aconike wrote:I need to contact the creator of this game, a remake or whatever. I want to participate in new maps, consultations and / or comments. Can ArcturusDeluxe call me? I can't write PM.
ps. what does it look like now? In general? When will the new version be released?
Hi! While I'm ok for maps for the main mod at the moment (though I have some ideas for the future), making your own should already be possible, though I'd advise hanging on for the next couple of updates. Any comments you have are welcome too! I'm on Twitter at @arcturusdeluxe as well, if you want to get me over there.
This reminds me, it's probably time for a
STATUS UPDATE!I've gotten back into working on the next update pretty hard the past couple weeks, and am getting closer to something I can release. It was going to be a fairly quick update but it kind of scope-creeped into something bigger. Might still take a few more weeks to get done, mental health permitting, but it's getting done. The next update will be 0.10, then hopefully follow it up fairly quickly with a full 1.0 version, depending on the feedback I get.
Here's some stuff I've already added for 0.10:
- Difficulty levels - there are now three modes, Contamination (easy), Infestation (medium) and Extinction (hard). These feature different amounts of enemies in the maps, and the enemies are quicker and more dangerous on hard.
- All new sprites for pickups, particularly weapon pickup sprites that match the new first person designs. These can be swapped out for the originals if desired.
- There are now small medikits (with both classic and new sprite variations) and armour shard pickups. Also trooper enemies now drop small ammo cases.
- A ton of edits to the original maps, for aesthetic and gameplay reasons. Loads of secret rooms added too. I've tried my best to balance out improving the experience with retaining the overall layout and feel of the old maps.
- One for the violence fans, smaller enemies (red aliens, all troopers and the mini eyeballs from the spawner) now gib more satisfyingly when exploded, with their own unique gib sprites that bounce around and stay on the floor for a while. There's also more blood spray on regular death. Some aliens now have brown blood for added alien-ness.
And there's a lot more besides. Most of what I need to do now is making sure the difficulty balance is right - now I've added the ammo drops, the new pickups, secrets and difficulty levels, this is taking a lot of work! I want to make sure its at least ok before putting it out there. That's why this next update isn't 1.0 yet, as I want to make sure other people like it before considering it a 'full release'. Also it gives me time to finish off the new soundtrack I'm working on for version 1.0 as well. I'll be adding the CD32 music option at that point as well.
At one point I was working on porting the demo maps with the green aliens. This will still happen at some point but there are actually quite a lot of different graphics in the demos compared to the full version. Some of the texture choices in these demos are a bit ugly and random honestly, and need some work. Some of them are even just straight up stolen from Doom! Which is convenient for me in a way, but I want to make it all look cohesive and don't really want to directly use Doom stuff. Also the green aliens only have front-facing frames so I have to draw a lot of new sprites for those. I've made quite a lot of progress on this already, the basic maps are already ported, but this game has already gone beyond scope and something has to give. Expect these later on in a future update beyond 1.0.
I don't have any specific ETA unfortunately, you know how weird things are at the moment. I'm aiming for end of the year for 1.0 at the very very latest, but this gives me a lot of slack and I don't see why it wouldn't be done a while before then. Stay tuned!
