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[barneycumming]

Hey everyone!  This is our game CRAWL!

basically it's an arcadey beat-em-up dungeon crawler, except it's multiplayer and the monsters are all controlled by the other players

you can play Crawl now on Steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/293780

we have a trailer here:
http://www.powerhoof.com/crawl/
for anyone who is interested

I'm just moving this over from the playtesting forum- took me this long to notice I should be posting in the devlog bit d'oh!

[barneycumming]

I'll repost all the bits and pieces of art here

[barneycumming]

[barneycumming]

[antoniodamala]

:D

[barneycumming]

[barneycumming]

hey thanks antoniodamala- fastest smiley in the west!  snuck in there before i'd even finished posting

[barneycumming]

and i just did this one last night:



this is a bit more of an experiment, as i'm not really sure if we'll use combos for the ranged weapons... i figured the best way to find out was to animate one and put it in game and see what problems come up...

i'm not 100% happy with it, it's definitley harder to come up with something good than when you're working with a melee weapon... the shot straight up in the air will rain down a cluster of arrows around him...

was a fun experiment anyway!

[ink.inc]

That fire animation is super slick.

[MrBones]

This is looking quite nice.

Keep up the good work!

[vivavolt]

 

Posting to follow.

[barneycumming]

cheers guys

[Uykered]

This looks great, it's a shame you're using the name of a popular roguelike though.

[Slowpoke]

Love the art and the idea. Can't wait to play!

[barneycumming]

thanks alastair, yeah it's been a bit of a shame getting all these passionate roguelike players so annoyed with us just for our choice of name! i was aware of the existence of DCSS, but had no idea it was referred to just as crawl

we're thinking about calling it "crawl: 4 players" or something which will distinguish it for search engines, but still the whole thing is a pity as it was such an "aha" kind of moment when we decided on the name and now we're really attached to it- it was initially called "crawling chaos" after an HP Lovecraft story but that got old really fast, then shortening to just crawl seemed so elegant and smart!

hehe

well i guess if people are annoyed about the name maybe it will distract them form all the serious mistakes we make

[Ant]

Spriting and animations are magnifique. 

My only criticism when watching the trailer was that the screen looks rather muddy making it a bit difficult to tell what's going on.

Btw what program are you using to make the animations?

[barneycumming]

thanks caiys

yeah we have a sort of lantern-light flickery overlay thingy which i think was the main culprit for the muddy effect you're talking about- especially when combined with the silly mistakes i made with video capture and editing... most of the video files ended up compressed many times which made matters worse

i've tried a different technique for lantern effect and i'm much happier with the results- maybe i'll post some screenshots for comparison and feedback some time

i've also been working a lot on colors for palletizing monsters and effects- lots of stuff went in so quickly when we were focused on gameplay and i hadn't considered the color composition we'd get when the pieces came together ingame, so there are some pretty garish colors in the vid too

i'm using photoshop for pixel art and animation- i tried some more specialized tools, but ended up going with the environment i was most comfortable in.  i had to mess around for a while to find a good workflow

[Games Inquirer]

It's just a word, keep using it.

[barneycumming]

thanks games inquirer that's good to hear



i'd like to come up with a different finale for the club combo- the jump up in the air feels too athletic and makes it too similar to the swords...

ideas for a more "clubby" finishing move anybody?

[barneycumming]

tried finishing off with a spin attack instead... seems to fit better!