Here's another weekly update from the Cosmo's Quickstop crew. Looks like they have tons of stuff to talk about this week!
Lauren - *Includes extra spicy🔥 info!*
This week I've been working in secret to get all the juicy details and organize everything IWOCON (Indie World Order Convention.) The super-secret reason for this is because we are featured as one of the indies!
That's right, you heard it here!👂
We’ve made a booth for the in-game convention where you can play our demo and be a pirate! YAR! and all that. The event starts right now until April 2nd!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422300/IWOCon_2021/
Head on down and come sail away with us. We are located on Smiley island! (Map included)
Bryan - *Minor Spoilers Ahead*
This week I’ve been fleshing out some effects for the final showdown with Cosmo’s nemesis, Dr. Quazar. Throughout the fight, Quazar can zap the player’s Quickstop, causing one of the docks to malfunction until the player repairs it. To really drive the point home, I’ve been adding all sorts of chaotic FX to signify a broken dock. Fire, arcing electricity and even a holographic Quazar shows up to mock the player’s struggle. We want this final challenge to feel really epic and I think these effects will help a lot.
Erin - Sometimes animation happens very easily and naturally, but other times it takes a lot of effort. This animation went through like 15 bad phases before it landed in this direction. First, we tried having the cat hiding behind Morv-O and he shoo’d the lil guy away. Then later, we tried having the cat hanging off the robot’s back, but the cat is gigantic, so none of the robot’s acting was reading well. Anyway, we got here eventually! And I, for one, am glad this one’s finished. You’ll be able to see this animation in the game during the multiplayer tutorial.
Ian - Last week was about finding bugs, this week was about fixing them! One of the things that had to get done was to set up a transition between the single cutscene camera into the split screen game cameras during the start of the tutorial. For the opening tutorial cutscene, we have a camera pan around showing off the characters and the station. In the end it should swap to the gameplay camera seamlessly, which is how it is set up in singleplayer. Multiplayer was tougher. We had to go from one camera to two cameras, somehow split the screen in that process, and get the UI in there too! Here you can see a gif of what that transition ended up looking like. It isn’t quite perfect yet but is certainly good enough for now.
That wraps up this week's update. If you want more frequent updates, or even if you just want to hang, make sure you check out our Twitter and Discord.
