City of Doom Update

It's been a while since the last update, mostly because I wanted to wait until the release of City of Doom, but it is taking far longer than expected. The good news is that the reason for taking so long is that the game has expanded to be a lot bigger than the original project. We are finially putting a cap on it though and finishing up the last parts of the game. I recorded a timelapse video of me working on the game a few nights ago that shows a lot of the level designing of the second section.



The game should be completed very soon, so make sure you check back for the release!

City Of Doom

I think that it is time for an update. Since last time, we worked on Grand Feather a little bit, but mainly we have been working on another Action 52 remake, City of Doom.


work in progress title screen.

The original City of Doom features a man climbing up a giant building that is so tall that it eventually leads into space. He is attacked by bugs that he must fight off with his spray can. He also has to dodge what appears to be bowling balls that fall from the sky. And that's about it. Here's a video of the original:




We are taking the basic concept of this game, but also making a few changes:

-we are using the gameboy color pallete.

-instead of using an aerosol spray can to fight off enemies, you use a gun (we thought it would be more enviornmentally friendly that way.)

-the bugs you have to fight are bigger and more alien-like.

-you can fire in 8 different directions

-we are trying to make it fun

Here is a mockup of what it might look like once all graphics assets are in:

The graphics have actually changed a lot since then, but you get the idea. Here is a small animated screen shot to show what the game looks like in its current state:



We are not too far away from finishing this small game so make sure you check back soon for updates.

Mash Man

Download Link.


We finally finished Mash Man, our entry to the Action 52 Owns game jam over at Tigsource. The idea behind Action 52 Owns is that 52 game developers each sign up to do a remake of one game on the original NES "Action 52" cartridge. It was one cartridge that had 52 games on it and to quote wikipedia:

"It was initially sold for the comparatively high price of US$199 (or "less than $4 for each game")and became notorious among gamers for the abysmal and terrible quality of its games."

The task of the Action 52 Owns developers is to recreate the games, only this time, not have them be completely terrible.

The game we chose was Mash Man. Here is a video of the original game we were to remake.



Looks like fun, doesn't it?

So as you can see, the original just required the player to move right, jump over tacks and spikes, and occasionally mash (jump on) strange eye ball creatures. It wasn't much to work with in terms of gameplay, so we decided to focus more on the mood that the original game sets. As a result, we did not try to make the game too hard or challenging, but it is to be more about the story and the overall experience.

The game is pretty short so it won't take long if you want to try it out. It also uses Grand Feather's engine, so it will be nice to see how well it runs on other computers.

We collaborated with a couple people for this game:

Vinh Duong - Helped us with some additional artwork.
C418 - Created the music.

Download Link.

It took us a bit longer than we wanted to finish this game, but we are finished now so back to working on Grand Feather!

Grand Feather Music

Here's a teaser for some of the music that will be featured in Grand Feather. The composer for Grand Feather is now Jamie Billings (check out her website here). This post is very long overdue (Forgive us Jamie ;) ) as we have been working with her for a little while now. She's attending Berklee College of Music. She's doing great work and here is a preview of her music for the game and some gameplay video.




In the video you can see quite a few glitches (specifically in the slime caves) as well as some missing animations. These will be fixed in the final version.

Angry Boulders Gameplay Video

It took me a bit of time, but we finally have a gameplay video of Angry Boulders up. I don't want to brag but I feel like I did a really great hand modeling job in this video. It could be a possible career path for me if this programming thing I'm into right now doesn't work out. Take a look:



And that's a couch in the background.