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[godsavant]

Minor request: Could you add lighter shades or magic sparkles to the grappling rope? It's hard to see in the pitch-black of the upper parts of the level, so I can't tell which points I'm anchored to.

[fucrate]

I'm very interested to see where this game is headed. The atmosphere and visuals are gorgeous. The camera and controls seem very "swimmy", however.

What do you mean by swimmy?  I actually just put in a "look-ahead" effect for the camera, basically an attempt to just rip off the camera effect in cave story.  Maybe that's part of it?

[Quicksand-T]

I'm very interested to see where this game is headed. The atmosphere and visuals are gorgeous. The camera and controls seem very "swimmy", however.

What do you mean by swimmy?  I actually just put in a "look-ahead" effect for the camera, basically an attempt to just rip off the camera effect in cave story.  Maybe that's part of it?

That's probably it. Sorry to be vague, it just seems like the camera is always moving around by itself. Maybe make the effect a little subtler?

[Reiss]

Love the atmosphere, and the pixel art is really fantastic.  The jumping is kind of strange, though -- does the character sometimes speed up mid-jump when it's got a running start?  Sometimes it felt hard to judge where I was going to land.

Minor request: Could you add lighter shades or magic sparkles to the grappling rope? It's hard to see in the pitch-black of the upper parts of the level, so I can't tell which points I'm anchored to.

Yup.  But also, since when are ropes are ink-black?

The game's shaping up really well though.  Can't wait to see where this is going.

[increpare]

forming up well.  i await death being added

run animation looks a little queer to my eyes.

[ChevyRay]

run animation looks a little queer to my eyes.

Same here. I might be seeing it wrong, but it looks like her legs stick out horizontally when forward, which if so is really awkward.

[aeiowu]

yep, i recently changed the player sprite given some feedback. so the run animation is really bare bones (shitty). But you guys just convinced me to move it up on the priority list. I'm gonna spend today refining all the character animation. hopefully i can get down the firefly flick i want as well. she'll flick her hair forward and it'll send one out. wish me luck.

also... @godsavant we're going to do a tiled rope here soon enough (with the colors of the player's coat). so yea, it's on the list but we got hung up on performance. Luckily mike has a plan to back everything into big BitmapData objects and it seems to be working out alright. it was touch-n-go for a second there.

[aeiowu]

Hooookay! big chunky update here.



We added death. Yellow lanterns are now checkpoints. A ton more instances of enemies are now everywhere (in the first few rooms). Built the level out a bit more with prettier assets and more "lush" level aesthetics (until the grapple room, at which point the level is thrown together-looking). I revamped all the character animations, let me know what you think of those, please. Also a new enemy (pictured above) who stampedes and kills you good. Mike also came up with an awesome way to optimize performance and we know it works it's just a bit ugly at the moment (deals with copyPixels and whatnot so there are a bunch of seams to deal with). If you get poor performance on this build, hold tight Mike's working on integrating his performance fix into the next build.

link: http://intuitiongames.com/games/liferaft

If you're having framerate issues (which you probably will) there is the jacked up performance edition here: http://intuitiongames.com/games/liferaftPerformance

[Ted]

The death sequence is really great.

The new hair whip for shooting is alright, but I feel like it should be as a result of the arm thrust and not by itself.

[aeiowu]

Alright, the performance fix is officially in. Had to iron out some weirdness with that but it's there now and performance should be drastically improved now if you had trouble playing earlier. It's not rock-solid of course, but it's a relatively big leap ahead.

Some notes on that... When you load up the game now (click on "Level 1") you'll probably get a spinning pinwheel/hourglass as what we're essentially doing is drawing each piece of the level (2000X2000 or so) to their own flattened bitmaps in Flash itself. For the final release this load won't exist as we'll just do it manually. If we did it manually for every build that'd be a ridiculous time sink but this allows us to put out regular builds with higher performance while sacrificing some initial load/initialization time on the front end.

In other news: We just launched Liferaft on Kickstarter. We made a bumbling video and put it up there hoping we'll see a bit more action. So right now we're trying to push the Kickstarter page as a way for us to run a bit of a pre-order system as well as possibly have some assurance that we won't go starving on release day. If anyone is interested in Kickstarter for their own game check out the thread here to request an invite and keep the chain alive: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=7561

A bit about Kickstarter: Kickstarter is an interesting fundraising site that is kind of an all-or-nothing deal. If you hit your goal in time you get the money and any that continues to come in is icing on the cake. Though, if you don't hit your goal, you get nothing. So it encourages aiming for something that's realistic as opposed to blue-sky. I think it's a really great opportunity for indies and can be that extra boost to try their hand at doing this full time.

Alright, that'll do it. Next we're tackling our first finished in-game Boss with a capital B. Hope to have him roughed in there by Friday.

[ElijahKatz]

Alright, the performance fix is officially in. Had to iron out some weirdness with that but it's there now and performance should be drastically improved now if you had trouble playing earlier. It's not rock-solid of course, but it's a relatively big leap ahead.

Some notes on that... When you load up the game now (click on "Level 1") you'll probably get a spinning pinwheel/hourglass as what we're essentially doing is drawing each piece of the level (2000X2000 or so) to their own flattened bitmaps in Flash itself. For the final release this load won't exist as we'll just do it manually. If we did it manually for every build that'd be a ridiculous time sink but this allows us to put out regular builds with higher performance while sacrificing some initial load/initialization time on the front end.

In other news: We just launched Liferaft on Kickstarter. We made a bumbling video and put it up there hoping we'll see a bit more action. So right now we're trying to push the Kickstarter page as a way for us to run a bit of a pre-order system as well as possibly have some assurance that we won't go starving on release day. If anyone is interested in Kickstarter for their own game check out the thread here to request an invite and keep the chain alive: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=7561

A bit about Kickstarter: Kickstarter is an interesting fundraising site that is kind of an all-or-nothing deal. If you hit your goal in time you get the money and any that continues to come in is icing on the cake. Though, if you don't hit your goal, you get nothing. So it encourages aiming for something that's realistic as opposed to blue-sky. I think it's a really great opportunity for indies and can be that extra boost to try their hand at doing this full time.

Alright, that'll do it. Next we're tackling our first finished in-game Boss with a capital B. Hope to have him roughed in there by Friday.

That website is really cool...
If you don't get all the money foes kickstarter get it?
5,000 is a big goal...
I hope you get it...

[fucrate]

That website is really cool...
If you don't get all the money foes kickstarter get it?

Nope, if we don't hit the mark then nobody gets any money, so that kinda sucks, but it makes sense.  If we fail we could always start another one at a lower price point.  We're more looking at it as a way to start setting up pre-orders and get more promotion going now, but if people really want to donate a lot we're more than happy to take it

[hyperduck]

Really entertaining piece of work here, I hope you get what you deserve so very much.

[gradgames]

Just backed you on Kickstarter.com.... really interested to hear if that works out for you.  it could be a great tool for other indies.

[Aquanoctis]

This is really great. I love the art and combat's neat as well. I did encounter one glitch (sorry if it's been mentioned already) Whilst falling and shooting fireflies I was lunged at by one of the toothed-wall thingamabobs. This pushed me backwards and I assume I just caught the edge of one of the downward crushers which shot me through the floor and I just kept falling through the sky. It might have just been an isolated incident. I tried to do it again with no luck but just thought you'd like to know.

[fucrate]

Haha, yeah.  The crushers don't kill you right now, they just push you through the floor.  I'm gonna have to get creative about handling crush situations, the physics system just kind of gets confused right now

Just backed you on Kickstarter.com.... really interested to hear if that works out for you.  it could be a great tool for other indies.

Thanks a lot! So far, it seems like kickstarter could be really awesome as just the place you handle pre-orders. Everyone who pre-orders can feel a lot more secure in that if the game doesn't get enough funding, they didn't spend money.

[Wander]

this game is pretty rad - nice job so far!  The world has a very cool creepy feel - nice color pics for that.  it's pretty original looking.

I died allot - so maybe you could make a button push skip the death cinematic what with the flies.  I spend most of my time watching the fireflies pick me up. (^__^)b

i'll have to keep watch for sure.

[aeiowu]

this game is pretty rad - nice job so far!  The world has a very cool creepy feel - nice color pics for that.  it's pretty original looking.

I died allot - so maybe you could make a button push skip the death cinematic what with the flies.  I spend most of my time watching the fireflies pick me up. (^__^)b

i'll have to keep watch for sure.

Thanks! =D That's a good idea to skip the cinematic. I always get annoyed with those too.

We've kind of had a bipolar week between liferaft and releasing Fig. 8, bug fixes and doing administrative crap (we're on the hunt for an intern!). Nonetheless a lot of the work we're doing is behind the scenes. Mike is taking the lead on making a bunch of levels which are shaping up really nicely. Our goal is to finish up the roughs (un-detailed without art) by the end of the month and then spend all of October on polish.

As far as updates to the demo version in this build we've got... new firefly particle effects, a new enemy kill explosion, fixed the elevator jerkiness, added a half-broke boss to the upstairs room.

http://www.intuitiongames.com/games/liferaft

BTW, thanks for all the support guys! Kickstarter has shown a lot of growth over the last week or so and we're really excited by that. If you're one of our pre-orderers (or even if your not) you especially kickass! 

ps. oh yea, also I posted a bit on our experiences with level design. We can't really show those off as we want that to be a complete package that's experienced on its own. The demo that we have up is more of a vertical slice without much of a narrative progression. anyway, here's that write up on my blog: http://mile222.com/2009/09/the-trouble-with-not-knowing-what-were-doing/

[aeiowu]

Work continues under the hood. We have the first 3 "levels" roughed in and I've been working on making the mechanical side of the spectrum more interesting. As it stands now, the game starts you off in a relatively stark part of the facility and compared to what you guys are playing it looks pretty boring. It's been a struggle but last night I had a bit of a breakthrough and got out of my funk.




As for what's playable, I added in three layers of parallax to give a better sense of depth, as well as some large struts/pipes to help make the interior feel like it was anchored. Originally the interior seemed pretty flat and floaty. I think this helps a lot. I'm not going to add it to the whole level as I need to keep working on the actual _game_ but this demo should give you a good idea as a type of sandbox.

Linky: http://intuitiongames.com/games/liferaft

Updates to the playable version will be less frequent (and have been lately if you haven't noticed) as we won't be making the actual game game publicly playable until release. If you're interested in testing privately and what-have-you, let us know though.

[Dom2D]

The paralax background works really well.
The shooting butterflies mechanic is great.
The grapple stuff works just fine.

Love the death animation.

Keep at it, I hope you get 100% on Kickstarter!