#covenge

I would like to inform you that a demo of Covenge is finally avaiable!

Download Covenge V0.1

I thought I would have never shown it, but finally here it is, ready to be tested and judged by the WORLD!

It's a bit like taking your child to the first day of school .. "go baby go, and make me proud of you!"

This version is obviously not complete, but it clearly shows the gameplay that the final game will have once it will be completed. There are two arenas 7 weapons and 3 types of bombs with which you can enjoy crushing a friend of your choice.

One thing is certain: the feeling of a game can not ignore the sound segment. The simple act of jumping or pick up an object have a completely different flavor with a good sound effect.

Or what about the music? A game situation immediately bought thicker with a soundtrack that can give rhythm and call the appropriate theme.

So, tired of test Covenge in total silence, I've spent the last few days to do a bit of sound effects suitable for the game.

I wanted to keep a retro feel to the sounds and the music, so I chose Bfxr and freesound.org for sound effects, and PxTone for the music.

Use Bfxr to produce the exact sound you have in mind is not easy but with a little patience and tweaking you can get good effects in 8-bit style. And with that sound that can not be maked with Bfxr there is freesounds.org (glory to him!) with tons of sounds and effects of all kinds (including farts),  all FREE, and Audacity did the rest.

For music is a different matter. As you can produce something just hacking on PxTone,

in order to create melodies and arrangements that make sense, I had to take up more than once the guitar to choose the right chords. My little musical experience surely helped me a lot.

But were not only days dedicated to the audio department.

I created a new arena that I simply called "Canyon" (Original huh? XD). Here...

Drawing pixel-art tiles for the rocks was not easy. The tricky part was creating a vary rocky pattern but tilde at the same time, and that's harder to do than other structures such as bricks.

Everything came out inspired by a lot of this kind of images (google.images i love you!)

Today was day of bugfixes. Especially the shotgun and laser gun had some bugs. I have increased the range of the shotgun, so as to make it more effective.

Added a bit of blood when players are hit, which is always good.

Added some graphic detail of the forest, in order to improve visibility.

Here the poor P2 owned during my tests

In this arena will add two traps, which are activated randomly throwing flames for a few seconds. Will not be too powerful, because it does not have to decide the course of the battle, but only be a distraction for the players. The flame will obviously be the same as the flamethrower.

Ok guys, it's been about a year .. a year where I have not been really productive. During this time a few things have happened that have kept me away from development. Covenge was stopped for quite a while. I have tried other prototypes, and hope to have gained a little more experience.

But recently I picked Covenge, with a word well imprinted in mind: Smaller.

It is said that many make the mistake of thinking too big, at least initially, and that's exactly what I did. The vastness that I decided to give the game, also in terms of level design, made me unmotivated.

So I decided to make the development process less long, to make Covenge smaller, in fact.

Goodbye, split screen. Goodbye too large arenas.

I made fixed camera and all arenas with the same size, to make the fight less confusing. I rewrote part of the physical engine, and improved some graphics.

I hope to show soon something concrete, like a demo or a video, but for now, here's a screenshot to give you an idea.

These days I fixed some bugs, especially implementing scaling with Surfaces, because on many computers when the game was scaled x2, x3, x4, etc. a blurred effect came out. I absolutely hate it! Also there were other graphical errors like a few pixels bigger than other ones. Now everything is fixed!

A lot of these things can't be seen without a video (...coming soon...).