Posted by Ross

Thu, 29th May 2014

Flame Over heats up

Hi everyone,

This week things are reaching a turning point in Flame Over. You might even say things are heating up (sorry, couldn’t resist). Team LJ has now completed all the assets needed to build our remaining levels, with the exception of a few specific mission-based goodies.  I can’t begin to tell you how exciting it is to have reached this point at last! Now there’s a ton of really cool stuff for us to create levels with, like this selection of lovely Factory machinery:

Above: Just a small selection of the contents of our Factory theme

What’s really great about having reached this point from the team’s perspective is that we are now freed up to spend time in the two most exciting areas of development: 1) adding more features to the game (we’ll be getting our hands dirty with player animations, new sounds and improved GUI and player feedback, etc) and 2) polishing and improving on the content we already have. Both of these things have been slowed up of late due to the ongoing optimisation of various level generation and fire control systems, plus of course the sheer amount of content we’re trying to pack in to the game.

Above: A Refinery room sample from our Lab theme. Chemicals will bring their own hazards…

Flame Over is a game that features WAY more content than we’ve ever included in a project before. It’s so awesome to have reached a point where we can concentrate on making new level content and on really getting the basic elements of gameplay feeling right. I am super excited to see what happens in the next 2-3 weeks as stuff that we’ve not looked at in ages will be updated, plus we’ll be adding as-yet-unimplemented features, all of which will hopefully bring us up to that next level of quality that we’re striving for!

Above: A Chemical Storage room. You can be sure that tackling a fire in here will be a tough ask!

So, we can now (kind of) see the light at the end of the tunnel and our core game will be complete soon, but in the meantime there’s still a ton more back-end stuff to be done. Then, it’s just a question of polishing and balancing and getting the game fit to publish.

All of the above does mean we’ll be able to show some actual footage in the near (ish) future, so get ready to have your gaming fires ignited!

Until next week, flame on!

Al