Heya I'll be documenting my dev process here once again, probably uploading progress videos every once in awhile. I do have less time though. But essentially I went in with railshooters in mind and decided to apply the idea with whatever character interested me or would suit a shooting game well. 

Decided to make a big change which was make the game third person. I think generally I just want to a do a mix between Sin and Punishment and Wild Guns. Probably will slow things down but I don't know wasn't as bad as I thought and I feel like the game will be less about twitch reactions and more about adapting to situations. Lots to think and worry about though. 

It's hard to fully know when to lay out foundation and when to polish/art things up because the game content just doesn't get worked on when you're an artist/programmer mucking around with art assets. I think my 2d sprite pivot means ramping up the art production side because i wanted to validate the look as soon as possible rather than assume it'll look good after more placerholdering. So it's a tough balancing act and there's no formula to the process I feel.

Hopefully I can get to beyond this one street sections and get rid of these sprite billboards.

So I've modeled a basic enemy with vertex colors painted on as opposed to UVs. That one shader i talked about with making the sprites pop out from the background wasn't wasted. The ones on the left of each pair has a custom shader i made to make the lighting affect the colors much less. Making them pop out more from the background.

This isn't an artstyle choice so much as a readability thing. I might be overthinking it though. As long as the humanoids are the only thing moving and the environment is relatively simple. It shouldn't be too hard to point out what's relevant. Having said that it's also why I've been trying to keep the environment fairly Doom wad-ish. I plan to make anything that's modeled to be interactable to some degree, and the rest will likely be baked into whatever I manage in the quake editor. 
 
Before rigging and animating I tend to just throw the models into the ingame scene because I never know what something looks like until it's ingame. The enemies are a bit generic but I'm liking how they're brining back the Virtua Cop influence, the lack of any complicated detail I think will help with standing out. This model is actually based on the protagonist but just puff the chest up to look more stocky and bam there ya go. I'm probably going to reuse the hell out of this model though.

Next up is rigging and animating these fools

So got the title screen done and placeholdered the rest of the game. next thing to do is actually flesh out level 1 with enemies and challenges and figure out how it all ties into the shop/abilities. That's the one big problem area is just the abilities ideas I have, like melee attacks or some kind of piercing round thing idk. 

There's a lot to cover with where I'm at and I can feel the time squeezing even though progress is pretty good all things concerned. The lack of enemy placement is what prevents the first game level from feeling complete, so my first priority is that and then reward/progression. The biggest wrinkle is probably the bosses... and the composer is cooking some bangers so hopefully they can live up to the audio spectacle.

So got the first half of level done enemy placements wise. I had to overhaul how enemies are spawned since basically echo location makes its pretty useful to see enemies behind walls but if you see through walls... well.... it'll look weird if enemies spawned out of thin air. So i had to set up parameters like enemies being activated at certain times rather than created. But I think having them already in the scene is easier to manage, I just have to be careful about loading the ones that you don't even see til the camera orientation actually sees them. One of those things where I try not to engage in premature optimization and just roll with it til it's a problem

 My plan is to get the first boss done then flesh out then subway, then test it tomorrow with local gamedevs at the meetup (maybe using the wiimote). Then get the shop done and whatever extras and then gun for the last 2 levels. The first level is likely going to be the framework for the next 2 and I don't know if I can promise the most spice and variety. 

Ultimately I'll have something but question is if it's going to feel complete or conclude in a way that isn't abrupt. 🤞

Not too much the report I've fallen behind on some stuff and still have the last bit of level 1 done, but with the last 5 days or so off I decided to slap all of the tasks on the whiteboard and look at it from a lateral progress angle than a vertical one. I tend to bounce between the two but it's hard to get out of the habit of being very vertical and making everything super linearly.



I also tested the game with some folks and level 1 probably needs work balance/onboarding wise but I think worst case I just have a default easy mode where you merely take a penalty to score if the game ends up being too hard. It took 3 weeks to get a solid foundation and level 1 done but I think I'm just going to have do a little bit of corner cutting to get 2 levels done in a week. It's really a matter of how polished/varied the game will be that's the big question mark. I think I just want to live up to the music though as Cowberry's been doing a really solid job with it.

didn't quite get what i wanted to when planned but the todo list is slowly shrinking . likely the last update before a post mortem sort of thing!

Game is now released, you can play and vote for it here! https://shweep.itch.io/echo-gunner

Level 3 is kind of just an empty level with some story bits and music left in. Sadly the game is not entirely complete but the first 2 levels have actual gameplay in them. I'm mostly proud of the music Delaney did and hope it wins an award. The music really did set the whole mood for the game.