Here’s a little teaser video and a screenshot of the new surface level graphics. We’re still working on the game and I’ll post some more updates as I finish more of the art.

I’ve been doing some work on lighting to give the game a darker more foreboding mood. I’d like the caves to feel quite treacherous. Here is a picture to show how things are coming.

I’ve also been redesigning the textures with much higher fidelity since we are planning on having the game be a full screen standalone rather than web based. I’m planning on working on more ambient objects to make the caves feel a bit less repetitive such as crystals in the rocks and luminous plant life. If you have any suggestions to liven up the caves we’d love to hear them in the forums!

As you’ve probably noticed, things have been going fairly slowly lately. Drillboid is still very much alive as a project, though, so no worries – we’re just taking some time to work on other things, too, so we have some money to fund the game. We’ll be sure to keep you guys updated when we have some more work done!

Here’s a peek at one of the new equipment models I’ve been working on. Since the Kongregate competition I’ve been hard at work redesigning the way the Drillboid character is constructed so that it’s separated into different meshes ready for having equip-able parts! I also took the opportunity to improve the textures and the shaders used on the character to the level of graphics I’d like to reach for the whole game.

What you are seeing here is the normal Drillboid character with the standard body unit swapped out for a more heavily armoured version. The equip-able parts of the Drillboid will be the Head, Body, Feet, Hand and Drill. In the final game every different part you can equip will be represented with a unique model or texture.

We were in the top ten games in the Kongregate Unity Game Contest! Thanks for your support so far – we’re looking forward to breaking the silence update-wise now that the contest is over.

We released a patch today, fixing some bugs with the game and adding some things to make it more playable. Here’s what’s new:

• Ball mode now makes the player invincible to acid gas and lasers, and makes the player dash while on the ground
• Removed gas pockets to allow free exploring
• Lowered escape time to add challenge
• Fixed level select size mistake
• Fixed death while holding orb bug
• Arrow now points to orb when it’s been dropped
• Fixed shaky camera
• Fixed a bug with groundbased lasers not hurting
• Added sounds for ball transformation
• Added tutorial text explaining the minimap
• Ship pickup zone made clear
• Added a splash screen to inform people of unfinished state

We’ve had 80,000 plays on Kongregate since we uploaded it, so we’re really excited to have such a big audience! Thanks for all your feedback!

Our Kongregate build is now complete and uploaded! Go vote for us here:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/capnbubs/drillboid

For those of you following us, here’s what’s new in this build:

• New, more comfortable control scheme (we think)
• Rocks instead of unbreakable dirt
• Improved performance
• Gas pockets deep underground (don’t dig too deep)
• Menus and options
• Kongregate high-score support
• A tutorial
• The Mollume – this nasty little mole will hide when you come by, then jump out when you walk past it. Be careful, they’re not very friendly!
• A new secret room type…  I’ll let you find it yourself!
• Treasures and score
• Lives, complete with a game-over screen
• More music, including an escaping theme

Whew, that’s a lot of things for a little over a week. We’re both pooped, but we’re glad we made the deadline. Enjoy the new build!

We’re only a few days from the competition deadline now, so things are getting hectic enough that we just haven’t had time to upload a new build. To tide you over until the next update, here’s a nice, boring article about programming!

If you read my first post about Drillboid’s level generator, you may recall that I mentioned that the generator works in three steps. I’ve covered the first step, which is choosing where all the rooms fit together, but those rooms need to be filled with something, which is what steps two and three are. Today, I’ll explain a bit about how that works. (continue reading…)

A new update is out! Here’s what’s new:

• Alien ruins deep underground, complete with moving laser systems. Be careful!
• A health bar. You can die now, although for the time being, you’ll just respawn.
• Two new variants of the Gelfis: Gelfizz and Gelfloom. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what they do!
• Improved efficiency of a few systems in the game.
• Made enemies spawn more consistently – you shouldn’t go long periods of time without seeing some sort of enemy.
• Made the escape time more lenient.

And, of course, plenty of little bugfixes and such as well, but these are the major changes. Give it a try!

Seems there was some kind of problem and the build wasn’t updated. I’ve reuploaded it now so give it another try for the features listed in the last post!