Okay, time for an update! I’ve gotten myself well and truly engrossed in social media shit (now I get caught checking my Twitter on my phone and my friends groan and ask what’s wrong with me), and I’ve had some thoughts about exposure/marketing campaign stuff for later in dev, which are just way too secret to tell you. I know you’re all just waiting silently to steal my ideas.
More importantly, I’ve been working very solidly on the first level of the game, pumping out new assets and mechanics. My pixel art skills are improving already, and considering I only started with proper pixel art 6 weeks ago, I think I might actually get good at this and be able to reliably create my own art for once.
I’ve also written up a story & level outline with several boss plans.
Umm, you don’t care about this, right? You want pretty pictures. Here. Have some pretty pictures.
New Effect: Apathy Goat smokes while idle & walking
Apathy Goat never got the memo about lung cancer. Like all goats he can’t read anyway. Reading is tied too closely with ambition, and ambition is dangerous territory when you live day to day.
New Enemy: Eastern brown snake
No-brainer. Comes at you. Type it before it gets to you. I also think I’ll open the level with a sequence a bit like this, camera tracking a snake.
New Enemy: Dropbear!
Oh, it looks like I broke the dropbear’s falling code when I implemented a new pathing system. And he’s in the wrong layer. Hmm.
Seriously, drop bear. You had one job. You can’t even drop properly? What even…
New Enemy: Flaming sheep + New Mechanic: TNT
When aliens invade, the sheep are always the first to go. This particular guy isn’t typable and he runs just slightly faster than Apathy Goat, so the player will need to work out that they have to go back past the TNT barrel and use it to blow him up. >=) Not that the sheep is evil or anything, he’s just panicking and likely to start some serious bush fires.
New Obstacle: Molly, the Formerly Living Cow!
Molly. Even in death, she was still in the fucking way. What is it about cows and roads? As he stepped daintily through her remains, Apathy Goat wondered what had killed her…
New Mechanics: Wireless Signal Detector & Pizza Rod
Still working on it, but the idea is that the mouse cursor controls your keyboard’s wireless signal receiver, and you can use it to detect typable objects in the level (in this case a very obvious barrel).
Here the barrel contains pizza, which Apathy Goat’s owner dangles from a fishing rod on the far side of the screen, motivating the goat to run faster!
New Mechanic: Edible Stuff
Some obstacles such as beer, ashtrays and school children will cause Apathy Goat to stop and eat them rather than just being bumped. You’ll have to stop and watch him eat and chew while you wait (and as a time-based game, this sucks for you). So, ideally, you’ll get rid of 'em before he gets to them.
Other new stuff:
- Destructible rocks, logs, barrels,
- Added rippling lakes & trees to the background
- Added hay bales, pitch forks & truck tyres to the foreground
- Added rocky hills to the level (previously it was entirely flat, which is actually realistic for the desert, but uninteresting for a game)
- Improved visual separation of foreground & background layers by adding a rough lip to the top of the foreground
- Improved the quality of the dirt textures (both foreground & background)
- Improved the bases of the termite mounds
- Revisited the graphics of the background windmill & watertank
- Adjusted the tree colour palette, but still not totally happy; think I need to improve the shading on it. But I don’t know if I will because I am exceptionally lazy. >=)
Thus concludes my epic update. I’ll try to be a little more frequent and a little less huge in future… But you know how it is.
