Hi again! It seems we ‘slightly’ missed our bi-weekly update schedule. By a week.
ANYWAY! We got quite some stuff to report this time!
Lea can do new stuff!
The last weeks I’ve spend some time to finally implement several features that have been overdue.
As a result, Lea can do so much more amazing stuff now!
First of all, she can enter doors… SIDEWAYS:
But that’s not all. Finally, Lea can take an elevator to move to whole different levels (as in floors):
And last but not least, she can also take the more healthy option by climbing stairs:
Now there is truly almost no place left that Lea won’t be able to…
… Yeah, we’ll get there.
“But that’s just trivial!” you say? Our physic engine thought otherwise. We first had to teach it how to handle things like varying height.
Finally, we made lots of progress on getting the outside of the cargo ship in the actual game. Here a screen of the new location with vignetting and clouds, right out of the game:
First progress with concept art
As we mentioned recently, we’re planning to create more concept arts on the future especially to plan the different areas of the game. So far, I got around to create a few (rather simple) images of new areas. The following is called Rhombus Square – a futuristic city in the middle of the sea:
Yeah, could be more professional… drawing concept art like this isn’t really my area of expertise. But it’s enough to communicate the idea I had in mind. We plan to get some other artists to help us with more detailed concept art. :D
Progress with graphics and thoughts about the future
In addition to that, T-Free started working on sprites for the crew on the cargo ship, mostly used for NPCs. Tina added some more details to the bridge of the cargo ship and Intero started composing a new track for the outside of the cargo ship.
Finally, we recently discussed in what direction we want to go with CrossCode and Radical Fish Games in general. Our plan is still to work full-time on our games eventually. These days, we’re getting more determined to really get serious about this. Thus, we try to fix a date, aligned with our studies, when Radical Fish Games will finally start through as a company.
…What about that Autumn Milestone?
Awww… we hoped you’d forget. :D
Well, it’s true. We had a milestone set around this time.
The good news is: We did some of the planned things.
The bad news: Unfortunately not all of it.
We finished Web Audio support for Music. We also made a lot of progress with the outer cargo ship area. However, we didn’t even start implementing battle techs and didn’t get as far with the plot as we planned.
Why so slow? We had some difficulties when creating graphics for the outside of the cargo ship. We also had to focus more on our studies again at times, especially since the semester break ended recently.
Now, even though things went a bit slow, we’re still very motivated about CrossCode! So we’ll make absolutely sure to finish the Autumn Milestone until the end of this year!
And that’s all for this update!
Thanks to everybody tracking our project!
PS: IHeartPieGaming recently discovered the final challenge of CrossCode and actually beat it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbAWjfE2AkY&list=SPNvkYCNDB8pQM7yYax6rt-ybbuqkrvShh
4 Comments
Okay, you definitely should hire this guy for PR – he’s so nice and enthusiastic and I somehow feel he loves you honestly (don’t know where this impression comes from).
And great you’re getting forward with game mechanics; even if it’s apparently trivial, the idea of stairs and elevators makes the game feel much more dynamic.
But I don’t still see the relevance of more detailed concept art.
I see that working out a concept to create a more consistent world makes sense.
But what would be the benefit for the game of – for example – a more detailed Rhombus Square, except the artwork looked better?
I’d think a concept in the style you already got there would sufficiently work.
(I simply don’t know – it was actually a question, not a suggestion.)
Hi Topp.
We’ll definitely contact IHeartPieGaming whenever there is new stuff for him to let’s play, that’s for sure. :D
About the concept art:
The concept art you see here is just a very abstract idea for the area. You can hardly make out any details, e.g. how the buildings look like in close up.
I think a more detailed concept art has two advantages:
1. You can fix it and have a great reference for multiple artists to work on the same area, making sure everything will match together, more or less
2. You have a nice picture you can show around for marketing purposes (e.g. for crowd funding campaigns).
Quite frankly, if I would work alone, I would just go ahead and sprite my own chipset, because I have the idea clearly in my mind. However, when you have to work with other people, this approach doesn’t work all too well. That’s something we realized the hard way the past few months. That’s why we think concept art will help us out.
Those GIFs. Man, those GIfs. XD
What about magical teleporters? Can she go there?
Or to somewhere without colliders?
Seriously, this is getting more and more awesome. What happens if you place a backwards stair tile, though? Fun glitchy stuff, or does it handle it as a wall?
And finally, for this deadline… release a new version that lets people mess around from the dev console?
Hopefully?
Hi Someone!
Some kind of teleporters is definitely something we will add.
Backwards stair tiles will simply block like it’s a wall. It even works decently from the side. It’s still not very precise for ball collision, but that’s something we can still improve.
About a new release: Sorry, but it’ll take some time until we’ll publish another release. That won’t happen at the end of this year. We plan to go for something big.