Posted by Al
Fri, 21st Jan 2011
Hey all,
Just a quick one to say that we've hit our deadline and DUÆL INVADERS was submitted to SCEE's FQA department earlier today. With a bit of luck it'll be a nice tidy submission so we'll be able to give you our SCEE release date very soon. We're working on the pricing as quickly as we can too, so I'll keep you posted.
The game should be going into SCEA QA very soon as well - again, news as and when I get it.
While you wait for more news here's some screenshots of the build we've sent in:
Here's our title screen.
A mother ship whizzes through the centre of the enemy wave.
The skew is red, hence the stars and planet moving towards the red ship. Nice touch, IMO. ;)
Probably the single-biggest chain in the game. That's almost 10,000 points in one bullet for blue.
Not bad, when you consider the base value of an enemy is 10 points. :)
Here's an Inverse enemy going off - nice purple halo... oooooh!
It change colours, which is usually a pain, but on some levels its actually pretty essential.
Cheers until next week. :)
Al
Posted by Al
Fri, 14th Jan 2011
Hi all,
OK, time for another Duæl Invaders update. By the way, I'll be dotting screenshots with captions explaining what's going on in them throughout this post - just an FYI! :)
Like I said last week, with Duæl Invaders we're essentially making an old-school single screen shootemup for PSN minis. The game's defining feature is that it lets two people play at once on the same PSP (or PS3 controller, if that's your preferred poison, not that the PS3 is in ANY way poisonous, SCEE - if you're reading this! We love you!). ;)
This shows the Skew fully (x32) blue. The planet in the background's nice and blue
and the sun's poking out. Your red ship has just died - see explosion on the left. :)
The logic behind making a game with these characteristics was two-fold:
1.) There aren't really any single screen shooters on minis. And we (that is to say, I) really like shooters.
2.) There aren't any minis (outside Japan, AFAIK) that let two people play simultaneously.
The big problem is when you're making a simple game based around the idea of simultaneous two player action on one console; what do you do when the game's only being played by one person? The way we've tried to get around this is by introducing a 'Skew' system that controls not only the game's scoring, but also how the enemies move towards your ships and how much fire they'll direct at your ships.
And here's a full (x32) red Skew. As you can see, the enemies have closed right in on the
red ship and the planet is a deep red and closer to the left of the screen. Clever, huh?
At its simplest you can say the Skew system works based on which of your ships is shooting which enemies. The best way to explain this is via the metadata text that the game's going to use, and I quote:
Using only the power of your red and blue player ships, a few power ups, and a simple-yet-innovative Aggro system called ‘Skew’, you must take on wave-after-wave of deadly enemies.
You score more points for shooting enemies of the same colour, but this also makes them VERY ANGRY! This simple rule is the key to staying alive and racking up massive high scores.
So, like the metadata says, if your red ship shoots red enemies then the whole wave starts moving towards red, while concentrating the majority of its fire at the blue ship. This gives the red ship something to worry about as its getting mobbed, while the blue ship has more fire to dodge but more time to dodge it as the enemies move further and further away.
Here you can see how sometimes a single bullet can combine with different area-effect enemies
to create HUGE chains of explosions and whack the Skew right up (note the big 'x32'
prompt at screen bottom).
Like Space Invaders, the fewer enemies that remain, the faster they move and the quicker they fire. It's a really simple system that I find hard to explain! When you play it'll be immediately obvious - hopefully I'll be able to post a movie of gameplay soon so you can see for yourselves! :D
Here's one of our 'Inverse' enemies exploding. They change the colour of all
enemies surrounding them when hit by a player ship of the same colour.
When you consider that lots of the enemies' feature area effects with the potential to kill many other enemies when they're destroyed, then controlling the Skew can become quite important, although you can just ignore it and blast away if that's how you personally prefer to roll.
Hope that's explained things a bit more to the shooting fans out there. I am personally really happy with how things are going with the game. There are still some bits to iron out, some effects to improve and balancing/debugging to be done, but you can expect the game to be out pretty soon now. More news on that front when I have it.
A shot of some 'regular' gameplay. The Skew is pretty neutral (note the nice purple planet) and
there are a couple of regular 'Grunt' ememies dying. Just another normal day in the world
of Duæl Invaders. Oh, and Red has a shield on. ;)
Thanks for reading - this has been a particularly long post, I know - and I'll be back again next week (probably).
Cheers for now,
Al
Posted by Al
Fri, 7th Jan 2011
Hi everyone,
As promised last week, here's some more detail on 'Duæl Invaders'. :)
The game is first and foremost a super-old-school twist on the single-screen shooter, as personified by Space Invaders, but with the following USPs:
- Two player ships are in play simultaneously, on opposite sides of the display.
- The game has simple colour matching to score more points (although just blasting away's fine if that's your cup of tea). One player ship is red, the other is blue. Enemies are also red or blue; shooting the same colour scores more points - simple.
- Enemy movement direction and aggression are controlled by the player ships using a mechanic we've called 'Skew'. It's kind of like 'Aggro' in other games (look it up)... :)
Here's the 'Duæl Invaders' game logo!
And here's one of the game banners (showing off some enemy types down the middle).
Pretty sweet huh? :)
I've also got a few pictures of player ships, an enemy and an early screenshot, although much of the art in the screenshot is highly likely to change, particularly the explosions and the background itself. Here it all is:
These are your player ships.
Take care of them! :)
And here's the 'Diver' baddie (facing up screen) in red and blue.
He is scary and has nasty pincers. :(
Here's a Work-in-Progress screen, showing off a formation of enemies and some other bits.
The art isn't finished yet, so be nice. :)
And that's that. Next week I'll be explaining a bit more about Skew and how it works, along with some other bits and bobs I haven't thought of yet. ;)
Bye for now!
Al
