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[noahwood]

SL'UP is a side scrolling auto-running platformer racing game aimed at Mac, Windows, and Linux where you kill enemies to increase your top speed. Slam into a wall or get hit by an enemy and your top speed will be reduced. Die and your top speed gets reset(plus you'll get a penalty added to your overall time).  Mixed in with the plethora of enemies will be a handful of pickups used to gain the upper hand.

The final game will feature singleplayer time trials, local multiplayer up to 4 players, and online multiplayer up to 4 or possibly 8 players.  There will be various enemies: stagnant, jumping, flying, aggressive, projectile shooting, etc.  There may also be moving walls and platforms in the level as well as obstacles to set off to mess with your opponents.

The game is running on a heavily modified version of Cocos2d-x and thus far, we have the basic movement, double jump, and attack hooked up using both the keyboard and gamepads.  Local multiplayer is already functional including a completely dynamic camera that attempts to keep all players on the screen(fall too far behind, however, and you die). The game is running on Windows and Mac, and we're currently working on getting the Linux build up and running.

And we'll leave you with one final detail, the game is using a simple deferred renderer to utilize fully dynamic lighting:

Click the image to view the whole video.

[noahwood]

Recently, I've been really focused on getting It Hungers finalized and ready for release with one programmer, while our new SL'UP programmer has decided to replace all the placeholder art with his own programmer arts...much better, but still in need of some proper love from an artist!

Click the image to view the whole video.

He's decided that he's gonna add online multiplayer next to make sure we're good to go on that front before adding in more enemies, some pickups, and other features.  Will finally be able to play against a proper player online instead of handing my non-gamer wife the controller to record a 2-player video

[Xienen]

Oh man, I can't tell you how great it is to be back on this project! First time I've ever been laid off from a company and it honestly turned out to be a positive situation, because I hated being limited to only working on Slipshot, while the rest of Greater Good Games projects were being programmer by others. Anyways, enough on that, we've made huge changes and progress in the past few weeks:

1) Got multiplayer entirely playable, but it's definitely still rough
2) Integrated Spriter into Cocos2d-x and released the source code
3) Removed our reliance on CocoStudio's horrible Scene Editor

Also, due to Noah's limited availability, we've finally landed a new artist for this project, Daniel Furlow. He has already drawn up a couple concepts for the character, which I think are absolutely fantastic:

[Xienen]

Well, it took many, many revisions, but I finally got per pixel lighting working in SL'UP! The initial implementation just used standard ray casting for every pixel, which always looks pixel perfect, but my god is it expensive! I then tried to optimize it by using an intermediary buffer and ray casting backwards, which would stop the ray casting as soon as it hit a pixel that had already been written to. Sounded good on paper, but really suffer with edges in practice.

I've decided to keep the full ray casting solution as the highest level setting for lighting, as it appears to run just fine on beast ass GPUs, but I implemented a simplified shadow map for the lower settings.  The shadow map solution seems to run 60+ FPS on just about any GPU, as it only casts 1024 or 4096 rays depending on the setting, where the pixel perfect solutions casts 2,073,600 rays on a 1920x1080 machine.

Aside from that, we've decided to switch multiplayer over to P2P using ENet(reliable networking over UDP), which has required that we handle Firewall Punchthrough. That was probably something we were going to need with the old client/server model anyway, but it's definitely higher priority for P2P implementations.  Consequently, I've been writing a Linux based STUN/TURN server implementation, along with implementing UPnP and NAT PMP support on the client.  Hopefully I'll have all the ground work done soon so that I can actually switch the game elements over to P2P.

If anyone's interested in hearing more about these implementations, just hit me up. I'll gladly share my code, shaders, and full implementation details.