BeardedBear - Update n°9 - Downloadable demo 06 and many many important news

Hello everyone!

It's been a long time since the last update on indieDB, but we are finally back!

As always, everything you read in this article will be available to test in the Demo 06 that I just uploaded in the Download section. Just click the button below to be redirected to the download page!

There are many many many news about the current state of our lovely Bearded Bear..

..so, since I know that you are impatient and you want to read all this post ASAP. enough talking and let's dive into the update!

• Performance:
  • The performance of the game has been improved hugely since I finally forced myself to change the whole screen resolution back to 480x270 instead of 960x540, the visual style is the same as before, but the fps are more than doubled even with the shader active on mid and low end PCs!
• Graphics:
  • The new graphics are really taking place slowly but surely and we can now say tat the first five levels are almost done!
    
    
    
    
  • The Egypt and the Greek backgrounds are still unfinished but you can already see how they will be in their final form.
    
    
    
    
  • We also finally finished restyling the power ups menu between levels, the background is now complete but it lacks animations. Watching through the windows you can see the previous level on the left and the next level on the right because f**k logic, we are in a time warping game! (And it looks so cool. Ed.)
    
    
    
    
  • And it doesn't end here, Giacomo was really on a roll and he also decided to redraw all the power ups (The power downs will be redrawed soon):
    
    
• Audio:
  • New sounds for every song! Now every single song sounds better and more chiptune style (drum samples are SO much better now).
  • In the next demo Alberto will redo the eq and mixing now that he has better headphones (as of now highs are a little too strong, and volumes are not totally balances (And He obviously wants to mess around with different settings and styles, Ed.))
  • New songs! Two new boss songs, new title/menu music (probably still a placeholder, He's not totally satisfied), new powerup music at the end of the levels, some new weapon bgms, and a new "ambient" music.
  • Some new sound effect, like a portal sound (needs more experimenting through).
• Gameplay:
  • There are two new guys running around after mid-game: Shaman and Stealer.
    • The Shaman jumps around and resurrects dead enemies he finds on his way.
      
      
      
      
      
    • The Stealer runs around very fast (don't worry, no contact damage for this one) stealing the crate, respawning it further away from you.
      
      
      
  • We changed the order in which enemies spawn, making the difficulty less steep.
  • An ultrasuperduper energetic beam is now part of the combo bonuses family!
    
    
    
    
  • Smokegranades are now part of the bulletType family!
    
    
    
    
  • Coop Mode is now available! After some months of tests and bugfixes it's now somewhat stable and should be bugfree!
  • The default keybindings are the standard keyboard ones for player 1, while player 2 defaults are gamepad buttons. You can rebind keys in any way you want from the options menu. (you can play with two players on a single keyboard, but two players with two different gamepads is NOT supported yet, it will be available soon)
  • Online mode is now almost a thing! We are working on both the online coop(one playing as a server and one playing as a host) and the daily system.
  • The online coop is still in WIP but the daily system is almost done.
• Other random things nice to mention:
  • We are now finally nicely organized with the workflow thanks to Git!
  • Alberto, the good old audio guy, is now promoted to audio-programmer-tester-bugfixer-lazy guy!
  • Giacomo is also on great shape since he's working hard as hell to have everything done as soon as possible (without compromising the quality of his work of course).

And that's it for this update, the main goal now is to have the first half of the game somewhat finished, both on the art style and the gameplay side...

... So stay tuned for the next update!