Pat:
Another week has gone by already? Felt like a day! Either way, this week we put a crazy amount of goodness into the game. For my part, there were updates to particle effects (code), the in-game camera, cinematic cameras, enemy AI movement and flocking, game progression, and memory management. All that along with updating some of the newer enemies and the first boss made for a busy few days. Kinda reminds me of my time working QA at Volition during crunch, only here at Coin App we’re just 3 guys, not 100+. We don’t get to spread out the work quite as much, but it is easier to get face time with the game designers, technical artists, and programmers, because they are all the same guy… Panya!
Dan:
Enemies! This week I made a couple of new enemies, mobos* and drill bits. They are definitely going to provide some nice variety and different gameplay.
Panya:
This was a huge week with lots of things getting done for our upcoming milestone. Visual details are getting all the necessary polish. Ship exhausts have a nice screen flare and emit a fluid trail of particles and help give the galaxy its final touch, along with Dan’s sweet new nebula. Particles got a lot of art attention this week, and more shader optimizing. Words are kind of meaningless for most of these visual updates, so we’ll have screenshots and a new video in the upcoming weeks.
*morbidly obese - in reference to a person, or in this case, a game character
Pat:
More optimization this week, implementing a new enemy boss, bug fixes, AI tweaks, a bit more UI polish, and a lot of time cruising around Offworld, where overlord Brandon Boyer was kind enough to give us another shout out this week. Thanks Brandon!
Dan:
Spent a lot of time prepping and exporting models this week, setting up galaxy rings, asteroids and debris. I started concepting/modeling a few more enemies and I opened up Visual Studio this week and “wrote some code”… haha more like copy and pasted code.
Panya:
The bulk of this week I was doing a bit of optimizing, cleaning up shader math and using every texture channel available. We’re not out of memory, but getting performance as good as possible requires some low-level cleanup. Most of which is still a bit over my head. I also managed to get new shaders in to support Dan’s new space art, which is looking damn sweet, incase you haven’t seen the latest video.
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:
Pat:
UI (that’s “user interface” for you non-nerds out there) finally got some attention this week. UI is a shining example of us at Coin App combining our varied skill sets (graphic design, animation, engineering, tech art) to build a solution that is both beautiful and functional. I’ll let Dan and Panya say a bit more about the latest updates…
Dan:
This week held some more UI work polish for me, it’s coming together quite nicely. Panya also had me working on some prototype art (bushes and plants) for the planets, it has really helped give the planets a unique silhouette. And rounding out this week I did some more character optimizations today! Bling, Bling!!!!!!!!!?
Panya:
UI is good to go! The main menu, pause menu, and attract screen all work perfectly. Smooth transitions, fancy animations, and the little beeps and boops give it a nice touch. The galaxy objects get continued work as well; now they support rotation to give them subtle motion. I also had to go back and optimize a few shaders I wrote when I didn’t know what I was doing (about a week ago) to get the framerate as butter as possible.
While Pat’s been plugging away at garbage collection, Dan’s been making his own version of space garbage… leftover debris from the Blastro/Dredge battles. Our mothership just exploded, and the molten steel pieces are shooting sparks everywhere.
We joked about having corpses floating in space, but that would change the game’s rating… probably from E (everyone) to A (awesome).
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.
