kyle d. wrote:
game looks awesome, better graphics would be amazing though!
Thank you, well, might as well post an update of what's been going on. Prepare for lots of dev talk!
I've been quite busy with exams and stuff past few weeks but I have more time, however this doesn't mean that stuff wasn't happening. Oh there's been lots happening!
First and most importantly, the sound engine swap, it finally happened and it went smoothly, the game used GMFMODSimple or simply FMOD since it was started, however due development over past some months and decisions that I have discussed and made with my team, we had to swap it for something else for reasons I will not disclose at this point of time.
We had two choices, go back to Caster aka OpenAL (what Zenodyne used but caused some issues, the newer version has a share of it's issues) or try out XeAudiere which is a wrapper for the Audiere engine. BPzeBanshee decided that XeAudiere as the way to go because it was most easy to implement and at least the engine tests of it proved no problems with recording software like OBS.
It went very smoothly, more than I expected to be honest. The most positive thing is that the loading times decreased SIGNIFICANTLY, stages that used to load more than 5 seconds, load in 1 second and so on.
From now on, all internal builds will use XeAudiere (and that will be provided) and those who have old builds with FMOD should remove FMOD.dll and GMFMODSIMPLE.dll once they get the new update.
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Second, emphatic's soundtrack is progressing really well and he helped me overhaul the game's sound effects, I won't say anything about their quality, it's a matter of wait and see, as there's a certain gameplay video coming in a month or two featuring stuff which brings me to the third point....
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Three, while it is important to design the remaining planned content (which there's quite a lot of), it's AS important to work on the stuff that is already existing and that's before the "bells and whistles" phase we have planned once all content is done where all the polishing will happen.
What I have in mind that I discussed with others in the team:
- Lots of sprites (which I have already extracted to TO BE POLISHED folder) need polishing so at least it's all consistent on a minimum desired level.
- Certain bosses need to be expanded in fun and exciting ways.
- First 3 stages certainly need some rework, at least on the gameplay level, graphicaly it might be hard to improve them, hard as in I don't possess currently skills to make them better (talking backgrounds) and Fox doesn't do backgrounds, he helps me polish sprites.
- Find interesting ways to create minor bonuses to spice up the game's scoring.
Okay enough talk and more proof, so the sprite overhaul began essentially, here's few comparisons. Keep in mind that the visuals will overall go under an overhaul later on, we are just bringing it up so it's easier for later overhauls.
1UP:

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Popcorn:

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Stage 2 Midboss 2:

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Stage 3 Train head:

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Last but not least, a little teaser that might make some people happy:
