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.

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.

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.

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!

The trails from last week’s update can be used for a variety of effects. In this video, the fireworks are just there to show how they’re used to complement the current explosion. When Max blasts into orbit, you can also see it in effect. It can even be used as a melee hit sprite when coupled with a concussion ring. Subtle but sweet!

A new feature we just got in is these sweet tron/snake trails. Right now they’re on all the time for really long, but they’ll get toned down and used for some of Max’s attacks. Unfortunately it’s killed productivity because I’ve spent the last hour trying to draw things.

My brother (a.k.a. brobot a.k.a. broseph a.k.a. broham&cheese) came out to visit Coin App a few days ago to get a break before heading back to work at Digital Domain. He recorded a little behind-the-scenes video of the latest version of Max Blastronaut while he was here:

One of the latest features we’ve been having a blast with in Max Blastronaut is gravity. Originally it was designed as a neat gimmick to give the player something else to play with - anything you toss or shoot around the planet will orbit indefinitely until it hits something. To our pleasant surprise, a bit of emergent gameplay was born! (yes, lame buzzword, but it’s the right one) Incorporating some of the recent updates (health bars, remote bombs, and tossing), you can see an example below: getting enemies to near death, then catching them with a tossed remote bomb… or seeing how many hammers can orbit without hitting the last guy:

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