Hi everyone!

Behind that curious and scary title, there is a shoot'em'up.... .... Well no it's a lie. There are two shoot'em'up !

Well well well.... In fact, it's a little more complex. (That title is temporary btw)

Behind that curious and scary tittle, there is two shoot'em'up a once. You control two spaceships on a split-screen, but it's for one player. So, you have to keep an eye on each side of the screen to avoid asteroids and kill some aliens. Killing enemies is the only way to pass to more difficult levels where everything is more, difficult. Asteroids and enemies are going faster, you have more of aliens to kill and there is more and more of those rocks. There are an infinite number of levels because it's just getting harder and it's only based on your ability to do two things at once, you have to get better to get to higher levels! and as I test it, it is very satisfying.

So, with 3 friends we decide to really go further with the concept and that's why I'm posting here. That game will not stay just a prototype that only me can play with. I shared it to those 3 friends and we want to share it with all of you! It is hard to describe how it feels to play it because you really must split your mind in two to play better. And the only reward that you get in the prototype is just a blue screen with "GG" and the possibility to go to the next level. And just with that, it is very satisfying!

I really enjoy flying threw rocks and take down 3 aliens ships without taking any damage, after that kind of action, you just feel good!

There are two ships, one little that goes fast but have just 2HP, and a big one that goes slower but can take up to 4hits, this give you the possibility to find your own way to play it and allows you to stay maybe more focus on the small one because the big can take more damage. Still, colours help you to "see" both of your ships without "look" at both. When you get good, you can easily avoid rocks with one ship when you take down aliens with the other one.

For now, we only have the base of the source code made with Construct2, few sounds and that’s basically all…. We have a lot to do : -music, graphs, and a lot of play test to find the good compromise of the difficulty. For music and graphs, the composer and the artist are going to work together on the “global art direction”  as I work on the code. The Fourth guy will keep an eye on everything and make sure that everything goes the cool way. We will soon make a 3-day-jam to try to have a good part of the game already done, we are students, so we don't have a lot of time between student jobs and studies... But we will try to finish the game very quick, but we prefer quality over time, so we will see where it leads us!

I’ll soon post more devlogs as we work on new versions of the game during our jam.

Hope it hypes you bit, we, 4 of us are very exited to share our progression on our first game project.

Hi everyone!

For the last day I've been making UI… and it’s quite boring to do but it's necessary.
I’ve just added a gamepad control and some menus (the menu option are still empty for now because it still is a very simple demo).

And I’ve also added :
A new game mode : Big run, you have to get to the higher level without dying ofc but you don’t receive health for your spaceship, it is the “stamina” run, the old “Git Gud” mode, you saved your progression by passing a new max level after killing certain number of aliens. With big run, you kill an enemy to go to the next level (without loading ofc).
-Shots from spaceships are now going back on the other’s ship screen. It can’t kill aliens, it is just here to kill your own ship. Because of this you have to manage your shooting rate. And it also “allows” to play with a friend, because you only have to focus on one screen, but if your friend shoot too much, you are dead.

I will have to make some optimisation, the prototype was very simple, so it would run on anything, but as I add things (and soon graphs) it will become harder to keep it run on small configs… I hope I will be able to do it well with Construct 2.

Artists (composer and graphist) work hard and can’t wait to show what they made.
And we just realised that we will need a lot of playtest…. So, we will soon ask for help.

There still are some questions about more technical issues, like lights. We don’t know yet how we are going to handle it… There are a lot of options, and we want to make it look cool but not too heavy on effect because the most important in our game is that we can always “see” without “looking”. But we want our game to be beautiful as well, so we have to work on that.

-Gredu and Blop (Blop is the graphist)

Hi,
Today we reviewed the progression. It was too hard too early and level one was very hard :/

The level one must be hard because of the gameplay, it has to make you learn how to move and shoot, not just completely destroy you. Now we can easily reach level 40, after that we have to focus, and it feels good to play it.
I’ve been all day on that. I reached level 60, my friends are thinking that I’m cheating. We will need help on this point.
They spend there day on art. We have some music demo, and some graphs.

Tomorrow we will unfortunately not work on the game, but just after that, it’s the “game jam”. And we will work harder.

Hi, So the game jam has begone!

We think of an Arcade mode with more enemies and stuff like that (there is also a black hole that just attract the ship).
We are now implementing art and music in the game.



This is not much, but now we know how to do it. And as you can see, we are also working on light effects, that are really tricky to make with construct2, but we love the engine and our lights effects are ok, so we won’t change.

We are now thinking on new arcade things and art/animations and sound design.
There is a lot of work left to be done, but we have coffee !

Hey guys,

Blop here for a first devlog on graphs ! Today was a big day with lots of work done, we finished most of the game, added plenty of new arcade features and integrated graphs for everything in the standard game modes ! We now have the overlay, all sorts of background effects, light effects, animations for the player and ennemy and many more. Tomorrow i'll redo some of the Asteroid models and i'll try to finish the menus and maybe try to work on some graphs for the arcade.

In the next week, before testing on a larger scale, I'll be working on finishing the arcade, maybe animating the in-game overlay and redoing some graphs that i'm not satisfied with.


https://gfycat.com/AdorableAnimatedHarrier
Here are some images of animation trials for the player shooting. We tried lots of diffrent animation techniques, we have a bone and rigs system for the enemy body animations and we made some hand drawn animations too. We did not keep all of them but it was fun trying new things, most of the work is done in photoshop and illustrator and I use After Effects to test animations but i usually work on them again as static images in photoshop after that.

Hi Boys and Girls !

The game jam ended in a terrible sticky room (and a small fight between me and the artist about a first version of menu) but with a lot of work done ! We did nearly all menus and add some animations, some affixes for the arcade mode.... We added some particules, we made new music... We did well, and it was 3 cool days even if my "Tagliatelles carbonara" will stay at least 3days in our stomach :O

 We still have to make the arcade affix selection menu, and add visual effect on the main menu, some sounds,  rework the in game UI and do all arcade art. Then we wil start to send the game for feedbacks and release the game.

But I still think we only did half the job :/ Because "10 last procent take 90% of the time". We will post less devlogs from now because on monday, our studies timetables are just full :'( ... Have a good night     -Gredu ("coding")

Hi everyone!
It's been a while I know :O
Don't worry we are working on the game, just slowly be cause of studies and all that kind of stuff  :/
Still, we made a lot during 10 lasts days...
-rework progression
-new animations/menus animations
-new menus
-2 new musics (we will post a link soon ^^)
-bug corrections, and added some graphs details....

More then that, we went to the "Brotaru", a belgian game-industry meet-up to have some feebacks... And... It was very cool, If you have the occasion to show your game on a small event, just go in ! It really feels good to see unknow random gamer get fun on your game :O We will also go to the next one in the first week of March.
We are now thinking to work harder for the twoo next weeks and we hope we can realease the game in March.

There is a screenshot of the New_New* menu :)

Thanks,

Gredu,