Games by Andrex

4kg Dev - Night 10

Another dev night! Let’s get back on track, eh?

A lot of today and tonight was spent tweaking the finer parts of the game. Here’s some screenshots:

The new loading screen. Note that since it’s a packed Chrome app, it loads in less than three seconds. 40 MB… in three seconds! I like it because it’s nice and simple, and kind of Tron-ish.

Here’s the new start menu. Compare to the old one here. It looks a lot better, mostly because of the new logo and because I added Consolas to the fonts.

And here’s a new in-game shot for your pleasure. It still has the same enemy and player robot, but the tiles, background, and HUD have been revamped. Compare to the old screenshot here.

Noticeably, the game is no longer blurry! Before, I had it running at half resolution with a 2x zoom filter (which is the “Akihabara way,” at least for all the demos.) But I decided instead to double the resolution, knock the zoom down to 1x, and scale all my images up (with no filters so that they remain crisp.) I think this looks much better now.

As for the HUD, I would say that it’s probably final, barring some pixel tweaking. It’s now slim, minimalistic, and modern. It’s tiny so it doesn’t interfere with gameplay, and even still, it’s about 35% translucent so that it definitely doesn’t obstruct anything. It also gets closer to my idea of the HUD taking cues from cell phones.

Now you’re probably thinking, “this doesn’t look very impressive!” Well no. Even if you have everything else 100% done, a game won’t look impressive with a dummy background and tileset. So that’s next on my list, to at least make them for the first world. After that I’ll start translating my level designs into the Akihabara format.

Speaking of the “Akihabara format,” I’ve heavily modified the default structure for games and it’s working pretty well so far. The above shot is the setup I have right now.

There’s still lots to do though, in the immediate short-term I would say that I still have to:

• Set up the saving system (expect a blog post on it in the near-future!)
• Finish designing the achievements system.
• Make the custom enemy types for the game.
• Make the custom item types for the game.
• Make the level tilesets and backgrounds.
• Set up the music downloading system (as mentioned, there is a 10 MB limit on Chrome apps, so I have to download the soundtrack after installation.)

Still, I think I’m really close to making a video. Just need to make the tileset and background for the first world.

Until next time!
-Andrex