Humerus?

Aloha, gangsters and gangstresses!

My apologies for the sparse posts of current. I have been residing in India for the past month and will be here for another month more, and for many resulting reasons my game development time has been a bit more constricted than usual. Also, I have grown addicted to Reddit, which is apparently a black hole for my brain.

HOWEVER, I have been hard at work hashing out new game ideas as well as finishing old ones. Buried Alive has undergone some major overhauls. First and foremost, I got frankly SICK AND TIRED of writing boring dialogue. Despite the fact that the game is about a man trapped in an underground cave who wants nothing in life but to rescue his wife, which I admit is a serious topic, I had for some reason made a conscious effort to suppress my urge to write goofy dialogue. Well, NO MORE.

Note: Yes, this scene depicts a wife trying to get her husband back instead of the other way around. I'm not concerned with such technicalities.

I went back and rewrote every single sentence of dialogue, and I am happy to say that the result is... interesting. Now, interesting can mean "great" or it can mean "horrible." I'm not concerned with matters of preference; what's important here is that the dialogue is not boring.

I want to ensure that this beast is as shiny and slick as possible with the right amount of polish and gusto, so I am holding off on announcing any kind of release date. Like a wizard, Buried Alive will arrive precisely when it means to.

Progeny: Buried Alive Progress

Development of Progeny: Buried Alive is coming along great. More than any game idea I've had, I'm really excited about the story that is being told through this game. And probably unlike some of my previous games, I am taking my sweet time with this one in order to very thoroughly test it and polish it as I go. 

I've had a few "eureka" moments where some interesting game mechanic just manifested itself and begged to be implemented. The most recent one is shown below.

As you may recall from my preview video, Dan's energy pistol has two firing modes. The primary fire shoots a green projectile that deals a pretty good chunk of damage to enemies. The secondary fire is not actually an attack but is more of a utility option. It's called "Propulsion" and allows you to throw yourself in the opposite direction of where your pistol is pointing, sort of like a rocket engine.

As I began playing around with the game and testing the first level, I kept instinctively attempting to use my propulsion in order to throw projectiles back at enemies. It just felt like that's how it should work. After all, if it throws out enough thrust to make me fly through the air, why can't I also use that force to send enemy projectiles back at them? So I worked it in, and I'm happy with the results. Check out the video of the current alpha state of the game below to see it in action!

Progeny: Buried Alive (Video)

Progeny: Buried Alive (Preview)

This week's game tells the story of Dan Palladian from the Progeny.

Before the crash, Dan was the ship's entertainment mogul, eventually owning and operating almost every single cinematic establishment on the ship. He wrote, directed, edited, and acted in all of his own films. He had recently married Paige Ellsworth, the lead actress of one of his latest films. But when the Progeny went down, the two of them were funneled into separate escape pods.

His pod crashed into a mountain and embedded itself deep in an underground cave. He survived for a week underground, defending himself with the low-tech energy pistol that comes standard in every escape pod and eating the cave-dwelling fungus and creatures he could find. Captain Moore found him after seven days.

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Unlike a traditional platformer that is "on rails", this one will take place in a huge, expansive cave system with no designated "end" and no levels. You simply have to survive for 7 days; to that end, there is a big emphasis on open-ended exploration. Your "hunger" is constantly going up, but you can satisfy your hunger by eating mushrooms and eating the critters that you kill. If your hunger hits the max, you starve to death. So there is no way to simply wait around for rescue; you have to keep moving so you can forage and avoid starvation. Each in-game "minute" is one second of play time, so that means you have to survive for 2 hours and 8 minutes before rescue arrives. Most of the creatures in the cave will kill you if you get too close to them, so you have to be very careful and try to blast them from afar.

But there is a catch: your only light source is your weapon. The weapon has a battery that charges over time, but each shot you fire takes up battery power. So the more you shoot, the darker it gets, and you are in the dark until your gun recharges (somewhat quickly, however). Most enemies and food items glow in the dark (bioluminescence), so you can still see where things are, but you won't be able to see the terrain or non-glowing objects when it gets too dark.

In addition, enemies behave differently the darker it is. For example, the worm thing you see in the screenshot moves faster as it becomes darker.

I'm also working on implementing creatures that only exist in darkness. So when it gets very dark, their glowing eyes will pop up, but when the light comes back, there's nothing there. Stay tuned for more updates!