Archive for the ‘ Release ’ Category

After a weekend filled with talks about the future I finally decided for a release date for Nordenfelt.

Nordenfelt will be out on December 15th, 2014.

Nordenfelt coming on 15th December, 2014

After more than 4 years of development there is no excuse for procrastinating any longer. In December the game will be out in version 1.0, however it will look, play and sound like then.

Cheers,
Thomas

Nordenfelt 0.8 Released

The Deep Web is a part of the Internet which can’t be indexed by search engines. Examples of not-indexable resources are private websites (password-protected) or dynamic content. Google, Bing and other crawler bots just can’t get there.

Why am I telling you this? Today Nordenfelt got updated to version 0.8, yet the changes aren’t obvious. This is because only the final boss got (massively) improved. It now has one more combat form and several more attack patterns.

final boss - phase 2

Try to go to the very end. Download the demo or get the whole game at www.nordenfelt-thegame.com or from Desura. I’m curious who has the guts to beat the final boss. 🙂

Now, on to Nordenfelt 0.9!

Cheers,
Thomas

P.S.: Get real-time updates via Twitter feed @nordenfeltgame.

Nordenfelt 0.7 Released

Welcome back!

For nearly a year this blog was quiet. If you want to know why, please read about the reasons here.

But I don’t want to talk about the past. The present is much more interesting…

Nordenfelt 0.7 Released

This is an excerpt from the change log:

  • added final boss
  • added level type desert
  • added equipment Omega Weapon and Auto-Aim System
  • added play analytics (player gets asked for permission)
  • (re-)added score system
  • replaced “level items” by “tech tree points” for unlocking equipment
  • primary weapon levels no longer need to get unlocked
  • player ship moves slower while shooting

I’m curious what percentage of players will allow the game to send information about their play behavior. The data is anonymous and only for reasons of game improvement. Nevertheless, people have the fear of being spied out. Therefore, enabling the analytics module is just for the brave. 😉

Screenshots

Download the demo or get the whole game at www.nordenfelt-thegame.com or from Desura.
There’s nothing more to say, just a pile of tasks left to tackle for Nordenfelt 0.8.

Cheers,
Thomas

P.S.: Get real-time updates via Twitter feed @nordenfeltgame.

Nordenfelt Dev Log 43

The Nordenfelt demo got its overdue update. The last version 0.5.3 dated back to 2011. So it did no longer represent the current development state.

Level 4

Right now I’m working on a desert-themed level. It’s quite tough to make an interesting background which mainly consists of sand and rocks.

However this area will develop I won’t spend too much time struggling with it initially. Gameplay is more important than fancy backgrounds. Regardless if it doesn’t look that good I’ll switch to expanding the tech tree tomorrow.

Tech Tree

As stated above the next task is expanding the tech tree. It’s structure should influences the way how you can play the levels. E.g. some enemy types are immune to the primary weapon. So you have to unlock the right equipment to wipe them out. This is the basic idea which I’m going to refine within the next days.

Cheers,
Thomas

It’s happening: Nordenfelt will be available on Desura on 9th of July.

The release was planned earlier but I made a mistake. I decided to add a new level boss while the latest version has been in Desura review. As soon as the initial boss draft moved across the screen I felt the urge to include it in the release. So be it. God knows why my rational brain did not intervene: “A new boss? Fella, you know this will delay everything for 3 weeks, don’t you?”.

Delay, delay, delay – it happens every once in a while.

Anyways, 9th of July is the day:

Desura Digital Distribution

The following stuff bears the blame for “being late”:

New Level Boss

The new flying warship level boss is a larger-than-screen enemy. You have to blow it up section by section:

flying warship

This boss introduced a crucial part in shmup design: scriptable bullet patterns. Patterns help players to memorize attack forms and let them come up with canned tactics how to dodge bullets.

(Not so) New Equipment

Also the Tesla gun got revived (first mentioned here):

tesla gun

This unlockable equipment is great when broad swarms of enemies enter the screen. Flashes of electrical discharge span over close neighbors. This way you can blow up whole flocks with less movement. Quite helpful when the screen gets littered with bullets.

Cheers,
Thomas

Nordenfelt Dev Log 33

Already 2 months passed since the last dev log entry? I can’t remember climbing in a flux-capacitored DeLorean …

Whatever. Let’s have a look what happened since begin of February.

Finished Music

The game’s soundtrack is finished so far. Because there’s just one level yet there will be more work to do. Nevertheless, finding appropriate tracks isn’t that easy. 99% of stock site tracks simply don’t fit the dynamics of the game. So it took quite some time to find the current compilation.

Time System

Nordenfelt got a time distorting system which can scale the effective time flow. There’s a factor for scaling frame times which is usually set to 1. If the game should run faster, e.g. for testing purpose to reach a specific point in the game immediately, this factor can be set to any value >1. Slowdowns can be caused with values <1. Logically pausing can be done with a factor equal to zero. The only thing I’m not sure about is if negative factors work as well …

Released Nordenfelt 0.5.3, Silently

Version 0.5.3 was published in the preorder forum. I did not shout it from the rooftops because there were no real gameplay changes since 0.5.2. I’ve just finished details like explosions and audio, nothing game-changing.

Now I’m busy working on new level content and fresh equipment, the game’s essence so to speak. An equipment type already available but far from ripe is the Tesla weapon:

For future level work I’ve decided to cut back graphical complexity and go for reusable tiles and segments. This idea is quite old as the left of the following two screenshots from 2010 illustrates:

Left half of image shows version 0.1, right half shows coming version 0.2

I’m not sure what exactly distracted me from following the tile concept. Most likely the urge for boundless creativity was the reason. Nearly two years later I know that boundaries are your friends. They coerce you to not expand artistically ad infinitum.

Time to meet finitude.

Cheers,
Thomas

PS: Just to remind you about the @nordenfeltgame Twitter feed. Feel free to follow and get dedicated info about what’s going on at the the Nordenfelt development front.

Nordenfelt Dev Log 16

Here comes this week’s dev log message, delayed by a deity:

Nordenfelt 0.5 hit the shelves today!

Everything’s set up and running. Just the store activation is pending. Fingers crossed it will be done within the next few hours.

The last days were pure crunch time. Much work was done and I’m tuckered out now. I don’t want to list all the work details here. Instead I tell you a little story …

The funniest incident during the 0.5 release adventure was that I was cut off from the Internet just before release. Yesterday my father’s ISP (which I’m using ’cause I still have no own net – customer support in Austria seems to be stuck in officialdom: “Why hurry?”) halted our connection. A billing problem made them cut the line immediately. Everything for releasing Nordenfelt 0.5 was set up and ready to go but the final steps could not be done offline. GREAT! Some god presumably pointed at me and told his buddies: “Today we hoax this guy!”

Now (1am in the morning) I’m sitting in our local youth center (which has Internet) and write these day-concluding lines. Even if any deity tried to mess around with me I just can say:

Nordenfelt 0.5 is out for sale!

It was important for me to meet this milestone before this weekend, just for B.O.C. Murphy’s law came true again but good preparation made it fizzle out.

Nordenfelt versus deity: one to nothing


Cheers,
Thomas