Ello fellow gremlins!
This month sure has been interesting for us as far as work on Cirque Interstellar goes, though its been sort of a mixed bag.
Some things exciting! Other things annoying…such as bugs.
Through the thick and thin though, we have persevered, and now Cirque Interstellar is looking pretty functional and awesome!
There’s quite a bit of things to cover, so I’ll list them off and explain each one piece by piece.
1: Blood, sweet blood
This one was a doozy and requires a bit of an explanation before I can go into how I fixed the issue.
When we originally started creating the blood and gore textures throughout our game, we thought, in our ignorance, that it would be simpler to just make the textures into objects and then decorate the levels with those gore objects inside the Game Maker level editor.
“Wow! that made it so easy!” we thought foolishly.
That was until we realized, after testing the game on the iircade, that this caused massive performance issues in the game.
The reason for this was because, once we finished decorating the levels, we now had hundreds of objects clogging up memory whenever you loaded up levels that were filled with gore. (oops)
Who knew that having every single blood sprite (small droplets included) be their own objects would cause lag? (lol)
We had to try thinking outside of the box for this one, so we began stretching our brain muscles, and after some thought we finally found the solution. The fix we came up with promised to condense the object count to only 2 gore objects per level instead of the hundreds we currently had. However, the problem was that this would be a very painful and tedious process.
Our solution was to take a screenshot of every level that had gore in it, move the picture to the corner of the photo editor so that it lines up when we put it into Game Maker, and then piece by piece put together the blood, guts, and bodies into the levels separated into different layers.
With 60+ levels to flesh out, and very little time to do it, let’s just say that the process made me want to pluck my eyeballs out and then set them ablaze with kerosene.
Through persistence, and the sacrifice of my sleep schedule, I was able to finish what would have been months of work in a matter of only a few weeks! (yay!)
We noticed immediately that the performance was much better on pc and the iircade as well, which is awesome!
2: Jugularnauts get a facelift
Recently we made a post telling everyone about our progress in redesigning the Jugularnaut bosses in the game.
Well, we have finally finished with the redesigns and now our boys are looking better than ever!
We are going to begin fleshing out boss fight mechanics for each Jugularnaut soon to make each one unique from the others, as well as spice up their fights and make them more memorable.
I’ll make another blog post when we finish with that.
3: Shiney spiffy space ships
For awhile now we’ve been wanting to update the looks of both ships for the games main menu and we have finally gotten around to doing so!
I think the redesigns actually match the rest of the games art style better now and are far cooler to look at, making the main menu look better in the process.
4: Squashing bugs
During testing we inevitably found a few more annoying bugs hiding right under our noses.
A lot of them were easily squashed and most only pertained to the iircade version of Cirque Interstellar. This was a relief, but we’re still battling in the trenches with a couple of them.
Unfortunately, we’re having a hell of a time figuring out the last of these bugs as they popped up when we began trying to get an android version ready for the iircade.
I’m confident that we’ll figure these bugs out soon enough and get the game (mostly) bug free yet again!
5: Booking a booth
This is probably the coolest announcement we have this blog!
We were able to finally book ourselves a booth at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo happening early October 2023 in Portland, Oregon!
This has been a milestone for us ever since the first time we went to this expo back in 2017.
Recent years we were finding it difficult have the time or money to do this, but this year we were finally able to purchase a booth for ourselves and we are stoked!
Our minds are brimming with cool ideas for how we will setup the area, create merch, interact with people, and get a 4 player setup for expo goers to play Cirque Interstellar at the booth!
The thing we are most excited about however, is getting to show the game off to tons of people in person! So far the only people we’ve had the chance to show the game to in person are friends and family, so it’ll be great to see what other people think of it!
These last couple months have been very eventful for us at Ettinsoft and we cant wait to see what the next few months hold for us.
Love you all and we cant wait to show you what we have in store! 🙂
-Matthew and Stephan Hanewinckel; Co-owners of Ettinsoft LLC
We hope to see more of you creatures in the discord. 🙂
