Torchlight Tuesday

Yeaaaaaah!

Hot Arrow Fix!

Found a small bug in the "engine" that caused Spawn Warning Arrows to stop working after the first level. Fixed this up and also increased the alpha level for the arrows on the emitters. Check it out in 0.52!

Hot Fix!

Small bug with 0.5 caused Dampener (3) to crash the game. Addressed it and you can download 0.51. Sorry!

Thanks to Grant Shonkwiller for the heads up.

Arrows!

Hey everyone! I'm pretty damn psyched about this new update. I've changed the nature of the emitters in the game for this new release so lets get into it!



So the new proto (0.5) introduces a whole new scheme. Emitters are now fixed so they cannot grow in size by holding now. Instead you can now apply a direction to the green emitters (the repulsors bound to 1). When you click, you can now hold down and drag the mouse around to set the direction of the new emitter. When you let go it will create it as normal. Now when enemies touch the emitter, they will go in the direction of the arrow attached to the meter. You still need at least 1 point of power to create an emitter. The direction will not effect the Attractor or Dampener, which pull in / slow down all enemies that touch em.

I am hoping that this new scheme will give the game a more tactical/puzzle feel. You can set up emitters to create long arrangements to shove enemies into a trap or wall. So give it a shot and tell me what you think!

Oh also, there is a seceret nasty bug that I'm having trouble reproducing. If the game does crash, please shoot me a line....well shoot me a line in general!

Metal and Nats

So here is the awaited weekend demo. This new version (0.4) features 1 new level and 2 new enemies.



The "Burster" (working title) is a extremely fast and small little annoying thing. I have them coming in big hordes that move fast. Catch with these guys is the have low hit points and take crazy high damage from wall collisions. So pound in the wall (hehehehe).

The Metal Zombies are slow moving and are quick to slow down (so throwing them back is tricky). They are completely invulnerable to wall collisions so you need to take them out with traps.

I lowered the lifespan of the Green Repulsor. You won't be able to simply cover the Defend Point - your energy will drain faster then you can deal (at least I am pretty sure).

The older two levels haven't been reworked but now that I did some major overhauls on the basic code (including adding layout loading for Sprites/Text - useful for GUI junk) and adjust the camera, I want to get to work on more direct gameplay tuning. I'll be trying to balance all three levels or scrapping em and producing some new ones based on feedback.

So take a look and tell me what you think!

Torchlight

Roughly 1 week from release:

http://www.torchlightgame.com/

This is a simple, polished-looking Action RPG. The more I looked into the team and how they come off in interviews, the more I'm digging it. Seems like an honest game good-times-had-by-all game.

New Camera and HUD

So a quick update - the new build (0.36) has a new camera system. You can use the mouse wheel to zoom in/out and now holding down the right mouse button and dragging will pan the camera (rather then clicking like before). I also threw in a better HUD graphic to make the numbers at the top make more sense. Going to be working on a new level soon. Hit me up with your feedback on the camera!

Weekend Update

First off, congrats to my older brother The Raj. He dun got engaged.

Second, I'm gonna sneak some time in this weekend to work on the camera. Lots o Feedback is declaring that it is the suck. I'm also going to try and sneak a new level in.

Third, Torchlight is now on Steam for pre-order. Go hack and slash for 17.99 on Oct 27th.

Attack of the Robo Zombies 0.3

Hola!

I've got a new demo up on the side there (Proto 0.3) that you and delve into. I added some more temp graphics to smooth out the look of the game but the bigger feature is a new level that shows off using traps to kill enemies. I'm thinking the game should be more focused on the idea of "herding" versus randomly spamming each zombie you see.



I've also added a new scoring mechanic which I hope to polish more down the road. So every time you kill an enemy, you gain 1 point but that is increasd by the current multiplier. Right now every kill grants you a +1 to the multiplier. This will reset to 1 after 5 seconds so its in your best interest to kill as many guys as close as possible (or save 1 while you kill a few others to net a high score).

I think there are a few bugs with it which I will look into later. Give it a go!

Ready when you are

While I'm fairly sure many of you could probably care less, I have noticed that there has been very few updates with ARZ. Originally I intended to do at least one feature (or parts of a feature) a night but with work and a few crazy things going on at home, this hasn't been the case.

The biggest issue with me not updating has really been about my gaming drive being down. When I do hobby stuff, I need a strong sense of..well of guilt really. I like to have a game or games that I find so much joy in playing I'll put aside my other tasks and after I do sink some time into them, I'm feeling guilty and want to get some work done. While this sounds sad, really it makes for some strong enthusiasm. I play a game, get jazzed up remembering why I want to do this hobby stuff in the first place and then go back and do it. If the gaming gets pulled or becomes sparse, then I start to lose any will to want to work on my hobby stuff. Actually it is kind of sad but in the end its a system that works for me.

As for the title of the post, my new "juice" has been Wolfenstein for 360. Hot damn is this game good. I snagged the demo and really wasn't thinking much of if when I fired it up. After about 3 or 4 times going through it, I knew I was gonna be hooked. I never really played the CoD series so to me, all this intense fire fight action is brand new. The game has my "core" likes with any action game - tight firefights where I get to choose what I do, upgrades, and visiting familiar enviroments. Apparently the Best Buy copy is $10 cheaper and comes with the flamethrower download code. The weapon really is horribly unfair in the early game but there is nothing more satisfying then getting surrounded in a house by Nazis and hearing them yell out that they are coming in. My reply as I switch to the flamethrower and point at the front door is always "Ready when you are"

So now that I have juice properly filled into my gaming veins, its time to spend it. While there is a list of things to add to ARZ to help solidfy the core gameplay, I think the best thing to do now is establish greater context. To accomplish this, I'm going to get a level "play list" going which let you try out a set of levels and then record your scores against the high scores so far. This will helpfully let all the folks testing the game get a better idea of what they/the game needs to improve on. I'm aiming for about 3-4 levels but first I'll need that Level Manager....to the laboratory!