Russian Subway Dogs - This Month in GIFs - Post Kickstarter Catchup

I've been posting progress on Russian Subway Dogs pretty regularly on twitter, but it can be hard to hunt them down if you miss them. I figure it'd be good to have them all in one place, so what I'm planning on doing is posting a big gallery round up of all the images approximately once a month. 

If you've been following the game you know our Kickstarter was unsuccessful despite a lot of really great press and response from fans. I wrote about our future plans in the final backer update and in this great interview from the final days of the campaign on ZAM. We're still sorting out how to continue work on the game and hopefully will have news on that soon.  In the meantime check out all these GIFs! 

I've added commentary to each image in the gallery and put them in rough chronological order.

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Chocolate is Poison for Dogs

While figuring out how the poison particles should look we ended up with these neat purple skull rainbows. 

The final particle effect. Sparser, bubbly with additive blending.

The chocolate eating little girl. If she sees the dog she hides it by stuffing it in her mouth. 

Example of the dog scaring up chocolate and eating it. Particles showing up properly on everything. 

Bears also get poisoned by chocolate (true, google it!). We'll need to eventually find a better way of tinting poisoned animals purple.

One of the major updates we've been working on is adding a poison status effect. Any animal that eats chocolate will become poisoned. Since we're always looking for ways to add more depth to our goofy simulation layer if that animal is not a dog and is roasted with a vodka explosion its meat will also be poisoned. 

Dogs and bears really can't eat chocolate, however we're debating internally whether animals that can eat chocolate like pigeons should still get poisoned and then what happens with their meat. Right now we're keeping it simple and consistent.

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Pigeons 

An early awkward attempt to  get a hovering animation by playing with the pigeon's gravity. Eventually got it right using TweenGMS instead.

Testing the player's ability to bark stun pigeons with food.

Early work getting crumb particles to show up. Looks more like crazy vomiting!

Closer to completion. The crumbs are coloured based on the food, but they fade into the background a bit too much.

Final crumbs with thin black outlines to make them stand out. I want to eventually add a  burst of these to other animals when they eat.

Our first, possibly only, air foe. I don't know if there are pigeons in the Moscow subway but we definitely have them in the subways here in Toronto.  These had a bunch of fun unplanned gameplay effects. Since they take a while to actually eat any food they catch they'll occasionally save you from losing your air combo if you can steal it back in time. 

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Alternate Player Characters and Guests

Question Hound from KC Green's Gunshow.

The Clawed Kitty, designed for a future They Bleed Pixels themed level. 

Clawed Kitty portrait

The player will be able to unlock and play as several alternate dogs, casts and other critters including guests from other games and comics. These even have unique "barks". 

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Misc Polish

Dogs now open their mouths when barking and when food is near. It's a small touch but it adds a lot of character. 

Hot food now smokes black briefly before crumbling to ash. Before this it wasn't always clear why it had disappeared. 

New pause menu!. The slick animations are driven by the TweenGMS tween engine. 

More tween magic driving the animated subways. We fade in a motion blurred version of the train based on it's speed. 

Finally some of the smaller touches we've been working on. We also added a whole bunch of new stations and improved the background artwork for the existing ones. You can see those on the Russian Subway Dogs webpage screenshot gallery.

Several of this weeks updates used TweenGMS a great free library for tweening animations in Game Maker Studio. If your looking to add tweens to your game I recommend both GMS and the slightly more feature rich TweenLine which is reasonably priced.  We went with TweenGMS because at the time TweenLine didn't support a few key features around rooms and permanence. Those issues have been fixed since (the dev is super active and responsive to feedback) and I can happily recommend either. You'll be seeing more slick UI animations in the future now that we have easy access to tweening.