What a difference a single day can make, let alone weeks! And in keeping with our promise to bring you nice bunch regular updates from now on, we thought we would talk about what happens when something gets replaced in the grand scheme of things …
Making The Redundant Less So
So, as the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed, the screenshot of the game screen we previewed in Update #1 looked different to the game screen from the announcement trailer (and various screenshots). Now, since the look of the GUI and the actual player’s ship have changed from that stage of development, this potentially means that we has assets that will be going to waste. Which is not good when you are a developer on a budget (admittedly, most of the budget is spent on beans on toast, but still, dev fuel is dev fuel). Now, one of the brilliant things about Unity 3D is the way that it works in a modular sense. Levels are built in “scenes”, and those scenes can contain whatever you want, meaning you do not have to call all of the game’s code in any particular scene. If you want to build a level vastly different to another one then you have that flexibility. This is also true for assets and such. But this also means that although we have all these assets left over from this previous version of the game, they are not getting thrown away, in fact quite the contrary …
Links To The Past
See, we always wanted to build the universe of Kitty Galaxies to be something which covered not just the present and future, but also the past too. As such, those levels you saw in the original announcement trailer? They are still going to be in the game. However, these will be unlocked via the main story, and will take place in the past. From our standpoint, this gives us a great way of explaining the basic player ships and (in comparison to the other levels), the simplified HUD for those levels, and also gives us the opportunity to tell more of the story of the universe in a way in which the player can actually participate. And what does completing these extra levels unlock? Well, we cannot be revealing everything right now, can we?
Raining Cats And Dogs
So you have seen our main characters as of Update #1, Tibbles, Sparkles, and Paul. Each character has their own ship, and each ship has it’s own attributes. Also, each character has their own set of levels, so you will have to play as all of the characters eventually to see all of the plot, however when it comes to unlockables most will be able to be done with the one singular character if you want to. And talking about unlockables, most will be rewarded for completing certain tasks, however there is another way to unlock most unlockables, some involve time, and some involve good old cheat codes, remember them? Back in the day, games used to have them in, and a lot of them made subsequent playthroughs of games more fun. However along came the advent of achievements, which seemed for the most part to have wiped cheat codes off the map. So we decided to bring them back, with style! Who knows, we might even have hidden one of the cheat codes in this very update …
Voting Hilarity(?)
As you may have seen on the previous update, there are a few things about the Greenlight process (specifically the way it has been abused by some) which have irked us slightly. In the past month it has come to light that some developers have been teaming up in order to game the system on a certain Facebook group, voting on each other’s games to bump them up the list, almost like a pyramid scheme. We refuse to partake in such behaviour as it is not just unethical, but also pushes down all the developers not partaking in such a scheme. It is not very nice, however ...
OBLIGATORY SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT!!!
... What would push us up the list is (if you are impressed with the game so far) if you share the Kitty Galaxies Greenlight page with your friends, family, acquaintances, pet Walrus, etc! Free hug person voting for us on Greenlight!*Just copy this link, and post it to everyone who you want to come and take a look at the game: Steamcommunity.com
Just do not be all spamming the link everywhere, nobody likes a spammer ;)*Hugs subject to range of how far our arms will stretch.
Escort-Me-Do!
We hate escort missions in games, we really do. See, the problem with them is that (in the vast majority of games) if the object being escorted is destroyed, then it is an instant Game Over for the player. In most of the games we have played in the past, poor friendly A.I. has been more responsible for a Game Over happening than our own skill, you know, like when you are shooting at a highly deadly enemy and your A.I. partner goes over to give that enemy a big hug (for no other reason than ”because they can”), leading to all sorts of colourful swear words being shouted at the screen as one’s game comes to an abrupt end. Escort missions for the most part are somewhat unfair on the player, as there is generally too much out of the players control which can lead to a Game Over …… And with all that taken into consideration we decided to put an escort mission or two in Kitty Galaxies, NO WAIT, HEAR US OUT! See, our escort missions are going to be more than a little different to your standard escort missions. We are making it so that you cannot lose the escort mission from the object being escorted being attacked by the enemy. However, did you think we were going to make things that straight forward? See, in Kitty Galaxies if you are on an escort mission and the objective being escorted is attacked too much then there will be consequences, as to what those consequences may be, well that depends upon the level. It could be a lack of support later in the mission, it could be just a stern telling off from the person who’s ship you are escorting, an extra wave of enemies to fight in order to progress, or a myriad of other things, you will just have to play the final game to find out, won’t you?
The Tease
So a lot has changed, not all can be shown off just yet, as this week we are working some overtime on the game in order so that when it comes to the next update we can show you some of the more secret things we have been working on, however we decided to sign off this update with a tiny TINY little preview of some music, and a change to the gameplay since the original announcement which some of the more eagle-eyed amongst you may be able to spot if you watch closely. Also most of the HUD is missing, because we have a few things which are not ready to show off, possibly HUD-related (did someone say new HUD? Oh wait, I just did, har har har har har *cough*), who knows?
Video is also available on YouTube by clicking on the nice link here: Youtube.com
As a brief side note, thanks to recent improvements on YouTube, the video is available in 720p at ... Wait for it ... 60 frames per second! Also the only reason it is in 720p is due to our screen capture software's limitations, the actual game runs at 1080p 60 frames per second, woohoo!
If you have any questions then keep them coming in! We try to answer all questions as soon as possible, because you guys following the game are completely awesome. Even you trying to hide at the back there, we see you ...
