Pat:
I mainly focused on performance and memory management this week. Big thanks to Shawn Hargreaves and Renaud Bédard for providing tons of great information and saving me from a mental meltdown.

Dan:
Another fuzzy week goes by… Worked on a destroyed Blastro mother-ship to be used in a cinematic fly-by… Refined some User Interface stuffs… and down-res’d some of our enemies…

Panya:
More code work on UI, but moving on to the Pause menu and tutorial overlays. They nicely slide on screen in stages instead of popping on all at once. I also started outlining the requirements for our cinematic cameras, so we can have dramatic camera motions and some basic storytelling during the game intro.

Pat:
Most of this week I did things that are too nerdy to discuss. No seriously. If the words “garbage collection” make you think of a big truck showing up at your curb once a week to take away your trash, then you obviously don’t know the joy (pain?) of managed programming. Regardless, I can say that things I improved/unbroke this week include our 4-player join-anytime co-op, ammo pickups, sparks, more shadows, damaged enemies, and throwing weapons/bombs.

Dan:
This week, I worked on the trailer for our second game. Oh, and I made a new droid enemy. And, Panya got my UI artwork working in the game this week!

Panya:
I’ve been trying to take some tasks off Pat’s plate, and one that is somewhat independent of the game code is the UI. With some of Dan’s artwork and ideas, we now have a flashier HUD. No more static images: these things will have motion, shine, animated glows… pretty much anything that can be done in a shader. Right now it’s only working for 1-player, but I’m sure 4-player is just a few “if” statements… (famous last words)

There are a bunch of tweaks we’ve made to the game over the past few months.  Here’s a little update of Max Blastronaut:

A few months ago, the game looked like this. We had a vehicle in with basic (boring) physics, a few enemies, an empty galaxy, a working radar, and some pretty rudimentary gameplay.

Now, we’ve got much more! Shown here are Max’s new look (involving a fancy shader that includes a working fuel meter & thrusters), updated enemy shaders, animated background elements (earth, ships) and floating nebula clouds, screen-space ambient occlusion, shadows, blinking headlights, and you can’t see it in this screenshot, but a new-and-improved melee system and much more satisfying vehicle physics. Next up on the task list is an update to the HUD and adding more variety to the enemies and their behaviors. And that scary boss guy, of course. Can’t wait.

Pat:
I spent the majority of my week working on updates and bugfixes in the melee combat system. Also implemented a nice little cubic spline setup to smooth out the movement for when Max Blastronaut jumps from the planet out to orbit.

Dan:
Two more enemies, that’s what i made this week. Ohh, and two new grenades.

Panya:
I jumped around all week again. Got animations done for a new enemy that Dan created, put in more sound effects, and made a special class for Galaxy objects. Now we can have much more than just a skycube in the background, which gives us great potential for fancy shaders on stuff in space (suns, planets, asteroid showers). I also put in a bunch more hours on Call of Duty 4, and Prestiged once.

The Bosses in Max Blastronaut have gotten a facelift, a little more personality and wide variety of attacks. Watch your back!

Pat:
One word: shadows

Dan:
This week was spent mostly at the doctors… don’t worry, I’m fine, I just didn’t get to work on anything too substantial… In between my doc appts I worked a bit on a new enemy model and a bunch of small miscellaneous art tasks like new grenades and headlights!

Panya:
Galaxy 1, the first level of the game, got a revised layout. Planets, motherships, and ship paths were all organized to frame nicely with the cinematic cameras. I also got a volume-light hack working in the game with some art help from Dan and code help from Pat. Now all the enemies can have headlights, which will be a useful indicator of their health. Gives new meaning to “punch their lights out!”

We’ve been talking about the melee combat improvements lately, without going into any detail. Originally, the on-foot combat system was pure button masher. While this is a pretty proven mechanic, it organically evolved into a more elaborate (and humorous) system:

Yes, enemies can be used as weapons; and if the enemy is holding a weapon, even better!  The characters also got a little upgrade, courtesy of a normal map and rim lighting.  It’s all coming together…

Pat:
This week saw some interesting additions to the melee combat system in our game. In the most recent of updates, I added the ability for skilled players to grapple with bad guys, pick them up, punch them, spin them, or turn them into living projectiles by throwing them at their evil cohorts.

Dan:
Another week gone in a blink! I spent a good amount of time this week fighting some battles against Flash and in code, prepping the soon to be launched MaxBlastronaut.com website.

Panya:
A lot of development this week, with a side of design. I did a ton of new animations for the ever-improving melee combat system. It’s a blast to play and even more humorous to watch. A bit of shader work happened here and there, as we polish up the game for our “first” playable… the game’s improved so much, it feels like we’re already working on the next version! So it’s really like a fourth or fifth playable.

Hi there, loyal readers! We’re going to start a weekly developer diary at Coin App, starting with Max Blastronaut. For those interested in the inner workings of game development, it will probably go a little something like this:

Pat:
I spent a bit of time this week getting the 4-player co-op vehicle mechanic working. We now have a driver (who steers the vehicle and gets to run over bad guys), a front passenger (who aims and fires the vehicle turret), and two rear passengers who hang off the sides of the rover and use bad guys for polo practice. I also worked on improving our melee combat system, improving the combo setup and adding the ability to link regular and strong attacks together for maximum damage.

Dan:
This week I spent most of my time in Photoshop and Illustrator, making diffuse, normal and spec maps for the first boss Max B. will encounter. In addition to that I made a little bit of this and a little bit of that for a new super secret project we got going on here at Coin App…

Panya:
Playing, playing, playing! I spent most of the week refining the game design, making sure all the pieces fit, and planning for the melee system to be a bit more robust than your average beat-em up. More melee animations, more sound effects, and better tuned game values also got in the game.

So if you’ve got interest in the day to day workings at Coin App, check in every Friday to read what we’ve been up to!

We haven’t had a media update in a while, so it’s about that time! We’ve been on the grind getting more features in. Some of the updates are 4-player co-op, new weapons, and just more solid gameplay in general. Head on over to the Games page to see the latest! Add comments, we’d love to hear your honest feedback!