The year of 2020 was long and trying for so many people including myself. Despite that fact I'm extremely proud and excited that despite everything I managed to work on and complete Laser Burst as my first independently developed video game. I hope each and every person who gives it a try enjoys the puzzles, the music, and the energy that I put into it.

<3
Jesse @ Never Mind Games

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1475000/Laser_Burst/

Hello, arcade enthusiasts.
I'm glad to tell you that the official version 1.0 of 《Rushing Beat Of Rage》 has officially published.

Support two-player cooperation mode, support remote play together, you can play with your Steam friends!
Perfect gamepad support, such as Xbox360, the whole game can be completed with the gamepad, gamepad enthusiasts good news!
Steam cloud save support, don't worry about local save lost!
Support Steam achievements, Steam global leaderboards, check out the leaderboards in the game, and play with friends all over the world!
For more detailed game features, please refer to the store interface. The store links are as follows:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1498840/_/

Speed Limit is gearing towards its release on Steam and consoles quite soon, and we surely wouldn't want to keep you in dark on how the development of the game currently goes.

In short - the development is going great, and all we have to do is to make some smaller changes, bug fixes, and there is a console port, too, which is done by our publisher Chorus Worldwide.

So, to keep you a bit occupied while you wait for Speed Limit, we made this "news digest" of sorts that contains our blog posts that we made to date. Let's get to it, then!




For this blog, we have invited our experienced pixel artist, Jurica who will answer some of our (silly) questions – just for your convenience.

Additionally, Jurica made five timelapse videos showing how he does pixel art (using Aseprite), which can help you with your pixel art endeavors.

What drove you into pixel art?

Easier learning curve and probably a bit of nostalgia. I got my first computer, Commodore 64 when I was 3.

Can you describe the process of making a pixel art character for Speed Limit?

1. Our game designer and project lead describe the feature, and an effect they want to achieve with the piece required.
   
2. Google all the stuff we talked about because I don’t know half of the words used. Also to draw inspiration from different existing technologies/equipment and make some kind of composition.
   
3. I draw 2-3 variations following the game art style as much as I can, and then we iterate on the best variation.
   
4. Profit

How do you make animations for Speed Limit?

It depends on what I’m working on.

If it’s character animation, I start with just a gesture line or a silhouette of the motion that we want to achieve. Then I grind out the details following the basic design in a few iterations until everyone is happy with the smoothness and motion of the animation.

How difficult is it to make pixel art?

It is easy to start and difficult to master. You can get away with a lot of stuff, but also exaggerate other. You need to learn color theory, anatomy, composition, general 2d art, basics of animation, you name it. I still feel I have much more to learn than I know and have my work cut out for me for some time.

If I wanted to start making some pixel art, where should I start?

Easiest and fastest – I would recommend an online app https://www.piskelapp.com/ that is easy to use and has basic animation covered.

Then open up a YouTube pixel art tutorial or a Twitter tutorial, e.g. Pedro Medeiros and just go wild, and most importantly, be consistent.

Read the rest of the blog.


One of the primary reasons why DOOM from 2016 was so damn awesome is Mick Gordon's incredible soundtrack.

And one of the reasons why Speed Limit will be awesome is our sound designer and soundtrack composer - Matija. F YEAH!!!



I used to work as a school teacher, but following a collaboration with Gamechuck that lasted a few years, I got a full-time job here.

I started working on Speed Limit music when I first saw sketches of levels.

Since the start, we were thinking of a synthwave soundtrack.

Ten tracks in, after playing a prototype level I have noticed that there will be a problem: The game was too fast and synthwave wasn’t giving that much of a kick and adrenaline to the player.

I was thinking; “I don’t want to make another metal soundtrack. It is the easy way out and it doesn’t reflect the atmosphere of the game at all.”



So I went to explore my possibilities. I did it the fun way: played playlists of music while playing the level.

After a week or two of testing and making music, I have noticed that music from the bands like The Prodigy, Noisia, Pendulum, etc. clicked immediately.



Matija goes really in detail on how we made the soundtrack, so make sure to read his full blog!


And now, the star of the show - Speed Limit transitions. Speed Limit is a genre-changing rollercoaster. The game seamlessly changes perspectives AND gameplay - as you play. Our programmer Karlo is gonna share a bit of his magic.



Some transitions were hard to explain by words so we made some animations just to be able to visualize them clearly.



Once I had that picture in my mind, I started making some preparations for both levels which was mostly positioning objects where they should be at the start or end of a transition, and discussing with lead developer Vanja to do the same for the other two levels that happen before and after mine.

In the meantime, our pixel artist Jurica chucked out all the necessary assets with their changing perspectives (ex. choppa rotating from a sidescrolling perspective to isometric perspective).

Finally it was transition time!



The majority of each transition consists of interpolating objects between key positions and scales, playing their animations at the right speed and time, and warping the background in several ways. Most of the work here was properly sequencing all the events and tweaking them to look and feel good.

Few issues arose during the making which required making some creative solutions. One example is the background during bike-to-choppa transition.

In the bike level, the road and sea background is constructed from segments, and you can see tall buildings. In the choppa level, the background is a simple warped scrolling texture of water.

How do you transition between these two? The answer is that you don’t. When the player hits the choppa after jumping on a ramp, the camera zooms into the choppa, covering up the entire screen. That’s when we remove some elements from the background (like the road and buildings) to make the transition easier.

The car-to-bike transition had a slightly different story. We had to draw a tunnel that transitions from a top-down perspective to a fake 3D perspective, ending with a camera behind the player inside that tunnel. How?

For this one, I went overboard and actually reconstructed the whole transition in 3D using the Godot engine. Then I recorded the positions of vertices of the tunnel, projected onto the camera’s 2D plane during the animation.

Finally, I added these positions into the level, and now I had exact coordinates of tunnel vertices. All that was left was to draw the segments between them. So in essence, the tunnel you see during the transition, it’s drawn with baked coordinates from a 3D animation. Whew! It paid off in the end.

Read the whole blog!




We are ending this Speed Limit news digest with a real gem: a blog post by our lead programmer, Vanja who explains how we use illusions for those perspective changes in Speed Limit.

If you were to take the game camera in any game anywhere you would like to. You would soon discover that the game worlds are illusions because the content outside of the player’s view ends with empty voids.



Speed Limit is no exception to this and so our transitions are illusions where we hide things out of the player’s view or simply obscure certain elements during transitions to bring the player’s attention to a specific part of the screen.

Changing perspectives in Speed Limit was one of the big challenges because everything we render on screen only uses the X and Y axis, the third Z axis is always 0 and the camera projection matrix is set up for 2D orthographic projection.

While it is possible to go full 3D with GameMaker Studio 2, going 3D for transitions would not help making them happen.

The transition for the outro to the train section was made out of a very special train carriage. The carriage has 4 images that we stretch in order to fake perspective changes. The road is made out of 2 images (fence, and the road itself) while the train tracks are just stretched out.



The background city is just moved above and outside the screen so the water ends up covering the top of the screen. Once this change is made, a tunnel entrance always sitting outside of the camera view to the right is brought into view and it covers the train and brings the repeated tile pattern from the car section in.

After the pattern covers the entire screen we immediately swap to the car section as seamlessly as possible. The car itself has an animation where the perspective changes which Jurica animated by hand.

Read the rest of the blog!

1. Added Spanish support
   
2. New marine animals: Dolphin, dolphins are animals that cannot be harmed. They exist as peaceful creatures,Orca too. They will follow you to play when you get close.
   
   
3. New rain system, more realistic and optimized rain particle simulation, unfortunately, due to engine function limitations, rain particles will still pass through the ceiling,Maybe it will be resolved in the future
   
   
4. New treasure chest and location mark:
   If you are worried about collecting resources in the game, or need to build a large number of buildings, then finding treasure chests can save you a lot of precious time to make walls, but it may also make you lose the fun of the game.
   
   The 3 chests on the map have been marked with icons. They are hidden under water，Two of the treasure chests are above the waterfall, and the other is in the water cave below the huge rock. You can turn on the flashlight to find them. There are different items in the three chests. There are a lot of building modules and wood, Stones. The new treasure chest contains a lot of iron ingots, saltpeter, and sulfur ore. You can use them to make a lot of gunpowder. I recommend you make more fireworks instead of making a lot of ammunition,Let's go to burn a lot of fireworks to celebrate the new year.
   

• Increase the probability of mining saltpeter from stone
  
• Fixed the bug that Orca , sharks and some fish flying out of the sea
  
• Fixed the bug that sometimes the plants are not watered when it rains
  
• Add the effect of the character's skin getting wet after rain
  
• Added tweet sound effects and various idle random animations for dolphins and Orca
  
• Fixed the bug that the puppy attacked the tamed goat and the tamed goat attacked the player
  
• Reduced the barking frequency of puppies and goats
  
• Rafts are prohibited from sliding on the shore
  
• Adjusted the interactive follow behavior of the Orca and no longer interferes with the player
  
• Improved the durability and attack power of the stone axe
  
• Added some UI operation tips

This update was planned for the end of 2020, but holiday stress delay happened.

Here's what's in the new version:

Features

• Remembers preferred spirals for each session now
  
• new Spatializer (can be tested in bundled hypnosis sessions)

Important Fixes

• Session audiofiles not having 44.1KHz samplerate could cause playback problems
  
• Pointer was not on GUI but behind UI-Elements

(music) Jimmy W's Band camp: https://moonsidetapes.bandcamp.com/music

(SFX) Shadow Giratina youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZpG0LPJ6vBbo11SqTlZxPg

Bumstead, best hypeman you could ask for.

Hope everyone had a great start to the new year! We’re kicking off our first patch for the new year with a continuation of the multiple levels for abilities, as well as plenty of bug fixes

Gameplay
Zed: Grav Pull Levels 2 & 3 – Level 2 increases the AoE while Level increases the debuff intensity
Zed: Tempest Levels 2 & 3 – Level 2 increases the length of the Dot effect while Level 3 increases the AoE
Zed: Cyclops Satellite Levels 2 & 3 – Level 2 increases the duration of the ability and Level 3 increases the damage dealt
Zed: Condenser Levels 2 & 3 – Level 2 protects resources from certain attacks, while Level 3 increases the carrying capacity of the compartment
Zed: Vulture Levels 1, 2 & 3 – Vulture allows you to salvage destroyed units from afar. Levels 2 increases the total amount of iron that can be salvaged, while level 2 increases amount of platinum salvageable
Iron Strike: Gambit Levels 2 & 3 – Level 2 adds damage reduction to the unit while the ability is in effect, and Level 3 increases the artillery damage while the ability is in effect
Responders: Redeemer Levels 1, 2 & 3 - Redeemer allows you to salvage destroyed units. Level 2 increases the salvage rate of iron, while level 3 increases the salvage rate of platinum
Iron Strike: Extraction Levels 1, 2 & 3 - Extraction allows you to salvage destroyed units. Level 2 allows you to salvage them from afar, while level 3 increases the salvaging rate of iron
Kylian: Salvager Levels 2 & 3 – Level 2 increases the salvaging rate of iron, while Level 3 increases the salvaging rate of platinum
Responders: Last Hope Level 3 – The final artillery shot while Last Hope is activated gets a massive increase in damage
Jammer Level 2 – The debuffed unit can still fire their artillery cannon, but takes damage when they do so
Kylian: Cryostasis Level 3 – Level 3 increases the debuff intensity
Leech Levels 2 & 3 – Level 2 causes further damage when the unit fires their artillery cannon, while Level 3 increases the max range and the AoE

Fixed
Issues with Ghost with multiple units spawning, and spawned units being able to build facilities
An issue with Afterburn L2 being unable to be researched
An issue with multiple abilities missing tooltips or were transparent in some cases
An issue with Scrambler’s debuff not happening
An issue with debuff timers sometimes going into negative numbers
Issues with some abilities having the wrong icons for their applied buffs or debuffs
An issue with debuff icons being clickable
An issue with your own recon orb giving you a debuff
An issue with Scutum lasting for less than a second
An issue with the Totem Launcher being unable to be added when playing as client

Demo 1.1 Patch Notes
--------------------

We decided to do a quick update today after reading player feedback. We can't act on every bit of feedback for the demo as we're working hard on the main game, but we're hoping this fixes a few of the larger problems that people have been having.

A big thanks to everyone who has provided feedback so far. We're offering a chance to win a copy of the game AND money in Steam vouchers for everyone who plays the demo and provides us feedback in January. We'll be providing a more in depth response to the feedback received towards the end of the month.

Provide Feedback, Win Prizes

Patch Notes:

- Added the ability to rebind the run and reload keys for keyboards and controllers
- Set 'R' as the default gun reload key
- Added tutorial messages for using weapons and items
- Added UI for the gun showing bullets in the magazine and total amount of bullets
- Fixed some minor graphical problems in the countryside park
- Fixed a bug where the map wouldn't load back if you quit the game and reloaded
- If Sam opens inventory near a wall it now gives a gentle nudge to stop visual clipping

If you've not downloaded the demo yet, give it a try now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/924120/Summerford/

Hello and welcome to all Great Dealers!



Today we are proud to announce the release of the new Update #6! :dlgift:

Here are the release notes for this update:

• New Item Pack #3 - Consoles: 15 brand new items related to consoles! Are you a Zbox or a Playbase fan? :dlgift:
  
• Improved: Pawner customers will now show the "Pawn" stamp while checking the item on your desk, this will better highlight these kind of customers
  
• Performance improvements

If you don't see the update in your Steam "Download" section, try restarting Steam and it will do the trick!

The launch was very frantic but we are so happy to see how much you liked our new game, how many ideas and suggestion you gave us on Dealer's Life Discord Server and how many kind words you have spent for us!
Please remember that this is an Early Access launch, if you followed us with DL1 you already know how much we work on our games in order to improve them, to add new content and to develop your requests! :dlgift:

We started rearranging all our ideas and tasks so we'll soon share a Roadmap image to show our plans, to recap everything and to let you see how many tasks we have in mind.
For now we can tell what we already started working on: New Item Pack #4 (Geek items), New Customer Pack #1, Avatar Pack #3 (more Insight Avatars) and more in-game currencies! :dlgift:

That's all for today, we hope you like this update, let us know what you think in the comments. And if you like the game, please consider writing a review, these can help a lot in spreading the word about Dealer's Life 2! <3

Your friendly indie devs,
Abyte Entertainment

Hello Operators!

With our latest update, we've added 5 new Cargo Rushes! Every weekend, a new region will be active that requires specific cargo to be delivered. Completing these quests will unlock the following new cars!



Deliver items to the inhabitants of the Great North!

• TN Diesel Engine
  
• TN Comet Car
  
• TN Lounge Car
  
• TN Coach Car
  
• TN Carrier Car
  
• TN Diesel Caboose

Deliver fun summer items to the east coast!

• Seashell Engine
  
• Flip Flop Car
  
• Sprinkles Car
  
• Seashell Car
  
• Bubbles Car
  
• Seashell Caboose

Deliver fresh fruit and vegetables to the people of Alaska!

• Northern Express Engine
  
• Northern Express Car
  
• Tour Train Car
  
• Minecart Car
  
• Rock Crusher Car
  
• Northern Express Caboose

Travel the west coast and deliver a variety of goods!

• Atomic Engine
  
• Hiawatha Lounge Car
  
• Classic Cinema Car
  
• Speakeasy Lounge Car
  
• Speedster Car
  
• Atomic Caboose

Deliver cargo items to the southern US!

• Great Galaxy Engine
  
• Hawking Effect Car
  
• Comet Cafe Car
  
• Orbiter Car
  
• Observatory Car
  
• Great Galaxy Caboose

• Click feedback on all interactive elements
  
• Improved Japanese and Korean localizations

Happy travels!