Customized the dialogue system for my liking. Getting the spritefont to look good was a bit tricky with a lo-res game (256x144) and I had to manually set the width of some of the letters. Overall, I'm feeling it!

And now I finally get to move on to level design for level 2!

Level 2-1 tilemap! Such a satisfying and rewarding point to be at.

The backgrounds on the bottom have parallax scrolling and following the player through the level (that's why they don't cover the whole background). I'll be doing 4 screens total for level 2. I'll post them as they're completed.

Level 2-3 (backgrounds and decorations hidden)

This uses the cave tileset as seen in the gifs above. One more map and I'm set for Level 2. Then I just need to set up dialogue triggers and the boss room.

It's been a few weeks but I've been hard at work!

Last weekend I showed off my demo at the Buffalo Game Space Showcase. Got great feedback and hung out with a bunch of other great WNY game devs. Here was my setup:

Looks like another week or two and I should wrap up Level 2. Currently I'm scripting all dialogue events and working on cutscenes. I made the decision to try and do still-frame cutscenes especially since the game is quickly getting story heavy.

Made some huge progress this weekend. As I have mentioned, I've been using a dialogue asset from the Construct 2 store. Over the weekend I realized and learned how to use the text commands which lets me script events from within the dialogue. So basically I can type the dialogue and then type something like {BossActivate} which calls a function or any other event. This is incredibly handy. I cannot recommend this asset enough if you use Construct 2. It's a steal for the price.

Here is the Level 2 Boss reveal. Don't worry; it'll be more difficult than pictured in the gif :lol:

Up next is drawing up the cutscenes, finishing the dialogue script, and setting up all keycard / door functions in the layouts for Level 2. Then on to Greenlight!

Starting work on cutscenes. Here is one of the more basic ones. Text will scroll along the bottom. These are definitely going to push my art skills. Time to get good!

Early Saturday morning game dev hustle at the coffee shop

All cutscene art for Level 2 is done. All dialogue is written. Now working on how to best initiate the cutscenes and hop back to the actual game layout. Should be able to wrap this up this weekend.

Got that sweet cut scene fade working!

LEVEL 2 IS DONE!

Check out the video.

Turn up for the music because this song is very important to me. As I've posted about before, some 12-13 years I was in a band called Tomorrow is Forever. We had a full length album that had music videos for every song telling the story of 2 game developers. We'd play the music live with the videos in sync with us. We wrote this song the first summer we all stayed in our college town together. When we had a rough demo, we brought it to our friend's house and we listened to it for the first time together. It was an incredible moment and it is immortalized for me in the form of this song.

Thanks for reading this far! I'll be launching my Steam Greenlight campaign the first week of August.

That coffee shop dev life

I decided that, since a bunch of people will most likely download my demo when I launch on Steam Greenlight, that I should probably update it. Here is what I managed to do this weekend to the Level 1 demo:

• Updated controls
• WASD or Arrow key controls
• Keycard "have" indicator
• No more doorways. All screen transitions are "edge of screen collision" types
• Moved all dialogue over to the new dialogue engine
• Began swapping out the "pure black" for a "softer black" in my tilesets

I've got a bit more to do but I should manage to finish the update by this weekend. Then on to Greenlight!

A Small Robot Story is on Steam Greenlight! Check it out here!

Parallax test for lab level. Needs some tweaking (parallax layers need to be bumped up to a power of two) but it's a decent start.

Annnddd I'm Greenlit!

More parallax testing! Gotta tweak that middle layer so it doesn't look like building-tops :p

Test of all Level 3 (Helix's Laboratory) art and set pieces. GIF randomly speeds up :\

Been working on coding Level 3 enemies. Unfortunately this means nothing cool to show yet since I use placeholder art while coding

Good news is that, according to schedule, I am ahead by one week. However I'm sure that will change soon I just finished all 3 new enemies yesterday and will start on their art this week. Hopefully I'll have something cool to show off by the end of this weekend.

Two new enemies!

Up first is Headshot. Erratic robot head that shoots a spread shot.

Next is the Infected Robot. He staggers around and then will vomit in your direction. Still working on vomit art. Currently he vomits bullets :D

Finally wrapped my head around passing along parameters to a master object. Right here I have a function passing different bullet parameters (animation, gravity, speed) for different enemies to a single bullet object. Setting up the object UID as param(0) was my hangup.

All Level 3 enemies. Will probably add a re-skin of a non-projectile enemy. A lot of projectiles flying around!