Hey Friendly Reminder That I Made Not One But Two Games In Which You've Got A Grappling Gun That's A

Listening to the Sonic Hysteria soundtrack by NicoCW while I work on Stardust Survivors! Some of the best music from the Sonic fandom. I'm a particular fan of the various Launch Base Zone tracks, especially the underwater variant that builds on the PC marching-band version. The Hill Top / Mystic Cave mashup is also *chef's kiss*.

MeaBea 🧡💙

Used to see a lot of 3D art back on Twitter, glad to see others like @molegato keeping it going on other platforms. If you haven't played their game Frogun yet, go grab it on steam! Great, classy platformer. I love those low-res pixel textures; they tend to come out quite crummy when I try making them, so I appreciate the talent.

I saw one of their tags as "WireframeWednesday", so let's give it a bash. MR's spawning in to blast some crazy alien noggins!

I don't really play Hearthstone anymore, but I've always loved it for the different ways it portrays the World of Warcraft. I love Mean Streets of Gadgetzan so much that I wish it was a part of WoW (I'd love to make a Starcraft 2 mod inspired by it, but I'll talk about that later).

The most recent Hearthstone trailer had two great parts. The first is this Tortollan volcano city, which looks rad as hell and has a bunch of cute turtle people. The Tortollan are fine in WoW, but they look a lot livelier in their Hearthstone art.

Chromie pulling alternate-timeline versions of heroic characters has a vast amount of fan-theory potential. There were certain character skins in Heroes of the Storm that had different backstories, such as Thrall's "Ashwolf Chieftain" story. From what we saw in the trailer of pre-banshee Sylvanas and Lo'Gosh Varian, I'm certain they won't take that particularly wild direction, but who knows? There may be a mighty surprise.

Let’s start with what I’m actually working on. Stardust Survivors is a “Survivors” game, a sub-genre made popular by 2022’s Vampire Survivors. If you don’t know what that is, it’s like a twin-stick shooter, except you only have the one stick. The goal of the game is to outlast an infinitely-spawning series of enemy waves by destroying them to level up, gaining new abilities and attacks, most of which auto-fire without your direct input.

At this point, we’d barely touched Armoured Engines in over a year, and we figured a new project would be just the thing to get us out of our rut. Stardust Survivors takes that original concept and puts it into a magical space setting reminiscent of Moon Dreamers and Sailor Moon. The Stardust Survivors are a group of magical girls and boys who protect the energy of planets from the insatiable and unending tide of Constellar creatures.

It’s still early days; we’re mostly working on adding playable characters and abilities. However, we intend to streamline the survivors gameplay with short, 5-minute runs that extend down a rogue-like track. You can try out an early demo that we prepared for a local games showcase on our itch.io page here: https://boundergames.itch.io/stardust-survivors. Can YOU beat the boss!??

Most recent character for Stardust Survivors : M.R.! A space-enthusiast who can call down rolling, flaming meteors. From Space™! These meteors can be upgraded to split into shrapnel, cause impact explosions, or leave a burn!

This makes... five characters so far. Once we've got her working in Unity, there'll be only one more to complete our first set of characters. After that, I'll be focusing on level design.

Following on from yesterday's post, another interesting presentation came from Victor Paredes of Moho. Moho is an animation software that does quite a few interesting things with vector art. Two things really caught my eye; the first was pairing recorded "actions" to control bones, causing really smooth 3d motion for 2d objects. Full on head turning for 2d characters can be pretty challenging, but Victor made it look effortless.

The second was "Line Boil", which reanimated the art applied to vector lines, giving it a really nice, natural, hand-drawn look. There's a certain stiffness associated with vector art, and this completely masked it.

I'm gonna keep my eye on it; there's a 30-day free trial if you want to have a go. The demos they had on display were immediately eye-catching, so if you're interested in a bit more "art" on your vector art, give it a gander.

Here's a weird optical illusion I found while modelling: the two black lines in the center are completely straight, yet there's this bulge in the middle. :'V

Wildly different characters (Quark, Dr Nefarious, Andrew Ryan) who share the same actor: Armin Shimerman.