We haven't posted any footage from Dual Core for a while, so here's a recent(ish) Vine from the arena mode. As you can see, it's getting a bit crazy ! (this is late on and supposed be difficult!)

I re-did the squishy slime guy

2 new videos showing how the game is progressing!

We've been using Spine by Esoteric Software for a lot of our animation. It's a great piece of software, and highly recommended for anyone doing 2D animation for games. Here's one of our space-alien-robot dudes (he's higher res & smoother in game)

So, for some of those who own some Wacom tablets, you may have run into a problem where, sometimes, your Windows pc boots up, and the tablet... just mysteriously fails to respond.

Like me, after much frustration, you may have discovered the restart-TabletWacomService "trick", which removes the need to reboot, and was probably a lifesaver.

Still, this is a bit of pain, and could be easier (easiest would be drivers that actually work, but that rant is best saved for a different blog post...)

Anyway, up till now I was too lazy to get around to this (don't know why), but it's actually incredibly simple to automate this task with a batch file. You just use the commands "net stop TabletServiceWacom" followed by "net start TabletServiceWacom". To save you 30 seconds of typing, I've put this into a convenient batch file which you can download here. (Note that Chrome might get a bit upset that this batch file might be "dangerous" as it's "not frequently downloaded". Well spotted Google, I only just put it up today! Anyway, you can trust me, honest. Or not. Just make your own .bat files with the above commands)

Put it on your desktop or something. You'll need to make sure you run this as administrator (right click, then "run as administrator"!) since Microsoft doesn't want the average joe running around starting and stopping services.

If all goes well, you may have just saved yourself 2 minutes of your life every day! (I accept donations of bakery items... or better yet, go buy one of my games - I promise I'll use proceeeds for bakery items ;) )

Rain makes everything cooler - especially in sci-fi. With that in mind, we decided to try out some weather effects!
Check out 6 seconds of rainy robots below!

The main character has needed some redesign work for a while now - his head, for example, was pretty much just a doodle, and his silly bug antennae were beginning to annoy me ;) I've been putting it off for too long.

So here's a vine trying showing some new designs for my main characters. These aren't necessarily final.

Also, heads and bodies are separate now, so I can make them look a little less rigid (simple procedural motion that I don't have to hand animate), and as an added benefit, they can also turn to look at stuff etc.

So after last week's post, I thought maybe I'd make a habit of showing progress with our (Still nameless) upcoming game. It could be a *thing* - certainly my dev-blog could do with a *thing* right now...

So here's another update - not a huge amount has changed since last week, but some definite progress. Right now this project is not our day job - we are working on other contracts, as well as supporting our existing games, so progress is limited to whatever we can get done in our limited spare time (oh, also, did I mention I have 2 little kids? Spare time is a precious commodity!)

So what's new? A few new environment variations (a little less grey!), improved lighting/shading (some extra shader stuff done in GLSL - we'll see how it performs on low end devices), as well as functioning keys/locked doors. Ok, I know "get key X to open door X", is as old as the (digital) hills, but I'm not going to refuse to use that mechanic because its been done before!!!

A note on sound: the music was written for the game, but was rather quickly thrown together - there's a good chance we'll keep this main track in some form, but the finally quality will hopefully be much better (and a little less generic). The 2nd tune in this video is the current "game over" theme (again a very rough draft) :)

Here's a very early, sneak peak at one of our games in development. Still nameless, but hopefully not for long!

Everything is work in progress - we know its a little rough around the edges graphically!

We're supporting as many platforms as possible using our own home-grown cross-platform engine. We'll definitely release it for Android, BB10/Playbook and iOS - we've yet to decide about PC/Mac/Linux, but theres no reason why not? Right?