CrossCode Update #60
Feats, puzzles, music, and a new forum

Hi again! One week can be pretty short, indeed. We still managed to make progress with CrossCode, prepare the crowdfunding campaign, and even created a new forum for you!

More Puzzle elements

In last week’s update you saw a very early preview of the new Bounce Switches. Those switches are now complete – here is how it works:

bounce-switch

You need to throw one ball to hit all those corner blocks and finally the bounce switch in order to activate it.
While this might seem fairly straight forward in this example, there are many ways to make these kind of puzzles more interesting, just by adapting the environment and mixing in other puzzle elements.

One of these elements can be the new “ball manipulators” (that’s at least how we call them for now). Those things will react with your balls and change their behavior, for instance like this:

ball-manipulators

These manipulators simply modify the direction the ball is flying. We have plenty more ideas for modifiers, such as slowing down the ball or changing the balls element. You can expect a lot of puzzles in CrossCode mixing in ball manipulators and bounce switches.

More music

Who wants some new music? Intero compose two new themes for CrossCode: Autumn rise, which will be played within exploration mode and “rhombus Dungeon”, which you’ll hear during the puzzle mode.

…Yes, we had music for these parts before – those where place-holders. :P

You can listen to the new tracks in this playlist:

How do you like the new tracks?

Feats + Menu content

R.D. worked on the menu, first adding a very essential feature that has been missing so far: credit and play time display in the menu start screen:

credits-and-time

Additionally, he added a small treasure counter in the map menu as was request by some of you:

treasure-count

We might still improve that chest symbol.

Afterwards he turned his attention to something completely new: the synopsis sub menu. There you can read a summary of what has happened plot-wise, see your quest log or get more background information about the game’s lore. And finally, you’ll check a list of feats (aka achievements).

Stefan and I planned the internal model for feats, how to store and update them. All of this has been implemented. What remains is implementing the GUI and, of course, coming up with many interesting feats.

And there we thought you might have some good ideas for us:

Can you think of any interesting feats/achievements you’d like to see in CrossCode?

Forum

Before you write about feats and other stuff in the comments below, we’d like to introduce a new place where you are free to discuss CrossCode – or anything else, really.

We’re talking about the new forum:

forum.cross-code.com

Feel free to create an account, open a thread or leave some posts!

And that’s all for today’s update.

Until next week! :D

19 Comments

  • I was just wondering if you would have a crosscode demo for wii u, also I was wondering what rewards there would be for each tier in rewards for the crowdfunding event and what could be possible stretch goals when crosscode gets funded. On a side note I was first user that was not part of the crosscode team on the forum registered :).

  • Spookiest Cheese on January 20, 2015 at 1:57 pm said:

    I’m REEEEALLY looking forward to a self updating crosscode. It justt doesn’t feel right to go and erase all my progress with each update.

  • sunstrykr44 on January 21, 2015 at 2:10 am said:

    Really like the new Bounce Switches. Also the new music is so good . =D

  • Loving all the new development on this project. ^^ Very inspiring and greatly looking forward to the release!

  • This project is so great. Have kept this one bookmarked in my innovative indie games folder :)

  • Hi! How will these updates work over time? Will you put these updates officially in the game at the end of each month, or how does it work? Thanks!

    • Updates work differenlty depending on the platform. As we want to use Steam for desktop distribution, updating will happen via the build-in auto-updater. For the web version we just have to put the new files on the server :)
      For the early access our goal is to give you an update each month so at the end of a month sounds pretty good! :D

  • Deathguy46 on January 24, 2015 at 6:55 am said:

    Hi! I’m really excited for the new update, things look really awesome and I can’t wait to listen to that sweet, sweet music, but I can’t seem to figure out how to play this most recent update. I tried re-downloading the demo but that seems to be the same thing, not updated. Any pointers on how to play the new update offline?

    • Ok, I start to see the problem here. :D
      People reading the title “CrossCode Update” expect that this is an actual update of the game. But that’s not the case.

      We merely name our blog posts about recent work done on CrossCode “CrossCode Updates”. This work is not necessarily released yet. So… I guess we better find a different name for our blog posts. xD

      To answer your question: Sorry, there is no update of the game itself so far. We’ll release another update around mid to end of February when we will start our Indiegogo campaign.

  • Will there be a wii u demo of crosscode coming soon?

    • Hi there!
      Sorry, but we can’t really promise a Wii U demo for now. First of all, I’m not exactly sure IF we can do this with Nintendo’s policy, and second, there might be a bit of work involved to get the current state of the game running on Wii U. We plan to do this at a later point.

  • Well, I’m pretty amazed with the perfection of the system mechanics and of course with the motivation that your team has got!

    I also wanted to say thanks for creating the Forum, it should be great to discuss things around.

    As I want you guys to read my feedback, I’ll post it here and there.
    I finally got a chance to play the demo and I’m a fan of your project. I’m telling everybody I know that this is gonna be one of the best indie games I’ll ever play! I’m even wondering if will be a Cross-Code 2 in the future due to its greatness, lol.

    So, what I can tell so far… I think the martial arts could be used with elementals too, otherwise I believe people won’t use it so often… I say that because I found that using the melee art or any other were cooler than just using ordinary (powerful though) elemental attacks. Which should come in handy only in the beginning. (At least that was for me.)

    And something I found strange… The overall NPC’s.. I mean the side ones, which are not main. They could have more colors on them. They look shady and scary being grayed out like it was a foe. Please check on that.

    And now the final thanks again! You guys are the best. And I know that you’ll amaze us even more with your creativity and skills!
    Cheers from Brazil! ;)

    PS: I know this is kinda big, but that’s what I kept so far to tell you for a long time. Heh.

    • Hi K0media,
      thanks for the extensive feedback! :D

      Glad to hear you like CrossCode that much. CrossCode 2 might be an option for the future… well… after we completed the first game.

      About arts and element modes: element modes will feature their own skill tree with their own arts in the final version. In fact: the elemental arts will even be more powerful than the neutral arts. So yeah, it’s all WIP.

      About the black NPC faces. Those things are mostly a “compromise” to have faces for all NPCs without having a huge workload with it. If we happen to be very successful with the crowdfunding, we might considering doing fully colored faces for all NPCs. Until then we will stick with the black shadow versions – or we might experiment around and find a style that’s still simple to do but not quite as creepy looking. Maybe we keep it black/white, a bit brighter and with visible eyes?

  • I hope this game there will be a PvP. And i hope there will be designed equipment. If we changed our equipment, the Avatar will have a different colors.

    Great game anyway. I expect to see a brilliant new ideas from you guys.
    Continue your masterpiece :D

  • comprend riiiiiiiiiien c que en anglais

  • hey hey hey

Post a Comment

Your email is kept private. Required fields are marked *