Now this changes everything! With this many enemies, the entire battlefield changes. Melee combat that was once like Afro Samurai becomes more like Dynasty Warriors. Attacks and weapons need to be much larger scale to account for this massive crowd. Explosives send groups of enemies flying. Don’t get your hopes up though, this probably won’t be in the final game… we were just stress testing AI performance.

Multi-threading has some neat side-effects! When shots orbit around the planet, their trails are recorded in memory. In some cases they’ll flash this ghost image for a split second. Normally this data is meaningless, but this does give us a great idea for a new weapon…

Pew pew! Max sits cozy as he rolls around in a Dredge tank, the Defender. Nimble and powerful, the Defender is driven using dual-stick controls (Robotron, Smash TV, Geometry Wars). There are a few variations of Defenders with different weaponry. Located on a planet in the Arcadia Galaxy, there sit 4… just enough for a rolling squadron in multiplayer.

We had a bit of fun recently and experimented more with post-processing. By altering brightness, contrast, and saturation on the final image, we can get effects like the one pictured above. There probably won’t be a need for such extreme usage, but subtle implementation would enhance the mood of a galaxy. The hot galaxy could get a sunburned high contrast look, whereas colder environments get more of a desaturated effect. Nuclear weapons (spoiler) could invert the image temporarily. I personally like the pink bad guys.

We’ve just started revisiting all of the planets in Max Blastronaut. Originally they were pretty basic spheres, with nothing too complex while we focused on combat and shooting. Now we’re working on environment-specific gameplay, and here’s one of the first examples. Nestled deep in a crater on this Mars-inspired planet is a Dredge Command Center. While active, it controls seven satellites in orbit searching for any threats on the surface. When locked on, a satellite fires rounds until you’ve managed to escape its red dot laser beam. Take out the Command Center to disable the satellites, or run around as bait to let the incoming fire destroy any bad guys nearby.

Here’s another behind-the-scenes look at Max Blastronaut. This time we construct a scene, node by node. Starting off extremely basic (which is pretty much how the game looked a year ago), it quickly builds into what we have today. In order of appearance, this clip shows: the skycube, background ships, sky objects (asteroids, planet rings), planets, enemies, players, weapons, headlights, transparent items (nebulae, particles, laser beams), post-processing (god rays, bloom, lens flare), and finally, depth of field.

The latest fun feature we’ve added is the ability to shoot while on foot. Originally you had to blast into orbit to engage in shooting combat, and planet combat was reserved for hand-to-hand* fighting. Now when you destroy a mech, his arms go flying off and you can pick them up and go all Smash TV style!

*fist-to-face

Just before Turkey Day, we added a bit of visual polish with depth of field. Most dramatic during cutscenes, depth of field will be used when necessary to add a cinematic feel to shots. We may explore using it during gameplay to exaggerate scale as well.

If you haven’t seen this image before, you’ve missed a huge update! We added 12 new screenshots to the Max Blastronaut website with our latest video, so go check ‘em out. They showcase a bunch of recent features we’ve been staying up all night adding. And yes, batting a guy into space is as fun as it looks!

Here’s an overdue status update of Max Blastronaut… new galaxies, new weapons, new enemies, and generally just a lot more than we’ve shown before! We’re getting real close to a solid game experience. Check out Max Blastronaut’s official website to see a new video and a few new screenshots!