Sprint 4/9

ACCOMPLISHED:
Valkyrie helped me come up with a better design for the box art.  I tweaked it til I got something that I was satisfied with.  Everyone else seems to like the new box art as well.

I don't think I mentioned this in my previous posts.  But somewhere along the way (I don't remember which sprint) I made a smoke animation that plays to show where hidden enemies are (guards or shadow monsters). For this sprint I changed the sizes of that smoke animation so that we can use if to different sized enemies.  That was a bit of a hassle as the shadow monsters are all different sizes.

I also fixed some problems with the sprite sheet.  I had somehow forgotten to add the pushing and pulling to the new sheets.

QUALITY:
I got a lot of positive comments about the box art, so I think it was good quality.  I haven't heard back yet about the smoke effect.

EXTRA:
I outputted some hi-def videos of all Suni's animations and the guard's animations so that Alice will have them at her disposal when she makes the trailer for our game.

EXAMPLES:

 

The FINAL BOXART!!!

BELOW You'll see the guard animations with the new shading. You've already seen Suni's new Shading in previous posts, but not the guards so I figured I'd add him here.

NEXT:
Cristine and I are going to try to convince the programmers to somehow include the old man in our game.  He's oh so adorable, it'd be a shame not to include him.  Even if we just use him as a loading screen graphic.  I'm not sure what the problem is.  They have moving lights and that's essentially all the old man is...

Also we need to make some better art for the start screen.  And Cristine still wants us to start drawing up some simple cutscenes for the story even if they don't make it into the game.

Russel says that we can always patch the game and add a story later, but I think that's a horrible idea.  Most games on XBLIG only draw attention when they are newly released.  If the game sucks when it's newly released people don't play it.  Even if it does get patched later, it won't matter.  It'll just be extra work for us that will not result in any more sales.

The reason I think that a story would help is this: I have played a lot those indie games, and I've never come across even one that actually had a good story that was presented well.  If we could just have a couple stylized cutscenes in our game (like the stylized still images used in The Dishwasher: Vampire Smiles), I think it would do a lot to set us apart from all the other crap available on XBLIG.

Anyway, that's all wishful thinking.

Since I'm already ranting, why stop now? I've told Russel several times that the sneaking should not be mapped to the analog stick.  It needs to be mapped to a button.  Stealth games are like my favorite genre, and having sneaking on the analog stick is one of the most frustrating things you can do.  You have to constantly be careful to only push the stick a little, so that she'll sneak.  If you accidentally push the stick to far she'll burst into a mad sprint and the guards will turn and notice her.  All that could be fixed by mapping it to a button.  You still use the analog stick to move her, but she just does it in sneak mode.