Blogs - mattmirrorfish

It's been a busy month! I've added a bunch of new features to the game, some of which I've made animated gifs for (see below). I've got a decent workflow for making GIFs now and that's sped up the process. Sharing GIFs on Twitter has been helpful in helping more people to know the game exists and so I've tried to be more consistent with that. Working a job, taking care of my kids and working nights on the game means that I have to prioritize key activities and lately that's been development work on the game. The past week I've had a few days off work and so been able to really dig into development and fix and add a bunch of stuff I've wanted to for a while.

New Beam Weapons

The shooting in Monarch Black has always used physics based projectiles. This means that it's not instantaneous. You shoot, an object flies from you to the enemy and hits them, or not. I like the feeling this gives to combat although I think it makes shooting a bit more difficult. Sometimes you have to lead your enemies a bit (shoot where they are going to be) if they are far away. This also allows me to do things like homing bullets, bouncing bullets and a few other fun features that I really like. But I've been curious what the game would feel like with raycast based weapons. Raycast shooting means that you click and an invisible ray is fired from your gun into the scene, it checks if it's hit anything and if that thing is an enemy it applies damage. The feeling this gives is that shooting is instantaneous. You click and the enemy takes damage right away. As of now, I've added a new category of weapons, beam weapons, to allow for ray cast based shooting in addition to the existing physics based system.

Here are two GIFs of one of the beam weapons, the Arc Lightning weapon. What makes it unique is that it bounces off things that it hits and can ricochet and hit other things.

More Mutations

I've also been working on adding more mutations to the game, powerups which you can choose from between levels. A few of these include:

Death Rockets: these give a chance to spawn a volley of rockets in random directions when you kill an enemy, here's a GIF.


Blood Lust: This gives a chance to create a shell of spikes around you when killing an enemy which damage nearby enemies. In this case it's combo-ing with Death Rockets and going a little crazy. Not sure if you'll be able to combine these in the final.

Enemy Tracking

Thanks to some feedback I got at the NYU Game Center play tests on Thursday nights I decided to try implementing a system to show you where nearby enemies are that you can't see. I'm pretty happy with how it came out. It makes the game a little more video game-y but I think it looks nice and allows me to make the game more challenging without feeling unfair. The action games I love most are hard and I'd like to get there with MB. This helps so I think it's here to stay. In the GIF below you can see the red triangle icons appear when an enemy is in range and point towards their location, growing brighter as the enemy gets closer.


That's it for now! My next goals are to keep working on the game, do a few more dev streams on Twitch which have been pretty fun so far and to try to post more regular updates.

I made a trailer! After much procrastinating I finally got to the point where the game looked mostly the way I wanted it to and so I captured some footage and cut it together. The music track is for the last stage in the game, a new piece I wrote over the summer. Also, I'm trying out the title Monarch Black to replace Pollen. There's another game called Pollen (which looks great) and I don't want people to get confused. I'm gonna roll Monarch Black around for a while and see how it sits with me.



 

Here are some new screenies. I took a few months off in discouragement and then got back on the horse after trying a few other small prototypes. Happily I've turned some game design corners and made things feel more coherent. I'm making a push to get some kind of finished version to show at the NY Unity Study Group on 9/25 which I've been invited to demo at. It's a great deadline and I've been working pretty hard. I just passed the year mark on this project which is pretty crazy but it's been much less than full time and I started pretty cold. I've gotten a lot better at Unity and scripting in the process and am really enjoying all that. Any feedback, comments whatever are appreciated!