Dan has been steady hustlin’ (his words, not mine) at Planet Moon in San Francisco. He’s working on fun stuff that I obviously can’t speak of because that’s just how the industry works. He won’t shut up about how awesome it is though.

Pat has been helping out the 2XL guys developing some secret stuff as well. Again, industry rules prohibit any mention of said secret stuff. But knowing Pat and 2XL’s track record, they’ve got some solid hits ahead of them.

As for me, I’ll be joining the Double Fine family as a Senior Visual Effects Artist. They’ve done great work in the past, and I can’t wait to see what they’ve got planned for the future. I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of what I’ll be doing there, but I am at liberty to say the place rocks.

And to our loyal readers, I want to thank all of you for following our story…all five of you.

Now this changes everything! With this many enemies, the entire battlefield changes. Melee combat that was once like Afro Samurai becomes more like Dynasty Warriors. Attacks and weapons need to be much larger scale to account for this massive crowd. Explosives send groups of enemies flying. Don’t get your hopes up though, this probably won’t be in the final game… we were just stress testing AI performance.

Multi-threading has some neat side-effects! When shots orbit around the planet, their trails are recorded in memory. In some cases they’ll flash this ghost image for a split second. Normally this data is meaningless, but this does give us a great idea for a new weapon…

Pew pew! Max sits cozy as he rolls around in a Dredge tank, the Defender. Nimble and powerful, the Defender is driven using dual-stick controls (Robotron, Smash TV, Geometry Wars). There are a few variations of Defenders with different weaponry. Located on a planet in the Arcadia Galaxy, there sit 4… just enough for a rolling squadron in multiplayer.

We had a bit of fun recently and experimented more with post-processing. By altering brightness, contrast, and saturation on the final image, we can get effects like the one pictured above. There probably won’t be a need for such extreme usage, but subtle implementation would enhance the mood of a galaxy. The hot galaxy could get a sunburned high contrast look, whereas colder environments get more of a desaturated effect. Nuclear weapons (spoiler) could invert the image temporarily. I personally like the pink bad guys.

We’ve just started revisiting all of the planets in Max Blastronaut. Originally they were pretty basic spheres, with nothing too complex while we focused on combat and shooting. Now we’re working on environment-specific gameplay, and here’s one of the first examples. Nestled deep in a crater on this Mars-inspired planet is a Dredge Command Center. While active, it controls seven satellites in orbit searching for any threats on the surface. When locked on, a satellite fires rounds until you’ve managed to escape its red dot laser beam. Take out the Command Center to disable the satellites, or run around as bait to let the incoming fire destroy any bad guys nearby.

Happy Birthday, Jetpacks! Today we’re going back in time, to exactly a year ago. We had just gotten Max’s jetpack animation in game and were testing it out. The radar may have been working at this point also, but we cut it a couple of months later along with the entire Freespace mode. It turned out that making an open-world game is A LOT of work, especially for three developers building the engine at the same time. We chose to cut it early and focus on the fun parts of the game, punching and shooting. Max’s blasters emerge from the jetpack when he needs that extra firepower, and they animate in and out accordingly.

Here’s another behind-the-scenes look at Max Blastronaut. This time we construct a scene, node by node. Starting off extremely basic (which is pretty much how the game looked a year ago), it quickly builds into what we have today. In order of appearance, this clip shows: the skycube, background ships, sky objects (asteroids, planet rings), planets, enemies, players, weapons, headlights, transparent items (nebulae, particles, laser beams), post-processing (god rays, bloom, lens flare), and finally, depth of field.

Another group of local devs have just released their latest iPhone hotness to the world. In 2XL Fleet Defense, you play the role of a lone naval aviator tasked to defend a carrier and the lives that depend on it. There’s some backstory about impending nuclear war, but I certainly don’t need a reason to blow stuff up! Easy to get into, there are some nice strategy elements about how you pilot your F-35 and navigate the battlefield. Pick it up for $1.99 and start laying waste to the DLP!