Stuff that I have to do before the release of Koya Rift.

I’ll update this as I go on, adding things as I think of them and updating the status on feature additions, so be sure to check back every now and then!

Tasks in RED need to be completed before I can release the full game.

Tasks in GREEN are already done!

Here we go:

BATTLE SYSTEM FINISHING:

There are a few more tweaks that have to be made to the battle engine before I can move onto the campaign and multiplayer stuff. Here they are:

Weapon Graphics: The current weapons are temporary, and I really need to fix them. Right now a weapon consists of a front and a back (randomized interchangably), and the back has two layers: a color blend layer and a normal graphic layer. The engine will be changed to support weapons that still have two parts (front and back), however each part will have three layers. Base, color blend, and white blend (for glow effects) in that order. Previously the front could not have color blending but this will no longer be the case. This will allow weapons to look cooler. Besides looking better, the weapons will be more varied too. Right now the engine chooses between 5 bodies and 3 fronts, making for 15 unique weapon combinations before color blending is applied. I will try and make at least 10 bodies and 7 fronts, for a minimum of 70 possible weapon shapes before blending is even applied (and then we multiply that by the number of possible colors, making a crazy amount of combinations!) UPDATE: Weapons are completed, placeholders no more! There are 11 bodies and 10 fronts, making for 110 possible weapons before blending is even applied. There may be even more added before the game is finished!

New Menu: UPDATE: This actually was an unscheduled change, but while doing some playtesting I realized that the old menu initially dropped peoples standards of the game before they actually started playing and realized it was much better than they had expected. So a new, more professional menu was implemented. Now the main logo has been updated to the second version and the text has been slanted and aligned to match it. There is also cool ambient fog and glow effects and new menu music to set the mood; and I’m very proud of it. You’ll be able to see this in a new video sometime soonish?

Player Animations: The player right now is a static image that rotates to your movement and an eye that looks around. Lame. The newly animated player character will menacingly point his nearest arm in the direction the weapon is firing, and his arms will slightly fluctuate with your movement to make him seem more like an actual being. UPDATE: Finished! This is a subtle yet very pleasing improvement over the visuals of the previous, flat player.

Player experience and reward system (per battle!): While I and my faithful testers played the game I noticed something strange. People were more willing to fight and seek out the enemy and kill them when the player was dead and they were controlling the droids. This is because the droids actually have an experience system, so they can level up and get better. This makes fighting the enemy a lot more fun, and you don’t view them as an annoying obstacle in your way to the crystal anymore. I’m going to incorporate the same methods into the game when you are being the main player and you haven’t died – you will be able to gain experience and level up, but it won’t affect your weapons like it did with the droids. Instead you will unlock upgrades to use for that specific battle. These upgrades include: (the $ is used to show the color status of the update! UPDATE: The system for adding experience and drawing the current rank of the player is complete so far. Time to start working on the actual upgrades! UPATE2:These are amazing. They add so much depth and fun to the game!

• $ A random high-level weapon being dropped off at your pod, upon collection it is added to your inventory of weapons.
• $ Fangbearer (new unit) being unlocked for purchase. The Fangbearer is a robot that is mostly made up of energy and uses melee attacks. His fighting is similar to that of the enemy gnat. UPDATE: I highly doubt this would be used, ever. I think this is a feature better left out. It would just be a waste of development time.
• $ [UNNAMED] (new unit) being unlocked for purchase. The [UNNAMED] is a slow-moving support unit that deflects enemy bullets and heals allies. UPDATE: I’m not putting this unit in the game. I don’t think any players play at a slow enough pace to actually thoughtfully use a support unit.
• $ A randomized group of droids / other units dropped off at your pod to help you. UPDATE: This reward, called Reinforcements, drops off a small troop of droids at your base. Also, every morning following getting this award, you will be granted additional droids for surviving the night.
• $ A randomized multiplayer mode upgrade (these haven’t been fully planned out yet!) UPDATE: Not sure if I’m even going to do this. The current upgrades are awesome already, adding goofy abilities might just make it too complicated.
• $ A secondary weaker weapon that automatically shoots. UPDATE: This little guy is more useful than I thought he would be, he keeps smackin’ down those gnats before they get to me.
• $ Additional health in form of a shield that can recharge in sunlight like your health. UPDATE: Instead of giving you more health (lame), I decided to make it have a refraction field (curves away enemy bullets) and kill incoming gnats. The shield only stays up when you are above approximately %65 health, so if your shield goes out you should go to the surface to recharge it.
• $ UPDATE: Rank up! is the new reward that allows all of your units to start out a level higher. These stack, so if you get several Rank up! upgrades you can start your units out a much higher and deadlier level!
• $ UPDATE: Droid Shields is a new reward in which all of your droids (and turrets) have increased health and have a cool blue glow to them.

War Metals: After playing a certain number of games you will start to unlock war metals, which you can choose to bring with you before a regular battle. These basically tweak the way you play the game a little bit, and with the right weapons you can get a really nice combo. UPDATE: these were pretty quick to do; hopefully they will encourage more variety in how players play the game.

Metals to be added:

• $ Increases homing on all weapons, but slightly decreases fire rate and size.
• $ All bullets are larger, however the fire rate is decreased and so is the homing.
• $ All weapons have a higher fire rate, however all bullets fired from your weapons have a powerful sinewave and lower homing.
• $ All weapons are more accurate, however the fire rate is lowered.
• $ All weapons fire an extra energy blast per shot, however all shots are slightly smaller, less accurate, less homing, and have more of a sinewave.
• $ All of your allies are more effective in combat, however you are less effective.

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CAMPAIGN FEATURES:

The campaign is a series of regular battles with upgrades you can buy in between. The last battle you do will be a multi-part battle going deep into the planet, followed by a boss in the end. Because the content of the campaign is also procedurally generated, there is much replay value here.

Map Generation: Each campaign a user decides to play will take place on their own procedurally generated (of course!) mini-continent. UPDATE: done!

Upgrade Purchasing: Between battles the player can use earned credits to buy various upgrades before moving to the next battle. UPDATE: Each weapon you have can have individual areas of it upgraded, and you can buy some of the upgrades from the upgrade orbs to take to battle. You can also buy a quota of starting units that gets deployed with you.

Final level set with Boss: (two separate items) Self-explanatory. Boss level will be basically a group of large-size brutes that have unique powers (one will be yellow with piercing energy, another will be cyan with freeze energy, another red with sear energy, etc) with a large crystal that is constantly spawning gnats and other nasty things to slow you down. UPDATE: Done! The level works differently than described above, it’s just one entirely underground level that’s larger than average. This enemies on this level have a MUCH MUCH higher chance of being elemental, so you’re practically fighting elemental phantoms all the time. On top of all this, there is a large chamber in the bottom center of the level with two elemental behemoths (!!!), and a rift crystal (the “boss”). The rift crystal isn’t as tough to bring down as the behemoths, they’re essentially the bodyguards and the bulk of the challenge. The rift crystal flies around and spawns gnats everywhere.

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MULTIPLAYER UPDATE: Whoops. I didn’t realize until now that splitscreening this game is impossible because I mixed my logic inside of my rendering in the game engine. Because porting views into a splitscreen requires you to call your render calls twice, but because my logic is all mixed up in there I can’t do that. So no multiplayer.

On the bright side, this means that the game will take less time to develop and will cost less when it comes out. So turn that frown upside down!

Online? I’m not sure if Koya Rift will be able to go online for multiplayer or not. I have never coded an online game and I’m not sure if I have the time to figure it out for this game. I’ll keep you guys posted – I may patch the game after it releases with online support later!

Make a new gameplay video: I’m going to be honest with you. I hate the first trailer I made. My recording methods weren’t bad at all, it’s just that I used a terrible video editor to scramble all of my nicely pre-rendered clips together. It lowered the quality and put an ugly border around it. Because Koya Rift won’t be having a demo (I’m sorry! Too much dynamic content…) I’m going to need a decently lengthy video with audio commentary describing how the game is played and walking the viewer through a few matches so they can see. I’ve bought fraps and sony vegas hd for editing so that now the video will be decent when I get around to making it. I’m waiting until I have the battle system features complete before I do this, though. UPDATE: This should hopefully maybe sorta be coming soon-ish? I dunno, I have to find the time. (updated april 23)

Translation: Koya Rift isn’t just coming out in english! I designed it to be easy to change/update with new language packs for a reason. Languages I’m definitely adding support for:

• Spanish
• Russian

And I *may* add support for any number of other languages later if I find a good way to get the translation done and there is a big enough desire. I’ll most likely continue casually patching it with new language packs for a long time, so if you think there’s a big enough fanbase in your language, tell me to add support for you guys! UPDATE: spanish and russian added. The game has very good language pack support programmed in now so other people will be able to translate it to whatever in the future.

New Logos/Shirts: I will incorporate the text into the existing logo design so that it fits better together and put these on new shirts. Hopefully these will be screenprinted, which means they will be cheaper too. I may also add redbubble manufacturing as well so you can choose where the shirts come from. UPDATE: New logos can be found here, and the new shirts can be found at my zazzle store here. The shirts can’t be screenprinted, you need to order 12 or more at a time to do that, so they are still at their old expensive price, unfortunately. The pains of buying clothing online.