Slug Boss

Here's the first in-game screenshot of the slug boss from the main page!  I'd made the art a couple of years ago but it took me that past three weeks to program his AI and attack abilities.  He's also evolved visually since I made the original animation, mostly to make him more consistent with the rest of the game art.  The coloring is also different because he turns red as you damage him, but in order to goad him into firing his gun battery for the screenshot, I had to do just that.  If you look closely, you can barely make out Trace being hammered back into the cilia by the shoulder beam.

Enemy Creature: Pliaa

The creatures live in pools of acid - which they spit back out at you if you approach.

Enemy Creature: Prongfish

I made four new creatures this past week; here's one of them.  It lurks silent within pipes (and, occasionally, in areas that look completely harmless) and jumps out when you approach.  Watch out:  I died many times just trying to test it!

Axiom Verge in University of Nerd!

Check out this interview I did with University of Nerd:

http://universityofnerd.com/game-spotlight-axiom-verge/

This game is listed as one of the most anticipated Indie games to be coming out this year, and I can see why! With it’s dark music and extremely layered level design, Axiom Verge looks to be a huge hit on the Indie game scene. I sat down with Tom Happ, and talked about his brain child, Axiom Verge.

Furglot

I thought I'd start introducing some monsters.  Furglots look a bit like tufts of grass or green fur (hence Trace's name for them, "Furglot").  They jump around like fleas and drain your energy if they latch onto you.

Final Weapon Update

I finished the last of the weapons tonight - or at least, the last of the weapons I'm okay with "spoiling" on my blog.  I counted them all, and evidently I made 2 more than I'd planned for (and I have no idea how that happened!).

Fat Beam

While this is not the final naming, I feel "Fat Beam" describes fairly adequately this huge beam attack that's larger than the weapon's muzzle - and which gets larger as you level your weapon power.

It's surprising how much trouble this weapon gave me, considering how simple it is.  While I would have estimated the lightning gun would give me trouble, I programmed that weapon in a single day; the Fat Beam, on the other hand, took me a full week.

Lightning Gun

I made 3 new weapons in the past 3 days.  Here's one of them.

Map Screen

I'd debated going super old-school and not providing an automap of any kind, but eventually caved in and added a somewhat minimal map interface.  It'll never fill out an area before you've explored it, or point you to your next objective, or anything like that (I always had the feeling that I was cheating when a game forced that on me).  The AV map screen doesn't even represent "walls" save as a black dividing area that occurs only after you've explored both sides of a boundary.  Hopefully this will allow it to serve as a record of where you've been without unnecessarily spoiling to much about what's to come.

The reason it's smaller than the typical automap is that eventually I want to incorporate this into an inventory screen similar to the one in Zelda, allowing you to equip one weapon and one item at a time.

Thoughts?

Walking The Dog

It appears I'm safe from kidney stones - at least for the time being.  I finally made a weapons testing room with a variety of different tiles in it to verify that everything works, which is why this image is kind of a jumble!  Here's another weapon pickup to show for it.