Powerhoof!
game development blog

it’s like inception… but less silly

Read The Article And Write The Article In My Article About Rock Paper Shotgun’s Article About Crawl

By Barney Cumming on July18th, 2013 at 11:53 pm.

RPS article

Articles about videogames come in many lighting conditions and are full of perils.  From articles commenting on the giant videogame rats of yesteryear to articles commenting on the hyper-detailed, physics-jittering corpses of giant videogame rats of today.  That, of course, is why humanity evolved friendship – as a defense mechanism in videogames websites.  Biology- it’s a disgusting thing!  But then along slithers this article about Crawl.  It’s a curiouslike game-details-mentioner where a guy from a website you’ve been going to every day for years suddenly and unexpectedly writes an article about the videogame you’ve been making!  Kind of like Kotaku’s League of Fighting Article, but about us!  But you can’t talk to the journalist?  Of course you can’t.  He’s in some other country.

Seems like it might be a little nerve wracking right?  Videogames journalists tend to be a bit more ruthless than some random human or family member I show my game to, after all.  But actually, the whole article seems pretty us-friendly.  Here’s writer Nathan Grayson’s description:

 

Seems like it might get frustrating, right? People tend to be a bit more ruthless (not to mention capable) than mid-tier AI, after all. But actually, the whole system sounds pretty player-friendly. Here’s developer Powerhoof’s description:

“This is our take on the classic four-player gameplay of Gauntlet, mixed with a Japanese bullet-hell shooter… I guess if you imagined Super Bomberman had sex with The Legend of Zelda you’d have Crawl… and a mental image of some sort.”

“It’s a very arcadey dungeon crawling beat-em-up where one player controls the ‘heroic adventurer’ and the other three control all the dungeon’s traps and monsters. If you kill the hero, you take his place and it’s your turn to crawl while your friends try to kill you.”

Also, the hero has markedly more health than enemies, so he’s not entirely a target in blood-soaked armor. Still, he’ll probably meet his untimely doom more often than most strapping mass murderers with hearts of gold, but it sounds like auto-switching will keep things from getting frustrating.

Also, Dave and I have markedly more naivete than journalists working in the games industry, so we’re not exactly the hypochondriacs in pee-soaked trousers we probably should be. Still, we’ll likely believe we’re about to meet our untimely doom more often than most strapping creators of low-fi murder simulators with hearts of gold, but it sounds like positive feedback from games journalists and pixel-art fans will keep us from becoming suicidal.

It all takes place in a manually generated videogame website with tons of great articles and info and this static image of the writer wearing headphones that won’t stop grinning terrifyingly out form the the RPS “about” page no matter how many times I try to obscure it with this half eaten cob of corn I for some reason have on a plate next to my computer, I guess I probably ate corn recently and put the plate down next to the computer but you’d think I would remember something like that

Apparently he’s aware of our publicly playable build in the coming months. We’d better not screw this up!
 
 
…man I think this really might be the stupidest thing I’ve posted so far!
 
I guess what I really meant to say with all that was:
OH MY DAYUM! RPS DID AN ARTICLE ABOUT OUR GAME!!!
 
Awesome.

-Barney

ideas for bosses…

Super high level bosses…?

bossdoodles

BUT…

I need to find out about the boring legal stuff… TV shows can reference people and characters and use an approximation of their likeness all the time, but i think games have significantly less freedom…?

-Barney

more anims…

-Barney

anim GIF dump

Some walk anims…

-Barney

crawl HUD working…

Working on HUD

We’ve still just got debug HUD text in there so I want to do something a bit more proper in case we get any opportunities to show people the game around PAX.

hudworking

Turns out this is harder than I anticipated… so few pixels, so much information to get across… still this should be a step up from the debug anyway… Do you still have to worry about safe frames for PC games? I hope not!

-Barney

I am a real business man!

Super awesome new business cards for PAX Aus

Just in case we meet a highly nerdy billionaire who wants to give all his money away, but for some reason he can only give it to guys who make dos references in card format… I’m banking on meeting at least one.

busicards

When I initially did the design Dave pointed out I had given the card way too may kilobytes free and rightly demanded I reduce it to something more in line with a floppy disc- good work us, we really are huge nerds!

-Barney

more famous than Kevin Spacey?

It’s official, we are now worldwide celebrities!

Our Molyjam game is mentioned in this article!

I’m pretty sure that’s how Kim Kardashian got so famous…

 
On a more intriguing note: GET A LOAD OF KEVIN SPACEY’S FACE in the movie Hear No Evil See No Evil

33 seconds in, massive lump revealed in all it’s silhouetted glory

…and no, his character has not been comically stung by a bee or anything- that thing is all spacey!

PRO SPACEY TIP: you will notice a suspicious “poc-mark” at the scene of the crime in all future Spacey films.

-Barney

a thing…

crawlstrip

 
 
I drew this picture of monsters playing super nintendo 4 players with the hero/knight dude… the picture turned out a bit crappy in terms of overall composition and stuff, so here it is zoomed in on just the character details!
 
 

-Barney

CRAWL GAMEPLAY VIDEO

BLAH BLAH BLAH headings are important

I spent the last few days putting together a gameplay video for Crawl!

>>CHECK IT OUT IN FULL QUALITY ON THE CRAWL PAGE<<

I did about a thousand things wrong in terms of video capture and maintaining file quality, so lots of clips are fuzzy and have messed up/washed out color values… oops! I learned a lot tho, so when we do a full announcement trailer I should be able to do it without any loss of quality.

No sound yet, but everyone I’ve shown it to says “why isn’t there any sound?”, so I guess we’re doing sound now…

*edit* TRAILER NOW HAS SOUND!!

We pumped out a whole lot of sound effects using this sweet little program, found some awesome chiptune music by this guy  Zen Albatross, and then i stayed up all night editing and chopping and repitching, always convincing myself I’m just about to go to bed after one more little tweak…

I emailed the albatross and asked if we can use the music in our trailer and he was totally cool with it so i think we’re all good to go- no lawsuits from angry waterfowl, good!

-Barney

Molyjam Deux complete!

molyjam_noflash

We made a game over the weekend for Molyjam!

Molyjam is sweet- get hardly any sleep, eat M&Ms for breakfast, and make a complete game in a weekend!  This year the deal was to make a game based on a real quote from Peter Molyneux.

We got together with a bunch of friends and made a not-creepy “Boy Bonding Relationship Simulator” inspired by this Molyneux TED talk, and the whole Milo concept in general.

Some boy animations:

timmy3timmy1timmy2

Just like a real boy!

PLAY THE GAME IN YOUR WEB BROWSER NOW!

-Barney

The Drifter Regular Human Basketball Crawl Buy T-Shirts Follow @powerhoof on twitter!

MAILING LIST

Stay up to date on Powerhoof and be notified when we have cool stuff to show!



unsubscribe



and then there's...

Tutorials

Posts we've made sharing our wisdom

Tools

Tools and code we've shared

Our Itch.io Page

Smaller games and collaborations

...we are an independent games studio, located in Melbourne, Australia. Get a load of our video games!