Rise From Your Grave

It’s been over a year since my last post, to be fair I have been extremely busy. For most of that time I was working at LightBox Interactive on Starhawk for PS3 which we shipped on May 8 and since then released 2 major updates. Recently I parted ways with LightBox and I’m focusing much more on independent development. There are a few projects I’ve been juggling that I’d like to share with you…

Faster Blaster is a retro metroidvania style game I have been working on for a while now, but only recently have I had the time to give it more polish. This is a great demo for my game engine and kind of a test run for a much more involved project I am planning. I redid all of the pixel art and sound because some of it was placeholder stuff borrowed from NES games, so now it is all original art. I also added mini-bosses, a map system, better controls, better puzzles, more enemy types and tons of other tweaks. I am actively working on this project and looking for beta testers and/or artists who want to help.

The Pixel Words Screensaver received a major visual update. Where previously all the letters were the same color I now have the ability to color individual letters and added a pixel color fractal mechanism which I think is much more visually interesting. If anyone is interested in porting this to Linux or MacOS hit me up.

A Stitch in Time is a game about time travel that I’ve also invested some time in polishing up. The original control scheme was a bit unwieldy and I think I’ve ironed out those problems. I also did a visual and audio pass. I still feel that the non-linear layout of the game is confusing to players and I’m considering redoing the whole map with a more linear style puzzles culminating with a final boss battle.

I also continue to update The Frank Engine, my open source game engine. There are some pretty cool features worth checking out, I will be posting a demo of it soon. You can even mess around with it in most of my games. Some of main commands are F4 toggles the editor, ~ toggles the debug console, F2 toggles physics display.

I hope that brings you up to speed a bit. Now that I am actively working on indie projects I plan to be updating this blog more often with details about the development process. I’m also interested in hearing feedback from players especially people who are interested in more actively beta testing, thanks!

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2 Responses to Rise From Your Grave

  1. Isaac Vanier says:

    Hey Frank! I saw your feedback to my post over at TIGSource. Very cool to hear from you :) I checked out a video and some recent screens of Faster Blaster. The physics add so much to that formula. The 2d Metroid games are my favorite series and it looks to me like you’re really on to something with this. I really dig that you have to hide under overhangs and stuff until it’s safe to exit, and the flying ships kind of trolling you rather than being easy one shot kills. I’ll be keeping an eye on your stuff and will try to give you some more feedback. For starters, I really think you should hook up with an artist to reskin Faster Blaster so you can sell it! I’d buy it. I’m curious, what are you using to build the maps?

    • Frank says:

      Thanks man! I think I’m pretty much done with Faster Blaster, that was kind of a test project for my engine. I’m just using my own engine for level design, it has a built in editor. I can just pause the game, switch to edit, then start it back up again, it makes iteration time really fast.

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