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SysOp!
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« on: May 16, 2017, 11:49:31 AM » |
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SUPER Cute Alien is an upcoming single/coop/versus platformer inspired on the greatest titles we all know. Is a mix up of action and puzzles, contrasting cute and gore effects. Grab your friends and play together or against each other! It features a campaign with rich story, that you can also play in coop mode.
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IntroHello people from TIG! I've been asked to post this over here to get some feedback. I heard you guys are lovely and supportive people  Been working on this game for quite some time and now we are on polishing stages! The design philosophyOne thing that I noticed from big platformers is that most of them only focus on a single game mode. Either single player or versus mode. And there's a few that they are just coop. There's nothing wrong with that, but the goal of Super Cute Alien was to give the players the freedom to play in any way they want and enjoy each game mode in the best possible way. While this means lots of work and a technical challenge, we did our best to make sense of everything and make it work.  Cooperative mode is not about friendly fire off, and more players running around in the same game. In the future coop players will have more ways to help/work with each other to solve problems. SUPER Cute Alien and youOur idea was to have a game we would love to play, and something you can feel at home. This is why support for mods are in. Right now you can use your own images to customize your characters. Is simple for now, but in the future, advanced modding will be introduced to tweak the game in any way you like. Since it features multiplayer, we think is important to use player's ideas and thoughts to make it better and bigger! This is why there are plans to give away free copies to you guys, on its current state, each week. More info on this later! Feel free to comment on anything you like. I'll be posting frequently around here  . Many thanks in advance and pleased to meet you all   |
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« Last Edit: March 12, 2018, 09:19:03 AM by SysOp! »
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SysOp!
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« Reply #2 on: May 18, 2017, 02:45:18 PM » |
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Since we count on each other... I added a featured video widget, that fetches from a server the ID, creates the link and parses the thumbnail.  Idea of this, is to showcase 'let's plays' from the community, and let other players know about other channels. Cooking up a version now, so people can start to do some playing.   More news soon. |
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SysOp!
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« Reply #4 on: May 20, 2017, 03:52:46 PM » |
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Alrighty, is ugly. Revamped menu.  |
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SysOp!
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« Reply #5 on: May 30, 2017, 10:26:38 AM » |
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Currently revamping graphics!  |
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« Last Edit: May 30, 2017, 11:29:43 AM by SysOp! »
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LeRan
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« Reply #7 on: June 01, 2017, 04:33:55 AM » |
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The new menu seems perfect. The new graphics are nice too - they are not 100% cute though, I'd say more something along the lines of 70% cute - 30% indie. Out of curiosity, how do you produce them ? Anyway, good job so far. |
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SysOp!
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« Reply #8 on: June 01, 2017, 03:06:58 PM » |
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Thanks mate! Now, on the "how do you produce them"... as is something that is of my interest, I'm gonna expand myself a little on that  Feel free to stop reading at any point! As you probably guessed, the scene is composed by multiple layers. Here's how it works so far (excuse the weird camera settings):  - The sky background is the one that changes depending of time of day
- The hills background has a opacity of 0.9. This way it merges a bit with the background (mainly, to simulate some tint)
- Everything uses a shader to control bloom and color correction (more blue at night, less orange/yellow - less blue at day.. etc)
- The sun rays are just a simple image, the trick is to make it subtle, 0.2 opacity or so
- One of the most important aspects of inmersion, in 2D platformer is the foreground, something that people forgot. Coupled with animation and such is something that can improve your game a lot!
On the graphics themselves, we strike for simplicity. Everything that is cute is ... simple, very easy to read. We tried before with fancy graphics and fancy brushes, but that just doesn't work in our game. Here's an example:  (left one too many unnecessary details - right one is more simple and fitting)As for the colors and such, we used references and tried to copy the pallete of the original graphics. We would need "edible" colors.  As how to actually make them, we strike for easy reading and simple shapes. Just create a shape using your lasso tool, fill it up, then apply a very simple shading:  Then blending. Now we use a trick to increase the volume of the graphics themselves, so they don't look that flat. In our case lighting comes from above, but even for other kinds of lights this trick will work just fine:  ... as you can see, is subtle. But is very easy to do! In 'Layer Style' just apply a gradient as 'soft light'. I think that would be everything I could explain on the subject. References are higly important as well. Hope you didn't die of boredom. Everything is WIP now, a few things aren't done right, but is going to look better gradually! |
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LeRan
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« Reply #9 on: June 02, 2017, 03:44:43 AM » |
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Thanks, that was actually very interesting ! I chose for my own project realist graphics, but I keep wondering if it's a mistake or not, so it' nice to see how you proceed with minimalist ones. Keep up the good work !
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SysOp!
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« Reply #10 on: June 03, 2017, 05:02:51 PM » |
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Thanks a lot mate. Your Fallout 2d game looks super interesting as well. I'm gonna check it in detail and give you some feedback over there! Aaaaaaaaand currently improving things here and there. Here's some tests for the night glows. Not sure if looks exactly accurate...   We changed the hard shapes for the foreground. Sharp edges are not cute.  |
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SysOp!
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« Reply #11 on: July 12, 2017, 08:23:57 AM » |
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Well, it's been a while without updating. Been working on this non-stop to polish it the best I can. Here's some images of the upcoming changes. The rest of the changes are boring:   Also, been tweaking the gore aspects a lot. Ragdoll is now supported for single player and there's decal support  More soon, of course. Ktnxbai! |
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SysOp!
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« Reply #12 on: July 28, 2017, 06:00:39 PM » |
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We are between tweaking GFX and improving gameplay. Here's a couple of things:  One is the antenna that controlls enemies, the other is the weapon vendor, weapon kiosk, where you can access lots of fancy weapons and items. Here's a gif that show cases new monster abilities and more interesting player damage: https://my.mixtape.moe/hedaif.webm That monster is going to be replaced by dis:  And well, it will come with a couple of variations, such as fire, ice, and etc. While people is having fun with survival and versus, the single player is going to be tweaked a lot. We are moving towards of what I would call a *closed* open world style. *Open* in a sense of bigger maps, in dimensions, with more optional content you can do... or skip. *Closed* in a sense that levels would pretty much start and end in the same way. How you do so would be up to the player. This would be a bit like Braid. A bit. You go right and finish one level after the other. Or you go and complete all the puzzles and challenges. Oh, and flashlight for da night:  More stuff soon! |
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SysOp!
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« Reply #13 on: August 19, 2017, 10:54:22 AM » |
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Very happy that the game is gaining some traction! Remember that anyone can fill up this form https://goo.gl/forms/sTaJOXLvUMHItgbq2 (just an email) to participate in the closed beta! |
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SysOp!
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« Reply #15 on: September 20, 2017, 01:47:08 PM » |
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New stuff! GFX Update   A classic dialog box, multiple characters, and gibberish audio!  New enemy!Somewhat concept-ish, but won't change much later:  |
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SysOp!
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« Reply #16 on: October 04, 2017, 10:00:19 AM » |
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ANYHOW, been tweaking a bit more the ragdoll system, which is up to a point where is good enough for the rest of the project. Takes around 5 mins to setup a ragdoll, but the benefits are immense. Added balancing radgolls! They try to stand upright while... well, while they are dying in pain...  Been working with the musician. Did I mention it? Well... here's the incredibly talented guy, Robert Fenn(fracturesmusic.com). Idea is to have adaptive music( ). Is something that I did before( http://www.moddb.com/mods/half-life-1-arrangement/downloads/complete-ost-bonus-songs-rich-douglas) but I'm planning to take it a step further! Here's a video that was supposed to be internal, but if anybody wishes to see how the single player gameplay is doing, please check it out! In the search of an optimal image quality, something more on the artistic side and less computery, less artificial, implemented HDR + Cromatic Aberration:  Notice how the lighting comes through and feels a bit more natural. Idea is to have a final image that blends together in a better, more natural way. So the player notices less the artificial separation of sprites. More gameplay options!  The way I see it, games should have a wide range of options to pick from, so you pick what's most fun for you. This is why brute force was added. If player doesn't feel like completing a puzzle, he will have the option of just blowing the frigging door. The hell with it. For this though, player would need to craft a bomb by collecting... screws? Those allow the player to create physical stuff, such as the little car or bombs (for now). Also, this explodable thingy supports barrels. Heh.  And that's it for now. Hopefully my next post would be about music! |
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SysOp!
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« Reply #17 on: October 12, 2017, 08:03:35 AM » |
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Well... more improvements, perhaps a few, but were *hard* to pull off... I implemented a dynamic lighting system. Multiple lights are supported, they can be switched on/off and there's light styles (for a camp fire, ie), they can be toggled, scaled up, etc. All of this can be easily set from Tiled. Here's some comparisions:  And a few more:   This had to be done because now... there will be a new mechanic, and has something to do with **power sources**. Idea is to completely shutdown bases. Lights going off would be the necessary visual *feedback* that you did good. This will be like... puzzles within puzzles. The other thingy that got done is the **dynamic music**. Supports day/night and if a puzzle is nearby, another fancy track will come in. But is better if I show a video about this, which I will do later. That's it for now! |
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SysOp!
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« Reply #18 on: November 02, 2017, 03:49:28 PM » |
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News! - We entered the freeGalaktus contest (http://freegalaktus.pl/), by some sort of an accident. So, well, we all been pulling our hairs out to get a decent video and a build.
You can check our freeGalaktus profile at http://freegalaktus.pl/super-cute-alien/) For voting: http://freegalaktus.pl/vote/#game-id-887. - Here's the video for the entry, with lots of new features:
- We gonna another betatesting round soon, so please check your emails. You can sign up here [Google form to access Beta](https://goo.gl/forms/sTaJOXLvUMHItgbq2) if you'd like to help us polish this little game.
- We preparing yet another build for a betatesting and *soft* launch over at itch.io. This will have more fancy features, such as Loot (random items, random rarity, masks for multiplayer as well):
And that's it for now. PS: We made a Twitter, because we have to twit things, apparently. So, here's the thingy https://twitter.com/SUPERCuteAlien (please make sure to be sit and be amazed at the amounts of followers we have) |
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SysOp!
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« Reply #19 on: December 19, 2017, 01:14:39 PM » |
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