Gaming at Grandma's

Howdy freaking doo! It’s finally here! I know you’ve been waiting for it... Frank from Earth Mega Update! With a tiny team like ours we each have to wear multiple hats and sometimes I don’t want to take my programming hat off. It’s off now and my blogging hat is on. It has a spinning propeller to attract attention. Speaking of hats, we now have cats in hats! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This week the big updates have been to the core of Frank from Earth. We are preparing for a live demo at Comicon and last week we had our largest dry run. 

The Test Subjects

I have close to 30 cousins under the age of 16 and last weekend a bunch of them gathered at my grandparents for my birthday. I brought Frank from Earth on my laptop and hooked it up with 4 Xbox 360 controllers. I left it set up in the living room and watched to see how things went with no direction. In no time, they had it down and were helping each other get set up. One of them even took some video of which none was really salvageable but here is a very early preview of the multiplayer adventure mode allong with a shot of me playing with this ball of joy that is my cousin. 

New Tutorial Level

We’ve also started development on a set of tutorial levels for learning how to play. They are set pre-disaster rocket launch at a desert P.U.G. testing site. 

Updated Frank Animations

Frank also can now run without his gun to move faster. This meant new idle and running animations. 

Enemy Shard Freeze Effect

In Frank from Earth you must go from world to world collecting the cosmic shards that broke off your ship’s cosmic drive and scattered throughout the solar system. If a cosmic shard is to land near enemy cats it will now freeze these cats until the shard is collected. This allows the players to plan their strategy before unfreezing the cats.

Dungeon Generation

Our dungeon generator is getting smarter now as well. While demoing at my grandmas, I had my cousins keep asking me where things were in the level. They were confused and thought I was lying when I told them I didn’t know. Here is a neat breakdown of the steps it takes to generate a level.

Step 1: Room Generation

Step 2: Population

Step 3: Play

Back to Programming

That’s enough marketing for now and it’s back to the grindstone for me. Here's what we're working on next:

• Phoenix Comicon swag update
• Audio updates for environment and effect sounds
• In depth, enemy update (animations, behavior, and texturing)
• And, I hope to fix the sword physics soon

Oh, and one last thing! We have released one of our Comicon Exclusives - Captain Pugard! Make sure to stop by our booth #1785 and check out our other merch and to play a live demo of Frank from Earth! 

More details on the Phoenix Comicon Website. See you next time :)