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

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.

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!

Appropriately nicknamed “The Hummingbird” for its whimsical shape, these refineries have been planted throughout the Dredge galaxy to mine for spacefuel. Their blistering laser beams bore through planets, burning anything in the way. Our hero may be able to use that to his advantage…

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.

Warp speed! Here’s an early shot of one of our cutscenes, as Max travels to another galaxy in search of enemy Dredge miners. It’s pretty hypnotizing in motion.

This week we’ve got something a little more behind-the-scenes: the game with some debug data. While developing, having these features turned on helps us see what’s happening behind the curtain. All the lines mean different things… the tri-colored axis-looking things are matrices. They help identify orientations of items, from enemies to planet objects. The green curved line with all the red spikes is the path that Max takes when he blasts into Orbit. It helps give Max a more fluid look when he transitions to space. The sharp tan line on the bottom left is a path for one of the spaceships in the background. It only uses a few data points, but the ships know to form a round path through them. The long red lines are the shooting directions of the enemies. They’re all shooting to the right because they’re either really stupid or they were shooting where the player last was. Probably the latter.
On the right side of the image are three of the game’s frame buffers. The top is bloom, which represents the higher values of the image, isolated and blurred. The middle image is the god rays, which is a stencil image blurred along the direction of the sun’s rays. These are both added to the main image. The bottom is the shadow map (blue because we only use one channel of the render target).