Flying Enemies
After working furiously on our demo for the Very Big Indie Pitch this past week and watching others play the game, we realized there was a significant lack of enemy types in The Painter’s Apprentice. After one of the programmers also pointed it out, I took a look and realized we needed to make some additions before moving forward. Right, now most of our enemies either patrol back and forth or will follow and attack. They all are also ground enemies. We’ve made some changes to one of our planned enemies to simply act as a kind of “turret” enemy that stands in place and shoots boomerang paintballs once players are in its line of sight, but it won’t follow. As well, we’re adding in a few flying enemies to mix up the gameplay a bit. Some have horizontal attacks, others will have vertical and still others will drop other enemies. There might be other enemies we add along the way, but for now this should hopefully add a good amount of variety. Do you have any ideas on obstacles or enemies you liked in other games? Let us know in the comments!
PG Connects and Very Big Indie Pitch
As you know, we attended the Very Big Indie Pitch at PG Connects over in San Francisco on 7/7. It was pretty hectic and a bit nerve-wracking (holy crap I had to speak with people from Samsung, Amazon and 148apps) but ultimately it was a very rewarding experience. While we came in still with many issues that had plagued our previous builds, we received some valuable feedback on how to improve the game for the future. Our main issue was with the UI. We have tried to come up with more fluid controls and, after speaking with several top-ranks mobile journalists, have decided on two methods:
- Have a slide out menu from the attack button and have the colors come out in an arc formation leaning to the right.
- Slide out menu but players press and hold the button to select the color.
We’re going to try out both options to see which one feels the smoothest and hopefully we’ll have that updated in the near future! Besides game journalists we also met with some great ad networks like appsholic and seed and also met with some China localization experts. We’re definitely picking up some steam and can’t wait to meet others at our next conference in DC.
Sadly, we didn’t win the pitching contest, that honor goes to the fine gentleman of Shovelware who created a zombie, match three, tower defense hybrid game. I was able to play some at the event and it was a lot of fun. I would describe it as a match three Plants vs. Zombies type game. It’s currently in beta testing so if you’re interested, sign up!
Luminaut Dev Log
While we’ve gone a bit slower in recent months, we’re starting to pick up the pace now that we’ve brought on another programmer. A lot of our fixes are mainly aesthetic and we’re moving along at a comfortable pace. If all goes well, we should have a very polished demo in another month.
After showing off the game at PG Connects I noticed load times were quite long when going between levels. At the same time one of the programmers noticed the same thing and we are now working on loading screens so players don’t think the game crashed. We’re editing some artwork we used for our postcards for our splash screen as well.
As well, we’ve implemented a new enemies: the the bludgeon blob. He’s our next attacking enemy and while he might be slow, he definitely packs a wallop. We used Clayface from Batman as a reference point for the character design.
Besides this, we’ll be streaming on Saturday at 7pm ET another level that we’ll be creating, this time for the Surrealism world. As we want to incorporate the overall themes of the art style in our game design, the surreal level will be very meandering with numerous dead ends. Don’t worry, we’ll have checkpoints.