Categories
Developer Blog

Goodbye Store Hello Perks! Luminaut Dev Log #17

We've got rotating sawblades!
We’ve got rotating sawblades!

The past 3 months have flown by and we’ve been busy showing off our game at various places like the Playcrafting Expos and, most recently, MAGfest. We even spoke to some college kids at The Wharton School of Business at the Univeristy of Pennsylvania at a Games Industry Panel. All that to say we’ve been super busy and we’re using these events as excuses as to why we haven’t been updating our developer log.

That doesn’t mean we haven’t been hard at work. We received a lot of valuable feedback not only from the gamers but from the judges at MAGFest as well. While it’s always hard to hear the negatives of a game, it really helps us figure out ways we can improve it. It’s also great for bug testing and we found a few new bugs that we’ve been able to quash.

One of the biggest comments we’ve received from judges is the fact that the game doesn’t fully utilize the mechanic of painting. Right now you just match the color to the paint blob to defeat them. Most people wanted to utilize it more so we’ve come up with a couple more mechanics to introduce some more depth to the colors. For example, we’ll have platforms that move across a track and in order to stay on the right track you must hit a switch with the right color otherwise you fall off. We’ve got some other ideas brewing too, but these might be something we add on for later updates.

rough draft of perks
rough draft of perks

The biggest change we’ve made is the move away from a store. Rather than purchase upgrades you now collect paintings to unlock your perks. This means there’s more replay values to levels and lets us go even crazier with our level design. Hidden areas anyone?

So what about those paint tubes you collect then? These will basically tie to your paint meter. The more you collect the higher the meter so you can then pull off paintball attacks and the powerful rainbow attack.

Of course we’ve also gotten rid of some other aspects of the gameplay. There is no longer a dash attack or dive attack. There was just no easy way to bind these to keys and they weren’t really necessary to the gameplay. We’ve also adjusted some of the enemies to ensure players can actually defeat them with the melee attack. The jump sound effect will also change as a lot of people had issues with it. Maybe we’ll stick with a more subtle sound than what we currently have.

Besides that, we’re plugging along. We’ll be looking for some alpha testers probably by the beginning of April. The demo will just be the first two worlds and we’ll want to know your thoughts on the levels, bosses and if you found any bugs. Speaking of bugs, we’ll be writing up an article on proper bug testing procedure soon so stay tuned!

 

Categories
Developer Blog

UI Changes, New Tiles and Luminaut Dev Log #10

Tiles and UI Changes

These past couple weeks have been full of updates and changes and we’re pretty excited about them. We’ve made a lot of small changes to the UI, which will hopefully make the overall gameplay experience that much better. Most of these changes were to add some subtle animations to the menu so they “fade in” instead of simply appearing on the screen. It makes the menu system much more dynamic and fluid. As well we’ve darkened the icons for the menu and level select so you know when you have clicked a button. These small changes really have a huge overall impact on the look and feel of the game. We’re still working out a couple other things but you can check out the new system in the gif below:

We mentioned in a previous post that we have gotten a new tile artist and we’ve switched over a lot of our old worlds to the new tiles. It’s made a huge difference in the way the game looks and for the better. On the design side, we have a lot more flexibility with our level design and can pretty much create almost every design we dream up (with a couple caveats of course). And since we have multiple tiles on a sheet, our game size should be much smaller than our previous method. Aesthetically, the levels are much more visually pleasing. There’s just the right amount of contrast to the background to really make foreground pop. You can check it out below.

[image-comparator title=”Tutorial Before/After” left=”http://luminositymobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Tutorial.jpg” right=”http://luminositymobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Tutorialnew.jpg” width=”100%” left_alt=”Before” right_alt=”After” classes=”hover”][/image-comparator]

[image-comparator title=”World 2 Before/After” left=”http://luminositymobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/World-2.jpg” right=”http://luminositymobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/World-2-new.png” width=”100%” classes=”hover”][/image-comparator]

If you’re in the NYC area, you can play our new and improved game on 7/29 at the Summer Expo. We’re still cleaning up a couple UI things but we’ve made a ton of improvements too so we’re super excited to show it off. As well if you’re in the DC/Baltimore area we’ll be at VGU convention August 1-2.

 

Luminaut Dev Log

Besides these UI changes, we’ve also completed some loading screens for the levels and we’ve updated some icons to keep with the painter theme more. We’ve finally fixed our double jump issue and now we’ve also added in the ability to jump once after you fall off a ledge so you can still save yourself. This makes the overall jumps feel much more responsive as previously if you tried to jump while falling off a ledge nothing would register. Plus, we’ve finally gotten the paint brush tip in-game to match the color you’ve chosen. It’s pretty great and serves as a great reminder of what you have “equipped.”

We’ve got a lot more updates coming your way. If you’re interested in testing out the build, subscribe to our newsletter and we’ll contact you first for closed beta testing.