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[dx0ne]

Codename: Diggers is a 2d top-down shoot’em up with hordes of enemies in horror + sci-fi setting. All in simplicity spirit of such classics as Crimsonland, Phobia and NaaC. Lots of shooting, killing and dying. We want it to be easy to play in quick runs as in “I have 10 minutes for killing”. Think of it as Shoot’em Up Theme Park.

Gameplay
You kill waves of alien bugs and their nests using various weapons and powerups. Sometimes friendly turrets and drones will help you. Along with earning experience you’ll get level-lasting boosters for basic stats or environmental conditions. When things get overwhelming you can call for Orbital Weapon Support or AI controlled troops. You can also build up trenches.

Story so far
You are a member of elite Delta10 squad within Ministry of Colonisation Engineering Corps. Your task is simple “Preparation of inhabited planets for further colonization”. In short words: exterminate everything that moves. Areas of your interest are infested with alien, highly hostile creatures called Diggers - mindless and eager to kill overgrown insects. With help of guns and other lethal solutions you have to kill as many as you can before you die. I mean before civilian colonization starts.

Progress
You can actually play some of it Core systems are mainly done - it moves, shoots, bites and dies. We’ve also built most editing tools. It’s not quite game yet but we really wanted to say Hi to the world already.
Graphics are placeholders - so programmer art warning.

Jump in and play
http://codenamediggers.com/testfield/alpha1/

Controls: WSAD/Arrows - move, Mouse - aim&shoot, Esc - pause menu
Demo needs quite recent Flash Player. Can get it here http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/






few more screenshots http://imgur.com/a/FcZbU#0

Future
Full game will have two game modes, suitable for quick plays. Regular missions with kind of storyline and challenge-like levels played for points.
Weapon arsenal will be greatly expanded. More guns plus turrets, drones, troopers and orbital strikes.
Smarter bugs with different behaviors varying in species and levels. Richer level events so it feels like there’s some overlord brain behind those bugs. Not just streams of enemies but Smart Streams of Enemies. Also bugs that kidnap people.
Richer environment - obstacles that will give you some shelter but also interact with your weapons of mass destruction.
Actual graphics and animations - something between Starship Troopers and BBC Life In The Undergrowth
Game will be released as desktop AIR app with optional online leaderboards.

Finish line
First quarter of 2013. Development timeline is due mid December. Plus graphic assets, level design and polishing. And then some more polishing.

Project history
We are team of two coders from Poland and we love top-down shooters. This game idea was born years ago and now we have possibilities to make it. Concept was reignited this summer, docs were rewritten and we’ve been writing code for two months now. It’s still early stage but core engine is working and we thought we could share some progress. To encourage us, to get early feedback and to get people familiar with the project. Also we hope to find an artist.
We work kind of full time on this also working as freelancers to pay bills.

Technical details
All the programming is done in ActionScript3 with Starling framework. We use FlashDevelop, Wedoist, Google Docs, ShoeBox and sometimes Lego for prototyping.

We want you
We’d like to hear if you like the idea so far. All feedback is welcome. The concept is pretty much solid and finite but we are open to any suggestions and ideas. Since this is our first game devlog all advices on how to manage it are welcome.

Are you an artist interested in such project? Contact with us: create monkey codenamediggers dot com

[antoniodamala]

Easily one of the best "programmer art" i've seen around. This minimalistic + neon feel is very cool. Gonna play it as soon as i finish some works here.

[dx0ne]

Thanks.
Even if we agree that it's ok(or as I prefer consistent) it's far from what we want in final product so there's the warning. But I'm glad it's ok for now.

[dx0ne]

UPD#001: Alive and shooting!
We’ve been busy working on adding features and redesigning internal things:
- added explosions from rockets or destroyed turrets “Yes, Rico, KABOOM.”
- layered particle effects because... well explosions are boring without some sparkles and halos
- AI got serious refactoring making ground for smarter bugs

Much work went into turrets. There are mass enemy raids planned for the story, so help of heavy firepower is highly needed. For now you have turrets. They can track targets on their own or you can jump in getting control and also some cover.


But enemy is always learning and mutating.


Luckily humans were always good at making big tools of destructions so why not double guns AND rockets


Also this happened

Instead of debugging why not bugriding?

As you can see, total bullet mayhem is big part of the game. But we also want missions where you had to think twice before going trigger happy with that atomic rocket minigun. For this currently we are working on AI. We want Diggers to act like a swarm. They may be mindless meat hunters on micro scale but overall they run by scenario. They have plan encrypted in their DNA and driven by hive mind. It’s brutal and primal but that’s just how nature works.

[dx0ne]

UPD#002: Lots of bugs
Since we'd like to throw large amounts of enemies at player render engine must perform well. AS3 and Starling provide such possibilities. We've prepared simple demo to test/optimize things and you can try it here http://codenamediggers.com/experiments/1kbugs/

Thousands of animated objects, all at once on the screen, runs smoothly in the browser. We are very pleased with results. Folks at Adobe and Daniel Sperl did great job. Big thx also goes to http://villekoskela.org/ for great optimization tips.

Currently we are pushing things for "bravo preview": lots of new stuff, some actual gameplay in kind of scenario. Also exploding bugs(we hope to make Michael Bay proud).

Btw:
We have some simple site up at http://codenamediggers.com/
Also you can follow us on twitter https://twitter.com/CodenameDiggers - currently it's #screenshotsaturday altar but we will post more non-dev stuff.

[dx0ne]

UPD#003: Be brave in Bravo
Second preview, called Bravo, has landed!

Play it here

Main new stuff:

- Power ups
Diggers are dropping small packages that give you superpowers for a while. Kill for candy that makes you immortal or paralyzes Diggers.

- Boosters
Increase your stats so you can have a chance against rising waves of Diggers. Inject retrovirus to regenerate your body or use experimental ammo that makes more damage.

- Manual turrets
Now you can  be in charge of some heavy firepower.

- Kind of scenario
We’ve made few missions that gives you a little insight into Codename: Diggers world.

- Nuke bugs
Nothing is better than killing your enemies with your enemies.




That’s it for now but as always more is coming. So stay tuned and don’t get yourself killed... without putting down lots of Diggers.

[tchassin]

Nice game
Some thoughts:
- Maybe I'm kinda bad, but I couldn't complete the first two levels, although I completed the rest. I don't know if it was intentional, but I think the difficulty should be ramping up.
- Picking up a weapon with limited ammo then finding myself defenseless seems very unfair. Maybe the current weapon could be dropped on the floor instead of simply disappearing.
- Not really convinced by the exchange perk. I didn't seem useful and got me killed the first time.
- I noticed the x2 bonus time bar stays up a little while before decreasing. I suppose it is because it's above the maximum displayed value, but maybe you could have another "layer" to the counter, because I though it was a bug at first.

[dx0ne]

Thanks for your feedback! All points are valid - we will work on those issues.

I think we fall into issue: "playing too long in game you are developing makes you too good at it" Lot's of work need to be done on level design.