I spent the past two weeks in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand with C. It was awesome!
Quite a bit less awesome was getting a kidney stone the day after I returned:
I'm feeling much better now but it does hurt if I sit or stand for too long, so coding AV is on hiatus (as is just about everything else in my life) until I'm sure the stone is out of my system.
This time with the labcoat open in front.
I've been doing a lot of this lately - coding weapons and then shooting them in every possible circumstance to make sure they behave correctly. The shape of the save station with its various slopes and corners makes it a good testbed.
Trace's sprite needs an overhaul. I'm internally debating on whether to give him a labcoat, since he is, at least in my current iteration of the story, a scientist. However it does give him a resemblance to Soma Cruz's ensemble.
The middle picture is an inbetween step where I improve the clarity of his features but still keep him casually dressed.
I'm on a weapon-making binge, and here's the latest fruit of that effort. Can you guess how this one works?
A flamethrower.Here's the flamethrower, which is one of the bonus weapons that you don't need to progress. It deals a constant stream of damage to any enemies it hits. I should stress that it's just a weapon, though; it doesn't burn the vegetation or open up secret passages or anything.
Do you notice anything else different about this screenshot?
Please give a "Like" to Petroglyph's mysterious new WW2 strategy, here: http://www.facebook.com/victoryww2
Petroglyph is what allows me to pay my bills and still be able to make Axiom Verge (with their kind permission and an addendum to my employment contract), so it really helps to have as many eyes on this as possible!
Not much to say right now - I'm at a juncture where I need to make about 25% of the game maps all in one go before I can implement the next feature, so I'm just mapping away. Here's a screenshot to show you waht this is about. :)
Now with animation.So here's a cool thing - I drew and animated all of my bosses about a year and a half ago, but I hadn't implemented a hierarchical animation system to be able to play back the larger ones in game. So I've had all these animation files sitting in my computer, presumably finished, but untested.
But this past week it was finally time to get cracking on it, and now I've got my first multi-piece boss animated in the game. He still has some work to do, but he can attack and take damage. Hell, I'm impressed that he even moves!
Interestingly, Gamespot had asked me for some screenshots a while back, and, not having this part completed, I'd offered up some mocks made by screen-capping what I'd done in Anime Studio. Here's how he looked in the mock:
The mockup.You can see what's changed between now and then . . . backgrounds are updated, bullets are shooting, and since I'm a sucker for bloom, there's that. Of course you can't tell in the still but the pink growths now animate as well. I'm probably going to do a bit of a consistency overhaul on the boss textures themselves at some point, too.
A Glitch Ray!
At least partially. Obtained early in the game, this item allows you to "glitch" enemies and tiles, applying slowdown, flicker, corruption, and other effects to your advantage. In the image above you can see a bunch of tiles that were glitched so that you can drill through them, and some enemies that have been glitched to slow them down.
There's more, though. The ray is just the beginning - the first of several abilities related to game breakage. Think of all the things you did in NES games that the designers didn't want you to? Yeah, those things.
You'll have to play to find out how many of them made their way into Axiom Verge.
Although I'd had these features planned long before I made this site (like, over a year), I didn't want to mention it until I had some proof to back it up with. So I let on that this was a game about collecting weapons. Oops.
What do you guys think?
his is the Axiom Verge site description. Hooray!
Copyright 2014 Thomas Happ Games LLC