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[DISHTY]

GREENLIGHT

SUMOMGAMES.COM

It's all finished! We'll be releasing Humans Must Answer on GOG.com and through the Humble Store for Windows only on July 11th!

Hey! I'm Chris from Sumom Games - the writer/tester - and I just wanted to introduce you all to our debut game, Humans Must Answer  .

I joined the team late so that's why I've started this thread now. The other guys on the team are all based in Ukraine and started working on the game just over a year ago after they lost their previous jobs. They've worked on the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series and Xenus II: White Gold most notably.

So the game is a 2D space shooter with lots of explosions and peculiar things to discover. You play as a Scout ship called The Golden Eagle on a mission to find a means of heating a large golden egg. The egg needs a temperature even larger than what the average star delivers for its contents to be satisfied and eventually hatched. to investigate the goings on of our solar system after they receive a distress signal from this corner of space.

Upon trying to establish contact, the humans immediately start firing (there is a reason for that) and off starts this explosive journey around the planets.

At the moment, we've got an alpha demo put together and have submitted the game to the IGF and Greenlight, as you can see by the links at the top. Now the focus is putting the rest of the levels together.

The gameplay is quite classic shmup really, with more explosions a need to evade just about everything (no insta-death when touching walls!) and some exciting weapons to play with. Below is a video that showcases how you can deal with different opponents by combining weapons.

Now, the levels and enemies are split into two styles: robots and humans. Below you can see some footage of the human levels just outside Jupiter.

Here's us testing some of the explosive barrels. They can be shot at any time and used to your advantage with the right timing (FUCK THA POLICE).

We're pretty proud of our destruction system in the game too. So, uh, hope you don't mind if I  just slow this down a little for you.

My personal favourite weapon is this badboy. Pretty much destroys anything stupid enough to get in the way - like this giant robot.

That's nothing compared to our bosses, though. They're big, they're tough, and you have to be clever if you want to defeat them.

[jamesprimate]

HELL YES

[DISHTY]

Not everything is what it seems in Humans Must Answer. In each level there are a number of golden and silver eggs to collect. The golden ones are the most important as they unlock new weapons and upgrades in the shop.

We try to hide them well...

[davidp]

whoa, those are amazing

[Wilson Saunders]

Your artists know their stuff. I really like the colonized Jupiter in the background.

[Cobralad]

Aint that supposed to be in announcements? Its not like you showing your development process, its more of "awesome features buy our game" stuff.

[Schrompf]

This is beatiful! I command you to get it done quickly!

[DISHTY]

Your artists know their stuff. I really like the colonized Jupiter in the background.

That's, um, "artist". Only one guy on the art. Yes, he's crazy

Aint that supposed to be in announcements? Its not like you showing your development process, its more of "awesome features buy our game" stuff.

Well, we've got plenty to add to the game yet. And I'll be posting more and more on this thread as we do it. Plus, it's not on sale yet so no one can buy it...yet 

[DISHTY]

We just got posted over on indiegames.com 

http://indiegames.com/2012/10/trailer_humans_must_answer_sum.html

We're all dancing around and falling over our chairs!

"The game will apparently feature astro-chickens and thus an appropriately silly plot, interesting weapon-combining mechanics, bosses, secrets, in-game shops, some lovely parallax scrolling and everything a shmup's feature list could hope to include."

Any other features that you people would like to see in our game?

[Schrompf]

Local coop? If it's not too resourceful, because I think most people won't get to try it out.

[Salsario]

Would you so kind to take my money? 

[DISHTY]

Today I wanted to share our space tank designs. We have two types of the nasty bastards.

As the humans in our future have spread the population around the entire Solar System, they're slightly nostalgic about the culture of the past - when Earth was the only place we called home. Combine that with the huge legions of robots that have been developed in the further reaches of the Solar System as a front line defence mechanism, and we see the human military designing tanks in a very old fashioned way - clinging on to the time when they were more vital to the human defence strategies.

The first generation of Heavy Tanks is referred to as "Leshy". The name derives from Slavic mythology; it's a male woodland spirit that protects the surrounding creatures and nature. It's also the nickname of our graphics artist

More notably, Anton Chekhov's The Wood Demon is a play that centers around this mythical creature. The pointless green camouflage pattern is our little visual nod to the forest dwelling spirit.



The second generation of Heavy Tanks is also derived from a work by Chekhov - The Three Sisters. Quite obviously, the three "fuck off" cannons (as I like to say) strapped to the front is the visual reference here.



Players should have more of a problem with The Three Sisters being that to shoot them with their main cannons they have to face three lines of fire. If they can, though, they should aim to go above or below and combine their matter weapon (machine gun, shotgun, cannon) with the support weapon which provides a way to shoot vertically. We're not always that generous with the level design though, so that won't be a solution every time.

The video above showcases how The Three Sisters can be defeated quite easily. It's not too hard by itself, but chuck in hazards and other enemies and we'll see how you fare  

[Impmaster]

You guys got on RPS.  http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/19/of-space-chickens-and-men-humans-must-answer/

[Windybeard]

This looks AMAZING!

[DISHTY]

You guys got on RPS.  http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/10/19/of-space-chickens-and-men-humans-must-answer/

 

I spilled my tea all over the place when I saw that. Damn

Now we have a lot to live up to; hope we can do that. I'll have some more updates about the game soon and we're going to outline the game's different features as well.

Oh and thanks for all the support everyone!

[Lynx]

Some great graphics, but 'space tanks' seem kind of odd!

[DISHTY]

Some great graphics, but 'space tanks' seem kind of odd!

You'll find a lot of the game quite odd then

Local coop? If it's not too resourceful, because I think most people won't get to try it out.

We've had a lot of people asking about co-op actually. Too many to ignore. We're pondering what we can do about it. At the moment, we have to release the game by the end of Spring 2013 or we'll have no money.

We're seriously considering adding a whole co-op campaign though, or maybe realise it in a more manageable way. It's just a matter of calculating how much longer that would take and how much money we'll need to do that. Setting up pre-orders or crowdfunding in some fashion seems to be the most viable option if we go this route.

If we do, we'll probably add more than just co-op to the game too. Maybe hire an animator to flesh out parts of the story better, more decorative elements to the levels, maybe even add another set of levels with new characters and a completely different palette.

What do you think? 

[DISHTY]

New boss is coming along nicely

It's not the Sheriff you should fear though...it's the deputy. But where is it?!

[DISHTY]

New development log in video form today!

This "Space Combat Tactics" video goes through what we consider to be the basics of the game. Nothing in here that hasn't been shown already, but we had a little fun (or at least I did) putting this together.

EXPLOSIONS!

[PythonBlue]

This game looks pretty good. Just saw the youtube video and commented on it (my username on YT is SgtYayap).

Do you have a composer? Your website says nothing about one. I'm willing to apply if you don't.