Thanks to all our early adopters and their continuing feedback! We've put some spit and polish on some of the graphical elements as we continue to build out the game,
BUILDING OVERHAUL
One of the complaints we got was the environment being too "flat". Considering the game is played on a flat screen, we took this to be "accurate". But instead of taking things too literally we dug deep into our two dimensional souls and made some updates to the buildings across the many generated cityscapes of GORILLA TOWN. We've redrawn the sprites to have more depth and shadow, as well as allowed the escaping citizens to leave a few lights on before they left. A comparison:
Old terrible no-good flat buildings with dark windows:
Ever so slightly improved buildings with lit windows (also showing the new film grain, and HUD, and larger characters, etc)
Along with buildings we also adjusted the look of the stone cliffs in the later levels and multiplayer levels. Instead of procedurally generating the stone faces present on the cliffs, we took a more straightforward approach and use pre-made sprites. This makes these levels generate faster as well as have smoother frame rates overall. This can mean the difference between life and after-life when fighting the cranky Panzeraffe robot.
BONUS! We also made it so the cliffs can be generated in different colors to add more variety as well.
Before:
After:
Sharper Characters
Victor the Gorilla and his robotic enemies are now 200% sharper with higher resolution textures. This really shows in the Robot Lexicon that is shown before jumping in to a level in single player, as well as the multiplayer character selection screen:
Before:
After:
OTHER GOODIES
- Stone cliff arrangements in multiplayer are now more random for more interesting combat. Same goes with city levels. SCIENCE!
- Added sound effects when hitting robots. We dropped our kitchen utensils and car keys into metal mixing bowls and recorded the outcome for your listening pleasure.
- We have changed the film noise effect to be a bit more realistic and less harsh, which makes for more calming and authentic 1920s video game experience (we don't even know what that means). This has been updating in all our Steam screenshots as well.
WHERE IS MY ONLINE MULTIPLAYER!?
We didn't forget, and we are toiling away in the code mines so you can battle your friends through the electronic ether. We are currently working on the user interface to make hosting your own server, or joining one, as easy as possible. When we get further along we will post screenshots.
Thanks again to our Early Access players - and we encourage you all to reach out to us with any questions and suggestions!