Wrapping up the finalized versions of all the characters. Here is a rough draft of what Sgt. sprinkle (and others) will appear like in the game and some of their facial sprites. The blue haired girl is a sprite from our lead female character Ice DeBerry Creame.
Rough draft of colors for them all.
Ice DeBerry Creame's smile. Aww how cute for such an angry person.
Yours always- the 2D artist.
PS -
if you have steam we would LOVE LOVE LOVE feed back and a thumbs up on our game if you like it!! Feed beta download.
A few months ago I made a post about the soon-coming ability to summon reinforcements, lengthening the battles and adding another element of strategy. After slightly longer than planned (due to various implementation difficulties, a long and busy winter vacation, and MAGFest) the feature is ready for the public!
Where They Come From
In many missions you'll be allocated a certain number of reinforcement ships. However, you can only sustain so many ships in a battle at once. As the dinner forces cunningly and cruelly destroy your drone fleet, you'll be able to replace them using the reserve ships. Once you drop below a certain limit you'll be able to open a menu where you select what type of ships you want to warp in.
Beacons and Arrival
After you've selected a drone type, you next choose a point in space and place a beacon. The beacons can be placed anywhere in the battlefield, but you must use caution, as the enemy could possibly notice it and destroy it before your ships have a chance to arrive. If the beacon manages to survive long enough, a new squadron will warp in right at the beacon's location and you'll have the ships you need to take the upper hand in the fight once more.
In the video below, you can see an example during the All-You-Can-Eat mode. The player loses a large number of fighters to the dinner forces and places a beacon to call in replacements. Unfortunately the broccoli bombers catch on and destroy it before the new ships can arrive. The player then has to place a new beacon further away, which survives and spawns a new squadron to defend the mothership. You can also see the enemy warping in new burger fighters near their mothership.
P.S. I apologize again for my less-than-ideal videos, somehow it refused to record the sound on this one...
Squadrons
As you keep warping in new drone squadrons, the number of squadrons you'd have to deal with could quickly get out of hand. To solve this, squadrons will now automatically merge together. Whenever two squadrons in the same wing lose enough ships that combining them would not overfill one, they are automatically combined.
Try it Soon
Obviously there are still a couple of things that need work, most notably a real beacon model, an actual reinforcements button, better menu art, and a better way to display how many ships each team has in the field and in reserve. All of that is on its way and should be in our next playtest demo within the coming weeks!
Its been a few weeks now. In that interval, a number of things have happened; We went to MAGFest 2014, we saw a let's play video of Galactose, we conquered the task of building our IndieDB page...
Anyways, I'm gonna talk about our MAGFest experience a bit, then give a brief postmortem, then talk briefly about our new IndieDB page and a new Let's play video of Galactose and what the status of releasing our rift build into the wild is.
MAGFest 2014
First of all, MAGFest was a lot of fun, and quite exhausting at the same time. It was definitely a good teambuilding experience and we all had a lot of fun.
Team Galactose's MAGFest Booth
Overall, our booth had a pretty sweet setup and a pretty awesome location - a corner with a lot of traffic. It was really loud at the convention center so we eventually brought an amplifier later in the weekend, but we didn't have one at this point.
Playing Galactose on the Oculus Rift
Adding Oculus Rift support was definitely good as the promise of trying out the Oculus Rift helped draw a lot of people into trying Galactose. However there were a few often repeated comments, when playing with the rift - notably about the unreadability of the UI and the low-resolution. Overall, though, most people seemed to like the Oculus Rift version too.
Overall, we felt like our showing at MAGFest worked out pretty well, we didn't run into any major technical issues, our booth worked out pretty well, people seemed to like the game etc. On the other hand, its also clear that its our first time expoing a game, so we could use more practice with things like prompting users, getting promotional materials printed ahead of time
...Possibly also having a slightly less Ghetto-tacular banner stand ^ ^
IndieDB Page
While at MAGFest, we also created an IndieDB page for our game! Its still very basic, but please check it out at http://www.indiedb.com/games/galactose!
A Galactose Let's Play
Jeskimo made an awesome let's play video of Galactose, please check it out! If anyone else makes a Galactose Let's Play video, please send us a link too!
We're still investigating the cause of the crash, there hasn't been as much testing on giving AI orders while having multiple squadrons selected, so something there might need some tweaking. Note: this is the build that is currently available from August, so it doesn't have some things like the updated sgt sprinkles image, etc.
Status of the next build
So, we have a build that is definitely playable, but as the main new feature is Oculus Rift support, I wanted to spend some more time trying to address some of the issues noted by players (and some that we cleverly avoided while showing off) before releasing the build out into the wild. This should be coming "Soon"ish.
