We know, we know… 3 weeks of silence. Don’t worry: while we have been silent on this page, we haven’t been sitting still during the Easter Holiday. While we did take some time off, there’s quite a bit that has changed, too. Take a look at this:

Adding to what exists

As we are drawing near the end of the second and last production sprint, we have decided to leave the bosses for what they are, and instead focus on working out what we already have - that is, 3 different tiles, and 3 different enemies. Until now, the tiles simply looked good. Now they actually do something, too. The forest tiles throw fruits at the ground, possibly hitting the player or the enemies - you do not want that spikey fruit to hit your head! The desert tile nibbles away at your health little by little, as the heat causes the astronaut to get a heatstroke. However, some desert tiles have an oasis, that will heal you as you stand in the water. And then we have the snowtiles: these will slow the enemies down, but watch out: getting hit here means sliding a whole end back!

Of course, not everything already works perfectly, and you will notice quite some bugs. Luckily, none of these are completely gamebreaking, albeit they are sometimes fairly annoying. They will get fixed in the next sprint, when we have all the wanted mechanics in the game.

We also started working on the enemy skills. Having decided to also cut a bit in those, we will give each biome-type one extra skill. At the moment, you will not see too much from those in the game, they are still a WIP and if they spawn, they will probably not work as intended yet. The desert enemies are for example supposed to spawn in a tornado, that will redirect all bullets that hit it, but at the moment is simply destroys your bullets and it looks like a gray creeper with arms. Leftover placeholder meshes, you know…

SPAAAAAACCCEEEEE flies past

You might have already seen it on the page itself and in the first picture, but we finally have put our planet in space. Together with the skybox, we also added in a moon that circles the planet, like a real moon should. It is quite amazing to see how much these two additions completely changed the looks of the game.
Some other things have been finished too, and yet other things aren’t in the game yet. The icetiles have been finished, they have gotten their final textures for both the ground and the environment on top. The same goes for the scientist and the science camp, that have been completed too.

Some smaller things have been made, but not added into the game, like some simple guns for enemies and player, an alien ruin, a shield for the player, and the breaking of the tiles. The shield will be added shortly and is one of the skills that the player will be able to use.

Something else that will be added in the upcoming week, is the breaking of the tiles. As bombs explode away at the tile’s health, they will become more and more broken, untill eventually, they will shatter and disappear into the planet’s core. Untill now, we didn’t have anything to viualize this, but with the new tiles and their animations, it will become quickly clear which tiles you should perhaps evade, and which are still undamaged.

Next week

As said before, we are going to leave some things be. This includes certain enemy skills and enemy bosses. We simply do not have the time to put those in anymore. However, we will still be adding things, like some enemy skills, player skills, and things like the breaking tiles etc. After that, it is on to animating everything and hooking the UI up to the playerskills. And after that, sound and bugfixes, along with FX to make everything shine are on the table.