 | | |
| |
| | |
|
A million things to say about Gunpoint, but most importantly: please welcome John Roberts aboard as the game’s main artist, and Fabian van Dommelen (Beldak in the comments here) as captain backgrounds and probably additional environment art. This means the people in Gunpoint are going to look a bit like this:  The levels are going to look something like this:
And sometimes a bit like this:
We’re going to have a chat about it, try some things out, and tweak all this until it fits together nicely, looks clear and readable, and makes you really want to play it. At that point I’ll try to pull it all together into a first proper screenshot so you guys can see what the game’s going to look like. I’m not kicking into proper “Woo, look at my game!” mode yet, but I have set up a Twitter account: @GunpointGame, to talk about the development, make programming jokes, link other indie dudes I think are cool, and ask you guys for opinions on how some things should work. I’ll also be putting out future calls for testers on there – not sure when the next prototype will be yet. As you’ll see from the first tweet there, I’ve now got every feature I want in Gunpoint working. This is the fundamental stuff, like:
It doesn’t mean I have the pause menu done or anything looking good, but the full skeleton of the game is there now. The plan for those elements has stayed steady for a long time, but it feels a lot more concrete now I know they all work. Once we know what we’re doing for the art, my next job is making all the levels. Which means knowing what the missions are about, which means knowing the objectives, which means knowing the clients, which means knowing the key players and their conflicts and characters, which means basically coming up with the story. I’ll put up another post about that probably tomorrow, because I’d like your advice on how to make it not suck. Lastly, I was interviewed over at Laser Romance, about stuff like why Gunpoint is no longer about a murderous space robot. As mentioned there, Gunpoint now has a proper URL if you want to link it anywhere: gunpointgame.com. It currently just shows you all the posts here tagged with Gunpoint, but I’ll eventually make it a bespoke site. Incidentally, if anyone knows how to make only posts in the Gunpoint category appear at http://www.pentadact.com/gunpoint with WordPress, I’m having a hard time figuring it out. | ||
| |
sQUEAKYfOAMpEANUT: Oh man, perfect choices, Tom. Now I really want to play this.
charlie: i'm first! 'i remember when gunpoint had dodgy old graphics made by the programmer!' & 'i like the old artwork better than the new artwork, the new stuff is way too overproduced' :D
Crane: Oh excellent! Those are the ones I would have gone for as well.
Goodness this is going to be magnificent... Karl: So sick, this is going to look awesome and be awesome. Cheers and good luck, Tom.
fatalxploit: I've been lurking for ages but I've got to say this: This looks awesome! Can't wait to test/play it :D And yes I've said too much.. back to lurking.
dual_barrel: Excellent choice!
The Indifference Engine: Now that the art-style's nailed down (awesomely) have you given any thought to the soundtrack? Because it's not a proper indie game without a kickin' rad reto-tastic soundtrack.
Or maybe something more along the lines of 20th century jazz by way of the 23rd and 1/2 century would fit with the aesthetic better? Either way, I'm excited! Drug Crazed: If I am correct, you want http://www.pentadact... ...y/gunpoint.
There's probably a rewrite rule you could use, but I'd just point it at that...
verendus: Out of curiosity, how likely are you to allow for changeable controls for us poor souls who own laptops and, thus, lack scroll bars?
barley: Hmm, so you'd want the gunpointgame.com domain (/whatever) to stay there even when you click to view the individual posts, or just not have it disappear straight after you type it in?
If it's the first, unfortunately there isn't any way to do that with .htaccess because it's made for serving up pages on a local server. Asking it to serve pages from a remote server will just result in it telling the client to redirect. You could park the gunpointgame.com domain though. It depends on your web host but most will have options in the control panel for setting up parked domains. Parked domains point to exactly the same content as other domains, so it's not like they do any redirecting. barley: Uh, I sort of got mixed up with what I was saying in that comment. Parking the domain is pretty much the only way to have gunpointgame.com load the page at pentadact.com/gunpoint. It won't persist after you click a link on the page, though. WordPress looks like it's using absolute links to all of its pages (http://www.pentadact... ...m/blahblah instead of just /blahblah).
.htaccess would work for silently redirecting /gunpoint to /tag/gunpoint or /category/gunpoint though. The RewriteRule that I mentioned in my other comment should work for that. Okay I'll stop typing now. Lack 26: I got bored and mixed the two to see what it might look like,
http://img808.images... ...mixed2.png I do hope the final product looks something like this. Bret: Looks pretty cool.
How does one go about volunteering to beta test again? I know, I'm shallow, but when it'll look this nice, I can't resist asking. Lobo: Congrats guys! Excellent choices I must say. :)
TooNu: This is going to be a fantastic looking game now :)
It's been a year of waiting but it's like almost here so that's awesome! I have one request, and it's fairly important. Please do not release it after Human Rev' comes out because I won't be able to focus on Gunpoint at all if that happens. Unless you release it months after of course. I think I'm actually affraid of this happening. Urthman: It would be great if you could use Beldak's windows (or get Roberts to do something similar). Those things look like they would sound fantastic and fly into a million shards when you shatter them. Just looking at the artwork makes me itch to break one.
Alex: Here's a quick and dirty way to get the shorter /gunpoint URL you're wanting: https://gist.github.com/933941
Put that bit of Javascript somewhere into the page and it'll change the URL shown and optionally change the title text too. It's only a quick cosmetic change so any links followed from that page will still have the same URL they've always had. groovymann: Hello artists, your art made me very happy, what looks to be a brilliant game is evidently going to have brilliant art. i am a bit worried about the mission tracking stats, being a bit OCD I will evidently feel the need to redo every level until I get an A or equivalent top mark, must you do this to me Pentadact?
thanks, groovymann Krushna: This sounds a bit like The Art of Theft
Amelia: Sounds great, can't wait until the art and levels are properly planned out
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
| |
| | |
Comment | ||
| |
I'm not sure how wordpress handles the whole url redirection thing because it obviously has something going on (when you try to go to http://www.pentadact... ...m/gunpoint it takes you to one of the posts with "gunpoint" in the title). It should work though.
Probably.
Maybe.