Time for another quickie-blog. We’re slowly preparing for Alpha 1.6 next week.
HUSH NOW, QUIET NOW
Sorry for leaving you guys hanging last week. I was planning on showing a little sneak peek of our new and improved Main Menu, but Risto hit the breaks on me and told me to wait until it’s finished. As I didn’t really have anything else to report on, I decided to skip the blog entirely. Let’s make up for that now!
WHAT’S ON THE MENU?
Both of our artists and Risto have been improving our Main Menu for the past few weeks. While our artists have (obviously) been making it prettier, Risto has been improving our navigation system. It should now be a less of a pain to navigate the menus with a gamepad or keyboard. He’s also been working on making the key-rebinding better.
And sorry, still can’t show you anything. You’ll see it all next week, provided we stay on schedule.
GAMEDEVS, ASSEMBLE!
In case you’ve managed to miss it, we got a new addition to our team some time back: a second graphic artist named Teemu. I’m happy to announce that we have another newcommer: Mikko no. 2. I suppose it would be appropriate to call him Music-Mikko, because he’s now in charge of making all the music for the game. So far we’ve been using random Royalty Free music, but once we get Mikko’s songs in, the atmosphere of the game should improve drastically. Actually, you should be able to hear a song or two in the next build.
STATUS UPDATE: NEW CHARACTER
I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the passing, that Risto has been working on implementing a second playable character to the game. Good news! Artist-Mikko has whipped up some tasty new sprites for it and we’re thinking of including it into the next build. The only thing that it’s missing at the moment are the skill icons in the HUD, but we’ve asked Teemu to make some placeholder art for that. Fingers crossed he makes the deadline!
STATUS UPDATE: BOSS FIGHT AND AI
In our last blog I mentioned having come across a particular limitation of our AI, that was hindering my progress in making our first boss fight. I ended up taking the hard and long route and started rewriting our AI. The process hasn’t been as massive as I feared, but then again, I’m still not finished. The good news is, the boss is working as intended now (minus a few new hiccups I gotta work out). With luck, I’ll get the boss finished
STATUS UPDATE: NETWORKING
Jukka has finally gotten transitions between levels to work… to some degree. Apparently our level instantiation routine is a difficult to work with on the network side, so there might be some rewriting waiting for us there. Anyways, online co-op is coming along nicely.
SUMMARY
Alpha 1.6 is just around the corner and we’ve still got stuff to finish up. I’m damn sure next week is gonna be very busy. With luck though, you’ll be getting a new character, prettier Main Menu, the first boss fight and tasty jams all in one build.
Till next week folks!
