April is coming

hol2_blogupdate

April is coming! the game is not done! PANIC!  … or don’t..

The last few weeks I had some “radio silence” as I was working on various other projects and literally not touched Heroes of Loot 2 code or even played it. Most of that work had to do with rewriting a game-engine that I will talk about in a blog soon as other stuff will unfold in the coming weeks.

Some of my time was also put in modifying a few Android versions for release on another distribution channel, again something I literally am not allowed to talk about which is starting to make this update a bit silly!

I also worked on Space Grunts making it ready for a release on.. yes.. I can say this: the Mac App store!  Honestly I have no idea what that will do, is it even a platform that people use? (personally I never look there). With some luck it will get a nice feature there, and we’ll see how that works out.

Finally I’ve been helping the Engine software guys with various questions about the messy code I like to call Gunslugs 1 !  ..what that means?  it means Gunslugs 1 is coming to Nintendo 3DS in (hopefully) a few weeks to a few months time! Making it the second Orangepixel game on there and possibly not the last one.. again, something that we’ll see how it works out.

OH and finally-finally, I’ve been prepping Space Grunts for a nice Google Play feature, which should go live the 2nd week of April, more on that also…

hol2_hotness

So all that stuff distracted me from Heroes of Loot 2 development, and I honestly started to be a bit grumpy. This week I decided to focus fully on HoL2 again.

A bunch of new level-settings are now added to the game, from castle-surroundings to more hellish-levels. There are about 3 or 4 new tile-sets in the mix in the last couple of days, and I think I can squeeze out a few other ideas.

Some new monsters are added, a rat-king, a skull-king and mini-skulls. Also some new hazards like sharp razor blades moving across the floor to arrow-shooting walls. Some of these are now also linked to “quests” to make the gameplay interesting in all area’s.

The up-side of taking 1 or 2 week breaks from working on a game is usually a fresh new look at things and a fresh look at adding new content.

I worked on a lot of balancing, so that some monsters only show up later in the game, and trying to make sure the levelling-up of your characters goes hand in hand with the difficulty of the game.

hol2_parallax

There is now also a nice parallax layer on-top of the screen, which makes you feel like looking into the game from a high view point. It’s used sparsely so that it doesn’t get annoying , and the layer will be transparent when it is above you and your surrounding so that it never blocks the action.

So as I mentioned, April is coming, and the likely ness of this game seeing a release in April is simply: no way. BUT the options of a pre-order and early-access are still very much possible. The game is at a decent playable state, and altho a lot of balancing has to be done and a lot of features need to be build-out more, it is all working and fairly bug-free.

I’ll concentrate on some of the bigger things in the coming weeks, like adding leaderboards, cleaning up the user-interface, and adding some more tutorial-animations and instructions and such. We’ll see if I can get comfortable doing the pre-order and early-access in a few weeks from now!

 

 

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