Hello internets,
January was an exciting month. Raygun Gadabout was accepted as one of the games to be shown at the Montreal Demo Night 2018. This was both incredibly exciting and terrifying at the same time. For the first time the game would be seen in front a large group of people, many of them seasoned game developers. And of course, all live. Fingers crossed, no pressure.
So, it’s safe to say that the month was really really busy and lots got done. And I’m exhausted. But it was all worth it.
So how’d it go?
I was far less nervous during the show than the run up to it. There was some fun audience reaction.
Got so much great feedback and really enjoyed getting to know other people making games and share stories etc.
New Music
Added some music to the game. All thanks to the very talented Henrik.
It’s incredible how much of a difference it can make to the feel and atmosphere of a level. There’s some interesting variety and mixing of styles in there. Fits so well!
Demo Related Stuff
So since I was to be presenting the game, I asked my friend Simon to be play the game on stage.
One worry is seeing as how we only had 5 minutes, there is the possibility of unforseen mistakes or technical issues.
What I did to plan for this possibility was:
Put the players health to double
Put in a failsafe that if the player’s health falls below 25% it would just refill
Added some teleportation hotkeys to allow us to reach different areas of the level in an instant.
So in case we start to run out of time we can teleport directly to the boss and still be able to showcase that.
New Enemy
One of the game goals is to make the player have to switch up tactics. Skarmag is an enemy that requires you to get up close and personal. He can’t be damaged while he’s shielding, but he’ll let his guard down before he attacks.
Skarmag can’t be damaged till it lets its guard down
Concept art
New Boss
Contrary to the the Xamoid boss who is more based on projectiles. Corta will come at you slowly and try to smoosh you with his giant hammer. He can also reflect back your own projectiles at you with his shield.
Corta is pretty much finished as far as his AI. He still needs some balancing and art/animation.
He’s too big to roll behind but you can double jump over him or use some platforms in the space where you fight.
Corta is meant to be an expansion on the battle concepts that you are introduced to when you first take on Skarmag.
Change To Xamoid Boss
Retooled the AI of Xamoid to have him fire at the player instead of preset directions, he also fires 4 types of objects that act differently (speed and follow the player)
Controls
Some control changes.
Added some deadzone to the movement controls. To make it less overly sensitive. I figure this cold be one of those things to put in a settings menu to allow the player to find their “happy place”.
Some testing of the controller deadzone. There’s a handy dandy read out of the analog input in the top-right corner. muy sexy.
Apart from that, the walljumping has been changed to push you in the opposite direction of the wall. You get less control but it’s a bit more predictable and allows you launch off a wall.
Wall jump will probably get some further updates in the future based on feedback.
New UI Art
Made some new Cutscene Avatars and overall changed the design of the various healthbars. You can see the current boss health bar in one of the previous GIFs.
Xamoid doesn’t care much for unexpected visitors.
Changes to Level Design
Still doing lots of iterating on the cave platform area. It has been suffering from some serious “dev difficulty” (difficulty balanced around the devs experience of the game)
So I’m trying to tone that down a bit. especially since this is meant to be early in the game so we shouldn’t go crazy hard right out the gate.
Combat
Changed the amount of damage that shots and melee inflict. The Gun shoots much faster but does less damage. It feels a bit more exciting to be able to blast away at the enemies. Functionally the damage amounts aren’t that different as the damage output/fire rate was adjusted to keep it similar to what it was previously.
That’s all for now
There’s a bunch of other little things that aren’t that interesting. (Bugs and tweaks), so we’ll leave it at that. Thanks for stopping by!!
Cheers,
M.
