M.A.C.E. – Remastered 2 – New Enemies

Enemies, Enemies, Enemies!

For the current version of M.A.C.E. Space Shooter we often get comments that the game has not enough different enemies and much enemy waves from the same type. We know that is a problem and our focus for the updated desktop version will be this issue. We have a big number of new enemies with different animations, behavior and strength.

New enemies for a more varied gameplay

Painting and technics

For our paintings, Thomas (the one who does all graphics) is using „Clip Studio Paint Pro“, a nice piece of software which does a great job in combination of an Asus ep121 Windows tablet. The hardware is not the newest one but it is more than enough for the painting job. The work of Thomas is more a „learning by doing“ and his skills are getting better on each project but he is never satisfied with his work. From the initial release of M.A.C.E. until now, the graphics style and the graphic techniques (cleaner painting lines, lightning and shadows etc.) has been improved and did a big step forward. That is the reason that not only new enemies will be included in the desktop version of M.A.C.E, also the old enemies and the player ship will be reworked into a better and cleaner look. The next development entry will show some before and after images of the reworked graphics.

Clip Studio Paint Project – reworked boss enemy

Work on the code side

The current work is not only focused on the graphics side. While Thomas is painting the whole day, Frank (the programmer of all parts of our projects) is working hard on improvements on the software side. As the main work on the game engine for windows desktop is finished now, the current step is to include the new enemies, update existing ones with new behaviors. One of our goals is also to create different ways of enemy behaving when they are hit from the player. Depending on the used weapon some enemies acts in a different way. This will be a nice feature because different weapons assume different strategies to play, especially in the two player coop mode (different weapon each player -> different impact for the enemies).

The following video shows a quick snapshot of this new function on a new painted enemy (all work in progress, nothing finished!):

Thanks for reading and voting on Steam Greenlight:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=727013167

Content of the upcoming Blog Entry:
– reworked graphics of existing enemies and player ship (before and after)
– new weapon system (changing weapons while playing instead of only collect and use one)