next »

[Neeko]

Yet another new Metro arena designed! While the others so far were rooftop skirmishes, this aims to take place street level, in midst of an office building.



I also made the ceiling lamps interactable, which will swing when touched. You can also shoot them down on top of an unsuspecting opponent.

[Neeko]

This new arena came together very quickly. It's a simple layout, but offers lots of possibilities and is fun to navigate. Watch your step though! It's a long ways down.



I originally left out the elevator, but feared that falling down would have been too easy and frustrating, so I added the elevator as a way for players to possibly save themselves from a fall. It's actually very satisfying to land on the elevator when you've misstepped and are about to fall to your doom!

Shotgun jumping will be key in this arena to easily avoid falling.

[sandfella]

very cool art style! very stylish death-blood effects 

[Neeko]

very cool art style! very stylish death-blood effects 

Thank you! I spent a lot of time getting those blood effects just right

[Neeko]

Here are our current Greenlight numbers.



We're inching closer to the top 100! But slowly. We could definitely use help, so please head over to https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=375619883 and give us a vote!

[Neeko]

Here's the new Demon design.



As probably noted before, this gives him more of an insane mobster look.

[Neeko]

Last post I stated that we redesigned the Demon character. However, many fans asked us why not have both the original Demon design and the new design as a separate character? And they're right, why not have both?!

And that's what we're going to do. The original Demon, which many people seemed to like, will continue to be in the game.

However, the new design will now be referred to as Deceiver, a demon, human hybrid that was born into the mortal realm as the antichrist, who naturally gravitated towards a life of crime and deceit.

So we accidently a new character! There's one more character that we have planned, but we're not ready to discuss that just yet

[Neeko]

We're Greenlit!!!!!! 

[Neeko]

In case you didn't notice, we were Greenlit! Thank you everyone for the votes, comments and support so far.

So what does this mean moving forward? One of two things. We either go the Early Access route and prepare to get a build ready sometime in the next month or so, or continue to charge towards a full release sometime before October.

To help make this decision, I've started to come up with a finalized, locked down development road map, a list of things that are left to do to essentially finish the game, as well as trying to come up with any additional features or major items we may want to add to the game so that we can lock down the feature list and have a full view of what's left to develop. We've been pretty loose about adding new features and ideas to the Trello board up to this point, but the time has come to lock it down and make sure that ToDo board only shrinks here on out

Part of the reason for doing this is to also get an idea of whether we can deliver consistent, meaningful content updates during the course of Early Access. The game has progressed quite nicely since we launched the Greenlight campaign in January, and we're actually not too far off from being in a beta state (all of the game's content is complete and the game is completely playable from start to finish).

[Neeko]

Per my last post, it has been decided. We will be releasing via Early Access!

Development logs will probably slow down over the next couple weeks as we hunker down and get everything in order for the release, which I would like to have happen sometime before June. I still need to start the process with Valve to get the game on Steam, so I can’t give an exact date just yet. The game is coming soon though!

In the mean time, check out some raw, uncut gameplay footage.

[Neeko]

I've been experimenting with actual Unity lighting effects and could use some feedback.

Here are two example videos of what I've managed to put together so far.

A Metro arena with more dramatic lighting effects, with a dusk to night transition.




A Cemetery arena with much more subtle lighting.




What do you guys think? I think I'm going to take a very subtle approach with them, using a subtly colored directional light in most arena scenes, and sparsely do more dramatic effects like complete black outs, storms and day to night transitions, saving them for only a few select arenas.

[Neeko]

Per my last post, I've always wanted to explore the possibility of having a dynamic lighting system in Demons with Shotguns. I felt this could really add a whole new layer of depth and dynamism to the game, while allowing some cool level mechanics as well. Now that the game was upgraded to Unity 5, I felt this was a good time to finally delve into this.

One of the first things you need to do to enable dynamic lighting is to generate normal maps for all of your textures, so that the textures know how to react to light and be lit accordingly. I'm using the excellent 2D Toolkit framework, which allows you to effortlessly generate normals for your sprite collections, so thankfully this was a painless process. 2D Toolkit also comes bundle with a set of lit shaders to be applied to your textures, so one less thing that I had to do!

With that bit of labor out of the way, I was able to explore adding lights to the game's arenas. Here are some examples.

One note though, for some reason, I was having a hard time effectively capturing some of these new effects with a GIF recorder (odd artifacts kept coming up) so I'm just going to post videos as well.

I started with adding a nice dusk to night transition to the Metro arenas. A match starts out at dusk, with the sky and buildings emitting a nice pink/purple color.



With the use of a pinkish directional light, I was able to intensify (though without being over bearing) the mood of match.

This slowly starts to fade out to darkness, transitioning the buildings to a nighttime blue color.



You'll notice the street lamps (yes, I know it doesn't make sense for a street lamp to be on a rooftop, they're place holders for now :p) using a spotlight to illuminate their immediate area, which also flickers, giving a sense of decay to the city.



Here's another Metro example of a street level arena, with street lamps and interior lighting.



If there's a bloody gun fight happening on the roof tops of a bustling city, someone is sure to notice. Here's a video of Metro06 which has police spotlights highlighting the battle above. This video also shows off the dusk to night transition.





The Cemetery arenas take place during a massive thunderstorm. As you can guess, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of some dynamic lighting. Here's a video of a thunderstorm that rolls in during fighting.





It's important to note that not every arena will have dramatic effects like this. For the most part, the effects are very subtle. I didn't want to get carried away with them and have them be overbearing. They're a special effect, and should be used sparingly.

For example, here's a Hell match which doesn't have any crazy lighting effects, but still makes subtle use of mood lighting and point lights for certain items and events like capturing a soul and teleporting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGUpoauPk4Y

[Neeko]

Work has finally started on the last arena environment, the Church!



In design news, we've made some major changes to the Soul Reaping game mode.

In Soul Reaping, players start with 5 souls. When they are killed, a soul gets released and is up for grabs by anyone. When a player collects it, they earn an additional soul. However, when a player has been drained of all their souls, they can no longer respawn! First player to collect 10 souls total, or to drain everyone else of their souls, wins.

The problem with this was that, on average, matches were very short, lasting no more than 2 minutes in most cases; we want matches to last around 4-5 minutes. To help balance this, we decided to have souls regenerate, but also degenerate! So if the player has < 5 souls, they will slowly start to regenerate a new soul every 10 seconds or so. If the player has > 5 souls, they will start to degenerate souls, losing one every 10 seconds or so.

This not only extended the average match time greatly, it also added a whole new dynamic to the game mode. The matches tend last the full 5 minute time limit, yet at the same time they are extremely fast paced and frantic as players rush to earn enough souls before their pool starts to degenerate.

I'm also getting ready for the Steam Early Access launch! More on that soon

[Neeko]

Designed two new Church arenas today.





Also, I was on the pilot episode of Show Important from Shacknews, where we played Demons with Shotguns live on Twitch and took fan questions. It was a great time. Be sure to check it out and all future episodes.

http://www.shacknews.com/article/89642/watch-shacknews-new-live-show-its-show-important

[Neeko]

Demons with Shotguns comes to Steam Early Access June 25!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/370940

[Nicholas Lives]

Happy to see development still cruising along! Very much looking forward to playing it; best of luck to you guys come this final stretch.

[Neeko]

Thank you! There's no signs of slowing down now

[Neeko]

We're expanding the roster of playable characters in Demons with Shotguns! The most recent addition is the peace keeping Nun.





She may look innocent, but give her a shotgun and she can hold her own.

[Neeko]

I cut a new release trailer. This one is much better with better gameplay footage and also features the Nun in action.



Edit: Modified the trailer once again based on feedback.

[oldblood]

Take this as outside feedback as I'm not overly familiar with your game.

I might recommend shaving off at least 45 seconds from your current trailer. It's long and while the videos may show some varying moments in gameplay-- from the outside looking in... it felt very repetitive. Same kills, same rooms etc. Realistically, you could probably even cut a minute of footage out. I think quicker cuts across the diverse locations and ending up with a 1:10-1:30 length trailer would help keep it feeling much more action packed. In marketing, generally speaking "less is more".

Best of luck with the launch coming up. I know the final few weeks can be really stressful...