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[Fenrir]

Wow impressive! Any chance to see a small preview of the spritesheet?

[Eniimal]

This is really impressive.

Do you think you will mix some elements of different class to create a new class ?
Maybe a class with a heavy head and a very light body and legs (something resistant, but really slow for example).

Anyway, you have an enormous number of enemies, 48,480 enemies is a lot
And 36,238,786,560 different possible combinations for player customization is a number so big, that I'm unable to understand it
That's more than two times the age of the universe

[MrHelmut]

Here's a little preview of the spritesheet, a glimpse of the light bots of the "rocket launcher" family.

They don't look surprisingly different in this family, but when these badies come in packs and move around, it feels quite right.


Unfortunately, we can't mix sprites of different classes, they just don't fit together at all because of the scale difference (e.g. a heavy head on a light body looks ridiculous and is a hell to align properly). This downside almost forced us to introduce player classes in the gameplay.

Players can be light, medium or heavy. Each class comes with a unique special attack to compensate their hitbox size and movement speed. We also intended to promote group strategies by mixing different classes in multiplayer. But because of the sprite compatibility limitations, players must possess at least a head, a body and legs of the same class to be able to make the switch to this class. This is something we don't quite like in the design, but it should end up well if we don't screw up the differences between each class and make the loot drop rates correct. We are still unsure of our choice regarding this, maybe we will just end up dropping the class system for players and just make the medium one playable.

[MrHelmut]

Screenshot Satruday!

We had some good fun yesterday implementing a feature totally useless, but it adds so much to the game lore and life: when idle, AI's play rock-paper-scissors.

[MrHelmut]

Lots of progress lately!

I revamped most weapons, enhanced the AI and the inventory menu, and Florian added more details to our test tileset.

And we also now have laser warnings on enemies wielding one-shooting weapons.

[MrHelmut]

Hey there!

In anticipation of the coming NeuroVoider public alpha, we added an in-game feedback feature. It plugs directly to our Trello, so it's as convenient for gamers as it is for us.

More to come soon! I'm working on a new devlog update and will have a lot of announcements by this month's end (including collaborations, a build to share, a trailer, etc.). Cannot wait!

[Dorian_SRed]

Gosh, your enemy editor is really, REALLY incredible!
Can't wait to try the game btw , original protoype was for a gamejam, right?

[MrHelmut]

Thx! The next devlog will most probably be about this editor, or the world one.
We didn't started the game in a game jam, maybe you heard of another of our games which was a game jam game? (Hoy, the kinect party game?)

[sidbarnhoorn]

The gameplay footage on YouTube looks great! Looking forward to buying/playing this! :-D

[FreakOrama]

Hope the demo comes out soon, looks fun and the art style is cozy =3

[MrHelmut]

Thanks guys!

We're shooting for an Ausugt 31st alpha release, in sync with the trailer. We are currently in a total rush to finish this trailer. Wish us luck.

[Mando]

Im quite new here but this game looks epic!

Can't wait for this.
Good luck

[MrHelmut]

Thanks Mando!

I hope you guys love RNG stuff, because this will be the kind of stuff that can happen in NeuroVoider:

Double super elite! One with a railgun, the other with a nuke... Game over struck me a few milliseconds after that screenshot.

[MrHelmut]

Update!

Last week I've revamped the entire audio layer of NeuroVoider. It doesn't sound differently but the engine is way more stable and use much less memory (and can lazy-load audio). So far, the entire game fits in 25MB of ram, including the proc-gen stuff and raw audio. Texture wise, there's 60MB of the GPU used. Which feels quite good for a .Net game! And no allocation during gameplay.

It should run on any dual-core DX10 config.

I've also enhanced the AI. Levels are filled with holes and AI FOV was previously computed only if players were at a given walk-able distance. This caused a few problems in situations where a big hole separated the players from the AI (the AI were simply ignoring them). So that's now fixed!
In addition, I've added some swarm behavior to the enemies, they now prevent you from circle-straffing them and they dodge attacks!


Last news, but not the least, we've reached the alpha milestone!

This means that the game is ready to be tested publicly and that we will publish it in couple weeks. We're getting a trailer and a dedicated website ready. So next time I'll post an update, it'll most probably be to announce the alpha access with a shiny trailer.

[MrHelmut]

Not much development news lately, but we're almost there!

Trailer is ready, Alpha is ready, and now the yet-to-go-online website is too!

We're all set for the game public announcement which will most probably happen around mid-September, before the Tokyo Game Show (so we don't get plunged by it).

[MrHelmut]

We're fully set! We're announcing NeuroVoider to the world on September 16th!

The website where everything will happen: http://neurovoider.com/

We will reveal the trailer on that day, including the reveal of the great artist beyond the soundtrack and the start of pre-orders (all of them will get a Steam key to access the alpha channel).

Nothing more to do except pressing the green button. That leaves us a good week to polish the first public build.

[MrHelmut]

We are getting ready for this week release! I have written a post about what to expect from the first build over there.

Early tests showed that the keyboard controls were quite crappy, so we revamped all of that with an automatic detection of the keyboard layout and added an ingame recap of the controls.

Still not perfect, but gamers willing to play it mouse-&-keyboard-style should be ok now. We still have some friction with left handed gamers, but hopefully we will be good once we implement key remapping.

[c023-DeV]

Very nice! Nothing to criticize! I'll be watching and looking forward to play!

[Fenrir]

Nice guys, good luck with the launch of the alpha!
Out of curiosity, how are you detecting the keyboard layout? Are you using the system language?

[MrHelmut]

@c023-DeV: thx!

Nice guys, good luck with the launch of the alpha!
Out of curiosity, how are you detecting the keyboard layout? Are you using the system language?

Thx! ^^

Yes. On Windows you can query two different things:

• The system culture: it's the OS language.
• The active keyboard layout name: the language upon which is layout is built.

The first won't help, but the second one is what you're looking for. It returns a string indicating a language ("US", "Belgian French", "German"...), not the name of the layout as we know it (qwertz/qwerty/azerty...). It's pretty simple to interpret it: all latin keyboard are either qwertz or qwerty, except those based on a french language.
Yup, french-based keyboad are the only ones in the world to be azerty. So all you have to do is to check if the layout name contain either "french" or "français" in its name, and you are set.

If you can plug in the Windows system dll user32.dll, the function is GetKeyboardLayoutName(out char*).