Hey there!

First of all, we are extremely happy for the response and feedback all of you gave us last week. It means the world to us, and the feedback was really useful. For the ones who don’t know what I’m talking about, last week we presented different versions for the Argos Panoptes and the aegis shield. And a lot of you reached us out via web, Twitter, Facebook, TIG and IndieDB. So we are really thankful to all of you! We still don’t know which versions are the winners, but we are gonna ask you your opinions again soon!

And now, for this week update, we are planning the 0.3 version of Okhlos! What does this mean? Here is what we have planned for this version:

 

HUD

We’ve made a HUGE GUI change. We were using a very old version of NGUI, and we decided to update to a newer one. That brought us a lot of headaches and extra work. It really gave us lots of problem. So for this version we are hoping to close the sad chapter of updating from a 1.2x to a 3.4x (trust me on this one: never a good idea).

Besides that, we were using  2x sprites in the hud and windows (we talked about this a few updates ago). Now, the 2x sprites are only for the mob portraits. The rest of the HUD is much smaller and less invasive.

Finally, we were doing a lot of mockups of some old windows.

 

HEROES

In this version, we introduce two new types of heroes: The psychic and the troubadour.

The Psychic basically spawns a force field to prevent projectiles.

This is quite useful against projectile thrower enemies. Not so much against melee enemies, though… Also, they don’t attack: they are too  focused on creating force fields with their minds.

 

The other hero type is a buffer. The troubadour will sing, boosting the stats of nearby units. As the Psychics, they don’t attack. You can’t play the lyre and punch something at the same time!

 

MUSIC

Gordon, the newest addition to the team, started composing the Apollo track, and it is wonderful. We want to do some dynamics things with the music and the mob gauge, but for this version the stage track and maybe some other low priority sound will do.

 

ENEMIES

We finally settled a lot of things regarding the enemies in Okhlos. We have a good number of enemies, and very cool behaviors. Now we have to put them on the stage, animate them, and tweak them.

For this version, we are gonna wrap up the Apollo enemies, which went through a lot of changes.

Apollo needed some changes also. So this version he will be a little bit smarter than before.

 

FX

Finally, we needed to tweak a lot the building’s destruction. We implemented this feature some time ago, but we hadn’t had the chance to try them out. So, for this version, we are aiming to create a a permanency effect by leaving some dust particles for a while after a building is destroyed.

By the way, now destroyed buildings leave these beautiful ruins.

 

So that’s what we have in our hands right now! Luckily, we will have it a week or so. Unfortunately, it will be for internal use and press only :S

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Hey there!

We are trying something new here … or at least, we haven’t done before.  Here is the thing, we have to make some choices, we have several variants of this item and this enemy, and we can’t decide which ones are the best. So we are hoping that you could help us deciding!

Click in the image for the full size!

 

The first image, shows the Aegis shield. This is a legendary shield that will boost your defense A LOT for a few seconds. The main problem with the original version, was that it looked very much like a coin, and people didn’t get that was a shield, so that’s why we are trying these new ones. As you can see, we have five options to choose from: A, B, C, D and E.

 

Secondly, we have the Argos Panoptes, an enemy from the later stages of the game. This guy’s main feature  is that it has one hundred eyes. And as we as the Hecantochires turned out really cool, and they are like in the same level, we want something as cool for Argos (we haven’t revealed the Hecantochires yet, by the way, we are saving them for later). Also, you can see here that we have six options, all the way from A to F.

 

Well, that’s about it. We would love to receive some feedback from you guys. Which one is your favorite Aegis? The mighty A? The impervious D? Or perhaps the wondrous E? And what about our buddy Argos, which version do you like the most?  Reach us out by any medium available (comments, posts, Twitter, Facebook) and tell us!

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We have been on Okhlos for a while now, but there was something which we haven’t even started working on: sound and music.

Neither Roque nor, nor José Luis, nor I are musicians, nor very savvy with a mixing console. We can make the art, the code and maybe even some game ingame jokes but definitely not music. So our plan had always been to eventually get  some who can  (and that would make a good job at that), and until then use place holder sounds and music. I don’t think I need to tell you much about the placeholders if you had a chance to watch our first pseudo trailer (I think there is a special place saved for us in the tartarus for having made people listen to that music for minutes) or some of the let’s plays (go, Kenny G, go!).

We have been pondering over this subject for quite a while, listening to the work on many game musicians trying to find the right one. We also went back to our favorite games, paying attention their soundtrack and the work of their musicians. The quest went on for months, until finally we found the perfect person for the job. One musician to outmusic them all (and in the darkness bind them).

Meet A Shell in the Pit. Meet Gordon MCGladdery.

 

We approached Gordon at first as fans of his work with Tettix on Rogue Legacy, not entirely sure if he would be interested in working on Okhlos. To our upmost delight Gordon played a build of game and loved it, so soon afterwards we started talking about things we could do and about our plans for the game. He is very excited about the project, and we are excited that he is excited , so there is excitement galore!

 

And  as you can see Gordon has some really awesome ideas about the music of the game. Just yesterday he gave us a sneak peek of something he was working on, and it was better than Aquiles’ uppercut.

 

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Ahoy there!

 

These last weeks we’ve been working hardly (or hardly working) on the enemies of Okhlos.

A lot.

Like, really a lot.

 

One of the most enjoyable things in Okhlos is fighting enemies. Early on, we figured out that one of the cornerstones of the fun and variation in Okhlos is to have enemies with very different mechanics. So we started establishing which mechanics were interesting enough to explore. Besides that, we have to put the mechanics in context, so we have to do a lot of research to determine which enemies will appear, when will they appear, and keep them coherent with the rest of the whole.

 

So we established 21 mechanics that we think are cool. But! Besides that, some of these mechanics can work with each other! So suddenly, we had a lot of new stuff that we didn’t think of! Basically, we have 21 behavior archetypes and a lot of combinations to do. We still don’t know how many enemies Okhlos will have. But I think that we’ll have plenty of interesting challenges.

 

So, besides the behavior, we have the sprite part (my part, the cool part). I’m actually making a lot of tests to see how they look. Trying different palettes and different sizes for the monsters.

 

One of the things I did was remaking some of the old enemies. Here you can see some of the progress.

 

 

As you can see in the image above, the Prophetai and Hosioi have their eyes covered, which makes them darker and gritty, because of Nolan.

The Nemean lion found a stash of steroids.

Also, the Hosioi now share the size of the Prophetai, because the Prophetai now summon a different creature!

 

Here are some enemies.

Here you can see:

-Some ideas for the Posidon’s stage creatures.

-A warrior that protects himself with a shield, and a color variation

-Some satyrs. One of these is based  on this guy.

-Some centaurs. They will focus on the mob and trample them.

 

Finally, I want to finish the post with some unjustified screenshots!

The Calydonian boar

The Nemean Lion

Some Hephaestus’ machine

And the three of them together

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