Michiel here again! The design for the flyer is done. Only a few tweaks from the first version, but this is how it went to the printing company. We should get them delivered on Tuesday! If you want a physical copy, come look us up. Unless you're my mom. Mom, I'll bring you one on Thursday :)
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The paper kind that is, not "flying units". You can't have flying units, the death lasers would shoot them!
Anyway, hi all, Michiel here! Since we'll be showing off Powargrid at the Dutch Game Garden and Indievelopment events soon, and our only handouts are our old business cards with the old logo, we figured we should design something new. Turns out you can get full colour, double sided flyers printed pretty cheaply these days, so that's what I've been designing today. I'm quite happy with how it turned out, if I may say so myself! No technical details or pretty pictures this time, we've just spent an evening discussing our marketing plans (i.e. we should make some) and incorporating (i.e. we are totally a legit company, man!) March 2nd we'll be visiting the Dutch Game Garden in Utrecht again, to demo our game and chat to other folks involved in making and marketing games. Lacking a good screenshot to show you, let me present you with a purple blobbie with a monocle and a top hat:
We're in the process of cleaning up the dialogues for the second to last campaign mission. Part of that is making sure that the dialogues trigger at the appropriate moments, so this involves playing the mission a couple of times (ok, we could call it testing, but we enjoy our own game so much we don't actually call it that). We then noticed a small thing: the AI overcharged a specific power plant in this mission, which it shouldn't do. The mission's AI script needed a tweak to prevent this overcharge. Only one problem: the AI script was nowhere to be found. The first thought was that the script had ended up somewhere else between our assets, but a search didn't turn it up. It simply wasn't there, which meant the mission was still running only the base version of our AI. It puts up a good fight, as it should, that late in the campaign. It was a pleasant surprise to see our AI holds up that well without mission specific tweaks. So we added an AI subclass to the mission and disabled overcharge. For that one power plant to be precise, so don't think it won't surprise you with a sudden overcharge :). Of course, this got us thinking about which other mission specific things this AI should do. We gave the AI:
As you may have surmised, we find building and testing AI behaviour to be fun. So much fun that we often get caught up playing our game instead of just testing. And even though we should spend our time on coding, building and writing, we think it's a good sign that we can still get so immersed in our game even after years of development :).
Sometimes you fix a bug and you're almost sad to see it go. In this case, we finally fixed the one where the game would spawn an additional AI (computer player) when you return to the main menu scene after playing a skirmish map. That means that you have three computer players controlling two teams, so they start taking each other's turns, which means the game goes crazy and it's awesome :) Do you know what that means? That means that every single player campaign mission is now fully playable! We're still missing some dialog and there's a bunch of placeholder pictures, but you can now blow up the yellow economic war machine, survive the steam powered onslaught of the purple volcano battleship, tread carefully to defeat a green superweapon, face down the accursed Morsabalto bunker with your allies, "liberate" a hidden weapons stash from the reds, fight the greens in their own back yard, and earn your victory in the epic final showdown. Well, not "you", technically... we'll be releasing a new build soon, but that will still be limited to the first seven missions. You'll have to wait for the beta to see more!
Hi everyone, Michiel again! Over the years we've received a lot of feedback that the graphics of the game were improving, or actually looking good, but that the backgrounds in the dialogue pictures were rather plain, and, to be fair, people had a point. However, we quite liked the clean lines of the pictures Willem originally drew using Inkscape (a great, free drawing application), and neither of us have the artistic skills to draw something significantly better. I had an idea, though: how about just adding a touch of depth and detail by post processing the vector images in a bitmap editor (Paint.NET in my case, another great free tool!) So, that's what I've been doing: adding some shadows, highlights, and grime, and I think it has added quite a bit of character to our backgrounds! Oh, and please don't ask about the suspicious blue smear. I'm sure the cleaners will take care of that shortly.
Little to report on Powargrid, because I recently got married and just got back from my honeymoon! Unfortunately, we're now back in cold, autumny Holland... We're in the process of selling our old apartment and finding a new place, but other than that it's back to "business as usual". Expect some new screenshots soon!
So this is what I currently have open in my browser tabs: I did not expect to be looking in to this, ever, but hey, you never know where game dev will take you :-) In this case, I suddenly got an idea for dressing up The Final Level of the campaign, which is to surround the Conference Center, where the great Peace Conference between all the factions is held, with a beautiful baroque style garden. Virtual landscaping has been quite relaxing, actually! Spoilers (not really): yes, everyone comes to the Peace Conference itching for a fight, and yes, you will be smashing through the garden and yes, you will be leaving the place a mess. After all, this... is... POWARGRID! No sneak preview for you yet, but check back soon! Happy gardening,
Michiel Just a little picture I was working on for fun, maybe I can turn it into a desktop background :) Update: went and did it!
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AuthorWe're Michiel and Willem. Hi! Archives
June 2017
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