Yep. In case you couldn’t tell from the lack of posts around here, and the ominous hint in the last one, Coin App is closing its doors. A lot of lessons were learned, a lot of money was spent, and a lot of time was sacrificed. We ended up with a great product (although probably three years too late), and we had fun doing it. We’ll all be going our separate ways, but keeping in touch frequently.

Dan has been steady hustlin’ (his words, not mine) at Planet Moon in San Francisco. He’s working on fun stuff that I obviously can’t speak of because that’s just how the industry works. He won’t shut up about how awesome it is though.

Pat has been helping out the 2XL guys developing some secret stuff as well. Again, industry rules prohibit any mention of said secret stuff. But knowing Pat and 2XL’s track record, they’ve got some solid hits ahead of them.

As for me, I’ll be joining the Double Fine family as a Senior Visual Effects Artist. They’ve done great work in the past, and I can’t wait to see what they’ve got planned for the future. I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of what I’ll be doing there, but I am at liberty to say the place rocks.

And to our loyal readers, I want to thank all of you for following our story…all five of you.

It’s been two years since Coin App formed, so I think it’s about time we checked out what our time lapse camera has recorded since then. After it died, it managed to capture a few more shots, totaling almost 12,000 images. Even at 30 per second, that amounts to over 6 minutes of footage. Warning: this video is pretty long and boring, except for the end where everything dies.

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Happy Birthday, Jetpacks! Today we’re going back in time, to exactly a year ago. We had just gotten Max’s jetpack animation in game and were testing it out. The radar may have been working at this point also, but we cut it a couple of months later along with the entire Freespace mode. It turned out that making an open-world game is A LOT of work, especially for three developers building the engine at the same time. We chose to cut it early and focus on the fun parts of the game, punching and shooting. Max’s blasters emerge from the jetpack when he needs that extra firepower, and they animate in and out accordingly.

After taking over 10,000 images, our time lapse camera has finally passed away. He served us well, documenting our daily progress in ten-minute increments. He died at the young age of six. A point-and-click shouldn’t have had to endure the life he did. You will be missed, Canon.

Pat:
Last Saturday we got news that we placed 2nd in Microsoft’s 2009 Dream Build Play Competition. However, we don’t want to rest at that. There’s work to be done, content to be added, improvements to be made, and bugs to fix. Since the news about the competition, I’ve been working implementing Dan’s new Ice Droid enemy that can freeze Max in his tracks, a driller droid enemy that can surprise Max by drilling up underneath him, and another new Boss enemy who can shoot saw blades. Yes, you read that correctly, he shoots saw blades. You are not ready for this.

Dan:
Churned out some more models and textures this week. Updated the very cool, Galaxy 3 cube map. Finished up some work on a new enemy droid, the “Driller Droid”, he’s a pretty neat enemy with a mechanic that will have you running. Made a couple of new planet props, the Mining Cannon and Mining Derrick, both pretty neat, you’ll see how they integrate into the planet in the next few weeks. Other than that, working on some miscellaneous rigging and texturing today.

Panya:
Galaxy4 slowly got started this week, as well as continued work on Galaxy3. It’s neat seeing levels different than the one we’ve been staring at for the past few months. Boss3 got animated (the dual-saw guy) with a pretty unique mechanic that plays well with the round planets. I also got asteroids to impact planets, adding more danger to the environments. Whether it’s a driller droid, sun flares, or stray asteroids, you gotta keep moving! Sounds like an action game! Oh and we also celebrated our Dream Build Play win by grubbing at Houston’s. Ribs ftw.

After Dream Build Play, we started getting a bit more press. To help our readers, we’ve cleaned up a bit and changed our Media page to a Press page. You can check out Joystiq’s preview of Max Blastronaut from PAX. Read all about it!

The results are in! Max Blastronaut has placed second in Dream Build Play 2009! All those late nights, all that crunch, all that nail-biting, has finally paid off. We’re extremely happy with the results. And now, we celebrate by taking it a little easier*. Read all about the results at the Creator’s Club website.

*only 40 hours a week

You may have seen our subtle attempts to direct you to our presence on the web. Well, enough of that… we’re coming out and saying it directly! For an indie like us, a great way to get attention is through word-of-mouth. Most of you have been telling your friends, and that means a lot to us. If you haven’t joined the Coin App cult yet, pick your poison below! With all these fancy options there’s something for everyone. You can also follow our RSS feed if that’s your thing.

Pat:
Have you ever looked at our previous videos and seen the shadows look a bit low-resolution or blocky? Well, it was always my intention to come up with a better solution and I finally got around to it this week. Now we have much higher-quality shadows in both our close-up cut scenes and during general gameplay. In addition to the shadow improvements, I got Dan’s two latest vehicles, a single-seater tank and a hovercraft, playable in the game.

Dan:
Well, this week another new boss was born. “Boss 3″ is an arctic ice miner that carries a large dual saw… with very, very large blades. Also, “Boss 3″ is the first to show the Dredge miner’s true face, and he’s pretty ugly.

Panya:
This week i spent some time polishing up recent work. Still worked on the solar flare, trying to make it more visually obvious when it’s damaging the player. Galaxy2 has also been coming more to life, with a few of the ambient ships we have flying around Galaxy1. And every week/weekend I review and think about the big-picture of the game, to make sure it still all fits together with the story.

Pat:
This week I continued work on optimizing audio. Trying to remove all the garbage generated was quite a task! Also, a new game weapon got implemented with its resulting mushroom-cloud explosion. A new droid and cute/obese enemy went in as well. Features get added pretty quickly, now that we’ve got a solid foundation to build upon.

Dan:
Mudbox, 3DS Max, Photoshop, rinse and repeat! Worked on a new boss this week, “the grinder”, basically his arms are giant grinder like mechanisms… you can see how that would be a danger to Max Blastronaut. Screen shots to follow next week.

Panya:
This week we started work on the rest of the game! Finalizing the design is one thing, but really finalizing it is another. Settling on the current design as the final game, without creeping in features later, is tough. As we play more, we get more involved in the Max Blastronaut universe and think of new, fun ideas to implement. The game has matured so much from the original design, so in that sense, the organic design method has paid off. On the other hand, the danger is always improving the game but never shipping it. But as it stands today, I think we have a design that will be fun, diverse, and addresses some early gameplay feedback we’ve received.