Race to 0.3 news - Okhlos

Hey there!

First of all, we are extremely happy for the response and feedback all of you gave us last week. It means the world to us, and the feedback was really useful. For the ones who don’t know what I’m talking about, last week we presented different versions for the Argos Panoptes and the aegis shield. And a lot of you reached us out via web, Twitter, Facebook, TIG and IndieDB. So we are really thankful to all of you! We still don’t know which versions are the winners, but we are gonna ask you your opinions again soon!

And now, for this week update, we are planning the 0.3 version of Okhlos! What does this mean? Here is what we have planned for this version:

HUD

We’ve made a HUGE GUI change. We were using a very old version of NGUI, and we decided to update to a newer one. That brought us a lot of headaches and extra work. It really gave us lots of problem. So for this version we are hoping to close the sad chapter of updating from a 1.2x to a 3.4x (trust me on this one: never a good idea).

Besides that, we were using 2x sprites in the hud and windows (we talked about this a few updates ago). Now, the 2x sprites are only for the mob portraits. The rest of the HUD is much smaller and less invasive.
Finally, we were doing a lot of mockups of some old windows.

HEROES

In this version, we introduce two new types of heroes: The psychic and the troubadour.
The Psychic basically spawns a force field to prevent projectiles.

This is quite useful against projectile thrower enemies. Not so much against melee enemies, though… Also, they don’t attack: they are too focused on creating force fields with their minds.

The other hero type is a buffer. The troubadour will sing, boosting the stats of nearby units. As the Psychics, they don’t attack. You can’t play the lyre and punch something at the same time!

MUSIC

Gordon, the newest addition to the team, started composing the Apollo track, and it is wonderful. We want to do some dynamics things with the music and the mob gauge, but for this version the stage track and maybe some other low priority sound will do.

ENEMIES

We finally settled a lot of things regarding the enemies in Okhlos. We have a good number of enemies, and very cool behaviors. Now we have to put them on the stage, animate them, and tweak them.

For this version, we are gonna wrap up the Apollo enemies, which went through a lot of changes.

Apollo needed some changes also. So this version he will be a little bit smarter than before.

FX

Finally, we needed to tweak a lot the building’s destruction. We implemented this feature some time ago, but we hadn’t had the chance to try them out. So, for this version, we are aiming to create a a permanency effect by leaving some dust particles for a while after a building is destroyed.

By the way, now destroyed buildings leave these beautiful ruins.

So that’s what we have in our hands right now! Luckily, we will have it a week or so. Unfortunately, it will be for internal use and press only :S