The Show Me The Games sale is now live, featuring 32 indie games on sale for the next 7 days. check it out by clicking the image below:
Infested Planet Beta is one of the games on sale. I’ve discounted it 50% from the final game price for this week.
And please do what you can to help us get word out about the sale, so tell your friends, even tell your enemies. Remember, this sale is 100% indie with nobody else taking a cut of the money you pay.
Hey gang, I’ve put together the patch with a bunch of improvements. Rather than list all of the changes here, you can refer to past Rocket Reports to get the info. Here are my favourites:
If you don’t own the game yet, you can buy a preorder-beta version right now HERE.
I’m at GDC right now, showing off the game to everyone who I bump into.
When I get back to Vancouver, I’ll release the new patch.
This week’s report is going to be fairly short.
I’ve been working on campaign missions and the latest one is a re-worked structures tutorial. My aim has been not to make tutorials be cumbersome, so this is more like a mission where you see turrets for the first time.
One think that I’m experimenting with is more scripted events. This missions ends with a large battle where you ave to hold off an alien attack.
That’s it for this week. Next week I’ll try to get a patch out to you guys. There’s been a lot of changes to the game and I think that it’s time to release them into the wild.
Last week was quite exciting, development-wise.
Guess what? Those helicopters that I added to the game last time can now do airstrikes.
I haven’t worked the UI for them fully, but soon they’ll be a bona-fide part of the game.
I also reworked the first 3 missions with character dialogue and journals. Writing all this stuff has been a bunch of fun.
Next week – more writing the story, making missions and maybe a new helicopter technology.
Welcome back to Rocket Report everyone.
Last week was busy for me, but not in the “making games” sense. I sorted out a lot of GDC stuff and finished some other jobs that were hanging around. Sometimes being indie means working on contracts, spreadsheet and not games.
I did get some improvements into the game though. I fixed a couple of bugs and tested the game with a couple of friends.
My tests show that most players don’t know where the ammo bar is, or how exactly grenades work. I put in a couple of tweaks to make this better. The first thing is that ammo crates and the grenade command now give info messages if something is off.
Another change is that when the ammo counter gets used, it emits a wave to draw the player’s attention. Hopefully people will notice this when tossing grenades.
The last thing is a small one, but one that’s been bugging me. The red highlight on the grenade command can get lost easily, so I changed it to a glowing orange, with a ring around the object.
Besides the game changes, I’ve been writing the game story. After that’s done soon, I’m going to be changing the missions to follow the plot.
Hey everyone, I’m falling asleep right now, so I’ll keep this brief. Here’s a quick photo tour of last week’s work.
Human buildings emit a soft blue light now. I like this because it adds more character to the map.
Look! A talking head! All text in Infested Planet will be said by characters, not some sort of AI-narrator god. I still need to rework all the existing missions to do this.
I’ve also added pre-mission flavour text for the characters. I’ll also need to write a bunch of it.
Finally, helicopters! I should just stop here on a high note. =) Ok, you want to know what they’re for? Right now they can be triggered from mission scripts to bring stuff onto the map. Maybe more in the future?
Before I go sleep for a few hours, here’s what’s on the plate for next week. Since all the groundwork is done for telling the game’s story, I need to write a plot outline and character bios. That’s maybe 20% done right now. Then I’m going to start updating the existing missions to fit the story. If there’s time left, I want to make a new mission with the bombardment mutation.
Some of you asked when you’ll be able to see the changes from the Rocket Reports in the game.
All of the things that I talked about for the past 3 weeks will be available in a future patch. I haven’t set a date yet, but I think that a monthly patch would work well. I will take all the work up to that date and bundle it up into a patch.
The Rocket Reports are there to let you know what’s happening with the game and a way to keep me motivated. =)
I need your help! I’m looking for someone to help fix a thorny bug. I can’t get it to happen on my computer, but maybe one of you has seen it.
Does this look familiar? Textures missing from the walls, text showing as blank or appearing as coloured blocks.
If you have this happen on your computer, drop me an email at support@rocketbeargames.com and I’ll send you a special version of the game that I think might fix it.
Welcome to the third Rocket Report folks. I think that I’ll keep doing these on Mondays – I work over the weekend, so Friday is weird for me.
What’s new in the world of Infested Planet these days? This week was very productive for me.
I added two new music tracks. Mark Wiebe (of Guitaro fame) composed them for me a long while ago, but the game was using way too much memory for music. So, last week I rewrote the music code to stream and added 2 new awesome songs.
Another thing that I was playing around with is a new shading model. The map is darker near the walls now and the world looks more 3D. Also, I added more blobby purple goo hanging from the walls. Makes the map look more detailed.
Another graphical tweak I added is the ability to mask out portions of the map. Now I can make it look like the game levels have entrances and exits. It always bugged me that you were fighting in a place with no exits – how’d you get there anyway?
“The Bulwark” got additional mission scripting. I’m still not done with it, but the player gets hints about using flamethrowers. Long-term plans are to have a helidrop of flamethrower crates, but they just appear now.
Finally (and I can’t quite show this via screenshots), I added screenshake. You won’t believe how great it is. Now when you toss a grenade the entire screen shudders. It makes me all tingly thinking about it. =P
A lot of times when I’m tired of working on the big features, I’ll start fixing small things that bug me. Here’s a list of some of these:
That’s it for this week. Come here next Monday to hear more about how the game is improving.
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