A lot of cool things happened to us lately! The first thing: we have been contacted by Good Old Games! Nothing is settled, yet, but the whole fact that *they* contacted *us* is incredible encouraging. So now we need to push even harder!

So what’s new? We struggled the last few days to put out a new build for IGF2013. In this build another two levels are touched up and polished, which is a good incentive to show pictures of it! Click for larger size!

The village map: sort of a “quest hub” where you can do side missions and dig up a few little secrets on the side. No shooting in this map, in fact you get your weapons taken away at the beginning and only get them back when you decide to leave. We played alot with small light sources to give the map a “Global Illumination” appearance, and I really like the outcome.

The beetle map: a side mission to explore a cave and find the source of the recent beetle invasion. Meet the beetles! They’re blind, but react on ground shakes. That means that your fear-inflicting flares won’t bother them! But it also means that, if you’re walking slowly and don’t do noisy things, you can get past them without a single shot!

We implemented the first Arcade game mode: the classic survival mode with “endless waves of enemies” gameplay, but each map has a special feature that you can exploit for better scores. The final score is then transmitted to online leaderboards. We are currently building a little framework for this, and intend to publish it as OpenSource. Thomas is not that experienced in PHP/MySQL, thus we hope the publishing will improve the security and reliability of the framework. In the end we hope to achieve a framework that everyone can use to host her/his own leaderboards.