Hey Guys,
New update just hit the App Store. This is our second apocalypse update.
The Locust Chamber!
So, in this chamber we have the Locust Queen that is sitting on a pedestal. She is huge and unable to move, her only job is to create more locust babies which you do by feeding her pygmies. When you feed a pygmy to her, her stomach starts to bump around and make buzzing sounds and then you have to touch her belly to squeeze out the baby locusts.
The locusts themselves are an algorithmic effect kind of like the rainbow and lightning. So they fly around randomly until you drag your finger on the screen and then they trail behind your finger. You can do a bunch of stuff to the pygmies with the locusts, you can cause a pygmy to swallow a single locust which will turn him into a mutant locust, you can cause a pygmy to swallow a bunch of locusts which will make the pygmy get large like a balloon. if you tap the large pygmy or the mutant locust, they go splat like a bug. you can also cause the locusts to eat the pygmies flesh and fly off with his skull and hair bone, this was a shout out to the ant update. you can also cause the locusts to pick up a pygmy and toss him back and forth in the air. when he is in the air, you can swipe through the pygmy and cut him in half with the locusts ala fruit ninja. this isn't an official cross over, we just thought it would be a funny idea.
We are also starting to build out the apocalypse chambers, the Locust Chamber is accessed from the second door in the Time Chamber. and the Locust Chamber has two exits that will lead to two future updates.
The update comes with the Mondo Skin Pack, it's basically a collection of weird items, like the nerd doodler, lava lamps for the islands, an old school video game cabinet for the island statue, etc. The same artist that did our Battle of the Gods and Killing Time posters did the pack for us. We are going to try and have some guest artists that we admire help out with more of the skin packs. I think it's a good idea and will allow us to add new creative items.
It's too soon to talk about the next update but we will be starting it at the end of the month. This month we need to focus on The Runs. We won't release The Runs until we think it's good enough to stand next to the other great games on the app store. We usually crank out our mini games fairly quickly but for this, we really want to do something special and sometimes it takes time to find the right approach that will make it shine. We have somewhat of a deadline to get a bulk of it done this month before we start working on the next PG update and then use May and possibly June to polish and release it.
We actually did a ton of work on a pretty awesome level design tool for the Runs. We started the tool when we did decapithon but it's come a long way since then. it uses Adobe Flash as the editor but allows us to lay out huge levels and add things like camera triggers that change the zoom, or slow down the frame rate so it will be like a bullet time part of the level. It's taken a lot of work to get the tool this far but it will allow us to do larger levels and make them higher quality.
We also are using a new render technique in The Runs. We want to add a ton of layers to the levels and bitmaps that have alpha channels are actually pretty slow to render on the iphone. so we are using vector graphics with bitmap fills for large pieces of the background layers.
So I think that's about it. let me know what you think of the update.
New update just hit the App Store. This is our second apocalypse update.
The Locust Chamber!
So, in this chamber we have the Locust Queen that is sitting on a pedestal. She is huge and unable to move, her only job is to create more locust babies which you do by feeding her pygmies. When you feed a pygmy to her, her stomach starts to bump around and make buzzing sounds and then you have to touch her belly to squeeze out the baby locusts.
The locusts themselves are an algorithmic effect kind of like the rainbow and lightning. So they fly around randomly until you drag your finger on the screen and then they trail behind your finger. You can do a bunch of stuff to the pygmies with the locusts, you can cause a pygmy to swallow a single locust which will turn him into a mutant locust, you can cause a pygmy to swallow a bunch of locusts which will make the pygmy get large like a balloon. if you tap the large pygmy or the mutant locust, they go splat like a bug. you can also cause the locusts to eat the pygmies flesh and fly off with his skull and hair bone, this was a shout out to the ant update. you can also cause the locusts to pick up a pygmy and toss him back and forth in the air. when he is in the air, you can swipe through the pygmy and cut him in half with the locusts ala fruit ninja. this isn't an official cross over, we just thought it would be a funny idea.
We are also starting to build out the apocalypse chambers, the Locust Chamber is accessed from the second door in the Time Chamber. and the Locust Chamber has two exits that will lead to two future updates.
The update comes with the Mondo Skin Pack, it's basically a collection of weird items, like the nerd doodler, lava lamps for the islands, an old school video game cabinet for the island statue, etc. The same artist that did our Battle of the Gods and Killing Time posters did the pack for us. We are going to try and have some guest artists that we admire help out with more of the skin packs. I think it's a good idea and will allow us to add new creative items.
It's too soon to talk about the next update but we will be starting it at the end of the month. This month we need to focus on The Runs. We won't release The Runs until we think it's good enough to stand next to the other great games on the app store. We usually crank out our mini games fairly quickly but for this, we really want to do something special and sometimes it takes time to find the right approach that will make it shine. We have somewhat of a deadline to get a bulk of it done this month before we start working on the next PG update and then use May and possibly June to polish and release it.
We actually did a ton of work on a pretty awesome level design tool for the Runs. We started the tool when we did decapithon but it's come a long way since then. it uses Adobe Flash as the editor but allows us to lay out huge levels and add things like camera triggers that change the zoom, or slow down the frame rate so it will be like a bullet time part of the level. It's taken a lot of work to get the tool this far but it will allow us to do larger levels and make them higher quality.
We also are using a new render technique in The Runs. We want to add a ton of layers to the levels and bitmaps that have alpha channels are actually pretty slow to render on the iphone. so we are using vector graphics with bitmap fills for large pieces of the background layers.
So I think that's about it. let me know what you think of the update.