After some mock-up-ing we resume work on the old Monster Mash, adding a scrolling map and dropping the lighting and grey backgrounds. Partly due to me being bored of the glowey sci-fi look we go for a jolly old medieval look…
… but we just couldn’t get arrows to look quite so much fun as blasters, lasers and rockets. Bah.
To be continued…
After Droid Assault was done and dusted, ideas were thrown around, mock-ups produced, prototypes prototyped…
… none of which were quite doing it for us. And then, wedged down the back of the proverbial sofa, we found the little lost game formerly known as Monster Mash…
To be continued…
We had intended to write a game that would be a fun shooter, something that would appeal to ’shmup’ fans and a more ‘casual’ audience - and we wanted to create a shooter that would feel natural to play with a mouse, and no keys. Titan Attacks could be played with the mouse but it had been tacked on at the end of development as an alternative to keyboard control, and the various mouse-only control schemes we tried with Alien Flux and Super Elvis aka Super Dudester either never seemed completely natural to us, or the ones we liked everyone else hated.
We also wanted to avoid scrolling, and not make a standard vertical or side-scrolling shmup, thinking that might put off a fair amount of people.
The problem generally was being able to handle both movement and aiming at the same time - to be able to move in one direction whilst firing in another. We sidestepped this by removing the movement element completely.
After a month of playing around with various ideas we had a pretty fun little game involving building up your defences with turrets, mines and barricades to protect your city blocks from an onslaught of funky gidrahs. Here, again, are the only surviving screenshots…
However, the game had several rather big problems…
1. We had a simple lighting system, with spotlights showing the tracking of automated turrets and under the player cursor. For this to look any good the levels had to be pretty dark, and grey. This left us stuck as to how to change background gfx sufficiently to show level progression, not helped by…
2. The fixed screen made things feel very claustrophobic, quickly filling up with buildings, the aliens appearing almost on top of them, and there was no room for any pretty background graphics.
3. We hadn’t really thought through any kind of level/world progression at all. The game was fun, but… it didn’t really go anywhere.
…and then Cas’ wife suddenly left him. And ‘crashed’ his brand new pickup truck into a tree. And demanded all of his money. Development abruptly stopped.
…and then a game of the same name was released (a generic tower defence game), after we’d mentioned Monster Mash on this here blog, many moons ago. An unfortunate coincidence.
Not that that should have made any difference, but when we did resume development we decided to start something fresh (on what would end up being Droid Assault) rather than tackling the above problems of our now nameless game.
To be continued…
…with less words and more pictures 
In the meantime, notice anything different here?…
We’re not really going for accuracy in geographical locations - but should do something about that cactus.
Added and updated a whole load of things recently - it’s looking pretty slick. The HUD now has working ‘quicklaunch’ icons and tooltips on the bottom bar for buildings and powerups, and an alerts panel top right the other right (doh!), that also lets you quickly scroll to the building in question.
Also added new Earth level colours, new explosion particle effects, capacitor effects, powerup collect and activation effects, new extra glowey bullets, monster death effects, mini droid units, and a whole load of new weapons and buildings, and a big bad boss for level 10… all of which I’ll try and squeeze into a new vid soon.
More screenshots… Read the rest of this entry
Sometimes an IM chat just doesn’t cut the biscuit when it comes to describing weird bugs - in this case the bizarre interaction between explosion particles and a floor setting which is meant to make little bits of shrapnel bounce about when they hit it. Instead it acts like a big gluey magnet. But only sometimes. And smoke, which should float upwards generally, has decided to head east instead. Creating a set of test emitters, a few screen grabs and a quick scribble helps narrow down the problem…
Dropbox is what we’re now using to zap these test images back and forth between us, and it comes highly recommended if your doing any kind of remote development thing.
With any luck Cas will get that little pesky fella sorted soon, and then I’ll post some video of things exploding in a gratuitous manner.
