next »

[gunswordfist]

This is one of the greatest looking upcoming games I've ever seen. I love it.

[Ashedragon]

I'm so into everything about this.

[gunswordfist]

The menu and three point landing are just fine. It doesn't matter is the menu has no story context. It's a menu.

[Ege]

i noticed every feature you add looks very polished and final(no placeholder art or buggy code) atleast thats how it looks to me is there a reason for that ?

[JobLeonard]

He's just that good

[gunswordfist]

[Moloch]

Any more updates? I've been watching from the shadows for awhile now!

[FreakOrama]

A boxed game that has the magical words: Isometric, shooter, 80's, cyberpunk, neons (especially those neons). Love all of those aspects of the game, and it looks fun! Can't wait to play it =3

[nicotuason]

Oh man, where to begin? I'll start with everyone's replies...

@JobLeonard - Thanks for the links! I do like the idea of pre-calculating the the paths with and without the furniture. Yes... something I'll have to consider putting in.

@Impmaster - Thanks! I can only hope this game will look and sound half (maybe 3/4?) as good as Transistor. I want to keep the combat strictly real-time though.

@EddCoast - Starling is a great little framework! I do feel it is very limiting at times, but it forces me to find creative solutions to it's limitations.

@eigenbom, @gunswordfist, @Ashedragon, @FreakOrama - Thanks so much for the kind words! Your encouragement means a lot to me

@Ege - For me it is essential that a feature be almost fully polished as it goes into the game. I need to know if it adds or detracts from the experience of the game, which I can only tell if it is close to final form.

@Moloch - Sorry for the long silence. Hopefully this post will explain it...


So what happened in the 4 months I haven't posted here?

The short answer is, I've been doing the

hard.


The long story:

Near the end of June I had to make a really hard decision... I had to replace James as the composer.

I feel like it was my fault... I'm not very good at communication and I was making slow progress on the game (you can see how much stuff I threw out from my previous posts). As a result, James had a hard time finding the right sound for the game.

Meanwhile, my little brother, Juan, came out of nowhere and surprised me with some tracks he had already completed for the game. I had no idea he was working on the tracks, but they sounded really good. I couldn't ignore them... plus he's my brother.

It took me a few days to work up the courage to tell James that I was replacing him with Juan. I dreaded sending the email... I felt really bad about it. James was not only working on the music but was doing a lot of promotion for the game on reddit, twitter, and facebook. He was genuinely excited for the game...

It turns out I needn't have worried. James took the news really well and was super cool about it. If you guys need a skilled and passionate composer, I couldn't recommend him more. Check out his Soundcloud for samples of his work!

For the next 3 months after that I didn't get a lot of work done, but Juan has been working at a breakneck pace on the music. As of this writing, he has completed 21 tracks for the game. I don't know how he does it... he seems to have formed his own story about the game in his head and is conveying it through music. It also helps that we have this weird non-verbal form of communication between the two of us.

Juan's work paid off in a huge way last week:




In the first place, I couldn't even believe we got in as finalists. I had submitted a buggy 5 min demo of the game to the IGF China competition, because "hey you never know". The demo only contained 3 music tracks, so even Juan felt that we didn't do enough to get any award. The whole time we were showcasing the game in GDC China (in Shanghai), Juan kept telling me that Thumper or The Time Project or The Swords would win best audio, because their games had considerably more content.

Man I hope the IGF uploads the video of the awards ceremony. Juan will kill me for this, but when we won Best Audio, he kinda lost his composure and broke down in tears while accepting the award. I gave him a big hug afterwards. Good memories


Here's some more pictures from the event:










Also, this happened:




That's Rami Ismail of Vlambeer... playing Lithium City! I'm still not over it. He gave me some of the best feedback on how to make the game better. I don't know how often this has been said, but he is really an awesome guy. And super tall.

Afterwards, he tweeted two vines of the game:
https://vine.co/v/eV0Y6jwn0vd
https://vine.co/v/eV0QVjhgzvj

I'm just super happy about the whole thing. I feel like we're in a really good place right now and I'm looking forward to making a whole ton of progress on the game.

Big thank you to all the organizers of the IGF and GDC China! And to all the players who dropped by!

[JobLeonard]

Kudos to James for being a good sport!

Also, if your little brother has a semi-story in his head that resulted in 21 tracks... maybe you two can try to use the music to inspire the story?

Also, Rami Ismail is only tall when outside of his native habitat of the Netherlands. People are freaking giants over here

[nicotuason]

@JobLeonard - Oh cool, you're from the Netherlands also! Haha yeah you guys are giants. The music is definitely inspiring the story and even the gameplay. Each track has a certain emotion attached to it. I just need to make sure that what shows up on screen is in harmony with what you hear.

I suspect though that after all the levels are complete, Juan will do another pass at all the music and sounds effects to make sure they all fit together nicely.

A few weeks ago we released the first teaser trailer for the game!





We've gotten a pretty good response so far! Mostly positive, but my favorite responses come from this reddit thread:





When I read the comment about the running animation, I said "Godammit, he's right". I need to buff up my animation skills. The comment about non-tactical gameplay is right as well... the truth is there just aren't a lot of tactical options available in the game yet. But I hope to fix that in the next few weeks.

First thing to fix was the running animation:





It looks better I hope? The first version had 12 keyframes, and the new version has 6. I found that lowering the amount of keyframes made the animation look less robotic (and was less work!). I increased the up and down motion, and the torso rotates left and right more. I'm also using some smoothing to get more circular-looking movement.

For the IGF demo I rushed a new feature: Melee weapons!





I wanted the player to still have full movement control while doing a melee weapon attack (otherwise it's no different from the punch-punch-kick combo), so I had to come up with an animation that doesn't affect the lower part of the body. It looked very awkward at first, but after a few iterations I think I got it to an acceptable state.





I really liked it! Fortunately the players at the festival really liked it too. They liked it a little too much actually, most players preferred to use the melee weapons over the guns, mainly because the guns took more skill to use and had limited ammo. Will have to do some balancing, but I do want to give players the option to play the game using mostly melee weapons if they prefer.

Next thing I'm working on as a rifle that you have to charge to fire, and then the bullets ricochet off the walls! And do lots of damage. I'm planning on building a few levels around this "bouncing shots" mechanic.

[clewcat]

Saw your game at IGF China, and the Best Audio awarding in the ceremony was the moment of the day

Keep up the great job!

[nicotuason]

@clewcat - Hey Thanks! Haha yeah it was a special moment... We never usually show much emotion in person :p


Juan has dubbed this the "Material Rifle", but it needs a shorter name... and better particle effects when it fires, but here it is in action!




Hmm... I realize now the charging effect needs to look more powerful. And it should leave behind a trail of more glowy stuff. Anyway, I plan to do a second pass on all the particle effects later on. For now it's back to building levels!

[marcgfx]

looks good to me but if you can make it look even more awesome, go for it!

[verticalvertex]

Great work. +1 sub.

[nicotuason]

So, I have some explaining to do.

Why revive a 5 year old thread? Simply, the game is finished. It's coming out on June 15, 2020.

Why didn't I keep this devlog updated? That's harder to answer. When I stopped posting, it was because I thought I was 6 months away from launch. When a game is close to release, you start to hold your cards close to your chest because you don't want to spoil the game too much for players... I wanted to surprise and delight people. Going quiet before release is supposed to create a little drama before the big reveal. I didn't expect 6 months would turn into 12... then 24... then 36... until 5 years later here we are.

It's not like when you miss your planned deadline, you immediately assume "well, this is going to take another couple of years i think". You tell yourself, "I just need another month or 2 and everything will fall into place".

Of course, there was nothing stopping me from just releasing the game anytime during those 5 years... I mean, besides the crippling fear of failure. I guess that's why it took so long. Everytime I would look at the game, play through it, I would feel "this isn't good enough". "This game will get buried in Steam". "It's not long enough, people will refund it". "It's repetitive, it needs more gameplay variety". "It doesn't look as good as other indie titles right now".

I can't help feeling so stupid about it now. How the fuck was I supposed to know this shit was going to be so hard? I had made a few small games before, I thought I knew what I was doing. I wanted to make the jump from small flash developer to "successful indie developer". I wish I could just be one of those artists who produce work compulsively, without caring what the world thinks. But I'm not. I needed this game to sell. There's no future for me in gamedev otherwise.

Ironically, in pursuing success I think I've just made life harder for the people around me. I've been working on the game full time, yet my savings dried out at around the 2-year mark. I've been living off my wife and my parents for the past 3 years. They make it appear like it's no problem at all, but no one wants to be a financial drain. The money they spent supporting me could have gone to enriching their own lives, pursuing their own goals and dreams.

I feel the worst about my younger brother, John, who is the composer and audio engineer for the game. He entered the project at around the 1-year mark, and has been working almost exclusively on the game. What opportunities has he missed because I took so damn long? I haven't been paying him a salary - he's staked his future on the success of this game also.


I'm venting and whining, sorry about that. Lesson is, kids, keep your ego in check.


Launching the game feels like closing a chapter of my life, and I want to close it fully. This devlog is one of the last loose threads. So, it took a while, but I can finally change the icon of this thread to "100% Done!". It actually feels amazing.

If anyone is still reading this in 2020, here is the state the game is in now:







Steam Store page


Thank you to everyone who posted, who tried out the game at conventions, and who have been following. I'm done!

[Schrompf]

I like the art style. And thanks for laying out your thoughts, I can relate a bit. These kinds of doubts are simply a sign of a empathic human in my book, albeit they're surely an additional burden to carry when pursuing one's projects.

The game itsself looks too twitchy to me, sorry. From the GIFs alone it feels like Hotline Miami - it was way too fast for me, I never felt like I have control over the situation. But a lot of people liked it very much, so maybe that's a good thing. Best of luck anyways. The indie market is a difficult place right now, even more than five years ago. And going dark on one's project before the launch is not a suitable marketing strategy. Who cares for spoilers if the one towering problem is "getting any eyes on it at all"

[JobLeonard]

Why revive a 5 year old thread? Simply, the game is finished. It's coming out on June 15, 2020.

And that is reason enough

Congratulations on making it through to the other end!

EDIT: the steam store link is broken for me btw

[nicotuason]

@Schrompf - You're right that getting eyeballs is a bigger concern than spoilers. Marketing is one of my weak points and I've asked some people to help me in that regard.

The gameplay does have a lot of similarities with Hotline Miami such as only holding 1 weapon, but I've tried to fix the most frustrating parts of that game like deaths from off-screen enemies and 1 hit kills (mostly). It is still a very twitchy game though.

@JobLeonard - Ah sorry about that, its fixed. Thank you for following the project for this long!