Elia Ferina

October 24, 2010
5:55am
5 lbs 12 ounces
18.9 inches

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.