M.A.C.E. – Remastered 3 – backgrounds and enemy formations

Gameplay video snippet

First, we want to show you a short video with some working improvements. It is also just a quick snapshot while working, nothing finished yet. Play the video and see some new game backgrounds in World1 and World3, also some new animated enemies wich are also affected by the used weapon.

Thanks for watching the video, next some work in progress information (some of them we also wrote as a short version in our regular updates).

Rework of existing enemies

Beside building new enemies and formations, we also do a rework on the existing enemies and the player ship too. As the graphic style and painting skills from Thomas has changed over the time, it will be a nice improvement for the whole game to bring better visuals with a cleaner look. Some old enemy ships where to dirty and also not painted very well. Most of the needed graphics are done, just some minor improvements are to do.

Clip Studio Paint Project – reworked boss enemy

Also the new player graphics, a refurbished version of the player ship which looks now cleaner and fits better into the whole game as before.

 

 

 

 

 

As M.A.C.E. is a 2D game with hand drawn images, it is hard to bring a player tilt into the game. But is is important for the overall quality of the game. In the old version of M.A.C.E. we only have 5 frames, now we have 7 frames for tilting the player. I used Blender and built a simple 3D model based on the 2D painted player graphics. I got a 3D surface which could be rendered with lights and shadows.

Game progress information

M.A.C.E. has now a progress bar within each level and also a game progress bar between the levels. This helps to see the current position while playing.

New game background graphics

We have finished some new background graphics for the 3th world of the game with some nice parallax layers. On the first screenshot you also can se our new, optional „Retro Dots“ screen filter which looks nice in our opinion. The next step is to bring some new variations to the World 2, also some background assets like a destroyed spaceship or a satellite is on our list.

 

 

 

 

 

Building more enemy waves

The work on new enemy formations is the main focus of Frank. He found a good plugin for building spline curves, which works great with Paint.net. The only problem was to load the splines coordinates  later into the source code. After some tests and trying other programs, he decided to code a small piece of software which reads the spline coordinates from the plugin file format.
Now he can use it without problems in visual studio for further operations and testings.

 

 

 

 

 

After finishing all the new enemy formation and the adjustments on the game graphics, the next step is to rebuild the levels for a better gameplay. Also the new weapon system is in the work. So stay tuned and thanks for reading!

Thanks vote on Steam Greenlight:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=727013167