#dev-blog

Kartik: Character Select, Backend Improvements and Bugsmashing

Spring has come and so have my allergies, meaning when I come home from my full day of doing a full time job and a part time job I’m a bit more tired and woozy than normal. In other words, not as much work as I would've liked got done this past week. I did get half of a new feature done however, a character select screen!

Character Select

So in the video you can see two panels that let you choose the character and skin color you want, and then you can see the “composite” cop in the middle. I wanted the character select screen to match the comedic tone of the rest of the game, and reflect the same energy as well. One feature I’m still working on is a little animation that shows the half of a face that has been changed being RIPPED OFF with BLOOD AND GUTS coming out of the seam, and have the new half face slam back onto the head. I think this will match the tone.

You can also see two fists on either bottom corner of the screen, and this is how you confirm the end of character selection: both players press ‘A’ (on xbox) or ‘X’ (on PS4) and the fists slowly close in on the center of the screen, have an epic fist bump, and then we transition to the game state.

As for how character selection actually impacts gameplay, it won’t. Not by much. We have some plans to maybe have character dialogue, and in that situation we might have some more character-building through unique dialogue. Other than that, it will be used to customize the high score board to show the portrait of each player next to their name and score.

Kudos to Garret for making all the art and writing the hilarious bios for each character. We are going to work on the seam at the middle of faces on each side. When Garret made it initially, he didn’t know I was going to show the entire face at any point so the art had a black line going down the middle.

Back end and Bugsmashing

As usual, Eric and I love maintaining good back end practices and decent efficiency in how information is handled. Recently I made some changes to the backend in how the various components on the player (shooting, moving, health, etc) communicate with one another. I also updated how Bullets deal damage to entities to be more generic. This unfortunately broke killing and dying in many ways, and this went more or less unnoticed until I was demo-ing the game to some friends.

Of course.

That is a good question. And I will tell you, the answer is that when we started the dev process for LongStory way back in 2013 all the dateable characters were called L1 - L4. That’s right, we started with only 4 dateable characters. We had no idea that Turkeyhawk was going to prove so darn attractive. We came up with names after we had the final art and the idea of who the character was in terms of their personality and cultural background.

Here is a sample of one of our sketches for the dateable characters. I think you can guess which one :)

Ok Ok… Here is the deal:

We are in the queue! Now this doesn’t mean it will come out in two days the current wait on the queue is about 10 days, and we are on day 7. Also we could get rejected and have to resubmit - so let’s not go counting chickens before they hatch.

We’re going to release both Apple and Android versions at the same time but the wait for Android is much shorter so we’ll  submit to the Play Store as soon as we know Apple is going to publish.

Remember when we showed you these nice guys? 

Today we want you to meet the Obelix/Hulk among the Orcs. 

When he was just a little Orcling he fell into a barrel of goop and now pursues the DieselKnights relentlessly through the streets of Ravensdale.

This impressive tank not only forces you to keep on movin' with his charge attacks, he also serves as a meat shield for the small goblins with his large health pool.