New Experiments!

Lighting/Normal Maps - Our artist spent a good amount of hours playing with Normal Maps yesterday and wow, they can really transform the look of a game. The cave tile set with Normal Maps almost looked 3D and really popped. It added some cool depth and realistic lights and shadows. We still have much to explore here

Effects - Playing with some effects our artist tried the Pixel effect and it works really well, maybe sneak a retro world in there some where or a playable arcade somewhere in the game? The Glass Effect is going to give our crystals a really cool look with some foreground crystals distorting whatever is behind them. Parallax the crystals and its that much sweeter. Much to explore here as well.

Does anyone know cool tricks or links to good videos or tutorials with Effects, Normal Maps or Particles that they would like to share? There are so many options and its tough to get good info on these other than the basics.

Player Animation Update: After hours of eventing, inventing and testing I finally got all of the players animations working smoothly.

- Tap the shot button and the player will lift its gun then shoot and lower the gun quickly while continuing its animation when idling, running and jumping in all four shot directions. This was the hardest part of the process to get the timing just right!

- Tap the shot button faster and the player lifts and holds the gun maintaining a shoot animation while the tapping stays at that faster tap rate or even faster tapping. Tap the shot button slower or stop tapping the button and the gun is lowered. This works nicely while running, idling and jumping in all shot directions. Tapping the shot button speeds up your fire rate.

- Hold the shot button down and the player lifts and holds the gun maintaining a shoot animation while the shot button is being held down. Release the shot button and the player lowers its gun. This works nicely while running, idling and jumping in all shot directions as well. Holding the shot button gives you a steady rate of fire.

Here is a look at our protagonist in action.

Introducing the new character sprite for our protagonist in GunnSwitch.

Happy New year everyone.

Its going to be a busy one as we try our best to have our demo finished and polished by years end. It may sound like a lot of time to get a demo done but its more of a showcase than a demo and it features a lot of the mechanics that you'll be using throughout the game. The demo will run about a half hour long, featuring four unique areas, two epic boss battles, some story sequences and a good look at what the full game will feature.

As we work on the showcase/demo we are also planning, designing, and working on the full game at the same time, bouncing back and forth. All the games we have worked on to this point were for mobile and web and were small games that we thought would fit those markets better. With this project we are finally doing something that we are really passionate and excited about and now have the experience to pull off something pretty special and large scale.

Good luck to everyone this year, hope your projects bring you joy and joy to others. Cheers

Here is a sneak peek of the caves in GunnSwitch. The Player graphic is still prototype and will look better soon when our artist is finished.

Here is a sneak peek of the caves in GunnSwitch. The Player graphic is still prototype and will look better soon when our artist is finished.

We tested a GunnSwitch export streamed from PC to mobile, we used a Bluetooth controller to play it. It looked so good on the small screen and ran smoothly. Tested it on a 42 inch TV as well and it looks nice and clean at 1080 resolution, even when we zoom in (scale) everything is looking good.

The light rays you see in the screenshots have been upgraded using some Sine language...get it? cough cough...anyways, bad jokes aside, using Sine to change the size and movement with some rays having different period offsets is creating a wonderful effect that can only really be appreciated in video or live...screenshots dont do it justice. Everytime we do a tweaking/polishing phase, which there are multiple passes, the game starts to take shape and come alive.

I'll try to put together an animated gif to show off the lighting, I dont like to show stuff this early as things are still evolving but I also want good documentation of the changes we make through the dev process...oh well! Happy gaming!

We are officially out of the prototype stage for the most part! There will be ongoing tests as we delve further into development but the core foundation for the game play systems and structure is pretty solid already. Feels good to play and the controls are tight, the game is unique and blends some awesome games like Metroid, Megaman, Blaster Master and Metal Slug into something new with a deeper narrative than those games.

I'm beginning to think about testing 2 player local Coop modes and local battles and eventually have an online mode that's fully featured with customization, boss rush, challenges and 4 player + battles. Probably will be released as free DLC a few months after the release of GunnSwitch.

I cant wait to have some of you play it in the new year and test it out. We want to showcase what Construct 2 can do, our goal is using physics, effects, particles,scaling and smooth camera panning, multiple paralaxing layers, 1080 HD graphics, and more all running at 60 fps on middle end PCs and up.

Great news, was worried about a bit of stuttering on the start of my layout when previewing my project on C2. When I exported it to NWS the game had no stuttering at all and was running a smooth 60 FPS. This means I have room to play with more particles and effects.

Growing up I was an avid video game magazine reader/collector as that was the best way to get new info on games before the internet. I loved when strategy guides in the magazines would piece together screenshots to show the whole layout of a stage map on a page or two. This screenshot reminds me of those spreads, this is the cave map layout so far:

Small Update:

First pic is of the newly added green mushrooms and the new crate sprites.

Second pic is a hint at a cool mechanic in the game.