A little glimpse at animations for the latest boss

It has been a while with no updates while we work on this boss, so I thought I’d start sharing some GIFs to tide you over while you wait 🙂

The next boss is a big gold statue brought to life, and this is the shaman who gives him that life with his voodoo spell.
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Yup it’s another update- v0.8 woo!

We’ve been slugging away at our crazy submerged statue boss for a while now, so to stop everyone getting too bored waiting, we put together a new update 🙂

Go into The Vault and select any monster you’ve discovered, to practice your technique in a single-player Challenge Mode 🙂 We’ve also got new traps, new artifacts, and I’ve done a whole load of monster and weapon balancing. Oh yeah, and we’ve got some AI helper ghosts to get the bosses working properly in 2p and 3p games- hope you like it!!

-Barney

New monsters are out

Another update is ready!

We’ve been working on prototyping new boss ideas, but we’re taking little breaks to put out more regular stuff, so it doesn’t get boring waiting for the boss!

We’ve got two new monsters, five new artifacts, a balance pass on the weapons, tweaks to get some monsters feeling better, not to mention The Vault where you can see your progress in finding all the monsters/items etc.

With The Vault, we’ve laid the groundwork for a new mode we’ll be adding next update, where you’ll be able to practice your monsters against progressively more powerful heroes. It’s not quite ready yet but looks like it’s gonna be a cool addition!

-Barney

Woo another one!

I initially designed the ghost-girl around her little flame dropping a wall of fire like this, but it turned out waaaaay too much for a tier 1 monster!

A while later Dave proposed a color variant for her with the light hair and dark clothes and it looked sweet so I’ve been planning this one ever since.

The lightning was a bit of an experiment (as damage effects often are for this game) and it looked like crap right up until the very end when all the bits came together, so I was 99% sure I’d have to scrap it and come up with something else.

Lucky once I attached it all together it started looking okay- PHEW I was all outa ideas for her if that didn’t work!

-Barney

Get a load of this little whippersnapper!

Just another monster I’m working on for the next update 🙂

Basically a souped-up mushroom because I love that little guy!

-Barney

Update time again woo!

Well, what I took for a one-week task (revamping the evolve menus) ended up taking waaaay longer. For a while I thought I’d perish, I thought they’d find my body under a pile of failed menu mockups, but somehow we did it! This must be how Charlie Chaplin felt when he invented flight or the human sandwich!

Here’s another gif illustrating the origins of the Greater Spikewurm.

So we have revamped evolve screens, along with two new monsters, an in-store GUI to show what gear your hero has, a tally of your boss kills on each profile, as well as a bunch of cleaning-up on some of the older systems that have been needing a bit of a revamp!

See the full change list here

I hope you like it guys, and never stop helping by letting us know what you like, what you don’t like, and if you come across any bugs or issues! Whenever you find any problem no matter how small, just remember IT WAS ALL SOMEONE ELSE’S FAULT!

-Barney

Just a little update on what we’re working on

It has been a while since I’ve posted- we’ve been hard at work getting the new menu implemented, which has ended up a bigger task than anticipated. It’s now at the stage where Dave is hard at work getting things functional in-game, and I’m able to move on to more fun stuff- by which I mean making more monsters 🙂

I’ve made another tier 4 guy which I’ll keep as a surprise for now, but also I’ve finally got around to making an upgraded slug! I’ve always liked the slug so much, I wanted to make a stronger version to use in the late-game, so here it is:

Hopefully this menu stops taking forever and we can get on with the rest of the update and get it out to you all soon!

-Barney

What’s going on with Crawl?

Aside from our two-week break to make a stupid free mech basketball game, we’ve been full-steam-ahead on Crawl.

This update, we’re focusing on some core stuff to do with Menus, HUD information, and simplifying our currencies to make for better communication. Definitely not as fun as making more monsters, but we’ve been putting it off for ages so it became very important to do another pass on it all finally.

I’ve been doing a lot of mockups- here are some of the more interesting ones:

basic art/animation design for evolving monster

This is my basic design for what it will look/feel like when you’re actually evolving monsters- I wanted the hands to bring a little flavor, to imply that it is the god choosing and upgrading the monsters. You can see I haven’t animated the smoke effect, as that will be done with particles in game. I’ll hold off til I’ve got the real deal particle system to work with, but I’ve figured out the basic size and color/value stuff here. it’s probably a lot more saturated and purple than the final will end up, but all the ground work has been done, and that kind of minor stuff will be tweaked at the implementation stage.
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Another update is live!

It has been a crazy time since last update!

We ran out of ice at GDC, my cat died, Dave became a father, I got permission from Gabe Newell to put him in the game, our friend got married, and Ol’ Shrimpeyes’ eyes have somehow gotten even shrimper!

Here’s another gif showing some of the new content.

We have another new environment- The crypt- some new spells for the hero- Raging bull and Spirit Bow- some new weapons- Battle Axe, Flame Bow and Ice Staves- a new monster for the Eye Bat chain, five special challenges for players who need to up the difficulty, and about a billion tweaks and fixes!

See the full change list here

Have fun guys 🙂 and don’t feel to bad about my cat- he was 22 and lived a pretty great life- my sister made him a fake human dinner every night so he could think he’s stealing our dinner.

-Barney

I couldn’t resist!

I’ve been wanting to animate this for soooo long 🙂

I’ve got a few larger monsters too powerful to put in evolve trees, so I’d like to squeeze some into this next update as rare statues like the IRS guy. This has been at the top of my list since the very start 🙂

-Barney