Apocalypse Cow Goes Alpha
Wow. With all this talk about serious games, games as art, games as a protected form of freedom of expression and a powerful medium for communication, I guess I feel a little embarassed to talk about my little game about evil (and explosive) cows.

I guess I'm "Alpha." The game is playable (I think) from start to finish, I have at least stand-in content for every game element, I got saving and loading games working earlier this week, and I'm continuing to get content in place. I'm working on some dialog elements and "punching up" the visuals for the first few levels to get it ready to show on the 18th at the upcoming Utah Indie Game Developer's meeting. Go me!

I probably won't actually give the game to external testers until after the 18th. At this point, everything but the core gameplay is open for discussion, tweaking, scrapping, and overhauling. If the core concept and gameplay sucks, I'm basically screwed.

One of the late additions I put in the game is the ability to upgrade your helicopter between levels. This means spending some of those precious points you've spent rescuing people, defending bases, accomplishing mission objectives, and of course turning lots of cows into hamburger.

Part of the trick to this was adding upgrades without increasing the complexity of the controls. Two of the upgrades were completely new abilities - the "Smart Bomb" (for lack of a better term - it is an attack that damages everything within a certain radius), and a force field which, like the Tempest's special ability in Void War, renders the player completely invulnerable for a short period of time. I decided to make the forcefield fire off automatically if you have any left whenever you get hit. So it automatically protects you from taking at least one hit. They are a bit more expensive than just incrementing your armor levels, but they can be really useful in many of the later levels where you are flying through curtains of flak, gunshots, and guided missiles.

Hmmm... I guess I was probably inspired to do this by my irritation at getting my butt kicked too much by my own game.

Unfortunately, the day job has gotten to be in crunch mode (as I expected), so progress has been SLOW. On the plus side, I'm heading up programming on a new, non-indie console game at work, and having a blast! I wish I could say more, but I can neither say more nor even hint as to when I will be able to say more. Except that it'll rock!

Well, that's it for now. Have fun!

Labels: Apocalypse Cow, Game Announcements

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:56 AM (Permalink)