Valkyrie upgrades and more BD

Hello! We’re back! After our killing feline adventure, we got back to work on Chosen, and something we had in mind for quite a long time was redoing the ship on which Crash travels to Mars (the Valkyrie)

At first, we designed the ship in a more low-res pixel art style, but as the game moved on and its graphics also improved, we felt that the look of the ol’ boat was somewhat outdated. In a way, we postponed updating it because there was too much stuff to do in other areas of the game, but now that we’re kinda happier with the whole graphic look and feel, it was the right moment to get over with it once and for all.

So, a large part of the ship’s sections have been completely refreshed and updated. There’s still some work to do, but we’ll get there eventually.

Just take a quick look and see if you can tell the difference.

Building all these areas is rather time consuming, especially when it’s done in high definition pixel art. Let’s not forget it’s a sidescroller after all, and the faster it goes, the more stuff you have to build.

The result is that we will have to reuse some textures for the more common elements like walls, decorative elements, etc) but placing them strategically as to avoid the nauseating feeling of repetition.

Everything was wonderful until A* started getting funky with our 2D. Yes, we know it’s not designed to work in XY, but with a little help from the guys over at the BD forums, we’re fairly sure everything is going to be ok. (http://opsive.com/forum/index.php/topic,1122.0.html).

Apart from that, all the BD movement tasks integrated with A* work perfectly in 3D, but in 2D we had to create our own tasks (pursue, flee, patrol, cry….).

The tree for our marine is going along nicely, although we still have to incorporate their behavior with factions. In addition to the player, they have to interact with ascended, and we want them to behave differently. As soon as we get the factions in there, we’ll do a bit of spring cleaning to the subtrees so everything ends up a bit more functional and simple.

At the moment, we have a marine that will go after you, he will flee when he’s at low health, when he sees a grenade he won’t try to eat it for lunch, will alert other marines in the area, and won’t randomly run of a cliff unless he’s very very scared. In fact, he’ll eventually regain his confidence and begin to shoot at you from wherever he is.

Obviously, they are blessed with an infinite pool of curses and swear words for when they decide to shoot someone, or they’re forced into a humiliating retreat after suffering hideous wounds.

We also added knockback to all of our enemies. We want you to dodge them, or roll, or jump over them, not just ignore them. That’s why we think collision is a cool thing. Since we don’t want it to be too unfair, the player also has knockback and can try to keep the enemies at bay by hammering them repeatedly, at least for a short time. The actual damage when a shot connects though, will be the same.

Well, that’s all folks! See you in the next post.