The last week was dedicated to bug tracking. We’ve finished the whole game and fixed all the bugs we’ve found so far. The next week will be dedicated to localization and public relations.
I wanted a break so I started the Mac OS X 10.6 port of the game engine. As all the gameplay is done in Lua, the hardest job was to tame Xcode and Mac OS X. In order to make the game working, I had to build some libraries. I used Macports for Lua and Boost, it saved a bunch of time. For the other libraries, I created my own project in Xcode and built Luabind, and SFML manually.
And the result is a fully working version of the game engine, and Reckless Squad on Mac OS X :
At the end of the week, we plan to contact Valve Software to try to publish Reckless Squad on Steam. Fingers crossed.
Because we are currently working on the last milestones of the game, all our weeks are alike.
When we don’t track a bug, we are working on content. We added some new situations, missions or achievements in order to provide the best experience possible.
Dri designed a new boss, some kind of post-apocalyptic-middle-age biker. Although he doesn’t have a Chopper (yet?), he’s really badass!
Dax added a very useful feature, allowing the player to know the convoy position when it’s off screen.
This bubble show you the position of your convoy even when it's not on screen
Franck worked on a mission that means a lot to him. He designed a Tower Defense-like mission, with all the characters of the game. You can expect a very high challenge! Take a look:
I’ve spent a lot of time on PR, I’ve sent some e-mails, improved the website design helped by Dri, or updated Twitter, Facebook and IndieDB. We have had good results, for example, the last article “Generating maps procedurally” has been read 325 times the first day. It represents half of the last month visits! We still have many things to do in public relations. Building a community around our game is my main goal for the next weeks.
For Reckless Squad we wanted the game to be highly re-playable, so we wanted to generate on the fly and randomly a lot of things. This way, the game keeps re-inventing itself.
It’s also a big help for us as developers, because we can’t afford to create all these maps by hand.
We are currently polishing the game and adding more content to it. It means new missions, new enemies, new situations and new achievements.
The AI Director was given a complete revamp and can now handle 3 level of difficulties. The units’ AI and the way they move was also improved.
We implemented the final boss of the game, the deadly Dragon. You must attack it to distract its attention from the convoy, but if you’re skilled enough, you may even be able to kill it.
Of course, doing so is rewarded by an achievement. There is currently 37 achievements in the game and we’re not short of ideas yet.
The hardest (or longest?) one is the trendy “Zombie Genocider” : you have to kill 53,597 zombies to achieve it. Yeah, it’s one more than Prototype.
37 achievements, and counting!
Other than that, I’ve managed to optimize the game significantly, to the point it can now manage a huge amount of units at once (just give a look at the minimap) :
In this trailer you can hear one of the song from John Imbler. You can also see some new environments, like the forest.
We continued to add content to the game, here are the main game modes :
New game : the normal mode, chooses a random story, generates random maps and uses the AI Director to create a unique adventure based on the way you play. See our previous weekly news for more informations about it.
Missions : some hand-crafted situations where you must complete given goals. The purpose of the first missions is to learn how to play. But the others are more difficult and require strategy.
Defeat the enemy's champion while protecting your king
Arena : we talked about it last week : you have to survive against endless waves of opponents. The longer you stand, the better your score.
Achievements : again, we talked about it before, they’re little objectives that reward you after being completed. You’re probably already familiar with them.
Library : the center of all knowledge, contains articles about the different units and the world of Reckless Squad.
As you can see, there is a lot of things to play with. We also added a lot of new enemies, like emo-Vampires, Witches, Werewolves, Bigfoots, Fire Spirits, etc.
Working on the actual content instead of the technical subtleties feels good and inspiring.
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