Aftermath Aftermath

Hello readers,

We’ve been away from the game for a while, and thus away from the blog, but, as promised, here is a final report on our game. Let’s start off with what we’ve got done:

• A playable and polished game

Ha! Well that was easy. In reality, though it took lots of time and we still have a lot to go. While it’s true you can sit down and play our game against the AI and to some extent with other people online. If you haven’t already, watch our presentation for the gameplay video (from our last post), then check out these sweet screenshots, then we’ll get into where we go from here.

Symposium Aftermath

Hello everyone!

The RIT Summer Innovation Symposium was a great success!  You can watch our presentation here:

[vimeo 27832873]

Look forward to a report on how much we got done, and what we still have left to do.

Crustacean Extermination

But not in a bad way! This title is in regards to our extreme game debugging. We’ve spent the past week removing the problems in the game and adding more polish to it. There have only been 4 of us here, but we’ve gotten a lot done. Most of the issues came out of the new C* system, but it’s been reworked, and everything else has been made to match. The bugs ranged from pesky to game-breaking, but we’ve worked most all of them out:

• C* now runs like a dream!
• Builders build again!
• Area-of-Effect and Damage-Over-Time units work again
• Other units’ special abilities have been restored
• Units no longer randomly disappear
• Triggers now function using multiple actions
• The MEAT now rolls properly (it was moonwalking for a while)
• The hand is sized and functioning properly

We’ve also added a good deal of polish to the game:

Lockdown Countdown: Ultimatum

Well, folks. It’s over. Sort of. In about an hour is when we had hoped to have all our content generated. And we mostly did it. There are a couple things left to work on, but we are ready to enter testing mode next week. Here’s what we got done this week:

• A complete reskin of the user interface (see yesterday’s screenshot).
• Revamped deck building & saving
•  Murder, MEATless Deathmatch, and Builder-Only Modes
• The Stagemaker
• Core AI offensive/defensive mechanics, wall-building, and deck-generation
• Collision and A* Pathfinding have been combined into a streamlined grid system (cleverly labeled “C*” by our programing lead)

All things considered, that’s some good progress. Our AI is tough

Lockdown Countdown 2: A Quickie

We’re all hard at work, so this one’s short. We’ve already found a bunch of bugs for next week, but have to stay on track for content creation. We’ve hit a snag for making levels due to a problem with the stagemaker, but hopefully we’ll FINALLY be done with that thing by the end of the day. Here’s a quick shot of our re-skinned menus in the new deck builder! Look out for tomorrow’s big lockdown update!

Lockdown Countdown 1: Beginnings of Endings

The pre-lockdown week has gone well so far. The deck builder has been completed functionally and we’ve added a new game type: Survival/Murder Mode.

In this mode, your army stands against oncoming waves of enemies of increasing strength. The playability of the mode will get better as the AI improves, but for now most randomly-chosen enemies randomly choose which units to attack. The waves and win-condition are all in place, though, so as soon as the AI gets fully developed it should play like a charm.

Our artist has been hard at work making icons for the perks and other assorted things. Check out this sweet drawing of the tongue-eating louse, one of the active perks! Our other artist will be retooling many of the GUI backdrops including one using Gorton and his crab shack!

The AI is moving along, but some collision-based speedbumps have slowed down progress. The upcoming week of bug testing will do the project will do some good. Look forward to Lockdown Countdown Part 2, hopefully with some images of the new GUI.

Comic Con 2011

Hello Dear Readers,

How’s it going? We are doing well here, in San Diego, showcasing our game at Comic Con! Come to our booth in the second stall in the men’s restroom by the west entrance. We have live demos of Crustacean Frustration, plus some sneak peaks of our secret new projects! We even met Mark Wahlberg and he says he wants to voice the Wall-Reinforcer shrimp!

Crustacean Restoration

After the destruction from last week’s changes, we buckled down this week (in a mid-quarter crunch time) and restored most of the lost functionality.  With these changes, we’re ready to move onward to the cooler parts of our game and start getting it ready to be complete.

Building, behavior-setting, and most parts of the heads-up-display have returned.  Likewise, matches are once again mostly operational.  We even made some more changes to multiplayer, and are getting closer and closer to having that perfect model for it.  On the sidelines of the cleanup

Content Spotlight: Some Shrimp

So far all the units we’ve shown you have been faction-specific (at least in appearance).  While the crabs and lobsters are dealing with age-old conflict, the other crustaceans of the sea, the shrimp, are caught in the middle of it.  They take a neutral mercenary-style approach to the war, playing for both sides.  The largest role the shrimp play is as the builders, however there are other units.  In this post, we’ll look at the two boss shrimp: The Ghost Shrimp and the Boxing Shrimp.

The boxing shrimp is the largest of the shrimp units, and is a strong fighter.

Website Background (First Look)

Our web guy just sent us this sweet sample of part of the background for our crab-shack-themed website. It looks so good, we might even use it in the game! Nice work, buddy!

Be sure to click on the image to see it full size, in all its glory! Stay tuned for more cool stuff!