Ahoy there!  Edmund McMillen is about to release a compilation of a bunch of upgraded versions of his old Flash work.  One of those old works is Spewer, which means I get to be involved!  The new version of Spewer runs at a higher resolution and contains ten new bonus levels.  It’s also got a bunch of subtle tweaks to make it more fair, like reworked spike trap code (god damn, those old spikes…) and a bunch of little changes in level design that ought to make the game a lot more consistently enjoyable (especially for new players).

The Collection will also contain a bunch of other goodies, like new soundtracks, development commentary, and unused video clips of Ed from the fantastic Indie Game: The Movie (among a bunch of other goodies).  Release is set for August 31st on Steam, and it will cost $4.  Get stoked!

Release day is tomorrow!  The game goes up on Armor first, and it’ll start appearing on other sites after two weeks or so.

I don’t really have anything else to say about it for now.  Let’s all wish the game the best of luck!

David’s audio is done!  This game is looking suspiciously complete…

Speaking of which, Fixation will release on ArmorGames.com on March 20th.  Tell your friends!

Damn people, just read this thing.  It’s so very well written, and I think it gives a really accurate and detailed taste of the game without spoiling anything.

Do it to it!

David just finished up all of the music for Fixation.  He made TEN tracks for the game!  There’s a long loop for each of the five gameplay settings and five more (shorter) loops specially made for certain story points.  For comparison, the original game had two songs that switched back and forth every few minutes.

I still don’t know how he does it.  I can’t wait for you guys to hear the rest of the music.  David and Ben have both done such incredibly wonderful work with their parts of this project…I’m ridiculously proud of them for their contributions and immensely thankful that they’ve stuck with me for as long as they have.

The current estimate is that the remaining audio (the sound effects) will be done in about two days.

Oh, also…I just hooked up Google Analytics, and it seems like more people read this blog than I had realized.  Hello, everyone!

We’re also about to start hooking up the actual sound effects, which is ridiculously exciting for me.  Here’s a picture of the sound map for one of the first chapter’s levels.  This defines what footstep noises to use for each surface that people can stand on.  In this image, Pink surfaces are covered in carpeting, Grey is the doors, and Brown is wood.

First things first:  It looks like Fixation will be complete some time next week.  Ben’s finished with all of the art assets, the code is more or less finished, and David says he’ll have the audio finished within a few days.  It won’t release immediately, since we’ll need to wait on Armor for a few things and we might delay a little until the hype around GDC dies down a bit.  Regardless, the game will launch in March.

I sent out an advanced copy (with no audio) to a gaming blog that had showed interest, so I’ll put up a link to their writeup when it rolls out.  Seems like they enjoyed the game, so I’m feeling pretty good about it!

Wanna hear some music?  Here’s the default loop for the first chapter.

Chapter One

The prequel to The Company of Myself has reached an official “alpha” state!

In general, this means that all of the features and content are in place, but things will still get tweaked and revised before the game is finished.  In this particular case, the alpha is still missing audio, but this is due to David’s time constraints and such, and we’ve known for a while that the audio would be one of the last things to be added.  So we’re still on track, and the game is almost complete!  It’s immensely exciting to see the game in a beginning-to-end playable state.  I think you guys are gonna like this one!

Here’s a screenshot of the starting screen of the main menu that Ben designed.

There are also two more screens for credits and the level select grid, but you’ll have to wait for the actual release to see those.

Since I’ve got a full collection of levels, I’ve been getting into the few remaining tasks left in the prequel’s code.  Right now, there are four important features that are still missing:

• A pause menu
• A comic strip viewer
• Save data
• Cheat codes

The main menu is coded, and it includes a nice little level select grid with 25×25 pixel thumbnails of each level (1/20th of normal scale).  These are rendered from bits of the game’s actual level data, which means that if I make changes to the levels, the thumbnails will automatically stay up-to-date.  Here are the thumbnails for the first two chapters.  How cute!

Have a nice Monday night.

So…it took about twice as long as I was expecting, but I just finished the 40th level for Company’s prequel.  I’m still probably going to revise things here and there, but there are 40 functioning levels and all of the puzzles are in.  What a milestone!

I’m feeling good about the game’s conclusion.  I’ve been planning it out during the past few months of work, and it’s pretty strange to finally see it in action.  It should work in completely different ways for the people who’ve played the original and the people who haven’t, which is exciting to me.

David’s music is also starting to come together, and it’s sounding marvelous.  What else would we expect from him at this point?

Level design continues.  I just finished the 37th out of 40!  Some of you might note some familiarity in this one…

As has been the norm lately, this level doesn’t have any detail objects yet, so the final version will also have various nubbins and doodads decorating the scene.

Ben’s illustrated comic panels are coming along really well–there are now 10 out of 15 completed.  David is also still hard at work on the music (sound comes soon), but it’s tougher to gauge his progress with numbers.

Suddenly, it feels like we’re getting close to the end of the project.

Numbers are fun, so here are a few:  I just checked and the game currently has around seven hundred lines of dialogue.  For comparison, the original had about fifty lines of monologue.  Hooray!  Some might think that “more words” isn’t necessarily “more better,” and those people are exactly right.  However, the tone of this game is much more conversational (since it’s not all about a hermit this time around), and it’s much longer, too, so I think the extra text is appropriate.

Oh, also, the original game was under 2,000 lines of code in total, and the prequel is already past 6,000.  2,000 of those are just level data, though, and half of that 2,000 is just the tile maps.  Here’s the above screenshot’s tile map because…I dunno, it looks kinda neat.

maps[36]=[[1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1],
          [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1]]

This is just the map of the terrain–each level also needs data for game objects like switches, characters, and doors, plus scenario data like hotspots, dialogue, triggers for dialogue, etc…but those don’t look particularly interesting.  If you’re curious about the hotspots, dialogue triggering, and NPC behavior, you can check out this earlier post that covers those topics .

Note that the data is a 1:1 representation of the level where each number is one 20×20 pixel tile, but it’s mirrored across an imaginary diagonal line that extends from the top left to the bottom right.

Pop quiz for programmers who are interested in tile-based games:  What’s the purpose of that mirroring?