We’re back from Berlin, gave a talk at A MAZE, recommend you to go there next year, etc.
Now, let’s talk some LUFTRAUSERS game design.
LUFTRAUSER was about feeling like the coolest person in the world. You sat behind your computer but really you’re a pilot going 5 million miles an hour shooting enemies and making water splash up behind you and doing loopings all while smoking multiple cigarettes at once and reading the newspaper.
In the highly anticipated superlative sequel, we are bringing you more of that & we’re letting you do it your way. You will be able to get dirty and build your own RAUSER from the ground up. By destroying enemies, completing missions and all that you will unlock new parts. Parts come in 3 types: weapons, bodies and engine.
A few days ago we finally got to a stage where we are no longer re-coding old functionality and just messing around trying out parts. This blogpost is dedicated to some of the weirder things we’re trying.
WEAPON PART – CANNON This weapon is insanly hard to use at the start. It shoots a slow glowing ball of death and has super long reload. If you do manage to hit an enemy with it however, it explodes into a circle of tiny shrapnel, just waiting to blow up whatever they hit. The moment boats start coming into the game you’ll be glad you picked this weapon, taking down these slow hostiles and using your superior acrobatics to avoid planes untill they get hit by the shrapnel.
BODY PART – MELEE We don’t have descriptions in yet but this one will have something like: -80% health, you no longer take damage from direct contact with enemies. Fly into the bastards, correction, fly through the bastards. In LUFTRAUSERS you can melee boats.
ENGINE PART – GUNGINE If normal jet-engine propulsion is too boring for you, just mount a machinegun as your engine. Shocky movement, but anything chasing you will be greeted in a very special way.
One of the coolest-for-you and worst-for-us features is that EVERY single combination of parts will get it’s own custom name. Some quick maths show that even the minimum of 5x5x5 parts results in a whole lot different names for us to come up with! Phew! You’ll obviously start with “the original” but bomb-dropping+gungine+homing missiles will be “the widowmaker” or change the gungine into aquatic propulsion and the bomb-dropping into heavy armor and you will be piloting a “blastoise!”. Or whatever. We’re gonna buy some Coca Cola for Rami and some alcohol for me and spend a night figuring these out.
Another amazing feature of the different parts is that they will change the soundtrack. Different weapon? Different bassline. Something like that. Hell yeah. KOZILEK is gonna be busy.
Next devlog we’ll tell you more about the enemies in LUFTRAUSERS!
Two-hundred million crates have been collected worldwide. If you add up the crate counters in Super Crate Box & its iOS version you get a sum total of 202 341 012. Almost 20 golden crates have been collected as well, so there’s just 80 golden crates left before the next update hits. We just let loose our stats on those numbers & our calculations put that at just over 1.5 million disc-gun deaths.
Just last week during the Utrecht Indie Meetup Jan Willem and I discussed that something felt slightly off about how things were going recently. Basically, Vlambeer has been focusing on earning money for a really big project that we want to do. We’ve been doing talks, events and a lot of other, great things. But we feel that we should put the focus back it where should be: making games.
Vlambeer allowed us to reach all of you, create games we wouldn’t be able to make seperately and hopefully, in doing so, offering you something interesting, novel and creative to play. We’re extremely thankful for all of you that support us – every tweet, retweet, like, share, discuss and sale allows us to make the things we work on so hard. In the end, that’s what it’s about, isn’t it? It’s about the games. We think we might’ve lost track of that a bit in all the madness.
So, we’re making a small course correction. That whole money-thing for that big project? We’ll work that out later. Actually, we’ll just work that big project out later. The two of us have been doing seperate things for the last few months – ever since the Ridiculous Fishing debacle hit – and we really want to make a really good game together. So that’s what’s up next.
That thing above is the first mockup of a prototype we think has potential – so we’ve started treating that as a completely new project. We’re not quite sure it’ll make the cut, but it’s definitely something we’ve been toying around with a while ago in the shape of Space Murder. Even though Space Murder failed back then, we think it is time to venture back into space sim territory. Actually, since we never released Space Murder – we’ve uploaded the last build we made of it just after the video.
We owe the amazing graphics and music that are in place in Space Murder to Adam ‘ATOMIC‘ Saltsman, Francis Coulombe, Derek Bones and Daniel ‘C418‘ Rosenfeld. They worked on this one with us before we axed it last year. So, fair warning – this is nowhere near done, it will never be done and it’s full of bugs, incomplete art, missing audio, lack of impact and all that – it’s just a prototype, it might take a long while to load. If you don’t care about all that and just want to see what a unreleased project at Vlambeer looks like, give Space Murder a go here!
We’re still releasing what we have on schedule (& we’ve got some nice things coming up). We’re still showing up at A MAZE this week and Indiedevelopment and GDC Europe (where, hopefully, we can do an improved version of our Indie Roundtable last week) and all that – we’re just going to be a bit more efficient with doing things that aren’t related to making games.
We’re still working on Ridiculous Fishing & we think we’ll have something new to show soon. Zach Gage – the programmer on Ridiculous Fishing – has been a little pre-occupied with the amazing Spelltower sale. In the meanwhile, the feedback from the IGF judges included amazingly positive notes, such as ”Ridiculous Fishing is an instant iOS classic” & “It’s up there with the best of them as a great use to the device with brilliant art and an addicting hook. No pun intended.” We’ll keep you up to date about what’s happening with Ridiculous Fishing.
Things have been quiet from our end for the last month – but we can assure you that we’ve been at it and doing (& preparing) some really cool things.
We’ll get the big one out of the way first: yes, the Super Crate Box iOS update is still underway. It’s amazing how much trouble we’ve had getting that one out – first having issues with save file corruption and then some trouble getting it approved. We’re a bit embarrassed by how long it’s taking and we really hope everything will be resolved really soon now and maybe you’ll be collecting one of hundred ultra-rare golden crates hidden in the update somewhere.
We had an amazing time at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We did a talk about cloning that hopefully closes the entire ordeal for now. We argued that the most important thing we can do about cloning is talking about it with everyone. Let people know that cloning is not an essential part of our industry or the voice of progress. Clones hurt creativity. Improving cultural literacy about games and pushing novel, original games – that hurts how lucrative cloning is. Cultural literacy hurts cloning.
We also presented at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions, where Rami discussed GlitchHiker. We had a camera crew from Vox Games following us around. Most importantly, we met up with a lot of old friends and met a lot of new ones. We did a lot of interviews, negotiated about a lot of things and from our Ridiculous Fishing IGF Booth, we released a game we first showed at Fantastic Arcade last year – Yeti Hunter. It’s free for PC, so grab it if you feel like hunting Yetis.
The downside of meeting with so many people in a confined space is that, like many others, we both ended up with a serious case of GDC-flu. We’re just now restoring from the jetlag and flu – just in time to announce that we will be at PAX East’ Boston Indie Showcase with Super Crate Box (& Ridiculous Fishing) at the beginning of next month. We’ll be at Festival of Games in the Netherlands after that and you’re completely welcome to run into us at A MAZE Berlin at the end of April.
Anyway, the most important thing is that we’re ready for another long haul of lots of work. We’ve got some nice stuff coming up that we’ll announce after we finish negotiations with some parties and some great stuff that we’re really happy to be working. Most importantly, though, is that what we’re gearing up for here is something Vlambeer has never attempted to.
As we announce new projects, you’ll see the frequency of posts here go up again. It’s going to be quite a ride and we’re really, really happy to have you aboard for all of it. In the meanwhile, maybe see you at PAX East, Festival of Games or A MAZE Berlin!
We were invited to the gamejam-themed talkshow Control Gamelab #2 yesterday-evening. We teamed up with GlitchHiker composer Rutger Muller & Super Crate Box pixel artist Roy Nathan de Groot to create a game during the 2 hour long show. The theme the audience chose for us was ‘paranoia’. Turns out two hours isn’t that much when there’s an audience of 150 people eagerly awaiting the result.
We managed to pull it, though, with ‘Café Noir’ being the result. The above is a timelapse of the entire process as recorded from Jan Willems screen. You can play the game by clicking here.
We really want to thank Brandon for working on Venus Patrol, and we also want to give a shoutout to Paul ‘Pietepiet‘ Veer for all the art in the game, Jukio ‘KOZILEK‘ Kallio for the music and the Venusian rap and Adam ‘Doseone‘ Drucker for the main theme rap and all sound effects. Without these people, this game wouldn’t be the interesting mix it turned out to be.
If you haven’t backed Venus Patrol, there currently is no way to get GUN GODZ. We’re looking into ways to see if there’s some way we can get the game to you – but we really don’t have any idea how it’s going to pan out. We’ll let you know through Twitter, Facebook and the blog if we have any news on that.
As a little bonus, the first person to screenshot the thing that happens when you get all 52 triangles in GUN GODZ gets a little prize from us.
jw on mei 7, 2012 |
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Rami Ismail
Jan Willem Nijman