It’s the 13th Dev Blog of Shellrazer!

     Hey there followers of the fearsome! Another week has trampled by here with Team Shellrazer! This week we’ll show a few of the more recently added enemy types that really mix up our game.  What was interesting about these enemies is that they have the most basic behaviour and have been added pretty late in the development. Most of our ground forces are pretty crafty and run away from your turtle before they get crushed but these guys just barrel into your beast with blades and bombs.

    We decided to use Bombed-up Buzzards for the aerial assaults and Wheelbarrow Warriors for the ground, designing the look of these guys was a lot of fun as usual. Initially the larger vulture had a giant bomb but we wanted him to visually show more of an up close and personal look so he got 2 cool swords instead. It’s going to take some tuning but these guys will be another healthy addition to our gameplay cake!

    Wow is that a shot of Nick’s editor? How cool is that! Next up is another quick shot of some of those baddies in action! Look at that super smart wizard blasting away at the ground! Better fix your aiming or else your beast will be eating those bombs for breakfast!

    The middle platform there is our Mortar Bank that launches three super strong shells in an arc depending on how long you hold it down. From the look of those health bars our turtle has already taken some damage, next time we should definitely bring a repair bay or slot in some healing items!

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    Also lets give a shout out to those super talented and hard working folks down at Blizzard for the launch of Diablo 3! Way to go! We debated even posting up a Dev-Blog today because everyone would be too busy playing that game to even see it. So if you can stop killing your mouse buttons for one second, here’s an authentic Shellrazer bro-pound from us to you!

    So another week stomps by here at Slick, we are nearing the end of our development and are getting super excited to be wrapping up Shellrazer! Thanks a million for stopping by and checking out our Dev-Blog, we love hearing from you and we’ll see you next week! Until then, keep those turtle-cannons blazing!

-jesse

It’s Our 12th Dev-Blog post followers of the fearsome!

     This week we are bringing some stupendous screenshots to your eyeballs! Raw and unedited, these screens come fresh off the presses of our latest build! So how about you keep an open mind as we show these badboys off as we are still hard at work making the game look and feel better everyday!

     Our first screen is a quick trip to the beach! Here  we can see our war-turtle armed with three exciting platforms! At the bottom of our scaffolding is Gunnar Gunnerson the super reliable light machine gun, here he is lighting up some enemy mines. In the middle is our hard working blacksmith “Clang” hammering out some health for our Orcish Cannon on top! The enemies shown here are the swarms of ballooners that are armed with unreliable cannons and mines which they drop from the skies if you don’t blast them fast enough. You can also see our handy progress bar at the top to let you know just how close you are to that finish line!

    Our Second screenshot is all about our world map. This will be going through some more refinement but as it stands now it’s a massive map with over 40 levels and 5 different locations. You get the full effect when you see the parallax of the upright elements when your little turtle avatar is moving. The cages with the little guys in them represent levels where you can unlock new weapon platforms, how exciting! The world map was one of the earliest bits of implementation we built on Shellrazer and it’s gone through a few changes to get to this point and will probably be going through a few more as we refine the game. Initially we locked the camera onto the avatar but everyone really wanted to explore the map as a whole so Nick made it so you have a lot more freedom when panning around the map.

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    So that wraps up week 12 of our journey! 

    We’ll be returning next week with some more news and screens so be sure to drop us a line! we always love hearing from you guys. So until next time, keep those turtle cannons blazing!

-Jesse

          Week 11 followers of the fearsome! Welcome back to that trampling terrapin post!

          This week we’ll be giving all you great folks a preview of our art tumblr! Remember when game manuals had all those neat pictures of the enemies in the game? Well we’re bringing it back with some Tumblr technology in something we’re calling “Shellrazer Scoundrels”. We’ll be releasing an enemy a week drawn up in a fun Polaroid style for you guys to check out and prepare yourself when they come up to your turtle. We have a bunch of baddies implemented in the game and we had so much fun blowing them up we wanted to give them the representation they deserve! So without any further ado here’s our goblin peasant archer, not to great of a shot and of an even weaker constitution, these will be the first few foes you’ll fire upon.

          Last week we hit up those super people at Full Indie and showed off our stuff to a capacity crowd. It was super great getting people to play the game right in front of us and see their reactions to the mechanics and fire the guns at those gobbos. Shellrazer was also shown around at the local Art show Anomally: 2012 last Saturday to a bunch of the art crowd and close friends! It looks like our triumphant turtle is trickling out too the masses, but we must stay humble. So to remind us just how tricky some things are here’s our defeat screen! The player will be greeted by this tragic turn of events if that horde gets through and beats up your beast! Hopefully you guys won’t be seeing this screen too often, but don’t worry if you do because you’ll still get some scratch to support your war efforts.

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          So another week has trampled by and we are getting closer and closer to our goal of launching this beast! We are getting some video’s up really soon and sound is coming into our game. Crafted by industry veteran Jenn Lewis, these awesome audio bites will be sure to bolster our battles and leave everyone’s ears salivating!

Thanks again for stopping by our blog and a HUGE thanks for everyone out there that checked out our game! So until next time, keep those turtle cannons blazing!

-Jesse

Into the double digits of Dev-Blogging!

Week ten is here with some new news for all those devout followers! This week we’ll be taking team Shellrazer to the Full Indie Meetup and showing off that shelled-stomper to some folks! It should be an excellent evening for all involved as we get some great feedback on our game and catch up with a ton of great people! Full Indie Started about 2 years ago and is where smaller devs get together and show off their wares as well as drown a few sorrows! Hopefully this design illustration will remind us the order to do things this coming Thursday! So if you’re a local Vancouverite sign up for the Meetup and We’ll see you there!

Since we are looking to feel victorious this Thursday, we decided to show our Victory screen! You’ll need to use your brain-meats to imagine scores and numbers flying across the screen but hopefully this gets the point across. Here we can see our heroic beast  charging through a canyon surrounded with glorious booty. Don’t you want to get in on that action? Then prep those IOS platforms for some Shellrazer soon!

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So there’s another week gone by! This week we will be starting to polish a lot of the elements in the game like the explosions and other effects. We are also getting ready to launch some more fun stuff in the coming weeks that’ll be sure to excite and amaze our devoted Shellrazer pals! Thanks a million for stopping by and checking out our progress every week. Until then, followers of the fearsome, keep those turtle-cannons blazing!

-Jesse

Week 9 and feeling fine! Welcome back followers of the fearsome for another installment of Shellrazer’s Dev-Blog!

As you may or may not have noticed, we got a beefy change to our home page!  Now the whole internets will see our shelled stomper! Taking a quick look at the splash page we can see that there are some pretty mean looking armaments on the turtle, including some machine guns! The fortified goblins are having one hell of a time defending themselves against this onslaught, the Beast is making it look like a snap! But fear not players, many challenges will await you when you arm your own beast and set out to crush your own foes!  

Now let’s take a gander at our title screen below! There’s our grumpy hero looking all tough atop our moniker! For now this is the screen that greets players at the beginning of our game. We initially just had his shell on there but look at that face! How could you ignore such a heroic expression? The turtle has gone through a few different transformations over the course of development but we believe we’ve found the right direction with these latest iterations.

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So that wraps up another week! Coming up will be a lot more stuff that’s directly from the game! We are wrapping up a lot of the functionality and almost have every weapon tuned to perfection. A massive amount of work has come from the store and equip screen, showing you guys those shots would be super boring so we opted for more of an arty post this time! Thanks for stopping by and checking out our stuff! Until next time, keep those turtle cannons blazing!

-Jesse

Oh boy it’s week eight and super great! 

      Welcome back followers of the fearsome! This week we get a preview of another super nifty weapon platform, the War Horn! When you want to increase the effectiveness of your current load out try picking up the wailing War Horn to boost those damage dealers! Be sure to save him for those trickier times because he comes with one heck of a cool down after blowing that monstrous horn!

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      Page eight of our art document has one of my favourite things ever, Boss ideas! We had to think about some ways that our constantly scrolling turtle could encounter some neat stuff. So here’s a neat-o war wagon idea! Heavily inspired by those great mobile boss levels in the classic Mario 3, these juggernauts would need to be taken down in sections over the course of the level until you freed the beast of burden at the end! Zeppelins are also beefy targets that can enter our player’s space in new and interesting ways and unload a huge serving of fire power! Time is always a factor and even if these guys don’t make it into the final game they’ve inspired us to tackle new experiences in the world of Shellrazer!

      Another consistent week has trotted by everyone! a big thanks to everyone dropping by and checking out our progress and good times! Be sure to check in next week as well for some screenshots (fingers crossed) and other in game goodness! We are clamping down on getting as much as we physically get into Shellrazer and have also been amassing a huge amount of tools for us to tackle other game ideas in the future. All in all it’s a super great time and it’s even better that we get to share it all with you guys!

      Till next time followers of the fearsome! keep those turtle cannons blazing!

-Jesse The Drawbarian 

Week seven is here followers of the fearsome!

This week we’ll be covering a neat enemy design, it’s the super buff Grappler! These guys will rush your terrific turtle and leap onto it’s weapons! Once atop your terrapin, the Grappler will pummel and disrupt your tools until you flick those jerks off your platform. These little brats are tenacious and will land on their feet and keep assailing your beast until you fill them with explosions, best of luck everyone!

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Page seven of our documentation was another super fun time involving specialized enemies. This page got us thinking about bigger enemies that would be more challenging to deal with. We wanted something that was impervious to machine gun fire but could be knocked around with concussive weapons so you could send him into a pit or something like that.

This was also where war-wagons were first introduced to the team, something that would keep pace with your turtle while it kept firing at you and causing problems. It became a little too busy when we started thinking about dealing with things environmentally because the most fun way of dealing with our enemies is by lighting them up with cool guns. But either way this page was a fun exercise that got everyone thinking and that’s the main thing!

So that wraps up week seven folks! A big thanks to everyone who follows our journey. Working on this title has been a ton of fun and we’d like to share that with everybody, hopefully you can get a sense of that right here from these posts. So until next time, keep those turtle-cannons blazing and get those grapplers off of there!

-Jesse

It’s week six, followers of the fearsome!

This week it’s a new name and a logo pass! So the Name has been determined to be “Shellrazer”, how neat! We needed something a little quicker to say than nature of the beast that still packed a powerful punch. With a super cool name like this there’ll be no stopping us! This is the first pass at the colours and background so that may still change but one thing’s for sure, Shellrazer is here to slay!

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Page 6 of our art documentation was created back when we had the idea of crews in mind. We were playing around with the potential to hire out specialist mercenaries to outfit your turtle with. Although the game has changed since this through regular development these guys here are still fun to check out. So here we have some vampires with steak-zookas and garlic bombs, some dragon-men with cross-hairs on their noses, and some aliens cause everyone loves ray guns. So even though these ideas didn’t end up flying they did get us playing around with different ideas of denizens and abilities and also helped me develop my style further.

So it looks like that wraps up week six everyone! Thanks so much for stopping by and seeing our raucous reptile rip it up! We’ll be sure to see you next week, but until then keep those turtle cannons blazing!

-Jesse 

Hello there followers of the fearsome!

It’s our fifth dev-post on our exciting IOS game!  This week we’ll be checking out a super-cool weapon design! We ran into our tricky air-born foes quite often and needed a dedicated destroyer stat! So here’s the Shredder!  It fires little spinning devices that deploy blades and arc up towards the sky! After playing through our test levels it was noticed that the most fun times were when the player was having to deal with a variety of high and low foes. Making different weapon platforms like these will help add variety to the experience for sure!

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Page 5 of our art document takes us to some more ideas we had when coming up with game play elements, that and of course silly hats. Initially we thought that the platforms would be limited by weight and your beast would become more powerful as you progress through the game. We also played around with the idea of having sweet hats that would add bonuses to your destructive experience. These hats here cover everything from goring those guys that get to close, to having an extra shot from a cannon!

Thanks for dropping by and checking up on us! It’s always great to know that there are interested folks that like seeing weekly roundups!

-Jesse

Hey there fearless followers!

Looks like it’s the fourth instalment of the Beastly Dev-Blog! This week we show another tasty mechanic involving napalm peppers! We figured that it would be super neat to be able to feed your beast treats that would immediately effect the battlefield. So here we see that snacking on a spicy pepper can have devastating results that can get rid of those pesky swarming enemies! We’ve also been playing around with the idea of having a kitchen on the turtle’s back that can be feeding the turtle a random assortment of foods to mix up your gaming experience!

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Page 4 of our art doc tackles some materials and environmental structures. These bad guys sure are jerks but they need places to live! Most of these buildings won’t be used in the game but they get us thinking about what they could end up looking like. Initially we ran into some problems of our background buildings blending way to much into the gameplay area so we had to use a different process to separate them more which usually is a removal of saturation  and a quick bit of blur.

Another week down! We’ve gotten a ton of weapon platforms implemented and are looking into some tuning as well as level creation. We’ve also been playing around with some names as well as strategies to get the most amount of exposure that we can. It’s been a lot of fun and we are just getting started. So until next time, keep those turtle-cannons blazing!

-Jesse