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 Chess Preview

Two days of development left for PROGENY CHESS! Here's a breakdown of the rules. The main gameplay mechanics have stayed mostly the same:

• All of the original pieces are there (pawn, king, queen, rook, etc) and move in the same way as they do in standard chess.
• Like normal chess, the goal is to take out the enemy king. Unlike normal chess, Progeny Chess does not have a "check" or "check mate" system. Instead, you must simply kill the enemy king. This adds some additional focus requirements from both players; if they don't realize their king is in trouble, there is nothing shouting at them to get the king to safety.

However, each chess piece has additional abilities beyond its ordinary movement/attack abilities. Using one of these abilities uses up your turn.

• Trooper / Pwn-Bot (Pawn): Can self-destruct to destroy both itself and the piece immediately in front of it.
• Captain / Commander (King): Can deploy a pawn to the space immediately in front of it. This ability has a 10-turn cooldown.
• Guard / Blocker (Knight): Can drop a Barrier onto any open space within one square of itself. A barrier blocks that space and lasts for 8 turns. Only knights can jump over barriers (just as they can jump over other pieces in traditional chess). Neither friendly nor hostile pieces can pass through a Barrier.
• Engineer / Scout (Bishop): Can drop a Smoke Bomb onto any open space or onto any enemy within one square of itself. Any enemy under the smoke cannot be selected by their commander, effectively disabling that enemy while the smoke lasts. Smoke bombs last for 6 turns, and do not negatively affect friendly targets.
• Sweeper /Dozer (Queen): Can destroy all Smoke Bombs and Barriers within one space of itself.
• Beardman / Grinder (Rook): Can trade places with any one of your pawns anywhere on the board. This ability cannot be used on your opponent's back row.

As you can imagine, these additions provide for some very interesting strategic opportunities and a lot more depth than traditional chess.

I'm able to successfully set up a LAN connection for the game, but am still working on getting online play to work. Hopefully I can get that all hammered out within the next two days. Check back Friday night for the final version!

(PC Only for now; though I plan on getting it out for iPhone and iPad early next year.)

Project 87 Screenshot Preview!

Here's a little glimpse of one of the further-along puzzles in my Indie Games Festival submission, Project 87!

The beta test begins around October 8th and ends by October 17th.
Want to become a Project 87 beta tester? Go here to sign up!

Project 87: INITIATE

Big news today! First, Goat Milk has landed at the #2 top rated platformer slot -- for all time -- at the YoYoGames site. To get that slot, it had to beat out over 11,000 other games. On the one hand, I'm pretty pumped about this, since I only spent a single weekend building it. It's the first game that I've really "unleashed" on the public, so its success gives me a lot of hope for my next project, which will take way more than just a weekend to create.

Speaking of my next project, here's a first-glimpse screenshot of one of the early levels:

Click image to enlarge.

The game is called Project 87. Without giving too much away, I'll just say that it's a puzzle platformer which blends elements of Portal and VVVVVV. In Project 87, you play a small robot that is being subjected to a series of logical challenges while some overseeing figure is observing your progress (for reasons I won't yet disclose).

Bottom line: Project 87 will melt your brain into a puddle.

Ability Stats

My Friday this week was spent developing the stats page for your various abilities. It's coming along pretty well! One of the more important features of the stats page is the ability to see whether or not you can purchase upgrades for whatever ability you're looking at. Here's an example:

(Click the image to enlarge it)

Updated HIVE!

More doodads and fun stuff to die on! Click to zoom.