Raygun Gadabout News

Hello Space Cadets,

This update is coming a bit late. Been very very busy.

December being the holidays things slowed down a tad but I’ve been focusing on greyboxing out the the last parts of the game.

What is greyboxing you might ask??? It’s the process of roughing out a level using basic shapes and often unfinished art. It’s really important for testing and allows quicker iteration. You also don’t risk wasting time prettying things up with art that you end up having to trash when your level turns out to be total cr@p.

Here’s a quick look at my process.


First things first. A sketch made in Photoshop. I have a list of enemies of mechanics that’ll be on a particular planet, that helps me plan things out to keep a nice variety. You wouldn’t want 3 puzzle rooms in a row right?

Here’s a couple rough level sketches.








Below is a greyboxed “room”. It’s not very pretty but it gets the job done!





Here’s an NPC. She’s going on an adventure. Will you join her?




Some concept art for a planet.




That’s All Folks
Stay tuned for the next update. Coming soon!

Hello Space Cadets!

What's new?

Raygun Gadabout was at MEGA+MIGS 2019 in Montreal in mid November. It was a full four days of expo goodness, suffice to say by the end of it I had no voice left.

The feedback was very positive and I'm really excited to be back working on the game. I've even incorporated a bunch of that feedback goodness into the game. I'm very excited about what's coming up.

For now here are some photos I snapped from the show.



The demo running is was around 15 minutes long. Run through a couple areas doing some fighting, some platforming, culminating with a boss fight.





That's all for now. Thanks again for checking out this month's update!

Cheers.

Welcome all Space Cadets,

Here’s an overview of some of the stuff that is new to the game this month. This is a lot of the nice and juicy things. There’s lots of behind the scenes/under the hood stuff that I spent a lot of time on that we can skip.

A reminder that Raygun Gadabout will be at MIGS+MEGA 2019 in Montreal from November 16-19. Be sure to come say hi if you are there!

Now shall we proceed?


Added a new NPC to the game.



He might have an important mission for you.






Added some new decorations/art to spruce up the environments.



Changed the colouring of this area. Wanted it to be more of a sunset look. This one is the old version…



This below is the new version.





Added some new hazards to the game.

The Space Pirate’s start to bombard the surface of the planet from orbit. You’ll have to avoid the deadly attacks.



These blocks will squish you dead! Best avoid them.




That’s just a taste of things. More to come, hope to see you next month. Below you can see the layout of an area of the game. A bit of a tease.



Bye!

Hello Space Cadets,

Here’s a quick update for what is new in Raygun Gadabout since last time.

Created a helpful bot that dishes out hints and tips on how to play the game. Previous hints were triggered, how you can choose to check them out or ignore them.




When you orbit a planet the camera now lowers and pulls back. This helps differentiate the view from the regular when when flying around. Less likely to get confused about not being able to fly until you leave orbit.





Meet Karanga. He’s a new baddie. You can’t attack him from the front but his rear is very soft and smooshy, so get behind him and blam! He also fires a projectile from his eye hole.





You may also notice the new “Back Crit” mechanic. Melee strikes to the back do extra damage!

I decided to slow down melee attacks as well to make them compliment the fast firing projectile combat. Melee feels heavy and more satisfying now in my opinion.


Lots of fixes and changes, experimenting with the level layout ahead of MIGS+MEGA in November. The demo is getting close to being complete and then I’ll be switching to bugs and art additions.

There’s a private ALPHA going on at the Raygun Gadabout Discord. PM me (Quantum Duck) if you are interested.

Hey fellow Space Cadets,

Here’s an update on what’s new since last month.



The loot pickup system is in place and I wanted to have some artwork for the drops. These are still a work in progress.



Loot you pickup can be used to upgrade your Badges. Badges give you passive bonuses like having more damage output or making your shield last longer. You can combine certain loot to upgrade your badges to be more effective. Last month we had an early look at the Loot Menu.



Because some things can be done out of order or entirely skipped I have added a Game Events system that checks the state of game progression before loading up a cutscene or even which elements of an area should be spawned.





Made some changes to how the dodge roll in tunnels works. It now triggers more consistently and feels a lot better. I’m hoping to add some really fun stuff with this mechanic, stay tuned!





Optimization? Exciting!

Enemies are now loaded via a trigger system, now they won’t be way off somewhere wasting CPU cycles for nothing, it’s also easier to control how the player’s initial interaction will be, making sure they are facing the right way for example.

Also particle effects will be disabled when out of view, this makes a pretty big difference in performance as particles can be pretty taxing, especially when there’s a lot of them.






I’m getting the game ready for my first game expo in November, so there’s been a larger focus of bug fixing and some polish. I’m pretty excited, hoping to get a ton of feedback from players.






Come check out the Raygun Gadabout Discord. Chat about this game, other games. Or whatever, or just come say hello!

That’s all for this episode, stay tuned next month.