Awaken - finaly finished! Ver. 1.0 aviable

Haha {I Love Burning Money} xD

Even now the game is worth money, maybe not a lot. But yeah.

Keep up the great work.

Even now the game is worth money, maybe not a lot. But yeah.

Thanks!

I ll see how ppl will like the demo whitch should be out in couple of weeks as im concentrating all my focus towards it.
Then if i ll get at least average feedback im planning to invest in to stencyl indie subscription as the full game have to be published as standalone aplication couse of its size would be unpractical for flash(my guess is about 25mb without music & sounds). Couse of it it ll be much harder to reach its audience and thats why i have to save at least little of money for promoting it. Probably ll use facebook adverts. as i found them really effective and they can do a lot for very little if setted up properly.  So till now this whole thing ll be pretty cheap and most expensive expense will be stencyl itself.

Things starts to be crazy when it comes to music, as its very important part of every game and purchasing sound tracks is really expensive and as i have a mess in all kind of licenses aviable, im bit worried about it. Especialy with my english its easy for me to miss something i may regret in future.

If you need any help with reading, Terms & Conditions. Just get me

You can get music really cheap on the internet, and for free (Not piracy, people who make music for the public)

Or, you can make you're own music. It's not that hard, but it will take a while to make something epic.

 

Hi again! After couple of days i feel like i ve made couple of game changes worth mentionig. First and most noticable is the background change.  Finaly ive made background im fine with and while it does not look stunning from the picture its pretty good in motion with multiple layers of smoke scrolling in parallax.
Another good thing is that after i used tinypng.com i was really surprised how much it can reduce png size, and that means flash version of game is again in play as now i can now use multiple backgrounds withou beign too woried about game size. 
Line effect was added to the screen to evoke old arcade machine times and personaly quite like it as it added retro feel to the whole scene, however im still not sure about it and it may change in future.
Spent some time optimizing events as well and now the game sits steady on 60fps even with multiple explosions going on whitch is great.  New spawning system works perfect, gameplay feels great, now i have to add sounds & music and demo release is very close;-)

Again, if interested you can check game progress weekly  in more polished form on  my dev diary blog: http://lurkerlair.blogspot.cz/

Thanks for reading & feedback!


   

Well, that awesome!

Will this game be available on mobile, or will you try to sell it on PC/Laptop & The Web?

Well, that awesome!

Will this game be available on mobile, or will you try to sell it on PC/Laptop & The Web?

It all depend on how good the demo ll be. Right now im planning just PC version. However that might change quickly as demo ll be released hopefuly in less than 7 days;-) Still a lot of work ahead of me, but as menu is almost ready i think i can show the screen of it;-) Backgrounds are scrolling and the ship&drone are changing its perspective depending on the mouse cursor position. Quite like this effect even its just little detail.



 

Incredible!

Will the game have multiple saves?

7 Days!? xD

Can't wait, and good luck.

Thanks!

Im not sure about multiple saves for multiple reasons, first and most important i dont know how to do that(never tought about that)and second im not sure its needed, as campaign is kind of "gear up" part of the game and there are challenges and endgame levels where players can compete for higher score.

Im worried much more about online score board, but ll have to found a way how to set up one and comunicate with it through web blocks. For flash version that sits on kongregate it would be easy, i ve done that before, but for PC ap. i ll have to display scores directly inside game window and thats my biggest obstacle i see right now.

Hello again! After hard week which started by terrible toothache, followed by xbox purchase(had to to forget about that tooth somehow)and spiced by couple of sleepeless nights i managed to resume work on the demo on friday. Did a lot of changes, like new HUD as everything important to player is now floating around the ship. Changed whole shield/hull/recharge system to something more thrilling and added/improved ton of little things whitch nobody ll notice anyway, but are affecting the gameplay a lot. 
Enought of talk for today, demo is uploaded on kongregate as its too big for stencyl arcade and if you are interested click the link below.  Thanks for reading and hope for some feedback so i can improve the game even further!;-)

http://www.kongregate.com/games/AlZ2/awaken-underwater-odysey

Hello again! The demo released last weekend got horrible rating on kongregate, so i decided to improve it as much as i can based on players feedback. Added tutorial mission, reworked scoring mechanics, improved gameplay and softened ship controls. However it does not look rating is going to get any better and it looks like im screwed as i lack feedback and dont have a clue whats so wrong about the game.  Right now im not sure if continue developing this game is worth the time however im leaning towards finishing the game anyway.

You can check new version on kongregate http://www.kongregate.com/games/AlZ2/awaken-underwater-odyssey
Or if you prefer  newgrounds as a oportunity to get few new medals then click http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/637873

Dont forget to rate and comment especialy if you dont like the game as without your feedback im kind of lost.
Thanks a lot!;-)

Took a week off after demo release and resumed works on Awaken just yesterday. Not much to show as did not touched the computer whole week but here is preview of second mission called "the descent" where you take your ship down through abandoned mining shaft as it seems the source of alien infestation.

Hello again, i continued working on the Awaken this week as well and again, i spent more time editing pixels than fiddling with stencyl. Here is the set of enemies for game second mission. Still have to draw a boss and implement these in to game but i have quite a good feeling about them.
The bad side of this is that im still improving the graphics, leaving the older sprites "not fitting" in to the game so there is another wawe of reworks ahead of me:-/

Hello guys, another weekly progress update about awaken is here.  I did not felt like there is a lot work done this week, but when i look at the game i must admit miracles happen time to time as i dont remember working on game any hard during the week at all, but somehow the game made huge leap forward during these few minutes i spent every day on it and i feel more pieces of puzzle got together in current version.
Well what was done this week? I was polishing enemy behaviors and completely reworked and simplified how bullets and patterns were spawned in game. Before this version all the bullets in game had their own behavior. Some were quite simple like set Y speed to bla bla upon creation, some were more complicated like Upon creation set your velocity to X under angle "variable here" and set variable to variable + somethink. It worked and i was fine with it for some time however it was quite complicated to create more complex bullet patterns and most imortantly when there was a lot of bullets on scene, then this method was very resource hungry.
I know you must be thinking "why so complicated?" Couple of days ago i felt like Columbus at the shores of america as i discovered "push last created actor" block and found out it simplifies creation of bullet patterns a lot and when i reworked all the bullets i found out it improved game performance as well over the old method i was using.
Well thats basicaly everything what happened during the week and today it was time to test all the changes in game to see how they work together.
It would be mean of me if i would not shared the impressions with you and what shares impression better than a video? Link below, thanks for reading, thanks for watching and eventualy thanks for visition dev diary blog. See you next time!;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRWybdRpY4A

All right, here is another update. As 90% of the work left on the game consist of drawing level backgrounds and new enemies as i want to have like 4 new for each level. I spent last few days by carefuly placing pixels one by one to create something worth players wrath to be evaporated by orca weapon systems shortly after arriving at the screen. Along with couple of new ships ive drawn backgrounds for third mission as well.
 I decided to use hexagons as they look exotic enought as in this level player ll be at the gates of alien city. I wanted to use somethink completely different couse in first mission, we have abandoned mining station, in second mission we are descending through huge mining schaft as it seems to be the source of alien infestation, and finaly in the third mission we ll see what miners have run in to. I had to change theme totaly as at this stage we ll enter part of whitch neptune colonists did not know about and everyone tought the rocks on the bottom of neptune sea are the real bottom. I ll not talk about the details for now as i want to leave them for level intro ingame so i hope screen ll be enought until next ingame video.
See you next time and thanks for reading this update!

Sometimes you are looking for somethink all over the world, checking most unprobable places and after hours of seeking for perfection you realize you had a hiden gem right under your eyes whole time.

Yes!!! The game finaly got soundtrack!!

But lets start over and explain everythink. As you know i ve got trouble finding well fitting soundtrack for Awaken and spetn dozen of hours by listening to royalty free tracks aviable online, then after realizing i ll probably dont find what im looking for i repurchased some of my guitar recording equipment and decided i ll have to compose and record the songs for a game by myself.
I knew i wanted to left music as a last thing on "to do" list, but i needed at least somethink i could use in game teasers so i spent last week practicing my guitar play and trying to compose well suiting score. My desperation grew even bigger as i did not played guitar for five years(and belive me, right hand really hurted trying to perform modern metal riffs after that long break)and ideas were not great either.
Dont get me wrong, after such a break my brain was fresh and notes came from it nice and smoothly, but its hard to pretend metal/djent feeling while its not in your hearth. And when i woke up in sunday to give this whole thing another try i realized pretending is not a way to go, however i knew i can not use my musical ideas for game as they do not fit.
I started browsing bands and found a hiden gem, and to my surprise the person i found lives in same city as i am. Then it was quite quick, i found his facebook page, sent him message asking if hes interested providing track for a video game and in less than twenty minutes i ve got positive reply. After chatting over facebook we found out we are neightbours and signing a contract about providing tracks is now just a formality.

You can listen one of the tracks right now on the youtube over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JT8Oz5RDHPM

Or another one here:http://youtu.be/SQdLGvHlvtE?t=20s

And if you like what you hear you can check artists page as well: http://www.developdevice.com/