Lots of Updates and Progress

 TL;DR:

• The name of the game and the title of ep. 1 will be announced soon.
• Episode I will be 10 levels.
• New bigger textures & sprites with more colours.
• Added more SFX and added music.
• Audio quality is not garbage anymore.
• The level editor is functional and up to date with the game changes.
• Things are good.

My wife came up with a name for the game and I came up with a tentative episode title. I have been calling the game “Boom” or “Boomer Shooter” for a while now and its good to have a real name. I’m going to wait until I have some title art before I announce it. I’ll try to get to that soon.

I have finished planning 10 levels for Episode 1 and I came up with a theme to tie them all together. I’ve messed around with making a few levels, but I want to get the order of textures and sprites finalized before doing too much work on levels. Currently the wall and sprite object identities are directly tied to the texture and sprite image indexes, respectively. I kinda want to keep doing it this way, so I need the order mostly finalized before I make levels.

I have also written a vague story, but it is mostly just to help me with sticking to the theme. It is not important at all. You do not need know the story to be able to play and enjoy the game. I’m going to stick to environmental story telling in the game and try to avoid stuff like “text walls”. I do, however, think it would be fun to make a manual for the game and have a couple paragraphs in there to setup the story and give a bit of background.

I did a bunch of work on the rendering code. I switched textures and sprites from 16 colours to 32 bit colour and increased the size from 32x32 to 64x64 pixels. I want a retro feel but 16 colours was just not enough. I may reduce the colours again in future, but I will probably do 256 colour or more.

Because of the colour and size changes I have been working a lot on textures and sprites. I’m not really great at art but I’ve put together a few things using an asset pack made by thatguynm and a bunch of reference photos I found. My contributions to the artwork is not great, but I think you can understand what most of it is meant to be. It is good enough for now but I would like to hire an artist to make all original art for the game at some point if I can find the funding for it.

I also changed the way I load and play audio. To save time and a bunch of work I have decided to use the audio libraries provided by Monogame to play sound. So I added songs and more SFX. The SFX are a combination of files from fesliyanstudios and stuff I recorded. The music is just random tracks from fesliyanstudios. I have no clue at all when it comes to making music. I think I should probably also try and hire someone to do original music if/when I can.

The level editor has also gotten all the engine updates along side the game and most of the data has working editors. It still needs a lot of work on the usability side, but its is functional and up to date.

Development is progressing well. There is a lot to do but I feel like the work is going quickly considering I am currently working alone on this project. I’ll try to get a new playable build up some time in the next couple weeks.

- Matt