Welcome to another AI Vendetta blog! It has been a while since our last post, but today we have exciting news! We have been working very hard since our last post to not only polish the current state of the game, but to also put together a completely new demo! The new demo features three levels showing you much more of the features and mechanics that AI Vendetta has in store for you! And not to mention, a much more smooth and polished experience!
So... here it is! The new demo, play it using the link below or the link in the menu bar above. Just as last time, this is a web demo which will only work using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Opera. The web demo will not run using Google Chrome unfortunately.
(Supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera using the Unity WebPlayer.
If you need help with the plugin feel free to contact us!)
So what happened since last time?
Many things actually, so many things that we can’t even show them all in the above demo! We have been focussing on getting a lot of the new content out of alpha stage and ready for play. While at the same time fixing many issues, including some physics issues. However, as you may have noticed, the demo has been expanded to 3 levels now featuring a lot of new content! Besides that we’ve also been working hard on tweaking and polishing in order to make sure that the overall experience is better and smoother!
Next to that, we also changed the appearance of several elements in the game, including a complete overhaul of the playable characters. And while we do not currently have an artist, we think that these new visuals at least give a little more insight into what direction we are going. At the same time, the visuals also show a major improvement over the former “whiteboxed” character models.
To put that all in a list, these are the new things you’ll encounter in the demo:
- Playable character visuals changed
- Playable character tweaked and made physics smoother.
- Introducing mobile enemies
- Introducing conveyors
- Introducing terminals
- Introducing new types of triggers and other switches
Some screenshots of those changes:
Where do we go from here?
While we are already a long way into development, there is still much to do before we can reach a beta stage product. Right now we have roughly 15 playable levels for the actual game, out of the initial 30 we intend on making. Most of the features that we want to roll out have already been implemented as well, so that’s all very good news!
However, to create a fun and polished game, we need to put in many, many hours of testing and tuning to make every bit of the game feel right. And besides that, we need a lot of art in order to visualize and decorate the currently very stale and empty levels. Next to this, we are also working on bringing the story element of the game more to light by adding dialogs and cutscenes, which are now on their way.
To summarize, we are doing quite well for ourselves and even though we are purely working in our spare time, we have found a good pace to work in. Right now we are almost midway from an alpha stage product towards the beta product. We hope to reach beta stage in roughly half a year, up to one year from now. (Creating games takes a long time!)
In that time however, we could really use your help! Most things we can do ourselves, but at the end of the day we are very biased towards the game. Therefore we need your opinion to help guide the game towards something that is enjoyable and tailored to a wide variety of gamers!
What can you expect from us in the next Blog?
Our next blog will arrive in about a month or two from now so we have chance to make more improvements to the game. In the meantime, we greatly appreciate any comments, suggestions and tips you may have (and all general criticism for that matter) so we can put that towards making the game even better! We’ll also do our best to answer any questions that come up and if you want more in depth information let us know! We would love to feature some community picked questions and topics in our next blog, so be sure to let us know in the comment section below (or any other media).
If nothing else, then for our next blog we want to show you a little bit more about how we are creating AI Vendetta. Next to that we’ll also discuss how the different aspects and professions come together in the process of creating games in general.
Are you working on your own games? We’d love to share tips and experiences, so be sure to stay in touch!
And with that, we end this blog. Please feel free to play our game and as always, any comments are greatly appreciated! Thank you very much for reading and we hope to see you all again next time!
~Thom de Moor, CatByte Games
