Hey guys,
I’d like to share the new game and kickstarter a couple developers and I have been working on. It’s a 2D vertical scroller and we’re using Unity to develop it. Essentially, we’re mapping sprite animations to geometry but I’ve also been doing quite a few tests with shuriken and getting some great results for particle overlays. The three of us are big fans of classic nintendo titles like mario world and zelda and our sound guy, Chris really pulled the feel for the game together with his work so far.
here’s a particle test for the volcano level:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14437564/DBC/volcano.html
I’ll post updates here as we move forward but check out the campaign and contribute if you can. We’re participating in the Free the Games Fund that Ouya is sponsoring to get our earnings matched so even the smallest amount will help.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2122675830/divebomb-chomp
Beau
Check out our SoundCloud playlist. It’s retro but not so much>>
http://soundcloud.com/divebombchomp/sets/dbc
Looks like an interesting game based on the kick starter video. I’m curious, how will the controls work on iOS?
Hello, thanks for the comment. The original idea was to use the accelerometer/gyro tilt controls for smartphones. I think we’ll still provide this option but we’ll certainly have others too. We have a very crude playable for android with these controls and it seems to work pretty good. Touching the sides of the screen (left to move left and right to move right) will probably be added as an alternative for any guaranteed haters. A virtual joystick is always a cheap solution but I find them intrusive to the visuals and gameplay in a lot of ios games. Any other ideas?
A thought on touching the left or right, what if you made the character just move towards the touch (so if you touch in the center of the screen, it moves to the center?) Then touching on the left or right would work as expected but the player could also swipe around on the screen to move. Just an alternate thought,
I do a virtual joystick in my game that doesn’t seem to be very intrusive. It just pops up under your finger (your finger would be in the way anyway.) You can see an example of this starting at 1:35 in this video:
Just curious if this solves your fear of the joystick being too intrusive or not? If not, I’d love to hear what you don’t like about it (since your thoughts could improve my game as well.)
I really like your proposal for the touch controls, and they seem to work well with your game but part of our design allows for the character to cross the edge of the screen and reemerge on the other side. This would work if the touch input continued to function in the same direction as it was registered until release every time otherwise she’d stop at the edge of the screen. Which leads to, when the character is close to the edge of the screen, you wouldn’t be able to make her move in the direction closest to the screen. I can envision it working with swipes too but you wouldn’t have as much control if you allowed her to drift. A touch and release swipe from anywhere on the screen could work.
I don’t mind the virtual joysticks that pop up on touch nearly as much as the stationary ones but they can still be an eye sore at times. However, from my experience you should at least provide the option for it. One of the coolest things when the original dead space came out was how isaac’s hud, inventory, map, etc. were all part of his suit. It felt totally integrated.
Yea, I agree on providing the virtual joystick option. I didn’t really want one in my game until the other developer asked for it repeatedly, so I added it. Then I realized that I like it much better than the other controls. 
