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[J. Kyle Pittman]

Big important update today! Gunmetal Arcadia is now going to be two separate games! The roguelike that I've been developing isn't changing at all, and its schedule shouldn't be radically affected by this decision. But as a stepping stone to help me make forward progress in the limited time I have right now, there will also be a prequel game landing first, one with a more straightforward action format in the vein of Castlevania or Contra.



I don't have a title for this prequel game yet, but you can vote on names here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1p8K60VzE_xPc7xlPF8J3H8vX7sFAugRnP0Rm3bM3-PQ/viewform

[J. Kyle Pittman]

New devlog is up. I've been refactoring my entity hierarchy to facilitate better reuse of components and minimize copy/paste markup.

[Pixel Noise]

Cool! I voted for the Gunmetal: Prelude option. I think something like that will maybe help remind people that there is more to come.

[J. Kyle Pittman]

New enemy behaviors: aimed projectiles and surface crawling!

[J. Kyle Pittman]

Crawling enemies can now temporarily engage physics to fall and land on another platform in the event that they're crawling across a destructible tile when it breaks.

[J. Kyle Pittman]

This week, I revised the player character's animation set to remove the last few traces of the Zelda II Link sprite that I originally started with.

http://gunmetalarcadia.com/wordpress/swashbuckler/

[J. Kyle Pittman]

I've been working on this game for a full year now! I updated my devlog with impressions from the first year, sales of Super Win the Game during that time, and this fun annotated graph of SVN commits over time:

[J. Kyle Pittman]

Did a video today on the art direction in Gunmetal Arcadia and what "programmer art" means to me.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDPAsZokr8k&list=PL6Q317vV_kts3iFBgzx4mGjP9oIQpyLG8&index=1

[J. Kyle Pittman]

This week's devlog is all about how user-defined control bindings work in my engine.

http://gunmetalarcadia.com/wordpress/control-binding/

[Franklin's Ghost]

You Have to Win the Game is still one of my favourite games of the last few years so looking forward to seeing how this one progresses. Do the diamonds do anything at the moment once you've picked them up?

[J. Kyle Pittman]

You Have to Win the Game is still one of my favourite games of the last few years so looking forward to seeing how this one progresses. Do the diamonds do anything at the moment once you've picked them up?

Thanks! The gems don't do anything right now, but my plan is to make them salable items. You'll be able to sell gems to various NPCs, and who you sell them to may have consequences. For instance, a black market dealer might pay more in the short term, but it may harm your reputation with other merchants who will then be less likely to offer top-tier gear in the futures. I'm thinking there will probably also be limited inventory space, so you'll have to make a decision between offloading gems to the first available merchant or waiting for the best deal at the risk of not having enough space to carry other, potentially betteritems.

Of course, none of that exists in the game yet, but that's where I'd like to go with it eventually.

[J. Kyle Pittman]

SCREEN SHAKE! SHAKE IT OFF! SHAKE IT LIKE A POLAROID PICTURE!



DARTH ELEVADERS



SOME FLYING BADDIES



MORE THINGS I CAN STEAL FROM ZELDA 2

[J. Kyle Pittman]

I'm taking a short break from blogging (and possibly from development, depending on time and motivation) for paternity leave. I already recapped the first year of Gunmetal Arcadia development a few weeks ago, so now I'm taking a look at the first year of documentation:

10 Things I Learned In One Year Of Keeping A Devlog

[J. Kyle Pittman]

I'm still on paternity leave (I guess, whatever that means when I'm self-employed) for the next few weeks, but I've made a couple blog posts in the meantime.

November 30: "Interim"



December 21: "Interim: Peppermint Mocha Edition"

[J. Kyle Pittman]

My goal for today was to make a new boss from scratch. Pretty happy with how this turned out. Even got some work done on new decorative background elements that drop loot a la Castlevania torches/sconces.





oh my wow, youtube links automatically turn into embedded videos now? how long has this been a thing? am i late to the party? 

[J. Kyle Pittman]

Been working on a new tileset for the city where you'll start the game.







Also grayboxing the rest of a level for a vertical slice milestone and prototyping a new biped enemy.



And of course there are still medusa heads because yeah.

[J. Kyle Pittman]

Treasure chests!



Fun fact: my entire motivation for putting treasure chests in this game is so I can add mimics late in the game. 

[J. Kyle Pittman]

I've put together a one-level demo build of Gunmetal Arcadia Zero. It'll take about five minutes to play; I'd be super appreciative if you could take the time to check it out and send me your impressions!

Download (Windows, Mac, Linux): http://gunmetalarcadia.com/wordpress/in-dev-build-vertical-slice/

Or if you'd just like to see what it looks like in motion, here's me playing through this same build while talking about adjusting my schedule to meet a June release.

[J. Kyle Pittman]

I wasn't too happy with the minimal shopping interface I had in the vertical slice build last month, so I've been refactoring it over the last few days to look and feel more like an item shop in an old JRPG might. Still a few loose ends to tie up (item description, actual prices, etc.), but it's coming together nicely.

[HIDEJI]

I like the art, and the Zelda II inspired gameplay. I *love* the CRT shader you have going on here. I thought you taking photos of your game playing on old TVs at first. Very cool, and very convincing.