Soon...

I finally submitted Gunman Clive for apple review yesterday, so it won't be long now. The Android version is pretty much done as well; I'll just need to move over the final tweaks I've made, but I'll hold onto it until I can release it on both platforms simultaneously. So next week I'll try to get started on the PC (and possibly Mac) version, but that won't be released until a short while after. I'm not sure how much work that needs to be done on the PC version, the main thing is to add proper PC-centric video options and save functions and replace FMOD with something that doesn't cost money, and of course make sure it runs on a wide range of systems. I'm also thinking of replacing some of the objects with more highpoly versions, but only if I can make it look good with some basic smoothing operation, I don't want to spend a lot of time reworking the graphics.

Gunman Clive

Unless I change my mind very soon this will be the official title of my new game. Still not really sure about the name but it's the best I've got. I had a few rather lame alternatives and then I got the idea to keep the GMC abbreviation somehow, and the first thing that popped into my head was Gunman Clive and somehow it stuck (and yes I know that's technically just GC, not GMC, but whatever).

Gameboy shading

I was a bit bored and didn't feel like starting coding menues today so I played around a bit with my post effects just for fun. Just had to tweak some colours and change a texture to get this effect. I tried rendering it in lower resolution as well to get it more pixelperfect but it just looked worse

Pompadour

Another short video of GMC. This is the first boss in the game. He has a pretty simple behaviour but can still be quite hard to defeat.

Finally getting started on GMC

So I've tried applying the rendering technique to GMC. Maybe I'm just crazy but I really like the style and I think I'm finally on track to get started on the game properly. I'm changing the plan a bit and I'm going to give the western theme a bit more focus han I previously intended, and have bandits as enemies instead of robots (though maybe some robots will pop up as well). Having more human enemies will probably change the gameplay a bit as well, but I'll still try have it as MegaMan-like as possible with lots of small simple enemies.

Also got it running on Android now. The post effect that's blurring the colours on the character might be a bit too demanding, and I'm not sure how much it really adds. I like it though. I get 30 fps on my Xperia PLAY, so it's probably ridiculously slow on weaker phones. Then again that phone will be about a year old by the time the game is finnished so maybe it's OK. I'm thinking of making it possible to turn of the post effects; but I have to see how much extra work that will be. I'll have to have two sets of shaders for everything in that case, as everything would work a bit different without the post effect.

Btw, what you see in the screenshot is some really old content that I've tweaked a bit. When I first started working on GMC ages ago, before releasing the Wii Homebrew version with the GreenHillZone-like environment, I tried making a train level but could never get it look remotely decent and gave up. I thought it fit the theme quite well and I don't really need much textures with this style so I tried reviving it.

More rendering tomfoolery

I was playing around a bit with the old rendering demo from my last post and accidentally spawned in the character from project GMC (who I suddenly turned into a cowboy a few weeks ago) without proper textures adapted for this rendering technique, and I absolutely love the result. The thing is, he's supposed to have two textures, one colour texture and one with some details that gets rendered along with the shading and outlines. But he's using his standard texture for the details, which just turned into massive areas of solid shading and for the colour texture he just got whatever texture was used last. In this case it's the texture for the tree trunk which turned him all brown; he also looked quite dashing when he was all green. I've tweaked the texture a bit to make some more details standout before I took the screenshot though.

The look reminds me of something but I can't quite place it. I think it looks a lot better than when I tried doing proper colouring, and somehow it just feels right with the cowboy motif as well.

I'm considering if I should just go ahead and change Project GMC to this style. I'm thinking very sparse environment art that are just outlines with some sketch shading and enemies in this style with just one colour. I'd have to rethink a lot of things, but I'm pretty much stuck anyway and have a hard time finding an identity for the game. This would certainly give it a unique style and it would most likely speed up content creation considerably, but I'm not sure I'd be able to use much of what I have so far, and I don't know how much variation I can make in this style.

I still have to try running it on phones though. It needs to render to a couple of different framebuffers and do some blurring and stuff, which seemed quite slow last time I tried to do stuff like that on iPhone and Xperia.