I'm writing the dev log early this week because I'll be away this weekend.  This week I just wanted to announce that the demo is finally playable on Steam! So if you're reading this, I'd love for you to check it out, and leave a review! 

So far the reception from those who have played it has been very positive, and I'm trying to find some professional reviewers to give some feedback.  Hopefully in a couple of weeks, I'll be able to start a bit more of a marketing effort and driving traffic to the page, but for now I'm just glad it's up, and I'm deep into conversations with an editor to help create a trailer that is a bit more spicy than the one I have up right now.  As it stands, right now I'm simply responding to feedback to make sure there are no issues with the build before the big marketing push arrives. Exciting stuff!

Art

While the demo is out, the full game still has to be developed.  In fact, this is the key reason I have yet to create a full trailer.  I've spent so much time on the demo, that I don't have all the level content in place yet to show off, so that's the next goal for me and Ref, once we have a couple of bosses and elites, and some biome diversity to tout, we'll be ready for the true announcement.

In regards to development, ref has continued creating enemies for the last level of the game. These enemies are very unique, even compared to the ones in prior levels, so the pace has slowed down a bit.  But slowly and surely we're crafting the remaining few.

Behold out giant mushroom

This beef cake likes to slowly clamber after the player.  He also produces spores as he travels that scatter the level and will get larger and detonate.  He isn't much of a threat when it comes to speed, but the longer you ignore him, the larger of a mine field you'll have to navigate through as he leaves his spawn in his wake.  Just to add a little extra danger to him, he also like to blow up when killed, so you probably shouldn't stand too closer when it happens.

Music

On top of new art, Juan is back to create some new songs for remaining levels.  This week he wrapped up the track to our burning farm level, and I have to say I've very excited to share it.  It's intense and has a lot of the energy that I felt when ref did the artwork for the level. Everything Ravaged Everything Burned.

Programming

While they have been churning out content, I've been focused on wrapping up the last few evolutions for the powerups I  currently have.  These have been... interesting to make since I'm really experimenting with some weird stuff.  For instance, my vortex arrow ability evolves into a white hole, which pulls in all enemies in it's path and spits them out behind the player while also dealing a bunch of damage.  I realized I have a physics system under the hood for knockback and I've been trying to put it more to use since it's fun to throw around your enemies like toys.

The implementation for all of these evolutions is now complete, and I'll just need to have ref give then a nice coat of paint once we finish up the enemies.

Next Week

Next week I'm going to try and continue pressing forward with new content.  I've been playing a game I found at PAX called Conquest Dark, which really solidified for me how important it is to have unique events in all of the levels.  I have a couple cool events planned which I want to implement.  I'll be adding several of them to the demo, and might just save some of the others for the full game ;)