My dad found this article: Top 10 Best Upcoming Free Games. I'm ranked #4 out of 10!

"Bug Army is an action shooter with some RPG and platforming elements. The visuals are fantastic and controls are reminiscent of classic shooter Abuse."

Pretty cool, though my mom said I should write and tell them I'm #1. Hah

I've gotten a few emails asking about the status of Bug Army. Yes, it is still in progress! I want to thank people for being interested enough to email me. It's really cool to hear from you guys and that people are actually looking forward to the game. I'm working towards a real demo with missions, upgrades, bosses, etc, so it's taking a while to finish. I want to get it all looking and playing great, nothing placeholder and all of the game systems in place. When this is done, I can just concentrate on making the game content and not trying to get things working.

I also want to call out Brett Staebell for helping me with the story for Bug Army...actually not helping me, but completely taking over it. It's a lot cooler than my "bugs from outer space" completely generic and garbage story. Brett wrote an intro blurb, and I'll post that up next. Thanks Brett!

As for future updates, I'll attempt to get back to at least one post per month. I don't want to write too much detail so that people will be surprised by whats in the game, but I'll try to make it interesting. If there's anything you would like me to talk about, comment here or email me.

Thanks!

I finally got around to recording a new video of Bugs, which is now called Bug Army.  There's been lots of progress since the last demo and this video shows some of the new features and updates.  As always, this is still a work-in-progress so some things may look out of place or just plain ugly.

(I just realized I can embed youtube videos in here...I'm a little slow.)

With Modern Warfare 2 out, I've been working more on my headshots than on my own game.  Before the release of MW2 though, I crunched to get as many features as possible into Bugs.  Here's a list of the major ones.

1) Cinematics System: This was a big step that was actually a lot easier to implement than I thought.  I have the ability to stop user input and run specific animations or I can give commands to characters, like walk to a certain point, and they will automatically use their proper walk animation.  Pretty cool stuff!

2) Item Dropping: Now when you kill enemies, there is a chance they will drop an item.  It works similar to the Metriod system where it only drops a random item relevant to your inventory.  So if you are low on health and also have low ammo for the rifle, it will only drop one of those two items.  When I make the upgrade system, I'm planning on having "Luck" be an upgradeable skill which would increase your chances that an enemy will drop an item.

3) Menu System: I've completed all of the background work for the menu systems where you can adjust the level detail, resolution of the game, effects level, controllers, etc.  I'm glad to have finally pushed past most of that boring menu stuff.  I'm hoping this work will make the inventory menus easier to create.

4) Saving and Loading: The basics are in for saving and loading.  It works well but I just need to create a nice frontend for it.  I also have to make some decisions about how I want the player to save their games:  save points, quick saves, etc.

I'll try to post a new video sometime in the next few days.  There's been a lot of changes to the game since the last one.

I thought it would be a good time to post an update for Bugs as I'm waiting for kids to knock on my door for candy.  I've decided to try for one Bugs update per month.  I think this will help me keep on track and also be a good review of the progress I've made each month.  We'll see how long I can stay with it.

I spent a lot of time building out the world.  Unfortunately, I started out in a different direction than I ended up at, but it turned out for the better.  At first I played around with having each level be one screen with no camera movement.  Some screens would be zoomed out pretty far, and others zoomed in really close which worked well if there was a point of interest, I could focus directly on it.  It looked good and it was really easy to create levels  since everything was contained on a single screen.  After a few tests though, it didn't play as well as I thought it would.  Jumping around and shooting weren't as fun and it just lost a lot of the exploration feeling.  I went back to square one and decided to go with large levels that were fun to explore.  Click the image for a large picture

To get an idea of how big a screen will be, the image below is a portion of the map for the Bugs world.  Each blue grid represents one screen which is an area of 8,192 pixels with the player at about 186 pixels tall.  It takes about 3 hours to create all of the collision and game objects (doorways, floors, spawn points, etc.) for one grid area.  Then it takes about 2-3 days to place all of the texture sprites (the grass, rocks, clouds , etc.).  It's a lot more work than the one screen approach, but much more fun in the end.

For next month I'm planning to get more of the world fleshed out and hopefully get an idea for how big the whole Bugs game will be.  I'd also like to get Xbox 360 controller support in if there's time.  That's it for now, Happy Halloween!