Nearing a playable product

Welcome to the week of big bosses!

For those who follow me on twitter you already know what I’ve been up to this week. I’ve been creating various end of level bosses, and managed to get four done which means I still have at least two to go (with the option of adding another area to the game, requiring yet another boss).

The above video is a bit of a spoiler, but I also plan on keeping the other bosses a secret for as long as possible, so don’t worry.. it’s not a big spoiler you’ll see this boss pretty early in the game anyway ;)

The bosses vary from still-standing, to fast moving and even a multi-part boss. It’s been really fun process of creating them, the only real problem I had was coming up with new designs every-time.

I actually create the bosses by first drawing them, and usually while I draw them, the ideas on how it should move and act automatically start flowing. After I draw the full boss, I look at splitting him up into various separate parts, and then I start writing the code to make it all work in the game.

Besides the bosses I’ve also done many other tweaks and improvements. One such small detail is the fact that all enemies now have a similar “black duck army” hat making them look more organized !

As for the game flow, I’m still pondering about the missions and as you can see from the video above right now the missions are not even shown. The way I had the missions, didn’t really add to the game in anyway. It was just a mission description that basically said “take down the towers” or “save 3 hostages” which all boil down to you running through the level, killing everything, and flying out at the end of the level..  which you also do if there are no missions.. so: pointless!

So perhaps I’ll go back to the original Gunslugs mission objectives, and have them as a little extra besides the normal gameplay.. or perhaps I’ll just have no missions at all, the game won’t be less fun or less interesting if I remove them.

Finally, I’m getting a lot of questions on “when is it released!?”, which is cool cause that means you people wanna play this, but really, I don’t know when it’s done!  Possibly still at the end of this year (2014), but since this game is already growing in scope, it will also require more time to port it to all the various platforms and test those versions.

Also there are still a bunch of things I have to add and implement. The weapons right now are just silly and don’t make much difference, also the characters all pretty much play the same right now, and the whole coin collecting thing is pretty much pointless cause right now nothing is being done with the coins! :D

So many things I still need to do and work on, and that’s excluding ideas I have as “extra” that I’d love to add but haven’t even started on yet..

so.. it’s done when it’s done! I’m working as fast as I can ;)   You can, and you should, sign up to the Orangepixel newsletter if you don’t wanna miss the release or possibly early playable demos or early access thingies.. who knows ;)

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