This is largely going to be a repost of the June update I just posted to Patreon, but I can cover some other stuff too! You may know some of it from the main hex night page, or other places, but..
https://mixelslab.itch.io/ – I launched the CMO Hex Night demo on itch, and did a few little updates. I’m unlikely to be updating that demo further as there have been some massive changes since then.. It’s likely to be a whole new demo near the game’s completion! I’ve also started a Itch collection for all the Scorpion Engine games i can find on itch, so you can find other peoples’ ones too!
https://patreon.com/mfdawes – I discuss, and you can support my projects over on patreon.. I’m really just using it as a tip jar..
Progress roundup…
In terms of progress, things have been going pretty well. I have had to take some breaks, sadly, for various reasons (health, work, other life stuff). I can’t really guarantee that won’t keep happening either.. Really sorry for any radio silence when it does.
AGA features and some tweaks for slower systems?
One of the recent updates to Scorpion engine has enabled a wonderful multi-layer overlapping parallax system – which only works on AGA machines. It also uses up significantly less Chip RAM using this method compared to the ECS parallax one, so it actually makes sense to use that in the build of CMO aimed at unexpanded AGA machines. I’ve also started work on optimisations that will allow it to run well on a wider range of machines.
As you can see it adds a lot of depth having parallax layers so close to the foreground layer. This isn’t so easy to achieve with the other style of parallax!
As well as this I’ve been experimenting with a 25fps mode to get things running on a wider range of slower Amigas. So far it plays great at 25fps, but obviously a bit nicer at 50. The lower mode will likely be suitable for Amigas with no fast RAM.. It’s all just testing at the moment though, we’ll see!
I’ve added an extra graveyard level, so now, like the sewer, there are two graveyard/garden maps. I’ve completed the school level and made a boss fight for it.. I won’t show everything in this post though.. Soon I’ll do a little progress video, but i’m reaching a point where showing all the boss fights etc is possibly spoiling things for you all? You can watch me making a lot of it on Twitch if you really want to see, among all my other nonsense.
Map changes
The world map has been condensed.. All the Gorcester levels are on one map.. The later levels are presented in a different way that you’ll just have to wait and see! This means the map no longer scrolls, which makes it a lot easier for me to script, and impossible for the player to miss level pings because they’re happening off camera. It was a tough call making this change but so many of the stages were crammed into small spaces, it can breath, despite being technically a fraction of the size now.
Other improvements? Anna has a lot of tweaked animations and some new movement types. Next CMO post will probably be about the improvements I’ve made between the early demo and now, in regard to character animation in particular.
Basically, smaller little updates about single elements of the game’s design and progress instead of trying to gather together progress reports, as I make too many random things too quickly to make writing them straightforward, haha!
Again, sorry for the quietness, it’s been really difficult to keep on top of things. I’ll keep at it though! I still try to stream Mon/Wed/Fri at https://twitch.tv/mixelslab when possible, so maybe see you there..
Until next time..