That’s me at 1:33.
If you’re an Escape Goat fan and have a Steam account, please vote!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=151577556
The final logo is here! Randy did an amazing job on this. Here’s a wallpaper which integrates some of the new gear elements he added earlier in the week. The text logo is featured on the all new EG2 T-shirt, which will be for sale very soon!
(It took a lot of drafts to get the “2″ just right. I think if I had asked for one more revision, Randy would have hired a band of assassins to take me away during the night.)
Lots of great stuff done today on Escape Goat 2:
- Randy drew some decorative background gears, and I hooked them up to operate alongside other machinery in the level. When a block moves forward, the gears turn clockwise, and when the block moves back, they turn counterclockwise again. Looks great in motion and has given my test levels a Metal Man vibe.
- Prototype gadget: Bone Block. Works like a bone wall (collapses when stepped on) but drops a full size stone block from its position. It also sets off neighboring bone blocks, creating a domino effect.
- Prototyped gadget: Valve Trap Door. Touched from one side, it springs open, then closes immediately after, trapping you or anything else on the other side. Can be used in all four directions to create one-way gates.
- Prototyped gadget: Mega Fan. Creates gusts of wind that blow any creatures in specified direction. Will take some tuning, in first tests has ultra comical results, especially when used to launch the mouse.
- Switch and decoration fastening: Floor switches (and some decorations) are automatically fastened to moving blocks in the editor. This way, switches can be placed on gear blocks and elevators. Lots of new machinery possibilities with this.
Tomorrow I’ll put together a few more gadgets and build some test levels around them.
Two weeks until GDC. Most important remaining Escape Goat 2 features:
- Transition animations for goat (turning from side to side, jump to fall, fall to land, etc.). Randy has done drafts of some of these, I just need to add the logic to smoothly transition between them.
- Squish tolerance fix: creatures are still getting squished unexpectedly, the most problematic situation being coming out of a Magic Hat teleport. Since most teleports end with the goat intersecting with walls near the mouse’s original position, the game needs to resolve to a “safe spot” near the teleport destination. As any Escape Goat veteran knows, it’s possible to get crushed from teleporting into a narrow passage, but that should only happen when there are really no safe alternative spots nearby.
- New gadgets. I’ve got tons of ideas cooking, and hope to get some prototypes together starting tomorrow.
- New levels. They need to showcase the newest gadgets and visuals (such as lighting) but also provide player training. I have a new device for text-free tutorials I’ll be experimenting with.
The GDC demo should offer a solid 15 minute experience, tuned for showcasing rather than difficulty. The puzzles won’t be brain benders. They should be pretty similar to the first few worlds of Escape Goat 1.
GDC is approaching, and I’m showing Escape Goat 2. That gives me less than three weeks to get everything together, meaning I should have something pretty playable in about a week, so I can playtest with a bunch of friends before showing it to the media.
For the most part, the new systems are in place. We’re running in high resolution, lighting and shadow casting is working, even the new world layout is implemented. One major remaining bug is the squish detection, something that has plagued me since the start of the project. I changed enough of the physics system in the upgrade from EG1 to EG2 that squish tolerance isn’t working properly. This means the goat gets squished in places he shouldn’t–such as after a teleport into a corner, or from getting grazed by a falling block. Definitely something that needs to be fixed before GDC.
Michael Connolly holds the current world record. I don’t know if I can beat this time. Lots of great techniques like summon refreshing and self-tanking, and expert archer placement.
// intro
Two weeks ago, I took my XNA dungeon crawler/tower defense hybrid to Newgrounds. The port was entirely the work of Kevin Gadd who stuck around during the first week to push no fewer than 8 patches. This was my first launch on a web portal, and this article is about what went right and wrong.
The main thing I did right was research what the Newgrounds community (and web game community in general) would be receptive to. I already have a web demo of Escape Goat, which is designed to feed sales of the digital download from my site. I learned early on that this type of demo/upsell wouldn’t go over well there, so I made the decision to offer the full game. (Thanks to Hyptosis for this bit of advice.)
Bottom line: If your computer is relatively fast and you use a modern browser, you’ll have an identical experience to the PC game I sell for $2.99. I also made sure to clearly label this as an Experimental Beta, given how unpredictable HTML5 support is with some browsers. This paid off, and some players even said they cut me some slack with the technical issues because it was marked as a beta. (Also big thanks to Lars Doucet for his wisdom after launching Defender’s Quest on Kongregate.) Continue Reading…