Eyo! What’s up fellow Creatures!
So as I said in the last short blog update I did, this month’s been kinda crazy.
We’ve been hard at work on prepping Circus Interstellar for release on the Atari VCS and now I’m proud to say that we are finally finished!!
In fact, we’ve even got the OK from Atari to announce the official release date for CI!
Prepare your polka dotted butts for the intergalactic circus to drop on May 10th at 9:00 am PST!
ONLY A FEW DAYS AWAY!!
Here’s a list to get you guys up to date on some of the changes we’ve made to the game…
Mechanical Mechanics
Oooooooh boy!
There sure was a ton of changes in this department.
Mostly it’s countless small fixes and tweaks, but there was also quite a bit of major changes as well and those will be the ones we cover here.
One big thing that was fundamental to getting this port working on the VCS, while not really being an actual change to the game itself, was getting the Atari controllers to work with CI.
This…THIS!
This was hands down the most difficult roadblock we had to overcome, and if it wasn’t for the invaluable help of a member of the Atari community named LostAstronaut, this port probably wouldn’t exist.
If you get the chance, definitely shoot him some support and thanks!
He actually develops video games as well and is currently helping other developers port their games to the VCS as well!
You can find him at lostastronaut.com.
Anywho, let’s get to that list now!
- Players can now be shocked by electric walls 3 times instead of 2 before dying, and their life will only drop down 1 step when shocked instead of dropping down to critical health when only shocked once.
- Jugularnaut slows down when shot by players to simulate the players lasers pushing him back. This works on both regular levels and boss fights, allowing the players to plug more rounds into him before having to dodge out of the way.
- Boss fights have been adjusted in several ways: speed, health, charge timers, and the amount and type of clowns in the fights. All of these are set for specific bosses to make them feel more unique from each other and be allot more memorable.
- Final phase for last boss had a glitch that let you kill him while he was still revealing his final form, this was fixed by making him invincible until he leaves the screen and begins the final phase.
- The popcorn (otherwise known as Butter Boys) had no gibs when you would kill them, so we added new gib sprites for them that behave exactly like the other clowns gibs.
- Balloons in levels were adjusted, now there are allot more chain reaction setups than there was previously. This ensures that every balloon you pop will give you a satisfying chain reaction that you’ll get more points from.
- Scoreboards were revamped, now there is only 1 scoreboard for each mode (escape mode, cutup mode, and hard-core mode) with different difficulties giving different score multipliers. In the past we had a scoreboard for each difficulty, but this proved to be too cumbersome.
- Tactical View camera now shakes just like the Action View when certain things happen, such as players dying or the ship going into warp.
- Score threshold for versus mode was lowered to make rounds shorter and less dragged out.
- Fixed the Jugularnauts fire effect to look smoother.
- Tutorial was adjusted to make it easier for players to read it and figure out how to play.
- Powerups will now make player pulse a color that matches the acquired powerup.
The Roof Is On Fire!
This was actually an unforeseen update that ended up drastically improving the look of the game as a whole: a complete revamping of the roof textures across the game!
I always thought that, while the game was starting to look pretty decent as we went on, there was something missing and it was bugging the hell out of me.
Then I pulled my focus away from the wall and ground textures and realized the error of my ways, the roofs were super boring!
When I originally made the roof textures, the idea was that roofs were comprised of square panels.
Unfortunately, with the roofs taking up most of your vision when you switch the camera mode to tactical view, it creates two problems: one, all of the squares created too much eye clutter, and two, players were having trouble differentiating the floor from the roofs…
Also, like I said before, it just looked boring.
So I took about a month or so to go about removing the square panels and decorating roofs with things such as boxes, computer systems, pipes, fans, gears, and various other things to make the spaces look sorta “lived in”.
60 or so levels later, this is the result:
Personally, I feel this was a very necessary change and it really makes the levels more enticing to look at.
Born In The Darkness, Molded By It
What’s better than shooting murderous clowns trying to assimilate you?
Shooting them after they Jump scare the shit out of you of course!
Lighting effects have been added back into Circus Interstellar and they look better than ever!
This was something we originally had before the IIRCADE release, but at the time we had to table it due to performance problems. After revamp, however, it has much better performance. 👌
Sadly we still couldn’t add any shadows to the IIRCADE version, its just too much for that cabinet and the performance just tanks…
Shadow density can also be changed in the options menu to tailor the game to your likings. (there’s an achievement for beating the game with heavy shadows if you’re feeling gutsy)
Creepy Colorful Clowns
During a testing session, after blasting through the entire game for the hundredth time and cutting down our thousandth clown, the thought occurred: “Shouldn’t these clowns have more than one color of outfit?”
Then we thought: “My god, they should! Why didn’t we do that in the first place??”
So we set to doing just that and this is the result:
The coolest part of this addition is that the levels that were already filled to the brim with colors are now crammed with EVEN MORE COLOR!
WOE TO YOUR RETINAS FOR THE COLORFUL TORTURE THEY SHALL BE SUBJECTED TO!!
…yeah it looks pretty cool tho…
What’s On The Menu?
…And now…
…For the greatest update of all time…
*drum roll*
We went and updated the main menu with little videos of gameplay that occasionally shows on screen!!! 😱
This is admittedly a small and sorta insignificant addition, but damn it looks so good!
The Beaver State Comic Con
You read that heading right, we’re going to have a booth at another convention!
Literally in a few days!!
Out of nowhere!!!
We’ll be at this year’s Beaver State Comic Con in Redmond, Oregon, at the Deschutes County Fairgrounds on May 11th.
We’re going to be showing off the final version of Circus Interstellar on the CI arcade cabinet as well as selling some art and merch, so we hope to see some familiar faces! 😃
We’re stoked and can’t wait to bring along the newest version of CI.
THE SOCKS SHALT BE BLOWN AWAY!
Cyber Dread
Woah! Thats a cool name, what the hell could that be??
Thats right, its our next game!! 😮
Finally, at LONG LAST! We will be starting on a new IP!
We are stoked for this and cant wait to begin a new venture into our Indie Dev career, its been too long.
Never fear you CI fans, we will be continuing support for Circus Interstellar and will be patching it with fixes and the like as the bug reports roll in!
Again, thank you to everyone who has helped and supported us along the way.
You Creatures rock and we love you guys.
We’ll keep kicking ass and continue making killer games for you guys! 🙂
In the meantime, here’s the newest trailer we made to celebrate the Atari VCS release of Circus Interstellar, enjoy! 😄
-Matthew and Stephan Hanewinckel; Co-owners of Ettinsoft LLC
We hope to see more of you creatures in the discord. 🙂
