On top of having a few different stages for those of you who already played Alpha 1, it also has these major changes:

• All scenes now have the mushroom scoring pick ups, which were present only on some scenes before. Quite a few are off the beaten path to encourage the player to try alternate paths.
• A proper user interface. The tip at the bottom is likely to go away once I integrate the tutorials.
• You now have a limited number of lives per level.
• It’ll show your score, corruption percentage cleaned and other values at the end of each level.
• Progress tracking, which will be displayed in the stage loader.
• New visual hints on elements that redirect a character, like cannons and fences.
• We have removed all of the placeholder visual effects, polished the music themes, improved camera zoom, added new sound effects and a whole host of other small changes.

Drop by Twitter and tell us what you think!

New closed gate effect…

… as well as an open variant:

We realized we needed better indicators on which way the characters will run when they encounter a scene element, particularly on busy scenes, so we’ve added some arrows to those elements that will alter their direction:

There’s also some new effects on the teleporter well, including a nice satisfying splash when the characters enter it,

This coming week we’ll replace the in-stage user interface for something cleaner, as well as add the final particle effects instead of some of the placeholders.

Here’s a sample of how the first scene looked on the alpha 1 I released last week:

And this is how it looks now:

Not only I like the subtle changes in tone better, but by virtue of it being mostly unlit (except for shadows) it is much faster than before, which will be a boon to get this running on devices with a slower GPU like the iPad. Two more examples:

Old:

New:

Old:

New:

You’ll notice we also got a new model for the obstacles, to make the scenes look cleaner, plus some new tiles for the whole stage.

This is really shaping up.

Update: We have concluded the first round of public alpha testing. Send us an e-mail if you’re like us to notify you of future releases!

You’ll notice it’s very light on explanations, other than a 1-liner tip on the top left. That’s intentional. I want to hear how understandable the concepts are, and how well they come across from the stage behavior.

It contains 11 stages from the game, showing some of the gameplay elements and should give you a good idea of what the stages are like. There is no completion screen yet, so once you’re done with a stage, just move onto the next one.

It’s very much a work in progress and still contains some placeholder elements and missing effects, but the gameplay is there. We’d love to hear what you think.

Which will have its own elements, challenges, and end boss:

We’re of course also adding its own type of trees and vegetations to be corrupted:

You can see our video previews here.

Update: We’ve finally settled on the tone for the corrupted tiles on the mountain levels.

And since I forgot to add them last week to the site, here are the power ups in their “natural environment” (but still lacking particle effects):

You may also want to head over to reddit for an on-going discussion and more sample images.

In the game, you help those little guys get cleanse the world of corruption by finding the pieces of the Alatuir stone and using it to cleanse the stages. They’re well-meaning but not very sharp, so you’ll need to lead them to avoid hazards, evil creatures and other dangers, while using contraptions scattered around.

We still need to add proper particle effects plus some sounds, so it’s very much a work in progress, but we’ll have an updated video soon.

More details along with a video later.

What they used to look like:

While we liked the previous versions by themselves, once we put them in the stage with all the other elements they tended to be too visually busy, and tended to draw the player’s attention away from the stage.

And here they are, already animated in-game:

The model:

We have also added bases to the hexes, to change a bit the sort of floating look that we previously had.

Mr. HintFish, ready for his close up:

Neutral good guys you can rescue:

And of course the baddies will sometimes block your way:

This how the screenshots looked two months ago:

And I took this one today:

• The stages now are not fully corrupted from the get go, and instead get corrupted gradually via a fluid mechanic.
• We replaced those ugly placeholder brambles with properly modeled and animated enemies.
• We have nicely shaded the fences and other elements.
• There are more decorations now, like the corruptible trees.
• The exit gate is now well shaded, animated and has an alternate corrupted texture.
• We have more enemies, like the corrupted oak on that scene.

On top of that, we have also progressed on the gameplay,

• Playtesting! Nothing quite like the experience of grabbing a few strangers who have never seen the game before and ask them to play it without any other knowledge.
• There are a bunch of all-new stages to play in.
• We have tightened the stages significantly.
• The number of guys you have to take to the exit has been trimmed down, and we’re giving them more individual personalities.
• We have discarded and adjusted a number of mechanics which were confusing playtesters.
• We have quite a few more animations, like those I linked to last week.
• The input mechanism is being improved and is now a lot more fluid.

Plus a host of other little details that we haven’t showcased yet. I have to say these have been some very productive two months and I’m rather proud of how it is progressing.

A short animation showcase of our little heroes. Sometimes Unity is a bit retarded about displaying the webplayer, so you may need to click the image then immediately come back.

This is done with a simple component which collects animation clips and random odds of playing them.

As the clips are played, the odds are balanced towards the ones that have been ignored.

The agent itself is using a behavior tree created with AngryAnt Behave, although this is of course only a showcase of the default do nothing case.

Currently when a radar detects a collider in the layers where it is expected to look, it then goes up the transform hierarchy and tracks all DetectableObject components in the tree. This means that if for some reason you have a tree with multiple detectable objects (vehicles and obstacles), some of which are beyond the radar’s detection radius, they will still be added to the list of items to evaluate.

This seems a bit wasteful to me, but otherwise I have to force people to just have the Vehicle/ObstacleData in the same transform as the relevant collider. Doing it this way allows people to accommodate to whatever style they feel suits their project best, and as long as you are aware of the possible side effects, not shoot yourself in the foot.

During this review I also found a bug with this process, which is that only the first collider found on the hierarchy was being considered. If you’re using such a set up, this is already fixed on the radar from the experimental branch.