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Progress Update!!!

Hello fellow twin-stick shmup fans!

It’s been a few weeks since the last progress update. We got lots of stuff done over the past month. Here’s a review of all the progress we made developing A Quiver of Crows.

Gauges!

Everybody loves gauges right? In A Quiver of Crows gauges will show you your health, current weapon, and current bomb. It’ll also show you bomb ammo and weapon upgrade level. In the screenshot below, you can see one of the gauge designs in-game.


The design has evolved a bit since we started on it. Check out (below) all of the different variations we’ve considered. We’re still tweaking the design for the gauges, but we’re getting close to finalizing it.
HUD Design
Also, while I’m at it, check out the awesome job Danny did animating the heart!

Vignettes!

Another thing we worked on was a vignette effect for when the crow dies at the hands of those demons and ghouls. Check it out in the screenshot below. We’re still fine-tuning the color and shape of the vignette, but this is the type of effect you can expect when a pile of biters decides to overwhelm our dear crow!

Dream Catchers!

Each stage exit in A Quiver of Crows is controlled by a fire-bound dream catcher. Once you complete the stage, the dream catcher’s fiery spell will be lifted, allowing you to move on to the next one. Much of the work for the dream catcher is done, but we have yet to place it in a pretty environment:

Damage Animation

Visual feedback when your player takes on damage is quite important. We decide to go with a glow to red effect for the crow when it takes on damage. We’re still fine tuning this effect too, but you can get an idea of how red the crow will get for a split second when getting hit:

Upgrade Design

There are a million ways to design a shmup. How do you upgrade? How do you downgrade? How do you get your bombs? Hundreds of shmups have explored different solutions with varying results, and so we spent a lot time researching and revisiting old shmups in order take away our favorite designs from each. The community at shmups.system11.org has been extremely helpful in sharing ideas and opinions regarding shmup designs. If you’re really into shmups, we definitely recommend you check out their site.

Balancing!

Last but not least – gameplay balancing! This is perhaps one of the most important tasks we’ve been working on lately. We want to make sure the different weapons, bombs, and enemies are all balanced accordingly. So we’ve been doing lots of math and fine tuning to get this just right.

Stay Tuned!

Okay – that’s it for this update. Thanks for reading and supporting us! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at crows@sheado.net or start a discussion in our Steam community hub. And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @AQuiverOfCrows for more frequent updates!

Posted by sheado on April 20, 2015 at 12:00 pm.