Hi everyone! I should really post here more often! The past months have been quite exciting at the studio. We’ve been to an handful of events including Milan Games Week and EGX Rezzed. Kudos to Epic for sponsoring part of the indie booth in Milan and the Unreal Showcase area at Rezzed.
Work on the game is progressing at a steady pace in preparation for the Early Access release (scheduled for later this summer! HYPE HYPE HYPE!).
Stability & Performance
From a programming point of view most of the work that recently went into the game has been aimed at increasing the stability of all the game subsystems. This was done to make sure new content (such as weapons, levels, characters, etc.) can be added more easily once we’re out in Early Access. Performance has also been one of our top priorities and the game can now run at a solid 60fps (capped) on an entry-level AMD Ryzen 2200G system using the integrated graphics. During the events, the game worked on this setup non-stop almost 10 hours a day, several days straight without ever needing a restart (or crashing).
Since to power the game we’re using a custom 2D framework atop of UE4 that I’ve written from the ground up, I’m quite proud of the results (so I’ll probably bore you with more details in the future :p)! As a side note, UE4 is a beast of an engine: it can power cutting edge ray-traced graphics while being scalable enough to flawlessly run our naive 2D game on low end hardware.
Arcade Experience
We also spent a lot of time refining the overall user experience. Since we want Guntastic to feel like a game you could have played at an arcade, everything in the game should be simple to learn and self-explanatory, but at the same time provide enough complexity to keep you hooked. In Guntastic players can only move, jump, pickup a weapon and shoot. This means one analog stick and three buttons and that’s it - a players knows how to play in seconds! Still, we worked hard to build a lot of complexity in the way weapons and powerups can be used and in the way levels can be played. Both players and journalists seemed to enjoy that, so we take it as a good sign that we’re taking things in the right direction.
New blog posts!
I also took some time to write a couple of blog posts (should do this more often as well, but days fly by while developing games!):
3 Tricks to Improve Pixel Art Rendering in UE4](3 Tricks to Improve Pixel Art Rendering in UE4 | Dev Blog | Ludicrous Games)
A series of tricks that we use inside Unreal Engine 4 to obtain a more authentic pixelated look in Guntastic.
Anatomy of a Level](Anatomy of a Level | Dev Blog | Ludicrous Games)
A writeup of the workflow we use to build levels for Guntastic.
PS: we now have one of those things cool kids are using nowadays, a Discord server! Feel free to join and have a chat with us if you feel like so! 