Well – I’ve fixed a few more bugs and added a few more visual effects this morning. I’m just fixing bugs and minor hangups now.

Final version playtests so far today have thrown up a few more issues than I expected, so I’m holding the release off until this evening. If you came here to check it out now, sorry for the delay and thanks for your attention and patience. If you’d rather be notified when it comes out, please follow me on Twitter. ♥

Edit: And by “this evening” I guess I meant Sunday. I’m going over the game with hanzonaut and we’re eliminating a few rough spots he identified. It’s heavy going but it’ll be worth it!

Beacon’s pretty much good to go! But… it’s 1am and no-one’s awake to playtest.

Right now I’m going to get some sleep, ’cause I’ve been busy all day tweaking and improving! I finished the third music track, added three kinds of tile, added a bunch of detail graphics, cleared up some DLL dependencies, optimised the game to run better on low-end systems and did some quick animated graphics for the splash screen. A quick snapshot of the splash screen mid-animation looks nifty in its own way, I think:

Anyway. I guess I’ll be setting up a page, getting a few playtests and actually releasing the game tomorrow morning. I’m kinda excited! See you then!

Thursday has been kinda busy. I’ve been working on music, reverb for the sound effects through FMod, bugfixes, an icon for the app and a quick splash screen… a lot of polish type stuff, but nothing really to talk about. So instead, here are some pictures of the editor I made for it!

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…have been the order of the day. I’ve been adding a few more particle effects to Beacon and fixing bugs, and I was starting to get annoyed at how platforms you could easily reach beneath you often fell offscreen thanks to the widescreen aspect ratio. So I fixed it. Now, when you stand on a thin platform or on the edge of a cliff, the camera moves down subtly so you can see what you’ll drop down to.

What the new camera does is, it scans the map and shifts up a few tiles when there’s a lot of empty space around and underneath you.  increpare showed me some neat camera tricks at CB2 which kinda fed into this: one effect of the terrain-aware camera is that, when you jump, it detects space underneath you all of a sudden so doesn’t follow you up as much. That’s a side effect, but it’s pretty useful by itself.

I think the game’s almost there graphically now. I’ve still got a bunch of stuff to do but I think I’ll manage to put it out this week. I think you’ll like it!

So what’s that lovely chap randomnine working on? Why, he’s been polishing his second-place LD48 game Beacon!

HERE’S A PICTURE

Back in January I put together a spiffy editor for all of Beacon’s game data. Over the past week or so, in between INCREDIBLE MISHAPS WITH VEHICLES, I’ve been updating the game world to make it that little bit sexier. I’ve also been adding graphical shine because it makes me happy. Up there you’ll see the particle effect for the astronaut’s jetpack and the new baked-in lighting on the tilemap.

There’s a certain irony in adopting crappy retro graphics for the sake of expedience and then spending hours on graphical effects to make them look better, but whatever! I’m going to have a kickass engine for random platformers after this. I will license it for millions. ♥