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[Jon]

Progress Update

We spent the last few weeks thinking about the features that we should implement to improve the game.

We need to add a few more enemy types that behave differently from the ones we have now. This will give us more options to play with when designing the waves.

Currently, we don't give the player much of a break between waves. We're going to add a 'day system' where every five waves counts as one day, and the player gets a break at the end of the day. In addition, we're adding an upgrade system which can be accessed at the end of the day.

Finally, we need a mission system, with missions like rescuing a crew member trapped within an alien.

We've already begun work on a new enemy type, which flies around the arena and attacks either the player or the core.

[Jon]

Progress Update

We spent the last month balancing the game and adding more waves. A new demo is out! This time with lots of bugfixes!

Demo download links: http://www.indiedb.com/games/spacejacked/downloads
(The latest builds are labelled Pre-Alpha v0.2)

Things changed:
- Fixed an input bug where the player can spam the fire button to sustain a high rate of fire with the blaster
- Added a simple intro scene to set the context of the game
- Fixed some bugs with the tutorial
- Added more sound effects
- Added more waves of enemies

We're currently preparing for a Greenlight campaign. We'll put up a web build on Newgrounds, Kongregate and GameJolt to go along with the campaign.

We've also prepared a video trailer for Greenlight:


Comments are welcome!

[Phasesaber]

Awesome game! The art looks great!

[Jon]

@Phasesaber: Many thanks!

Progress Update

Spacejacked is on Greenlight! http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=398146007

We're preparing medals/trophies/achievements in the web builds for Newgrounds, Kongregate and GameJolt. Web builds should be ready soon.

In other news, one of us will be at GDC this year, under the Singapore Game Box.

[Jon]

Progress Update

Spacejacked has been Greenlit!

It took us about 48 days on Greenlight. Here's an animated gif of the day-to-day stats:


On the day we got Greenlit, we had 1181 'yes' votes out of 2369 votes in total (about 50%), with 3614 unique visitors and 95 followers. We were around 64% of the way to the top 100. We had a good number of visitors in the first two days, but that tapered off really quickly. In the last few days before being Greenlit, our percentage to the top 100 fluctuated, going down as other games surged in popularity, and increasing whenever some games got Greenlit. All these stats just show that the Greenlight process is a real black box: nobody seems to know how games get selected to be Greenlit.

Anyway, some things we did for the Greenlight campaign:

• Put the pre-alpha web demo up on GameJolt and Newgrounds, and native builds on IndieDB.
• Tweeted about the Greenlight campaign.
• Sent emails to sites that cover indie games
• Went to GDC to meet people and promote Spacejacked.

Interestingly, our web demo ended up on a site that we didn't submit it to, but said site brought more traffic to our Greenlight page than Newgrounds (based on referral traffic via Google Analytics).

Now that Spacejacked has been Greenlit, all that's left to do is finish the game before we can put it up on Steam.

[Jon]

Progress Update

Things!


Excitement!


More things!


More excitement!

[Jon]

Progress Update

Woot! Spacejacked won the Best Linux Game prize at the 2015 Intel Level Up Contest!

In addition to that, we put up our demo on Steam alongside the other winners of the contest.

Links:
Intel Level Up 2015 Hall of Glory: https://software.intel.com/sites/campaigns/levelup2015/hall-of-glory/
Demos on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/sale/levelup

Now, off to PAX Prime to meet other developers!

[Jon]

Progress Update

We released a new build of Spacejacked on Game Jolt. Some of the changes include:

• More Metal at the start of game - this is done to better ease beginners into the game. Early playthroughs of the game showed several players running out of Metal way too soon.
• Repairing cores now costs more Metal - done in response to certain players surviving into the late waves without really focusing on turret building.
• Colored text in dialogue boxes - makes for easier reading, especially during the tutorials.
  
• Gamepad support.
• Subtle GUI changes
• We’ve also made Hugo, the hulking red giant alien, way more damaging than he was in the earlier release.
• Complete revamp to the art and animation of turrets - we also took this chance to practically remove all delays from turret deployment and upgrading. It made little sense to have lengthy deployment times in a game as fast-paced as Spacejacked.
• Challenge Mode - a mode for hardcore gamers that often requires the player to approach the challenge differently (in contrast to Endless mode).

Stuff that we're still working on and polishing:

• Better portraits in the dialogue boxes (with animations!)
  From
  
  to
  
• Scientist rescue missions
  
  

Side note:
Awesome tutorial on how to convert a video to a high-quality GIF with ffmpeg: http://blog.pkh.me/p/21-high-quality-gif-with-ffmpeg.html

[Jon]

Progress Update

One step closer to completion! List of things we've done:

• Finished up the 30 waves that make up Act 1 of the story mode, including the 3 scientist rescue missions.
• Added more music (courtesy of the awesome sawsquarenoise) and more SFX to the game.
• Finished up a mini-game called Metallius (a reference to Gradius).
  
• Made changes to the UI to guide players better. (Mainly little stuff like providing more obvious hints during the tutorial.)
• Added some effects during the hyperspace warp sequence.
  

Stuff that we're working on:

• A new enemy alien based off Hugo. We call him Hugonaut. As usual, character design by Vickie.
  
• Finishing up the final act of the story mode, featuring a new set of arenas.

We got ourselves some booth space at GameStart 2015 this weekend! Hope more people will get to know about Spacejacked!

[Jon]

Progress Update

We've settled on a release date for Spacejacked! Spacejacked will be released on Steam on 26 Feb 2016!
We made a release announcement trailer:




We've also set up the Steam store page.

We're working on the finishing touches in the time leading up to the release.

List of things we've done in the past few months:

• Added blaster upgrades (increasing bullet penetration, improving overheating duration, increasing damage).
• Added turret "reprogramming" (giving players a new set of turrets to use).
• Completed the arenas and waves for Act 2 of the game.
  
• Finished up Hugonaut, which is something of a boss enemy.
  
• Finished up Revy, an NPC who helps you out in Act 2 of the game.
  

Stuff that we're working on:

• Cutscenes: one for the transition from Act 1 to 2, and another for the end of the game.
• Steam API integration.
• More challenges and an Endless Mode for the new arenas.

Exciting times!

[Jon]

Progress Update

We're done with Spacejacked! We launched it on Steam less than two days ago!

A few months ago, we set our release date to be 26 Feb. Over the past few weeks, we've been trimming stuff from Spacejacked in order to meet it. We had to drop one set of arenas for Endless Mode, and three turret subtypes. We still plan to introduce them in a future content update, though.

We've put some effort into marketing in the weeks leading up to the launch. We were hoping Spacejacked could land on the 'featured new releases' section of Steam, but that hasn't happened so far, so we've got to work much much harder on marketing.

Now that the game is out in the store, we'll be taking a bit of a break from development, after which we'll work on some content updates while planning for our next title.

[chinykian]

Hello, I'm chinykian, Jon's teammate. It's been a while since we launched Spacejacked on Steam and since then we've been doing the occasional updates to the game on Steam. We've also been working on PS4 and PSVita ports of the game, which we're aiming to release this year.

Some of the updates we've worked on include:

• 2 Different PlayStyles - Original vs Planner Mode(gives players more leeway between waves)
• Easy Mode
• Self-repairing cores
• 3 additional challenges

Also, here's a teaser to the upcoming PS4/Vita versions of Spacejacked!