Just a quick update…
Been busy adding missions and adjusting PRPL (the scripting language) as necessary to support various tutorial and game play elements. Good stuff but time consuming. I’m hoping to catch a wave in a few days and get several good story missions out of it fairly quickly.
Interface wise I’ve added some game event notifications similar to what CW3 has. You can see them in the screenshot. Helps when you hear something go ‘boom’ off screen in the middle of an intense fight. Or if you just aren’t paying attention and something blows up right in your face… it helps then too.
–Edit–
Oh yeah about to forget, wishlist if you haven’t already: http://store.steampowered.com/app/422900
Localization support?
American English and Bad American English are what the game will ship with. I might slip in an “amongst” instead of “among” here and there. Or I might spell “behavior” as “behaviour” (thanks for that Unity).
Of course custom maps can have whatever language they want for text and game events… so long as the character set maps to ASCII (that’s a font and texture atlas restriction).
Joking aside, I just don’t have the resources to make the UI and all of the text work in a range of languages. If it were only the conversation dialogs, I could pay for translation services and call it a day. But making all of the text in the UI ‘fit’ when in english/german/spanish/french/cantonese/etc I’ve deemed a bridge too far.
“Bad American English”
do I detect a swing at the Brits?
xD
Maybe he meant the canadians? 😉
More of a self deprecating swing 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJhlD6q71YA&t=49
Awesome work, carry on slogging it to victory, sir!
I wonder if perhaps the notifications could be more customizable than in Creeper World 3?
With user made maps especially, I often find myself needing to disable the notifications because there’s too much of one thing happening that it becomes a real annoyance to have it spammed across corner of the screen constantly (spores, siphons depleting, things being blown up (and instantly rebuilt just to blow up again)).
A way to tick on and off which notifications show would be great.
Currently, I have things working a bit differently. Only 3 show at a time and you can scroll back if you want. So it is basically a little list that can grow however large but only 3 show at a time. You can also toggle the visibility off if you want. So some people will leave it off and only ever take a look (and maybe scroll back) if something happens and they aren’t sure what it is.
Other people will leave it visible all of the time and just glance at it as necessary. On larger displays, that is what I prefer since it is top left and not really in the way. On a small display I prefer to turn it off and just pause the game and take a look on demand.
ugh i want one too but not ready for Knuckle Cracker
its still on comeing soon
Looking good as anyways Virgil! On a side note, interesting structure on the bottom right there. Is it just a placeholder texture from cw3 until you make something more original or is it actually a proper thing? Either way, throwback object is throwback.
Those structures look that way because [redacted] (spoilers) 🙂
Ah, explains everything. And by everything I mean nothing. Oh well, I’ll find out in a month hopefully. All good things take some time 😀
Looking good! Interesting to see land… “emitters”. By the way, what are the particle things called? They can’t be emitters because they are deconstructed, not nullified. Also, hoping that you can post some gameplay videos by the beta testers. Good luck!
Is there a way to “recharge” the nebula? Lathes, particle beams, particles?
Something special?
The particle beams repair it.
The blue particle beams can rebuild blue nebulas which turned grey after stopping red particles.
Check out some videos in older blog posts to see it in action.
I wishlisted on steam, but I don’t want to buy this on steam. Creeper world 3 is my go-to game when steam is down. I want PF to be the same way 🙂
You know you can use steam offline, right? Not to mention steam is almost never down anyway.
I can’t wait to play that mission just to work out wth those things are!
All the hints at Creeper World are awesome xD. I see that one of those “placeholder” sprites has been broken apart… is it an actual unit now? And land Particle emitters look like creeper emitters… possible connection? 😀
It’s been said multiple times that the particle fleet and creeper world games take place in the same universe. I’m really interested in finding out how closely the two are linked though
Can I buy early access?
Shut up and take my money!!
How about a release of 3 levels, either custom or the first few story levels, soft-released as a demo to assist in the bubbling anticipation for the big release?
Starcraft 2 Legacy of the Void did this with 3 prequal levels that were not even part of the main story. Just food for thought.
I’m considering this… basically release the free ‘demo’ a week ahead of the launch or something like that. Might also give me a chance to also catch any last minute platform issues and such.
This is a common practice, and works great for building hype.
do it 😉
I am all in!
How do you go about designing story and missions? I know it sounds silly, but it’s always the story that sucks me in, and I did get sucked into the grand tragic narrative of Creeper Worlds.
And for each individual mission — do you sort of sketch out on paper what you want the dynamic tensions and balance to be? or what new technologies and techniques you want? Or do you dive into coding first and then tinker it into shape?
I ask because it’s such a complete mystery to me how you managed to pull off something so engaging with Creeper World.
Yeah… I wish I had a methodology. It’s more of a thing I think about a lot all during game development. I have a general arc or story kernel I work off of. But the details and how things exactly play out doesn’t get set till I start making the story missions.
At best I sketch out how the tech and other game features will unfold and roughly where in the missions I want certain key points in the story to be made. Other than that, I just dive in and make missions and tell the story and massage it all till it takes shape.
Here’s an idea I’d like to see for these notifications: Several pointers to one notification. Like, if several buildings are destroyed at once, give *one* notification that says something like “buildings destroyed” that points to *several* locations. In CW3 I remember getting dozens of notifications at once because the Creeper managed to break into a collector field. But maybe, since there aren’t collectors or relays in this game, this won’t be needed, because there aren’t so many buildings that can be destroyed.
But anyway, please consider this.
Is it definitely scheduled for the 30th September? Is it likely to come out any sooner?
Sooner… I seriously doubt it. Later, yes. On ‘time’… I hope. That date was kind of an accident. I had to fill in some date to complete all of the steam setup. When I launched the Coming Soon page, I didn’t expect them to publish that date. But they did and it took me 5 minutes to notice. By then it had been seen by thousands of people and there were already tweets about the release date being Sept 29 🙂
It’s as good a date as any to shoot for…
Virgil has said in a previous video’s comment that the release date he posted was kind of an arbitrary one, as Steam required a release date in order to post his game there. He didn’t realize that Steam would then broadcast that date on the front page. He has said that he will try his best to uphold the date he gave, but cannot promise anything. After all, there are tons of ways the project can be delayed, from pesky glitches or crashes, to ideas you learn don’t work the way you needed them to, all the way over to stuff like getting ill or having some other home emergency.
The short answer to this is, he’ll be trying to release the game on that date, but it’s not guaranteed. And please don’t lynch him if he misses the date 😛 If you do, we’ll never get the game, and that would be far too tragic.
How about a video to show the new features? A new video to watch 10 times would make the wait easier… 😉
I will likely do 1 or maybe 2 more video prior to the launch. There may also be a “how to play” video. The plan is to work all of that out this month.
Cool feature, I still need to see some action though.
2 questions about the ships:
1. Will the enemy AI use different ships differently? (Grabber, Tanker, Relay) If so, will custom ships be affected as well? Say, by what modules they have?
2. Are you going to stick with the Creeper World template of a new ship a mission? Or do you have some other plan?
Still not sure why you can’t simply post gameplay of the Beta testers.
Good Luck!
Hey virgilw,
if you want to, i would do the german Localisation/Translation. (Maybe for a free key? But i would do it for free, too.)
Just a fan-based offer 🙂
Reply to this if you’re interested in.
Ben
Probably a bizarre question/request but is/can there be blue doppels? That seems like it would be a cool mechanic.
Yeah! And blue ships! I’d love to stage giant battles with little micro management!
Virgil, if you have time, I’d love an August update!
Virgil, I feel thoroughly ashamed at been the first one to say this, and I know that the more you focus on the game, the faster you’ll finish. But there is only so many times I can re-watch the trailer. Please, you promised us 3 more videos before launch. It has been over half a month after the last update, which wasn’t even a video, and only a month and a half left until the “semi, sort-of, probably, maybe, will-try” launch date. Please, anything! A beta-tester playing simulacrum map must be so easy to make!
I’m finishing up story mission 13 in the next day or so… then I’ll try to make an update. Maybe a video if I can show something that won’t be too much of a spoiler.
In a few weeks the floodgates should open up. I’ll be releasing a version for press previews…
How, exactly, does one qualify for a press key? I’ve been intending to start a Youtube channel for a while, and I feel that doing a review of a highly anticipated, although niche, game, like PF, would be a great start.
Maybe it’d be better to extend beta and fix some bugs before sending keys to the press 😉