Today I entered the first 2 levels of Star Crisis into playtest on the XNA Creator's Club. This is an important milestone, as it means that content-wise, the game is about 50% complete.
I pondered long and hard about what work to hire out for this release -- graphics, or soundtrack? Ultimately I chose to do the pixel art and sound effects myself, and find someone who was better at music composition than I am.
After listening to many music portfolios, I settled on the retro-stylings of Magnus Pålsson, a Swedish composer who also created the soundtrack to the acclaimed indie game, VVVVVV. As soon as I heard Magnus' work, my decision was made for me. In less than a week, we worked out a deal that fit my budget constraints and my game had a nice little soundtrack that was far better than anything I'd managed to come up with.
Take a listen to the Level 1 theme below:
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This past week I spent my time worrying whether I'd be able to keep Star Crisis on schedule. I missed three nights of XNA work, but somehow still managed to complete Mission 1 today, boss battle included.
As I began throwing more and more elements into the level, I found that I was generating a lot of garbage that caused some major framerate issues. Reducing the number of stars in the background helped quite a bit (and wasn't really noticeable from a visual standpoint).
However, the biggest performance gain came from replacing all of the flying debris (from destroyed enemy craft) with a simpler explosion sprite. This change probably reduced the number of sprites being managed by a factor of four.
Next week, I move on to Mission 2.
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This week I spent my game-making efforts on the graphical assets for Star Crisis.
As I said before, I'm approaching the entire development process a little differently from Aesop's Garden. Being mindful of the fact that I'm planning to make a $1 game, I've kept it pretty simple in the graphics department.
Here's an example in the form of some of my enemy designs:
You'll notice that I don't have anything particularly complex in that portfolio. My main goal was to ensure each enemy was easily distinguishable from the others in both shape and color. I didn't go overboard with fancy stuff, in order to avoid extending development time far beyond what a $1 game would be worth.
In summary, Star Crisis is still officially "on schedule" for its 6-week development period.
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I've been working hard on my next Indie Games release for the past week or so, and I'm happy to say some good progress is going on. Here are a couple of screen mockups based on the graphical assets I've been creating:
Title screen:
Infiltrating a battleship:
I've been saying all along that this dev cycle is not going to be the nine-month saga that Aesop's Garden entailed. That's still the case. I want to have a more-or-less complete version of Star Crisis by the time the Dream Build Play submission window closes (March 3rd). Once that's done, I'll take a few more weeks to polish and work out bugs.
Hope to have even more to show by next weekend. I'm excited!
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It's the new year, and I've started up on development for my next Indie Games release. The Flash-based prototype was known as JetTrek and reached a certain amount of popularity online, so hopefully the "fuller" version will also resonate with people.
The new game is called:
If you've played the prototype, then you know that at its core, Star Crisis will be a shmup. But of course the unique control scheme will introduce an experience that's substantially different from your traditional shooter.
In any case, I'm beefing up the original concept with things such as powerups, more interesting enemy attack patterns, and a handful of boss battles.
One thing I'm kind of excited about is that because Star Crisis is made in flixel, I'll be able to release a Flash version of the game quite easily if I'm so inclined. (I might simply end up making a shorter demo version online.)
As with Aesop's Garden, I'll post periodic updates here on the Excalibur Studios blog. It's good to be back!
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