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[skudfisher]

I've been working on Captain Narwhal & The Alien Horde (formally called Space Face) for a couple of months now. It's a little action platformer defense RPG game (is that a thing?).

You control Captain Narwhal (the beardy guy in the top screenshot) as he defends his crashed teleport pod against hordes of aliens for as long as possible. There's a levelling up/skill point system, coins,  a random (diablo-style) loot drop system and you have guns, grenades and a deployable turret.



I'm getting close to having it finished right now. It just needs a lot of tweaking/balancing and it's missing some special effects, sound and music.

Today I've been working on a little trophy/achievement system. There are currently 55 different achievements.

So yeah, I've basically taken an extremely simple gameplay base and added as many ridiculously complicated systems to it as I could come up with.

I'm making the game in Unity for PC/Mac.

(You can find a more complete dev log I've been keeping for it on my site http://www.redpotiongames.com/blog/)

[Tiago_BinaryPig]

Love the art style!
Looks great to pass some time. And that upgrade tree looks big enough to enjoy this game a little more.

Keep going 

[[bk]door.maus]

The art style is indeed very nice! I would love to see it in action. Looking forward to seeing some more!

[cubertron]

awesome art! Keep up the great work. Looking forward to the game :D

[zede05]

Very cool style! Are the enemies going to come from the left only?

[skudfisher]

Thanks guys! The background art was done by my girlfriend (who is a comic artist/illustrator) and I did all the character art and animation and everything else. I'm very happy with how it looks.

Very cool style! Are the enemies going to come from the left only?

The enemies come from both sides and fly in from all angles above. I originally had it on one side and it wasn't very fun only defending in one direction, so I moved it to the middle. I've tried to force the player to move around and jump as much as possible and not just sit on one side or right in front of the pod.

Each enemy behaves differently. The little flying guys (Floaters) go right for the pod and explode on contact (with you or the pod). The flying spaceship guys (Invaders) also go for the pod but blast it with that giant beam. Invaders move slowly but have a ton of health. There's a Crawler that runs directly at you (and speeds up when he gets closer) and explodes but you can easily jump over them and have a swarm of them following you around. And then there's a Grunt that walks on the ground and shoots his gun at either you or the pod. Oh and a great big alien bug (seen in the top image of the original post) which pounds on the ground and throws you into the air for huge damage.

I'm still tweaking them though. The Invaders will eventually also drop bombs over your head as they pass towards the pod.

The longer you survive the faster the aliens spawn, so after a couple of minutes things start getting pretty hectic with everything exploding, burning and being poisoned/blasted to death. 

[Dom2D]

I played a bit of this during development, and it was really fun! It's super polished too. I can't wait for the game to be finished!!

Also, Bombanade is a cool word.

 

[skudfisher]

I had planned on keeping this thread updated daily but I've been working on music and sound effect stuff mostly and screenshots of music and sound effects aren't very exciting...  

I will try to record some videos of gameplay once I get the final music in.

The one thing I have added other than sound is a new bombing ability to the Invaders (saucer guys). They drop little egg bomb things (seen in this screenshot above) as they fly towards the pod now. I've been told they are the most terrifying thing in the game right now. So that's fun.  

I've also tweaked the way the turret works. You can now redeploy it anywhere, but while it's out, your shields no longer regenerate. So you can switch the turret around more depending on where you're being attacked most if you want but you're weaker while it's out.

I also got trophy/achievements working really well right now. I'm working on the trophy screen at the moment.

I've had some more feedback from testers and have some new ideas for tweaking the difficulty as well (everyone still complaining that it's too hard at first). Invaders won't show up for 30 seconds in a round, and the big green guys won't show up for a full minute (possibly two... still testing it) now.

With all the sound effects added, the game is really coming to life right now. Looking forward to sharing it with people soon!

[skudfisher]

My girlfriend (the background artist) and I redesigned the pod that you protect. She sketched it up in pencil and I finished in Inkscape. I wanted it to feel like a 50's vacuum cleaner, and the teleport pods from The Fly, mixed with the Oscar Mayer Weiner truck...  I think we succeeded quite nicely!

The green light in the middle at the top turns into a red alarm light that spins and flashes when it gets heavily damaged. I'm also working on making several damage states for it right now so it gets burned and scratched up as it takes damage.

You can also see the newly added placeholder achievement/trophy art and a nice Invader explosion happening in this shot...

[skudfisher]

New start menu art! I've also redrawn the pod you are protecting and added a bunch of new raygun graphics to the game.

[skudfisher]

I added a trophies/achievements system and finally got around to making a scrolling list of all of them so you can see what you've earned so far. I'm still tweaking the stats/info stuff on the right.

[Dom2D]

I think the title text and "button" text should have different fonts, maybe?

[skudfisher]

I think the title text and "button" text should have different fonts, maybe?

I'm still playing around with all the fonts. I'm going to remove the 'star trek' font from the whole game as well eventually... It's hard finding good free fonts...

[eigenbom]

looks nice

[jO]

that start menu artwork is brilliant!
It perfectly captures the mood of those retro sci-fi tales

[zede05]

That start menu looks great! 

[Ant]

Wow nice style.  

I wish the game art looked much more like this...