OUTBUDDIES - a 16bit style metroidvania (with alpha demo!)

[arthurh]

Oh Dear ! Felicitation for your son !

[Robeez]

Congratulations, now you and your son are true outbuddies

[SHINBAXTER]

the little buddy came out early (had 2 get in on the puns)

congrats dude!

[Volnaiskra]

Probably all the kickstarter stress your wife was feeling induced the labour

Congratulations and good luck!

[Julian82]

Hi guys,

I'm back with an update on the game's status since its Kickstarter campaign. I've not managed to do a writeup about the campaign itself yet, but here's some other stuff I made for today's Kickstarter update. I'll roll out the first early access copies in about three weeks and I'm trying to improve the game as much as possible until then. The Kickstarter provided a lot of valuable and critical feedback which resulted in a lot of work and higher ambitions to deliver a better quality with the next build. So what's new?

VISUALS

I made changes to the menu screens and HUD elements. John has a fancy glowing helmet-bubble now, which indicates his health and helps a lot to keep track of the tiny sprite. Also, some additional frames were added here and there and I cleaned up some weird looking stuff. And finally: I'm done with the water-shaders. Technically I was not able to implement the water shader I got from Chrilley's Jarvis in the end, but I'm satisfied with the result anyway, which is a combination of a multiply blend and a substract layer.




PLATFORMING MECHANICS

Outbuddies now has a Run-button which makes traversing the corridors much faster and enables to perform a fancy far jump. If you approach a platform's edge carefully, John's speed will now automatically slow down to a small step movement and allow a pixel-precise control. You're now also able to jump out of the falling tech-roll, for a better flow of movement.

The default control-setups were improved due to player feedback. I also had multiple requests to implement key and button rebinding, which I fully understand. I'll not be able to get this done in the next build though, but it's one of the most important things on my list.



REBALANCING BUDDY & CO-OP PLAY

Design-wise, the Buddy droid has been a real problem child to me in the last weeks. If you guys played the demo you realised that Buddy was able to freely fly around in each room wiping out all enemies with its slingshot cannon. While this was somehow funny and was originally implemented to be a Co-Op only feature, it completely destroyed all challenge and tension in many of the rooms and would have led to even worse power creep in the later game. The sad news: The slingshot cannon is dead now, it just felt wrong and displaced in the end.

The good news: "Corridium-Alteration" is there using the old slingshot mechanic and combining it with fancy hacking-abilities. Corridium is the omnipotent element of Outbuddies' universe which permeates every living being and environmental structure of Bahlam. The Old Ones used it to shape their Cities and even create and modify live forms. By collecting "Corridium alteration protocols", Buddy can be upgraded to use vulnerability points in the Corridium structure of creatures and facilities. Think of it like combining Star Wars' Midi-Chlorians with alchemy and the brilliant Glitch-Ray from Axiom Verge. Depending on a target's exposed weak point and the right protocol used, Buddy will be able to basically create everything out of anything and I'm very excited to fiddle around with this stuff.

[arthurh]

Oh ! what a lot of good news Julian !
The best to finish your game !

[Volnaiskra]

Wha? You managed to do all that with a newborn?! You must have been blessed with a good sleeper!

[Julian82]

Wha? You managed to do all that with a newborn?! You must have been blessed with a good sleeper!

I took two months off from my daytime job to be with the family. In Germany, fathers are encouraged to do this and you get a salary replacement from the state for up to 14 months (for one couple combined, you can decide who takes how many of them). It's much harder for my wife, she has to care about all the feeding, I just do nappy changing, cuddling and supply chain management, so there's a couple of hours left every day/night

[Julian82]

Outbuddies' early access program launched on Kickstarter yesterday. Already got some nice feedback, bug reports and feature requests (I feel the creep coming aready). I also started to experiment with putting voxel-based graphics into the game. The technical tiles in the gif were made in the (free) Magica Voxel and then adjusted to Outbuddies' resolution and color depth using GIMP. I really love using this tool so far and I wonder which other things it could possibly do for speeding up the game's asset creation. Not having to care about shadows on complex surfaces makes me so happy :P It's like doing 3D pixel art with super easy options to create different model variants and perspektives. In isometric games, I will probably use this for everything in the future . Anyway, when it comes to crafting organic shapes, it's probably better to do it by hand, but I'll experiment with that too.

[arthurh]

Thanks Julian for this ! i will see Magica voxel. Do you use a tablet or a mouse to draw ? to speed up the game asset creation, work with a block of tile with your tablet. But it depend of what tablet you have, pc...