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Cheeks of Steel finally reaches Alpha stage in this latest update, complete with tutorial level extended teaser trailer.

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Welcome everyone to the fourth update for Cheeks of Steel. If you've been following our progress so far, you'll notice that this update has taken a little longer to release than usual. When such a thing happens, it either means that; a) the project has been sidelined for various purposes, or b) things have just been too busy to report what's going on. Thankfully, in Underdog's case, we are pleased to say that it's a result of the latter. In fact, I'd say that this update is probably the biggest one we've ever had.

In last month's post, we announced that Cheeks of Steel had left pre-production and entered ‘full fledged development'. Since then, we've managed to accomplish a number of things.

The first challenge we overcame was getting our custom character (Harry) into Unreal 3 with a custom rig and set of animations. Once this was complete, we could begin sculpting levels and mechanics to suit Harry's frame, so that everything is running as smoothly as possible. With this in mind, our producer went away and began learning Unreal script, coding the core features within a mod folder, including our core attacks and power ups. Therefore, from a programming perspective, all of our alpha features are scheduled for acompletion by early next week.

Moving into the aesthetics of the game, we have also achieved a significant amount of progress with the style, characters and general level activity. So to kick things off, here are a few samples of 3D characters related to the game;

Tick

3D Model of Tick3D Model of Tick3D Model of Tick


Harry, Tick & Espher

character models


Critters
Enemy Modelcharacter models

Next on the agenda is the level themselves. As planned, the game will contain a total of 6 levels where the player must complete several objectives in order to obtain Hamster Tubes. Currently, we have turned our focus to the Prologue level (tutorial level) and one of the themed levels, 'Indiana Harry'. This week's update is based around the tutorial level, fully set out with meshes and textures, barely resembling that of a typical Unreal level. More information on Indiana Harry will be released in the next update, along with a full video showing all gameplay mechanics operational and in-game. Again, for those that have been following the progress for Cheeks of Steel, you may find the tutorial level vaguely familiar from previous screenshots of the level when it was empty. Now the level is nearing 95% completion, with merely a few cutscenes and sounds left to implement.

The 'Prologue' is as the name suggests, the opening level in the game, and is designed to enforce a basic description of how the game works, introducing various mechanics and their uses in the game. From a Narrative perspective, the level is set within a dream world where Harry must navigate through a large maze in order to escape and awake from his nightmare. This essentially then opens up the main plot and the primary purpose of the game. It is also likely that if we decide to release a demo before the final release date in May, this level will be apart of it. So without further delay, here is a teaser trailer of both Harry in-game, and the first real look at Cheeks of Steel. Enjoy!

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vfn4i83
vfn4i83

Interesting concept

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AlCool
AlCool

Haha, this mods gonna be great :D

A whole new game!

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Kamikazi[Uk]
Kamikazi[Uk]

lol this looks so random... Great work though could turn out really funny.

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hushpuppy
hushpuppy

I honestly dont know what to say. It looks good....but at the sametime very very bad. I think you should improve some of the animation, and well..try giving him some fur at least XD

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Scourged_Wolf Author
Scourged_Wolf

Thank you :) yes there are a few issues with things like some of the animation but as the title says, this is just the Alpha stage. A number of tweaks to characters, animations etc are scheduled for completion a little nearer to completion. It's just with the vast amount of work to get complete in such a short time, we have to prioritise certain aspects over others.

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ECM_Tank
ECM_Tank

Liked the blue screen bit and the overly epic music!

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blackmodeler
blackmodeler

the video's awesome, hands down this mod is epic! nice

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