It’s Squidly! On a Hat!
Hey All! We’ve been really busy preparing for GDC and Too Many Games over here, with new builds, new interns, and new hats!
Seriously! Hats!
If you want to meet up at GDC come find me. I’ll be wearing a hat. I’m excited to have some company schwag! Here’s some detail:
See you at GDC!
2 comments February 29, 2012
Enemy Art
There’s been one aspect of this game that I’ve been slacking on a little, and it’s been implementation of enemy art and behaviors. Everything is all stubbed out, but the actual enemy placement and the second to second detail is still being worked out.
Now, I can go on and on about my view that 99% of your gameplay should be interacting with the environment. Maybe I’ll post about that one day… but the real reason I haven’t gotten to it, is because it’s a heck of a lot of work. Implementing and timing all of the animations. Sandboxing all of the individual behaviors. Making sure they all work correctly in their environment.
Heck, someone testing the game caught the mini boss sneaking outside his door and wandering outside of his designated “mini boss” area the other day. Yeah, try to reproduce that bug on demand.
Wait, where was I? Oh yes – enemies! I’ve been sitting on these lovely enemy concepts for a while now. I love the style and can’t wait to get them jumping around and trying to kill Squidly!
Let me know if you have any favorites!
2 comments February 8, 2012
New Screenshots
Hi all! Here’s a couple new screenshots of levels that are getting polished up. The progress seems painfully slow at times, until I compare shots from only a few weeks ago to what’s in the game now. Would love to hear what everyone thinks about how the game is coming along.
4 comments February 6, 2012
Boss Numbah 2
Finally got the second boss up and running! It’s a “chase type” boss with guys chasing you up a vertical corridor. I thought just for fun I’d put up a shot of the debug level and some temp art for the baddies. Remember, this is just straight out of the level tool – but I thought someone may get a kick out of it 
.
I’m thinking about doing a quick write-up on how we go about making levels, from concept to graph paper to blockwork and polish. It’s an unfortunately long process – and because much of this game is content driven it takes a while.
So far, we’ve got about 20 levels or so finished (with about 5 or so being stinkers that still need work). We’re working on getting the final order and progression done too. Because this game has a unique non-linear progression system, and is very much an adventure game it has some unique balancing and level creation problems that need to be solved.
Ah— but I’m ranting. Here’s the promised shot . Enjoy! I should add “PRO-TIP” callouts.
Add comment January 6, 2012
Some art updates!
We have been super hard at work over here! Building levels, making art, putting polish on everything. We have some really great new updates to show now. You should be able to see the changes we’ve put into the background art.
We are able to squeeze in some more detail in our tile maps because of some engine updates. You can see the start of “Planet Squid” there too, with the star sprite, and the smoking crater he leaves at the beginning of the game. We’ve also got most of Polka Hills up and running, but the art isn’t ready to be dropped in quite yet – so visually it doesn’t look much different yet. That will change very soon and I’ll have an update to show off everything.
Oh yeah! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays. Can’t believe it’s that time of the year again already!
Add comment December 23, 2011
Mini Games + Cool new Stuff!
So, we finally got an update to show. I’ve been fighting bugs, and trying to get together a good demo to show for a while. There’s a lot of changes under the hood, but those don’t really matter much (well, except to things like game stability).
The BIG changes are the ability to spit out enemies as stars to attack, the completion of world 1, and a cool mini game.
Let me know what you guys think about the changes and additions! I’d love to hear from you.
Add comment October 12, 2011
Squishy can pick his food!
Hey All,
We made a lot of changes over the last couple of days. The biggest one is the ability to target an individual object to eat. This doesn’t change the mechanics of the game really – but it does change the pacing, and it makes everything feel just a little more dangerous.
For example, now you don’t have to wait for enemies to show up, you can barrel ahead and just pause-select them when you’re ready to eat them.
Here’s a video, that shows what I mean:
What do you think?
1 comment August 16, 2011
Mimics Eating Squid
The design of Star Saver has been a very organic process. The whole process has been a series of rapid prototypes where we put together builds as fast as possible, then dig for the nuggets of fun. We build on the good bits, and throw the bad bits away. This is really my preferred way of designing games: Take a base mechanic, put it in a sandbox, and don’t stop sandboxing until you’ve got a game that’s fun to play. At that point you can start building levels.
The overall design has changed a several times, and we are committed to a schedule and a design now. We think we have enough bits of fun to carry the entire game, and we’re only now stepping out of the sandbox into real levels.
The fact that we’ve been so organic in the design process makes it really hard not to explore new gameplay opportunities when they accidentally creep up. Here’s what I’m talking about. I’ll wait here while you watch this:
The accident that happened:
Squishy and Squidly can become disconnected and stuck. Because their chain can drape over objects, Squidly can become stuck hovering in air with nothing to jump off of. This can cause a condition stuck condition that forces you to restart the level, or exit the game.
Obviously this doesn’t work, and it only became apparent during some play-testing. So, after finishing up the work I needed to do to keep to the schedule I tried letting Squishy pull Squidly through walls to safety by hitting the munch button.
This didn’t make much sense unless Squishy actually tried to munch Squidly — and that was easy enough to add. But it just felt so weird for Squishy to munch down on Squidly, then not be able to move. So a (rather long) 7 or 8 hours later (it’s now after 7:00 am as I’m writing this), and Squishy is rolling along…
Now… I’m going to defend this as a bug fix and not a feature. Even though it feels very much like a new feature. I absolutely refuse to go all the way down the rabbit hole and let Squishy spit at angles (sequel anyone?), but it does change the dynamics somewhat and I don’t know how this will affect level building yet.
So what’s the moral of the story? Probably nothing. It’s still quite possible that this doesn’t make it to the final game but I wanted to show it, and see if anyone has feedback.
I’m tired – I’ll play this after a few hours sleep and see if I feel different about it when I wake up.
Add comment August 11, 2011
New Developer Diary
Hey everyone! Keeping up great with the new project schedule… in fact, I’m able to nail out some bugs early and I’m still a day ahead.
Here’s the latest developer diary:
Not counting my chickens yet – there’s still a lot of stuff left to do. I’ve been trying to keep up this blog as best I can – and if there’s anything you want me to mention or talk about let me know!
What would help us the most right now is to subscribe to the youtube page, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter. It’s a tremendous morale boost to see that people are interested in what we are working on! And that’s what we need to finish!
Add comment August 10, 2011
New Star Saver Developer Diary
Doing some Project Management Stuff. I’m trying to figure out when the game will be finished now. We have sandboxed almost everything, and now we’re building worlds.
Add comment August 6, 2011
