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[Orun]

UPDATE 9: Thick Line Style

Was recording some Hardline Gunner gameplay footage and noticed that sometimes the thin lines don't show up in the video that well.  So I made them thicker and I kind of like it.  Actually I don't know how I feel, both seem to work well.  I may just keep the thicker line style.

[Orun]

UPDATE 10: Improved Enemy Corpse Animation

Small update. Went through my levels and made some of them a bit shorter and have a few more health boxes. I was playing Hardline with some friends and we couldn't beat the demo boss after about 30 tries so I think I need to make it a little bit easier too.

Also I made the enemy's corpse fragments now fly out of the enemy and spin. They were too lackluster before. Check them out below.

[Shackhal]

Cool, fast, chaotic. That's how I describe your game.

Nice work you're making here. Keep it up!

[Orun]

Cool, fast, chaotic. That's how I describe your game.

Nice work you're making here. Keep it up!

Ya, that about sums it up. Thanks

[Orun]

UPDATE 10a: Spamming Enemy Corpses On MiniBosses

Quick addition.  I'm really liking the simple corpses so I made minibosses have a ton of them. Now it looks super awesome.  I think on boss and miniboss kills I'm going to add screenshake, slow motion and screen flash to make it at juicy as possible.

[Orun]

UPDATE 10b: Accidentally Made Every Kill Trigger Slow Motion

So wanted to add slow motion to boss and miniboss kills to make them more juicy but I accidentally made a beautiful bug yesterday where every enemy kill triggers slow motion. I really makes the game look like some action movie and it makes it a lot easier.  I really should make this a new special gun that triggers slow motion on kill.  Love it when this happens.

[Orun]

UPDATE 11: First Try With Video Dev Logs

I never can keep to my schedule of writing blog posts so wanted to try just talking into the mic and recording my screen instead and maybe I can make these a regular thing.

In this first episode I go over some of the basic mechanics and how to pro them. 

Check it out below.

[Orun]

UPDATE 12: New Hardline Gunner Playthrough / Review

This morning I was surprised with this awesome demo playthrough that @IndieGamerNews did you his Youtube Channel

His review is hilarious while he tries to find his way through the brutal levels of alpha 021.

Check it out below.

[Orun]

UPDATE 13: Player Death Animation

Still working on fixing up the alpha demo. 
Made player death animations look a bit more satisfying.

[Orun]

UPDATE 13a: Player Death Animation (updated)

Now the player death animation looks more like it comes out of the player and they bounce off walls.

[Orun]

UPDATE 14: Slow Motion Gun

I turned that slow motion bug into its own gun. Now each enemy kill will slow down the all enemies and bullets making it super easy to stay alive. I really like how the yellow/orange enemy explosions looks really juicy in slow motion.

[Orun]

UPDATE 15: Rocket Gun

This is the first attempt at a rocket explosion. I don't think it feels just right yet, but it is a good start.  The rocket explosion can currently go through walls. It is the only gun that can do that and till I see it being abused too badly, I will probably keep it like that.

Really enjoying making random guns. On the code side, adding a new gun isn't much work so I can brainstorm and prototype up a new one quite quickly.

[Orun]

UPDATE 16: Hardline Gunner - Video Dev Log 002

New Dev Video Log. This time I go through a bunch of the upgrades that I'm making to the alpha demo and discuss some mechanics and design changes.
Indie devs have to wear a lot of hats and now I've got a new one, The Youtuber. I'm still getting used to how to record videos and edit them. Playing and talking is harder than I thought but like everything new, practice makes perfect.

[Orun]

UPDATE 17: Corpse Explosion Gun

New gun idea.  With this gun, on enemy death, the corpse starts flashing and can be exploded at any time.  This gun is really similar to the Goldeneye 64 remote mines mechanic where you can detonate them at any time you want.  Now you can kill a few enemies, lead the rest to the corpses and explode them all.  It's extremely satisfying to watch everything explode on command.

[Orun]

UPDATE 18: New Enemy - The Blob

Was just messing around and came up with a cool new enemy type.  This time it's not a square.  I'm planning to make the blob not hurt the player but slow them down on contact.  The player can choose to kill them, by attacking the center, or just push the blob out of the way for the player to pass.

I first started with getting a circle around the blob and make it collapse on collision with bullets.



This was cool, but wasn't enough, so I made the circles's radius randomly change for each point of it.



Now it felt like a real blob.  To improve it even better, I made it rotate ever so slightly



Added enemy bullet collision as well.  Enemies can't kill the blob but can help you in pushing its walls in.  Makes it feel like a real part of the game world now.



Since enemies bullets can't kill it but your bullets can, I added a flash on hit, so you visually know exactly when you are doing damage to it.

Now I am satisfied with it. Next i will just add a few already existing enemy AI's to it to make it follow the player on sight or anything else that I think it will benefit from.

I didn't really code anything extra fancy to get the blob's walls to act like they do. No complicated math or fancy algorithms needed this time.  All that I did was create a bunch of collision boxes around the blob at a set radius.  If any box is hit by a bullet I decrease that boxes radius by a little bit. And also each box's neighbour will decrease by half of that. I draw a polygon connecting every collision box's center points and what you get is the blob effect.  Here is a gif showing the collision boxes and how they respond to bullets. 

[Orun]

UPDATE 19: I'm Back

It has been a while since my last post. I've been on vacation, backpacking through Indonesia.  It was my first time doing something like this but it was such a great live changing experience that my only regret was that I didn't do it sooner.  Needless to say being away from my computer and Hardline dev was hard so once I returned home I jumped right back into the mix.

Last week I brought the current build of Hardline Gunner to Bento Miso's Games With Friends event and got some much needed playtests in.  Got some great feedback and also got a chance to see where people struggled to understand the mechanics.  The spin mechanic is really the most valuable in the game and a few players had trouble figuring out the timing with the visuals that I was providing.  Needless to say, the first thing I did when I got home was implement a much more clear way to show spin.

New Player Spin Invincibility:
Now spinning creates new individual objects around the player. Each has its own collision and changes color if it collides with a missile. Once the spin deflecting portion is complete, the shield will remain around the player

[Orun]

UPDATE 20: New Start Screen Prototype

Was inspired by old arcade games playing themselves while the start screen is AFK.  This is my first attempt at loading and scrolling through levels in the start screen.
Currently I'm just loading them and ignoring all the enemies and special walls, scrolling from the start square to the end square.  I need to do some transition work from one level to the other but so far I think it is a nice improvement from the old boring black.

[Highsight]

Those new title screens look seeeexy.  I'd love to see some little enemies roaming around them, maybe even firing at each other for shits and giggles.  Always happy to see this game progressing.

[QOG]

I really like that you took a simplistic art style and made it look really dynamic and interesting, that's not easy to pull off.

I'd love to see some little enemies roaming around them, maybe even firing at each other for shits and giggles.

^Great idea.

[Orun]

Those new title screens look seeeexy.  I'd love to see some little enemies roaming around them, maybe even firing at each other for shits and giggles.  Always happy to see this game progressing.

Oh that is definitely going down. And it will fit in perfectly with the simple story hardline will have too. 

"The hardline world is a simple peaceful 2d game world with no conflict. But then an evil game patch comes and tries to upgrade everything to 3D and destroy the world as you know it and you are the only one left to stop them." 

I was thinking of the start screen showing the levels in their 2D mode, before the apocalyptic evil game update attacks, and let the player see all the characters interacting and getting along.  Still need to polish the idea but I wanted some story that would not affect the gameplay elements at all, since they are the most important thing to me.