Weekly Update

Nothing to report this week. Retromite is pretty much shut down with the holidays, and I've been battling with a case of tendonitis in the wrists/forearms for the last two weeks just about. I've finally surrendered to doing nothing until they heal.

Happy holidays, we'll see y'all in 2013.

Weekly Update

Gravitum continues to march towards the finish line.

The week brings forth a new multi-player loading screen, the animated intro being integrated into the game, a few additional screens implemented, and at last a finalized in-game hud.

Kawe has also begun working on the animated outro.

We've also brought on a talented sound engineer to create awesome chip based sound effects and jingles for the game.

Other than Gravitum, things are winding down here with the holidays approaching. We have a small  fun update for the PC/Mac versions of RobotRiot planned for release sometime in Q1 of 2013, and of course will also be starting up serious development of M.I.N.T come the new year.

Weekly Update

Level building continues on Gravitum, with a quick sneak peek at one of the sections below.

We're aiming to have Gravitum wrapped up internally by the end of the month, and then go through a round or two of play testing before opening the game up to sponsorship. 

We also have brought onboard Lee Nicklen aka Kayotix whom did the wonderful RobotRiot chiptunes to work his magic on Gravitum.  

Also of course this week we officially announced our next major project M.I.N.T: Mecha, Infantry, and Tactics. A turn based tactical wargame which is being designed for PC, Mac, and possibly Linux. Expect a lot more development updates on M.I.N.T come the new year. 

Finally to be notified of major announcements, feel free to signup to our newsletter, we won't sell your email address, or spam you, we promise =) 

The Next Project: M.I.N.T

Another lovely mockup of our next project M.I.N.T: Mecha, Infantry, and Tactics.

M.I.N.T is a tactical turn based wargame, and is planned to enter into full development at the start of 2013. 

You'll be able to follow its development here. 

Weekly Update

Work continues to progress on Gravitum level building, and the new title screen has been completely integrated. Check it out in the video below.

General Status Update

So November is over, and we're back into the full swing of things more or less.

I've completed my move, which consumed far to much time.

Gravitum is once again making progress as I'm working on wrapping up the remaining levels needed. Kawe also just did up a new and very cool title screen for the game, which we might share down the road.

We're aiming to have Gravitum wrapped up by the end of the month, and since the game is for the flash market, begin a hunt for a game sponsor.

Our tactical war game is also making progress, though is still in the early mockup and design stages.

Finally we are also looking at resuming Hello Pixel, though we may have to adjust the frequency of it, as producing high quality Pixel Art is really just very time consuming.

Hello Pixel On Break

We've been doing Hello Pixel now for just shy of six weeks, and its been a great experience, if not a challenging one to at times.

Its been great doing these, and we will be continuing to do them once again in the future, but for now Hello Pixel will be going on a break for a few weeks, due to me moving.

Look for us to return in the near future. =)

Cheers
-Gregg

Hello Pixel #29

More early concepts, this time in tactics land.

Hello Pixel #28

A rare concept piece, and its finished form. (Concept art is exceedingly rare around these parts.)

Hello Pixel #27

Fences, and zombie containment.

Hello Pixel #26

Another tactics design mockup.

Hello Pixel #25

Elevation Mockups

Hello Pixel #24

Idle animation for armored dwarf. 

Hello Pixel #23

The legendary dwarven shield block.

Hello Pixel #22

Scene mockup for fantasy platformer.

Hello Pixel #21

Wolf mount concept for fantasy platformer.

Hello Pixel #20

A ridable mount concept, meant for our second platformer game. An epic fantasy based platformer with RPG elements, that is still in the early design phase.

Hello Pixel #19

More in-progress work on elevated tiles.

Hello Pixel #18

Exploring tactical games, before ultimately switching to an isometric view.

Hello Pixel #17

Experiments in raised terrain, slopes, and associated scales.

Hello Pixel #16

Gravitum Intro, click on the mad doctors and proceed at your own risk..

Hello Pixel #15

Artillery tank, a work in progress.

Hello Pixel #14

Pixels from above.

Hello Pixel #13

Hello Pixel #12

Class E infantry battle suits anyone?

Hello Pixel #11

The lonely humvee, soon with weapon mounts.

Hello Pixel #10

Gravitum

Hello Pixel #9

Run Forrest Run!

So the Germans can raise Nazi-zombies. Why am I not surprised?

Hello Pixel #8

A lighter mech's walk cycle, and one possible configuration.

Recon mechs can also jump..

Hello Pixel #7

An anti-armor mech variant and supporting soldiers.

Hello Pixel #6

Back view currently a work in-progress.

Hello Pixel #5

Riders on the storm 
There's a killer on the road 
....

Hello Pixel #4

Anti-armor tank firing and new palette.

Hello Pixel #3

Initial close combat mech animation, and a new paint job.

Hello Pixel #2

Rockets behind your exposed head?
No problem for these high speed scouting adrenaline junkies!

Hello Pixel #1

Introducing Hello Pixel!

Hello Pixel is our new initiative to bring our fans and readers a new pixel art piece every weekday, from projects we are working on.

We're not quite sure how well this will work out, so if you have feedback do feel free to give us a shout out.

Today's piece... The elusive and deadly sniper.

Development Update

Just a few quick development updates for those who follow our dev blog here.

1. RobotRiot is currently for sale as part of the indie ran Bundle In A Box sell, which besides supporting indies and charity, also features the indie dev grant which goes to a voted upon game. You can check out the bundle here


2. Gravitum is still in level design production, which is unfortunately going very slowly as I'm in the middle of moving as well.  


3. Kawe is working on some simply terrific art for our next serious PC/Mac centric project. 

Tactics Teaser

A little glimpse at a hopefully bright future. =)

More Gravitum

Progress continues on Gravitum, with Kawe working on the story intro, and level design pushing forward. 

Gravitum Update

A couple of screenshots of a current level in Gravitum, now that level building is coming together smoothly thanks to the tool chain updates.  Note: All images are still WIP and do not include finalized HUD's and so forth. 

Tool Chain Updates

All of the recent level design work, as can be seen in the Gravitum Teaser posted the other day, has been taking a considerable amount of time, and has led to some toolchain improvements.

Early on we invested in custom tools, one of which is Loki our tile based level editor. We decided to develop this technology in-house vs going with one of the many open source and free tile editors available.

This had both advantages and disadvantages. The primary disadvantage in my opinion, is of course the time investment to make the tool, support it, and update it as needed.

The advantages in our case, was having a map editor that you could actually place interactive objects with, set their specific properties, turn on preview mode, watch the platform or enemy move, or the laser barrier flicker on and off at a given time interval, and easily adjust as needed visually.

This was combined with a robust plug-in system, where it was relatively easy to write any new type of special object and plug it into the editor. Ideally all of this would decrease actual game development time, as more of the level mechanics could be set and seen inside of the editor.

Of course like all internal tools, Loki was never really finished, let alone polished, due to other deadlines and time investments.

As such a major feature for working with tiles has been missing for a long time, and this is the ability to create essentially custom brushes by copying existing tiles.

This is a huge time saving feature, especially when working with more complex tile groupings like animated lavas and such. It's also a feature which I implemented yesterday, which took most of the day to do, but has already made up for the implementation time.

Writing in-house tools always is a cost-benefit calculation, and one you should think about greatly, but its hard to deny the extra productivity that can come from a custom tailored pipeline and associated tools.

Gravitum Teaser

Menus Crushed, now for the Physics Re-Match

Rejoice, for the in-game menu system and backend networking has now been fully completed and is working quite well, even with evil test conditions like disabling your network adaptor in the middle of a network request.

I've now moved onto probably our fifth revision of tweaking the physics model of the game. Its so critical to really nail the "feel" of things, and Kawe was also pointing out to me that I was perhaps going a bit extreme in some of the response times and timing needed. (A fact I attribute to my up-bringing of mostly fighting games, platformers, and arcade shooters, which are inherently reflex and memorization driven, even muscle memory driven in the case of fighters. )

Given the above, and with the addition of more interactive pieces to the level design, like speed boosters, and obstacles that stun or slow you, i've been pretty much redoing most of the physics model.

The real challenge of both the physics and level design in the case of this game, is to create something that is generally quite accessible to most players, yet is extremely difficult to master.  This goes towards our social/MP gameplay where you have catchers and escapers, and the idea of a "Perfect Escape" is something that should require real mastery to obtain.

Development Update

I've been working on our next game release, which is a sort of auto running, gravity flipping, turbo boosting, bridge spanning, laser defying, agility and reflex oriented game.

However, it also has some interesting competitive social features allowing you to record your level escapes, and for people to try an catch you during your recorded escape. This is all backed by easily being able to share a URL to watch a person's given escape, attempt to catch them, and likewise share the catch as well.

A few images of the game have come up across the internet in various Retromite interviews like the following one:

Of course with all of the social features comes lots of menu work. Which if there was one thing to ever convince me of quitting game development, it would be menus, and this is what I've been doing for the last week straight. So if anyone needs an out of practice armorer, mercenary, or something, now would be your best chance of stealing me away from the life of indie game development. Just saying.. 

Anyways in an effort to make menus very standardized Kawe whipped up a sort of lego based menu system, which is quite similar to how a lot of MMORPGs build up all of their various menus and gumps. Alas i've been assembling menus ever since. 

Tons of work given this is also tied to networking states and you need to wait for server responses, and also deal with error conditions, but I do think they have turned out quite nicely. 

Ideally this project will be wrapping up in the next two weeks or so finally, and then we can adventure into the insanely awesome world of ISOMETRIC based games. 

A.R.C.S Featured on Newgrounds

New Sprite coming your way

Exploring opportunities to enhance some of RobotRiot's FX as part of its soon coming content update.

Work in progress of one of the new levels coming soon to RobotRiot.

Trailer to our upcoming release Outpost:Invasion