This has been one epic week! In traditional game development fashion, this week was crunch week. This week was the week that we had off for spring break, but it wasn't a break for us at Demergo, instead it was 400+ hours of pure game development fun!
As of this writing, pretty much every major fixbot feature is implemented. There is still plent of tweaking and design perfection needed, but adding major new features is over, and we have finally hit the beta stage!!! Our next goal is a gameplay video by the end of next Saturday, so stay tuned and be ready to see what we have been working hard on for the last 2 months! This week, the artists finished up 3 of the enemy movement animations, the cutscene animations and art, the character art, the fonts, some of the major story art, and some of the lighting needed for Fixbot. They also finished up the environmental animations and save point animations. They also did a lot of other cool stuff that they didn't tell me about and that I don't know about, but is probably really cool and I should try to find out what it is so that I can I can tell you how cool it is...or you could just buy our game when it comes out in a few weeks and see it for yourself!
The programmers essentially made all of the stuff above work! I must admit, Saturdays seem like engine overhaul day. Today we decided that after fighting with angle code forever that we needed to just go through all the code and use one unified angle system. Some may say, well thats a duh, and we would agree, but cocos2d does angles one way, math does angles another way, and our human minds do angles a completely different way. Essentially we had 3 different angle systems in our engine that we were converting between. It would take us 20-30mins to write the logic and then 1-2hr just to get the angles write. This is a major overhaul that needed to happen sooner, but hey, better late than never (and by never I mean continuously having it break because we didn't convert something and thus having lots of complicated code and lots of bugs with that complicated code). I am sure that Dan will write a post on this sooner or later.
On the design side, all the levels are designed, and 3 or 4 of the 10 levels are built and in the game, but still need final touches and cutscenes added to them. Zak has been tweaking and redesigning the levels all week to get the perfect user experience and most fun out of each level and each area in the levels.Thats it for this dev update, look for more blog posts to come this week as those regular posts should be starting up again now that crunch week is over!
Devbot Todd crashing for the night....
