The Daily Click

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Project Started:	10th November, 2012	Last Update:	4th November, 2013
Project Owner:	butterfingers	Project Members:
Project Type:	2D Cover Based Shootemup	Project Progress:
More Info:	peanutbutterfingers.co.uk/urnotahero	Faves:	9

Progress!

Posted 22nd Nov 12, by butterfingers

Hello All.

First up thanks for the Faves and Comments! Really encouraging to get positive feedback.

I've done a ton of new dev, but alot of it is behind the scenes, so it's kinda hard to show it to you, still, I want to use this as a page to track where we're up to so:

1) Massive improvements in character AI. Each enemy will behave differently, having different preferences to cover, charging, shooting and aggressiveness

2) Editor now supports alot more functionality, new object types and more control of the degree of randomisation of objects.

3)New Mission Type - RAID. Kind of a horde mode where you have to survive a set number of waves of SWAT teams while trying to hack computers.

4)Totally revised gameplay loop. You can now respawn in a level when killed, instead of getting 1 attempt per level.

At the end of a level you are given a rating between A+ and F. This rating is based on the number of times that you respawned before completion.

In order to progress through the missions you must keep your average rating above a B- (averaging less than 6 deaths per level).

This heightens the intensity of the game levels and means that as a player you don't have to keep reloading between deaths.

This also adds replayablilty, with unlockable items being linked to level scores, so a "B" might let you progress, but to unlock the flak jacket you need to go back and score an "A"

5) New Achievments:

sssh - complete a level without and enemy firing a shot
Boom Hello! - Shoot/blow and enemy through a door

6) Danny Pearson has been creating some great assets for the game, from characters to scenery. These are all now in the editor and the game and just need levels making with them!

Phew. I think that's it. Right now the game has 6 playable levels, but the difficulty balance is WAY OFF!
By next week I want to have fixed the balancing to have a 10 level Alpha with a decent order of levels.

Update and video soon, it's just that videos take AAAGGGESSSS to make.

Posted by Chloe Sagal

22nd November, 2012

I'm experiencing the same nonsense with video editing. For instance, it took me about 4 hours to record a video, all I wanted to do with it was to put the separate clips together, speed up the clips and trim some of the edges. I started using AE CS4 and Premiere CS4, they have this nonsense where they render out the video before you can even preview it, so editing it is painful. Took me forever to get it to kind of where I wanted it, and the render was going to take an hour, came back in an hour and it was like "no, FU, 7 hours", and this was on "hey this looks like shit" settings. So I switched to Vegas 11, editing was sooooo much better, however, the codec I used to record the video (which was the only one compatible with the Adobe Products), was buggy in Vegas, so I had to take several hours to convert the files. The next issue was that Vegas only lets you speed up by x4 (Always something with these programs). Eventually I found a plugin that allowed me to speed up clips to x10,000 without having to re-render everything. Took me around 18 hours to do a 10 minute job

. But now I've got a system going that I can edit quickly and takes about 30-40 minutes to render out a decent quality video that is very small in size. So yes, we've all been there.

Posted by butterfingers

23rd November, 2012

I was kind a the same, but I've now bent premier to my will! Bin using it for a few years now so it's OK, It's like photoshop, you hate it when you start because there are like a million settings, but when you get used to it there really isn't a comparison.

That said, all the video I'm doing for this is zoomed in loads on the action and also keyframed to track what's going on, plus I tend to record around 30 mins of footage and try to cut down to 3 so it takes a while.

I've done some straight Dev videos, just showing how things work and so on, but
a) I did it in FullHD by accident so they're HUGE
b) I think they'll bore everyone to death.

Have been thinking about doing an AI tutorial. I don't know if the way I'm doing it is how everyone does it, or if I have made something that is potentially useful!

Still. I've got the full "game loop" now, so you can basically play the full experience through, I just need to make the levels and expand some of the elements a little - basically more of everything - powerups, awards, missions, etc

Posted by tetsuya_shino

23rd November, 2012

Sounds great! I am looking forward to the next playable build. Keep it up.

Posted by Marko

23rd November, 2012