powered by oil drilling towers scattered across the map. You must find and capture these towers to shut down power to the main base, allowing you to get in and steal the mother ship.

Eris is a game about freedom. You can plan your attack on an enemy tower however you see fit. You could walk in the front door with a shotgun in one hand and a grenade in the other. You could grab a jet pack and come in through the roof. You could sneak in through the back door in the middle of the night with cloaking device and a silenced pistol. It's up to you to decide.

You earn XP by killing enemies and capturing towers. XP can be spent on perks, stat boosts, and tower defenses.

Perks and stat boosts play a large role in Eris. Perks can be anything from a parachute to the ability to quickly dash in any direction. Stat boosts effect things like weapon accuracy, health, run speed, ect. These things can dramatically change the way you play the game. Grabbing double jump and boosting your jump height allows you to scale up exposed stairways, and boosting your armor and grabbing the dash perk can make you a serious threat in close quarters conflict.

Tower defenses, such as turrets, are a must if you intend to leave a tower you have captured and have it stay captured. You buy defenses with XP, and can immediately place them where they are needed.

Multiplayer will be a big part of the game. Playing online with friends, deciding whether to team up, or fight for control over enemy towers. We have a team system implemented that allows players to form teams. Anyone on your team can place defenses in your towers, and your turrets will automatically attack anyone not on your team. Teams can be any size, from one player teams, to one big team.

We've been doing development videos since the very first week of development. You can check them out on our channel.

[SpooderW]

Week 6

Eris got a big aesthetic upgrade this week. Lot's of weather effects like rain, lightning, and clouds. As well as a new day/night cycle complete with a sun and moon.

Some random features here and there as well such as some more feedback when placing turrets, blood effects, and a flashlight.

Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej5BQyPv_2I&feature=youtu.be

[SpooderW]

Week 7

Video here:



Got enemies automatically spawning this week, which allows me to play the game without having to worry about spawning enough enemies to test a given feature.  Enemies will now automatically spawn inside towers they own. I've also implemented a global alien AI that randomly picks a tower on the map and spawns waves of enemies to attack it.

Other big feature this week is a placeholder set of arms and a new gun.

We also added a little bullet hole decal for when bullets hit hard surfaces.

The rest of the week was spent tweaking recoil and optimizing existing features.

[SpooderW]

Week 8

Video here:



I got a new mic for this week’s video!

We got a proper HUD in this week, as well as random initial spawn location for players, and automatic respawning.

Other little features this week include a new blood splat effect, some more procedural animation, and an alt fire system. I tested the alt fire system with a shotgun.

All that and more in this week’s pre alpha preview of Eris!

[SpooderW]

Week 9

Video here:



Travis is out of town this week and it’s my birthday, so this video is a little short on content.

Big feature this week is additional turret functionality. Turrets now have functioning rocket launchers and flamethrowers, and you can kill turrets now.

I got a waypoint system working as well, and tested it out on a tower warning system. A waypoint will pop up if one of your towers is under attack and you are hanging out somewhere else in the world, showing you which tower is under attack and where it is.

I also played around with some post processing effects, and added some new stat boosts.

Post Effects:


Tower warning system:


Rockets and flamethrowers:

[SpooderW]

Week 10

Video here:



Big feature this week is vehicles, making it much easier to get around between towers. Believe it or not that beautiful white stallion is in fact a placeholder model.

Also included this week are a jetpack, some new perks, sexy new particle effects, and ammo boxes.

All that and more in this week’s pre-alpha preview of Eris!

Not much to screenshot this week unfortunately.

[Toby]

Awesome concept, nice execution too, but you seem a little lost on your direction.

You're calling it a tower defence game, but that's only because the buildings you attack/defend are towers. Maybe it's more like a survival/shooter game? There's some other tropes from the tower defense genre, but maybe it's not the kind of game tower defense fans would normally look for. I guess for this you need to think about what your aims for the player's experience will be...

One thing I saw that didn't really fit was that you have this dark game which is starting to capture the dark feeling of being stuck on an alien planet surrounded by hostiles, then each time you hit an enemy some bright, arcady XP and damage indicator comes up. The idea of perks is nice and would add a lot to your game, but maybe you could fit it better into the setting? Upon killing an enemy could they drop some energy or artifact for you to spend on upgrades?

Just my thoughts, hopefully they help. You've certainly made a great start.

[SpooderW]

I've had people be confused by calling it a tower defense game in the past. I'm just not sure what else to call it.

It's hard to explain the game within traditional genres. It's more similar to a multiplayer game mode like domination than a true tower defense game. I feel like calling it just an open world FPS kind of undersells it.

[SpooderW]

Week 11

Video here:



First off, got a new ranged enemy in the game this week. Using extremely placeholder art of course.

We also added new enemy spawning ships to make battles a little more intense.

Several people suggested I make the car wider/shorter to improve stability, so I did just that and it was a big improvement.

Lastly, we decided we want the towers to be built out of modular pieces, so we made a small test arena out of simple walls and floors to test out the idea.

All that and more in this week’s Pre-Alpha preview of Eris!

Enemy spawning ship


Modular tower test

[Rube]

This looks really cool. I'm digging those enemy spaceships, I imagine you could have some really unique, hectic firefights with a whole bunch of them flying around dropping enemies on top of you.

How's the multiplayer work? Is it dedicated servers? Is there any persistence, or is the game played in rounds?

[SpooderW]

Battles tend to get very hectic with the new ships. I recorded a video where I've got like 3 ships spawning enemies, explosions everywhere, enemies breathing down my neck...unfortunately I was playing music at the time and could not use the footage for fear of YouTube flagging the video for copyright. :/

The multiplayer will be sort of like Left 4 Dead in that you'd just play through a map with a group of people. No persistence or anything. I'm not sure if we're gonna have the budget to swing dedicated servers. Regardless of whether or not we do, there will be the option to start your own server.

[Rube]

I'm not sure if we're gonna have the budget to swing dedicated servers. Regardless of whether or not we do, there will be the option to start your own server.

I meant dedicated servers in the sense that players set up servers on dedicated machines that they rent from hosting companies, as opposed to P2P where it's all handled by the player's machines.

I gather it will be dedicated servers from what you've said though, which is good to hear!

[SpooderW]

Oh, so that's what dedicated server means. Probably not. The plan is to have the server be run within the game. If that doesn't go well, at most it would be a standalone app.

I can't imagine a simple 4-8 person multiplayer game requiring dedicated host machines.

[Rube]

Yeah P2P will work okay for 4 player coop, I imagine 8 players might get a bit tricky depending on how deterministic your game is and how many moving parts the clients are expected to remember. Games like Starcraft manage to have 8 players playing P2P with hundreds of units because they're super deterministic - it's the reason you can't join a game midway or skip to the end of a replay. Even unit positions are stored as integers, it just tricks you visually by not aligning them perfectly to the grid underneath.

[SpooderW]

Week 12

Video here:



We worked on getting a menu system in place this week, as well as some simple multiplayer features.

I’ve tested the multiplayer with a simple lobby. There’s chat, and you can change your screenname.

Now that we’ve got a client/server set up. Getting some real online gameplay should not be too hard.

[SpooderW]

Week 13

Video here:



I was on vacation, and Travis has added a new member to his family this week, so we didn’t really have time to work on the game. We decided to put up some unedited gameplay rather than have nothing this week.

It’s a little rough, but it’s pretty entertaining.

[SpooderW]

Week 14

Video here:



We were busy working on getting ready to launch a kickstarter for Eris, and Travis is dealing with some personal issues. So we didn’t get much done on the game.

I noticed this week marks exactly 3 months of development, so I thought it would be neat to look at the intro to every video, to see how the game has evolved.

Next week we’ll hopefully be back to regular development again.

[Conker534]

Looks like it could be really fun!

[SpooderW]

Week 15

Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPEoodICpIs&feature=youtu.be

We finally managed to get back to work!

First thing we did was implement a cool new flying vehicle, which went surprisingly smoothly. Travis says this model is just a place holder, so expect the look of the plane to change in the future.

The plane took up most of our week, but we did manage to add a particle effect to the Drop trooper perk to give some visual feedback when it is activated.

[SpooderW]

Week 16

Video here:



I’ve upped Eris from Pre-Alpha to Alpha. This is probably well overdue, but it’s done now, so that’s all the matters.

This week I added a machine gun and rocket launcher to the plane, and worked on a new perk that recharges ammo.

I also added grenades, which really spice up the combat and help when clearing out packs of Gaangus.