Previously on 'The Adventures of TFG'
We just realized we've never actually told anyone what happened to Brian Storm : It's been put on hold as progress was deemed to be too slow. We were inching along surely, but at the current rate it would take us a few years to finish (In retrospective, making a psychic-power Castlevania look-alike was a bit too much for a first formal project). We decided to take a break and try to make something else - Slinki.
This time we took another approach: We are focusing on creating one level at a time and use them to refine the gameplay as soon as possible. We also have a separate test level to test out tweaks (we used to have some problems in Brian storm where a couple of new features could force us to partially rebuild the current level).
We are also publishing occasional builds with the current progress of our first level.
Soon(ish)
The first release (for Android and PC) will contain only 5 levels and will be used to gauge interest. We'll be adding new features and level packs afterwards if there's any demand. For Android we're thinking of releasing it for free with occasional non-intrusive Advertisements. We hope to use the 24th of January as a release date but you didn't hear that from me.
Here's a rough guideline of what we're currently missing:
- Main menu
- 4 levels
- Final boss
- Refining AI on last 2 enemy types
- Powerups for the boomerang
- More music and a few other sounds
- Misc bug fixes
- Random bits of scenery and general aesthetics
That's all fine and dandy but how do I know you haven't been sitting on your arses?
This last month we've focused on improving how the environment looks by making it a lot more "organic". You'll have a chance to see the changes firsthand with alpha 3 in the coming days but have a few screenshots in the meantime (for best results click on "View original").
We initially tried using the amazingly simple to use the Platform Builder Unity Plugin. However we were running out of time and it was missing a few highly-specific features so came up with our own solution. The creator however was incredibly helpful and personally I feel sorry it didn't work out. From what I'm told, his next version will feature a lot more freedom on how the platforms can be built.
As a side note we've always found that making games is easy, making it look pretty and fun is the hard part :) Brian Storm would have been done in a month if we'd just focused on cranking out powers and bland enemies throughout a monochrome landscapes of rectangles.
