What’s a good SHMUP without a decent Asteroid stage? Not much I’d say, we’re making a doosey, here are the first couple of shots of the work in progress, currently there’s just the asteroids and you on screen, but the A.R.G.U.S. Complex has a few tricks up its non-existant sleeves.
Not to worry though, you’ll have a few tricks of your own. Hot Rox ftw.
Im thinking I might aswell rename the blog ‘Sorry for the Lack of Updates’, I should really try and find someone to make these updates for me, rest assured though development continues. I’m right in the middle of some significant developments that will be chronicled on grassrootsgames.co.uk when i get closer to completion, I thought I’d lay down some more awesome art work from Maher in the mean time:
These are two shots from our opening cinematic, these two are both from the opening, but there’s also an ending scene which is currently, in my opinion, the best looking thing in the whole game. Click on them to view in the gallery, be sure to check out the full 1280×720 images by clicking the link at the top right of the screen.
I say cinematic but really, due to the lack of video support in XNA, we have taken a more stylised approach. The idea is to borrow some ideas from Homeworld and use subtle transition effects, animated portions of the screen, and some well placed audio cues to create the illusion of a cinematic in what is in an everyday 2d scene. Luckily it doesn’t take much to make Mahers work look amazing and my only role will be making sure it all fits together nicely and provides an atmospheric start to the game.
This is a real labour of love because I doubt whether most players will even notice how much work has gone into it, but my general approach with Maher’s art has always been ‘More = Better’. This stuff has been sitting on my hard drive for a while just begging to get added to our already somewhat bloated asset directory.
Probably wont make a start on the creation of the scenes for couple of months, right now the focus is on getting the weapons in, getting the enemies acting in an entertaining way, and putting all the stages together (aka The Game). But once it’s together I’ll be sure to give you all a sneak peak (if Maher lets me).
I’m pleased to announced that the Stage 1 demo of Last Alarm is back, it’s not the same demo you knew and had problems running back in March, it’s been updated with a load of bug fixes, a whole new GUI and HUD, a new (never seen before) stats screen.
Minimum Specs
1.0 GHz processor
512 MB RAM
Windows XP
Shader Model 1.1 or greater and DirectX 9.0c supported Video card
Recommended Specs
2.0 GHz processor
2 GB RAM
Windows XP
Shader Model 2.0 or greater and DirectX 9.0c supported Video card
When you boot up the demo you’ll be greeted with an overlay, make sure you read it, press F1 to close it.
You can get the pad/key layout in game at any time by pressing F1 (this has the handsome side-effect of pausing the game so you dont die while reading).
Because I know some people hate change, here’s a flash version of the video below (for the full 1280×720 glory though, you’ll need to download the divx version in the previous post).
Thanks to the miracle that is stage6 I have a new video to share. This one is a complete run through from start menu to the of stage 1.
Unfortunately while stage6 rocks for storing high-quality videos online, FRAPs sucks at making them (at least on my PC it does) so I must appologise for the slight frame drops in places (game runs in a glorious 60fps) and the poor sound quality, I probably need to find an application that can capture higher quality sound, or play around with XACT to reduce the instances for the capture. I’ll work on that this week but for now heres what we have:
There’s a few cool things to notice in this video…
Your first official look at Lucas, he’s your Earth based informant who’ll be giving you intel about what to expect in the upcoming stage
The interactive loadout screen, you can see I’m picking my weapons on the left and testing them out on the right of the screen
360 Degree firing arc: You can see me taking out smaller ships with my secondary turrets at all kinds of angles
Extra weapon functionality: The Bullshot Plasma Pulse turret weapon can be used to take out enemy projectiles, you can see me taking advantage of this, using it as kind of flak cannon to shield myself from incoming fire
The shield: In my B10Housen encounter you see me activate the shield, which drains power from the engines but makes me virtually invulnerable, B10Housens drones explode harmlessly on the surface of the shield, making it shimmer and shift position.
Boss Weak Point: Putting my self in the firing arc of the main turret I was able to strike B10Housens weak point with everything I had, taking him down in a flash
This is all non-final of course, there’s loads of work to do on the enemy waves, and there’s a tonne of UI touches I’m going to add to the stage itself that will make the whole experience totally different. But that was basically 4 minutes of your Last Alarm experience (bar the awesome cinematics..but thats another post entirely). As always feedback is greatly appriciated.
I’ve installed a new All In One gallery for the site, just click on the image above to get to it. There are a bunch of new images there, and stuff from stage 2 should start going up soon!
You might notice the URL has changed and things look totally different…thats because my ex-webhost went down again, so I’ve switched to dreamhost. At the moment I havent been able to get access to the old site so all the content is gone for the time being. Luckily the game code isn’t just stored on that server so it’s safe and development continues.
