It’s art time!

Last week, I promised to steal Oxeye’s level art creation process. I can’t believe it, but the lab technicians actually discovered my intentions! They hired a team to counter–hack. Turns out they’re pretty cool people, so we joined forces and formed the Cobalt Investigation Agency! Comrades, get out your inner Leonardo. We’re going to the gallery.

…Just pretend that was cool, okay?! What do you think I am, a wandering wizard of words or something?

First, here’s my favorite piece of fan art as warm–up!

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The Hero returns.

…The Hope? The Hoarder? I need some sort of code name. The Helixian?

I’ve been absent for a while! After my vacation secret alpine mission, I was met by some mysterious men with lab coats and syringes! I’m not really sure who they were or what they did, but I seemed to catch some sort of illness after their experiment!

I’m getting back in action, however. As promised, there’s some community craft in this week’s report. Tons of it. Am I forgetting something important? Definitely not. Let’s play the community game.

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One of our forum members, known as “Doublevil,” has made a pretty rad mod for Harvest. It plays more like a standard tower defense game, with upgradeable towers and enemies attacking your base in a straight line. Doublevil has put a lot of effort into it,  you should definitely check it out! You find it here:

http://www.oxeyegames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&p=3674

Some highlights:

• 17 different towers
• Upgrade menu (with custom-built buttons)
• Nice use of the rush and threat level GUI items
• Some clever particle effects (I first thought it was custom graphics)
• Clean and pretty Lua script, you should definitely take a look

The mod suffers from a crash bug, unfortunately. It occurs sometimes when you upgrade towers, and is likely one of the bugs I’ve fixed for the long lost 1.17 patch… and I still don’t know when we’ll be able to release it…

/ jeb

Happy new year everybody!

As you already know, Oxeye is run more or less like a hobby, so things get done in the order they are fun and we have energy and time to make them. That means we’ve accumulated a lot of unfinished projects (because finishing projects is not as fun as starting them), so I’ll begin this year with a small list of stuff that aren’t “done” yet, and what our “plans” for them are.

• The Harvest 1.17/1.18 Patch – I still intend to finish and release this patch, but unfortunately the Mac OS X version just keeps crashing on me. I’ve spent a whole weekend cursing at xcode to no avail, and I’m not looking forward to wasting another weekend on the same problem. You could say that I’m waiting for some kind of divine intervention, and who can tell when that is going to happen…
  Also, I want to add more features to this patch before I release it. I realized that it would probably be possible to allow mods for other game modes than creative, as long as I make sure that all “cheating” methods are disabled. That would be quite nice, since it would allow people to make user interface mods and so on.
• Harvest Lua Documentation – I started moving our forum documentation into our Oxeye wiki, but that quickly became really boring, so it’s also unfinished. I’m not really planning to finish it anytime soon, but I’ll make sure that whenever I change or add stuff to the mod system, the documentation on the wiki will be up to date.
• jeb <3 RTS – The RTS Design article series I did (over a year ago now) is also unfinished. I think the reason I stopped working on it was because I had already written my most important points, and the remaining articles were derailing a little too much. I also got some critisism that my articles were too Starcraft’y, so I need to take one step back and look at the subject in a more general way.
• thewreck’s Retrospective – I’m not the only one here who isn’t finishing projects Daniel Brynolf, who is better known as thewreck, has made a lot of small games in MMF over the years, and was writing an article series about them. The first article is here, http://www.oxeyegames.com/thewreck-in-retrospect-part-1/, but the second one is still a draft in our wordpress backend. Pontus (Kinten) even wagered 500 kr (roughly $60) that thewreck would never write the second article. He said, “the money is safe with me,” and so far it looks like he’s right.

So there it is. I’ll make a new year promise that during 2010, we’ll start more projects that we won’t finish!

/jeb

It’s time for another “Harvest: Massive Encounter” update. The new version is numbered 1.14, and is a non-crucial patch that adds mod support to the Creative Mode. We have started a whole new section on the forums related to Harvest modding, head over there now and check out all the mods that are being made! The forum section also contains all the necessary information needed to get started with making your own mod. For example, check out How To Create Mods or How To Create Custom Graphics to get you going. All mods are open source and easily changeable in any text editing tool.

The patch contains the following mods:

• Emulate Normal Mode: A mod that works just like the Normal Mode.
• Emulate Rush Mode: A mod that works just like Rush Mode.
• Emulate Wave Mode: A mod that works just like Wave Mode.
• Starhawk: A mod that allows the player to send in a small fighter jet with custom graphics by entering “starhawk” in the input field that appears after pressing Enter ingame.
• Super Gun: A mod that allows the player to upgrade defense towers into bullet spewing super guns! These guns don’t require energy, but instead eat credits when they need to refill ammo.
• Infinite Credits: A mod that gives the player infinite credits.

Here’s the Mac OS X updater for registered users (2.6 MB). Open the dmg and run the patcher, then simply drag and drop the Harvest application on to the patcher’s window.

The Windows update is available here (1.3 MB). This patcher requires a previous installation of Harvest, simply use the same application folder when you run it.

Happy Modding!

As some of you might already know, we’ve been working (experimenting) with adding Lua to Harvest. The mods allow you to alter the game rules in Creative Mode, and can be used to add new effects, triggers and even gameplay elements. While there still is a lot of work to be done (such as modifying alien AI), it’s already running nicely.

The mod support has its own forum category, where you will be able to find documentation and other people’s mods. So far we’ve released a “beta patch” for those who wants to try the mods or make their own ones. You find the patch, and some basic example mods, here: http://www.oxeyegames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=246

/jeb