Working on mud.

Hi.
Two weeks went by. I think I'm finally "mostly" done with the mud city.  Since last update I've added several new houses with new puzzle in them. It's a quest for the four keys made from blocks.

I also added some health for the mud walkers. They are scattered around the town. I still need to work on few things with them, but overall they feel much better now.

There's a few of these keystones, you need to hunt around the town. Most are somehow hidden.

I also changed some of the mud castle floors due to some feedback that I got while people were testing it. I think It's pretty fun now. Still wondering if I should add health to the player or some sort of life system. I hesitate, for it might suddenly look too much like some of its peers and that would not be ideal. I'm not too keen on adding any hearts on the top or anything like that. Then again if it works, then it works.

I'll probably be still polishing some of these features around the mud buildings and adding some secret stuff here or there. So no... We did not get away from the mud yet, but we are close. New features should be right around the corner. Stick that can create land and some shopping mechanics. I've settled on the dynamite. Also adding a stamina or mana of some sort, would create more opportunities for the shop.

Lucius is also coming along nicely. Our statistics show that we are around 50% mark now on content though there's not much of actual gameplay yet. No real puzzles yet. But soon.. It's even got a secret web page already: http://Lucius3.com

But don't tell anyone I told you. ;)
There's also a possibility to add yourself to our mailing list.

Okays that's it for today. Thanks for reading.

-Johannes

Some Unintended business.

Soo. I'm feeling good now about the mud king encounter.
Next I need to work on the mud city a bit. There's a lot of unfinished things there that need to be finished. So I'm currently working on them and getting them ready.

Here's the city. It's got some houses and I'm currently creating some puzzles inside so that the player can get access inside the castle. I have the main puzzle already laid out, but this also needs some smaller obstacles here or there.

It's good to also bring some of the features for re-iteration that I used elsewhere. Like the magnet..

I also created some new crates. I needed something that could give some random loot and fill the rooms a bit.

Once I'm ready with these I'm gonna clean up the mud city and bring the original town out from under the mud. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll have some shops and homes.  I've been also thinking about bombs like in Zelda. But I want them to be unique to the Unintended world. Not sure what that is going to be yet, but it would have to be something that can break a wall.

Well. That's it for now. See you later.
-Johannes

The unintended break.

Hello again.
My break went a little bit long. I was suppose to take only a week off, but things and life kinda took their toll. Anyways I'm back again and hopefully will be staying on a schedule. I have been slacking off a bit on Unintended, but not entirely.
I've still been working on the Boss encounter of the Mud King and I think it might be pretty close to being ready. Maybe some polish and aftermath is still needed. I decided to record the whole encounter and show it for you. The video is considerably long this time. So some spoilers ahead, but hopefully you will forget those before the game is actually out.



Maybe the changes in the phases also need some transition music sometimes. I'm not sure. But I would like to move on soon from this encounter so that I won't get stuck doing this forever.



One other interesting thing was that Lucius was a part of Gamer Block M. It's interesting to watch those unboxing videos. Hopefully I'm getting one too. I'll be sure to take a picture of the box and put it here.

Okays..
Maybe next week?
Who knows. Bye!
-Johannes

Some small graphical fixes.

Hi.
So I have a vacation coming up. We are gonna travel to Lisbon and hang out for a week.
This means there will not be much updating going on during the upcoming week, but maybe thats a good time to show something from Lucius.

I've been adding some small details on the earlier parts of the game lately. I think I will be doing this a lot as the time goes by. Just to make the world seem more dynamic and interesting.
Here are a couple examples:

Dropping leaves.

Smokey jiminy.

I've aldo added the third playable character now. It's another boy. Hope someone likes it. So now all we need is another girl. 

My pipeline for these characters is terrible. It takes way too much work to create a new playable character. I should create some sort of automatization but I guess since we are all ready doing the last character, it makes very little sense to do it now.

Okay Cheers.
I'll be in Portugal.

Another Unintended Boss

Hi,

It's been almost two weeks since last update. Sorry about that. Progress has been painfully slow, but I finally do have a sort of an idea of the mud king encounter. It's a boss fight and I've spent quite bit on thinking about this one. Finally I have a clear idea what's it going to be.

Here's a video:
So what happens here is that the monster will jump every 20 seconds and the player will fly in the air because of that. Now once in air the player can fly around and he must try to stay with the mud flying with him, so he can land safely. He should then proceed to break some pipes where they are vulnerable and some of these spots might require the flight again.
Once the pipes have been broken the king is vulnerable and the hero can actually dispose of him.

I still need to create a beginning to this and an ending for the encounter. Destroying the king would give the player a new item and also would change the mud city into a totally new area. I needed to create a song for this and I wanted it to fit the 20 second loop. I feel like it does the job of a boss encounter music and is pretty well in sync with the encounter. I also created some new songs for Lucius too while I was at it. They were pretty simplistic piano things.

Well. That's about it.
Until next week maybe?

Cheers
Johannes

The Unintended news and moving around + Masters of Doom

Bujaka bujaka!

So. I have no officially moved and working from the new apartment. I had to get rid of my old desk and buy a new one so officially I did not work on anything from home during the last couple of weeks.

Reason for getting a new table was to save some room. I wanted to try and put my piano under the desk somehow, so I bought a desk that can be raised a bit to appropriate level.
It's a bit of a dominating part of the room but it kinda works.. sort of.

Anyway now I'm finally back to working on Unintended and a lot of things happening in the game development news.

First off, it seems Valve is removing the Greenlight program and replacing it with a more expensive but totally uncurated version called Direct.

I think it's a step towards the right direction. I don't quite see why would they just not hire a small team to curate the games and let fewer games in. It's baffling to me how all these scam games get through. I was under the impression that they are still hand picked from the greenlight system. I guess that is not the case. Anyway it's a good sign that times they are a changin.

As for my little unintended project. I'm not quite sure what to do with it now. Should I push for greenlight early? Or just fork up the money later? I'm fairly certain it will be the hardest couple of months ever to get through the greenlight, since everyone wants to get past it before it becomes expensive. The game is not really that visually impressive or interesting, (it's not really the main point) so it might be hard for me to get through at this point. I was going to add more eye candy gradually as the game progresses on and really work on the trailer a lot. This anyway sparked some interest to get back to some of the things needed for a clear presentation of the game.


For example I've redone the title screen and added some context to it too.

I also worked on a much more complex background painting, but decided to scrap it and keep it simple instead. Now while doing this, I still discovered some issues with the player selection screen and some other problems at the main menus, so I started to polish them a bit. I might be naming the main characters soon and creating the final two playable characters. I think the game also needs a story cutscene at the beginning. So maybe I'll first work on the mud-king-boss-encounter and an intro cutscene soon after that.

On other news.. Someone recommended a book that I should read called Masters of Doom.
I have to say that, five chapters in, I would already recommend this book for anyone interested in videogames and their development or history.  It's very good so far. Carmack is such a genius.

I also went to the movies again and watched John Wick 2. It was very entertaining. It's interesting to see that no matter what genre, if you have passion for the craft, it will come out great. 8/10


So that's about it for today.
I'll get back to you in a week or so.
Good luck and Stay frosty

Unintended Puzzle Rooms

So. Next week is moving-day for me. Yay! That means that there probably will be a small gap on the blog and Unintended progress.

This week I continued on the Mud Tower and its main tower puzzle rooms. I've managed to create some fairly fun ones, I think.

Here are some examples:
One where you run through a room with spikes and try to keep ahead of the ones that are raising back up. It was very exciting for my tester. It probably should have a music also that keeps getting faster during the run. Have to think about how to achieve that.

Another room I did was this magnetic apparatus room. It basically has a magnetic connection thingy that will remotely control few of these blocks.

I think the tower has seven floors altogether, so maybe the next stop might be the boss man himself.

On another note: We did have our first outside tester for Lucius III and it seems we have something like 45 minutes of content "somewhat-done". It played fairly smoothly and did not have much problems on the progress. Overall feedback was also fairly positive so we shall see. I'm pretty hopeful on our current progress. It is pretty straight forward in the beginning. It remains to be seen how well it goes after that.

Well that's about it for today. I'll return in a week or two provided that I have an internet of some sort.


-Johannes