#twincop

TwinCop #1 - Two Boys one Cop - bro-op

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 ABOUT THE GAME 

TWO PLAYERS, ONE COP 

#indiedev Interview: @kkiniaes of @finitereflect on #TwinCop #indiegame

A few devs we talked to post-PAX East mentioned the game TwinCop to me. A chaotic, synth-filled coop shooter where you play as a half of a cop (together forming one complete TwinCop), I knew there had to be a good story behind this game.

Luckily, I got the chance to talk to Kartik Kini, the lead developer at Finite Reflection and of TwinCop. In this interview we discuss how this game came to be,…

TwinCop co op twin stick shooter games coming to Mac and Windows PC, but we have a Linux support update. Thanks to the team at Finite Reflection Studios. Who are also psyched to announce the May 10th release on Steam . So we reached out to Finite Reflection Studios to confirm support. The developer has further plans for TwinCop. They also explain the game and when we can expect a native release.

Linux Support Plan:

"My current goal is to confirm a QA resource who can test on Linux. And ensure that TwinCop runs smoothly and without issues. We are currently very busy on ensuring Mac and PC have the best quality release possible. But have not had the resources yet to start testing on Linux. We are developing with Unity. So that should make porting it to Linux relatively easy! As soon as I am able to either set up a linux testing environment myself. Or find a resource to test on Linux for us. We should be able to give a more certain answer. I hope this information helps, and I hope to be able to provide TwinCop to the linux audience as soon as possible!"

TwinCop Launch Date Trailer (Mac and Windows, then Linux)

TwinCop #indiegame Release Date Announced by #indiedev @finitereflect

It was only recently that I learned about TwinCop, a ridiculous and over the top cooperative game where each player controls one half of a cop, like some sort of bizarre synthwave fueled Frankenstein’s monster of the law.

Zac Fierce mentioned it in the recent indie developer interview we did (check it out here), as did Robert Wahler in the interview we recorded with him (coming soon!).

Luckily,…

Kartik: Greenlight, Roadmap Complete, Improved Environment Visuals, Final Flow Started

We had a solid 5-hour company meeting where we hashed out the entirety of the rest of the game, which is described intentionally vaguely below. We also decided to go ahead and post our Greenlight even though we are only in pre-alpha. This has been a very anxiety inducing experience for me personally, putting my work in the public space is hard enough especially when I know we’re not even close to making this look as great as we can.

Greenlight

Here is the link to the Greenlight campaign. This is how we’re going to get on Steam, so if you like what you see (or believe that we’re going to continue working on this and actually finish it) please give us a vote here.

Also, get in touch with us via that page! Tell us what you think and what you want to see in the game, I look forward to responding to some of you!

Roadmap Complete

Pre-Alpha to Alpha: Ok, here is the basics of the roadmap and what we’re looking to do with the gameplay. We are currently in Pre-Alpha because our core gameplay isn’t quite complete, we are missing one core function: player abilities. Once all player abilities are complete and working we are going to be in Alpha. Here is a taste of some abilities I’m currently prototyping: Grappling Hook, Power Punch, Super Taser... etc. We have them all planned out, just a matter of prototyping and figuring out what is fun and what works.

Beta: Once we have reached our Alpha milestone, we will start working towards our Beta milestone that will be a matter of completing all the content. Our planned content (subject to change) includes three chapters that take place in unique environments, with unique boss fight(s), and a story arc that ends with an epic final boss fight. We will also have an “Arcade” mode that unlocks various stages as you progress through the story. The ‘Arcade’ mode levels take place in small arenas where you face an endless horde of enemies and compete for the best high score. Once all of the content exists in a playable format we will officially be in Beta. At this point we may or may not decide to do some public testing, but that is TBD.

Gold and Reach Goals: Once the Beta is complete, we will continue to polish and do as much quality assurance as possible before hitting a launch date sometime Q4 2017. Some reach goals we will try to accomplish around this time include: Online Cooperative, Online Arcade Leaderboards, and whatever other fun ideas we’ll come up with as development progresses.

Thats our roadmap as of right now, the entire thing is subject to change, but I am going to do everything in my power to hit our (internal) deadline dates to ensure we reach a reasonable release date.

Improved Environment Assets

Ok, on to talking about actual development! I’ve spent this past week polishing environmental art a LOT. Our unique camera angle presents a range of problems with how we chose to do our environment. In the screenshot below, I pulled the camera to an angle you don’t normally see to give a better view of the environment I’ve been building for the game. All the art is done as sprites and placed in 3D space, which in hindsight wasn’t the best way to do things but that is where we are now.

I also spent a lot of time sweetening the lighting and adding ambient occlusion decals wherever geometry intersection stood out too much. Although this is a lot of work to do by hand, I’m very pleased with the results and the fine control I have over each aspect of the visuals is exciting to me.

Final Flow Started

Here you can see the main menu has some new options on it, namely: Story and Arcade. Everything else is about the same, but will probably be slightly reworked as the flow is finalized.

Eric spent some time getting the loading and scene transitions to work with knowing what mode we’re in, and which scene to go to as we reuse modular UI elements. Eric also re-worked the training scene since up until recently it had been a very weird/disconnected scene from the rest of the game. It now has a similar flow to the core gameplay and less prone to breaking.

Kartik: Recent Accolade, Updated Main Menu, Player Abilities, Fine Details

First of all, we won an award!!

We won the Best Student Game award at IndieBits 2017. We are super proud and very excited about this achievement and hope to continue to take this game to other local shows to gain more recognition.

This update might be a bit short due to how busy this week is (and last few weeks have been), in spite of the significant progress that has been made.

Update Main Menu

One immediate change you’ll notice about the game is the update main menu. The previous main menu had been feeling very “dead” to me, nothing about it felt alive and the design didn’t match the energy and excitement of the game. Take a look at the new main menu:

The design is by no means final, but it is far more in line with the aesthetic of the game and feels much more alive. In the video attached at the bottom you can see how the elements are animated and breathe life into the previously dead menu.

I have plans to make the text a bit more readable and to improve on the visual of the icons along the side for more clarity but those are on the back burner until other work is completed.

Player Abilities

One major critique we received from one of our recent playtests was that there is no compelling reason to choose specific characters from the main menu. Our solution: player abilities. Each character is going to have a unique ability that adds significant flavor to the gameplay. The two abilities we have completed thus far are Power Punch and Grappling Hook (names subject to change)

These abilities are activated by the left trigger (giving symmetrical controls on the controller) and have a set number of “Charges”. See the UI below:

Each time one player uses their ability, the other player’s charges are refilled by one. That, and Twinsanity, are the only ways to refill your charges for your ability. This goes hand in hand with the cooperative gameplay that is already well established in the game, and we hope it works for players as well as it works for us.

These abilities are going to be used mostly for crowd control and strategic maneuvers, though balancing their usefulness is certainly going to be a huge challenge. None of these abilities are going to do a whole lot of a damage, their primary usage will be to move/stun/relocate enemies around the map to make them easier to kill.

We can control the maximum number of charges an ability might hold and plan on using that as a balancing tool and a gameplay tool to encourage various play styles. We hope that the other ability ideas we come up with will be equally fun and engaging to use, and that each one will have an interesting play style with another.

Fine Details

As usual, a slew of smaller changes were made (bug fixes, tweaks, other miscellanea) that don’t deserve their own category so here they are in a concise list:

Bringing attention to the wave instructions: A lot of people seemed to miss the small bit of UI on the top left corner of the screen that showed you how many enemies you have to kill, or what the special instructions for a wave were. Now, a small animation pops the UI close to the center of the screen and brings attention to itself before it pops back into its position

Wave end communication: Some players were confused about whether or not they’d defeated all the enemies since the only communication that a wave was finished was the UI that indicated the beginning of the next wave. Now there is a flashy animation that indicates that you have successfully cleared a wave, not only rewarding the player more but also better communicating their success.

Sleep frames: This is something that we have been struggling for a while with. We wanted to be able to momentarily freeze the game on important moments like hooking an enemy or landing a huge hit (a lesson learned from Jan Willem Nijman’s excellent “Art of the Screenshake”) and we finally managed to get it to work mostly bug free.

Improved loading logic: Previously, the game would have a variety of issues related to loading and these have mostly been dealt with

Balance: regular shooting enemies move a bit faster and are a bit more squishy, rocket dudes are more tanky.

Polish: Cans now explode into a puddle of soda, layering of enemies and bullets and environment has been improved, Twinsanity auto-disables at important moments to prevent awkward slow-motion.

That concludes this Development Update, thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more fun announcements and even more content!

Kartik: Player Dialogue, Improved Communication, Boss Polish, Procedural Blood, and Bugsmashing (as usual)

Don’t worry, I know we went one week without an update. Maybe that was because we’d been working on this for 5 weeks straight on top of our other jobs and obligations and felt tired. I don’t know, just throwing it out there.

Player Dialogue

One of the biggest changes between the previous update and this one is that there is now a system in place for player dialogue options. Just like everything else in the game, this is (intentionally) awkwardly controlled by both players. One (randomly selected) player gets to choose the first half of the response sentence and the other player chooses the other half. This leads to some sentences not quite coming out the way TwinCop may intend.

You can see that the UI even reflects which “side” of TwinCop is speaking. There is a timer at the bottom right corner of the panel to encourage quick responses and reduce dialogue fatigue (I hate it when dialogue cutscenes take unnecessarily long in games... hint: you can press “Start” to skip all dialogue in our game!)

Developing this system came with its own slew of challenges, for instance handling the wide range of responses. There is a total of 10 possible responses; 3x3 combinations of options, or the 10th option: being silent. Eventually it is my goal to have a written response for each dialogue option (the system allows us to easily add whatever dialogue responses we want). We can add a lot of comedic value through this dialogue system and I look forward to seeing how this is fully utilized.

Improved Communication

One of the most common bits of feedback we’ve been receiving is that it is sometimes hard to tell which way the players are trying to move. Since the indicators are only two small triangles that turn white when they overlap, it can be difficult to stay in sync.

The new visual does two important things: it drastically increases the visibility of these direction indicators and helps the player be able to tell which indicator is theirs even when aligned. The former is achieved through (obviously) making the colors more vibrant and adding colored rings around the player. The latter is achieved by offsetting the triangle positions such that even when they overlap and become white (an important part of indicating that the player is healing and charging twinsanity) you still know which triangle is yours.

Boss Polish

Watch the video attached at the end of this post if you want to see what I did. Basically we had been missing some audio during the boss introduction, and the boss kinda just disappeared when it died. I made a short track to play while the boss is transforming, and started the music right when the name appears. I am still planning on improving the visual for the name reveal however.

When the boss dies, it now has a prolonged explosion followed by cheesy light beams that erupt from within. It feels far more satisfying to defeat, and the sound effects (very slowed down and pitch-shifted gunshot sounds) make it feel that much more epic.

Procedural Blood

Up until recently I’d been spawning small blood splat sprites I’d made every time an enemy got shot. I was growing tired of seeing the same blood sprite over and over again, especially when some of them wouldn’t always appear where I expected them to. I decided to try to make a new system for making blood decals and am now using a particle system to paint the blood splat onto the decal layer.

All I did was switch the layer of the particle system to the decal layer (see one of the earlier dev blogs to see how I’m doing the permanent decal system) and tell the decal system to render the particles shortly after they’re created. What that creates is a blood splat shape that actually resembles how and where an enemy was shot. I already had this blood particle system working, so utilizing it with the decal system should’ve been a no-brainer. I’m much happier with how the blood naturally fills the play space now.

That was a dark and gruesome thing to say. Moving on~

Bugsmashing

Due to the plethora of bugs we fixed this past week, let me just list them with minor details so you can see the madness we’ve been dealing with:

Our system for initiating TwinSanity had up until now been requiring players to both press “A” on the EXACT SAME FRAME. No idea how we didn’t notice this until now.

Sometimes when enemies died, their death would count as 2 deaths instead of 1, throwing off the entire wave system

Blood started spawning on the wrong layer, causing lots of z-fighting

Explosions during the boss fight would randomly freeze from time to time

Rockets were being rendered in front of UI

One of the skin color options on the main menu got set to a VERY sickly yellow on accident

Layering for the PopTop machine got broken when we updated to Unity 5.6 (praise the new layering system)

More minute frustrations that were buggin’ up the system.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading and also get a life what are you doing reading this go outside make some friends. Or watch the play through of the latest content here. Your choice.

Thank you,