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!

The Creation of Mona Levela

We have tons of cool community maps, many of which can be found in the Cobalt Vault, but our favorite game of guns has its share of official maps as well. Fact: They look pretty good! But how are they made? I’ve managed to dig up a few pictures from the process.

Here’s a level that our beard overlord jeb designed:

It has quite a few doors!

While these locales may be prettier than the scraps of mapping I’ve attempted myself, they’re nowhere near the quality level of finished maps. What happens next?

Kinten, the great art magician, steals the map and beautifies it. With his pen and Photoshop, he takes a close look at the map and crafts custom tiles specifically tailored to it. See those doors? I don’t, because they just got changed.

There’s a lot more where it comes from! Click this for more! And this! Another! Even more! Interesting, I say! …Oh, there’s one more.

Throw these in the mix and touch it up a bit, and you get…

Is this even the same level?! ‘Cause it’s on a whole different level of quality! Get it? Level? Never mind.

This map isn’t in the game just yet, but if you manage to break free of the state of trance induced by its coolness, you’ll probably notice the level name—and prefix. It’s a Puzzle map! There are currently none in the game, but I checked up on the Challenge submode, and surprisingly, it’s a game mode featuring puzzles! The details aren’t completely decrypted yet, but it’ll feature a different way of racking up points than we’re used to.

In Other Nets

Our frenemies at Oxeye Labs like to keep logs of everything they do there, which is quite fortunate for us, but thewreck’s log was quite short this week. He’s been doing a bit of field work at Fatshark, and there are very good news:

Networking! Progress!

Nothing is certain yet, but it seems like the shark will be getting online multiplayer, and if the shark gets networking, the PC & Mac versions of the game will too. Hopefully, we’ll all be able to roll around together someday!

A Cup of Community

I mentioned the glorious map sharing site known as Cobalt Vault earlier, which is a great way to fill up that User Maps list in–game, but it can be hard to keep track of all the new maps and works in progress. Fear not—Janeator is here to save the day with a new Twitter account! Follow @CobaltMapmaking for the mintiest of minty maps!

For more community news, the Cobalt Forum Content Team has just gotten a new member! FabiotheTurtle has written his first post, featuring the brilliant Multikill mod which has just been updated to work with the newest edition of Cobalt. It’s one of my favorite mods, so go check it out!

Two weeks ago, we took a look at a cool map. That was fun; let’s do it again! However, I won’t be the one doing the talking here. One of the members of the Cobalt Investigation Agency may or may not have threatened to publish those pictures of me dancing to Caramelldansen which he may or may not have snatched, and to avoid the absolute annihilation of the human race, I’m going to let him write a few words each week. My dear friends, I bring you the self–proclaimed Duke of Cobalt, and the map he’ll enlighten us about is…

“Overall a very fancy ‘n very compact map. A bit fruity with all the shadowy surfaces. Random loot is lel, makes map control hard. Good thing I’m the duke of map control.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. It feels like there’s a tad bit too much Phaser action going on, but overall it’s a very cool map with interesting gameplay!

That’s all for today, folks! Come back next Friday for more metallic babble!

…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.

There’s No Eridium Here

The developers recently revealed that we’re not getting in–game level sharing in the near future, if at all. While that’s sad and all, this community isn’t a place where we cry. It’s a place where we don’t give a single drop of care and go fix the problem ourselves—at least if your username is Northcode. In the ancient days of the early Cobalt alpha, we had the Cobalt File Database. Now, Northcode brings you:

The Cobalt Vault! You can check it out right now at cobaltvault.no!

The site is still being developed, but so is Cobalt. The beast is armed and ready to snatch your maps out of your metal paws, and if you ask nicely, it may even give you a few to download. See that Cobalt folder in your Documents? If it doesn’t already contain a folder called ‘maps’, go create it right now. Put stuff in there, and it’ll appear in User Maps in the game! I’m quite fond of magic tricks.

As of my writing, the Vault holds 26 projects, of which community member Janeator owns around 58. Got maps? We’d love to play them! If you need a map making crash course, FabiotheTurtle got you covered with his text and video tutorials!

Got feedback about the site? Here’s the forum thread. You can also accidentally run into the creator through IRC in #cobalt on EsperNet.

Videos Galore

I like videos. As friends, though. We saw a lot of cool ones appear on the magical intertubes through the past few weeks. Here are some of my favorites.

First up, one dosis of what–am–I–looking–at–ohthat’sfunny by the one and only DolanCZ:

Some sort of magic barrier is preventing me from embedding videos, so you’ll get a link. Here.

Marvelous. Simply marvelous. See that piece of montage parody, though? I want more.

Pickselate delivers.

And now for something completely different.

Cobalt doesn’t have that many derivative works just yet, but Librus is in the process of cooking up something in Flash– It moves! There’s not much yet, but he recently showed us a test animation or two, and the style is already giving me major nostalgia trips back to my childhood Flashventures. Good luck with your animation brewing, Librus.

Learn to Fly

Okay, that wasn’t completely different. We need something crazy like flying around with a supercharged Phaser—I didn’t make that up. Isogash did.

He’s making a new modding API, and he wants you to know that Cobalt modding is the easy kind of wizard magic. To prove that, he made the DeathPhaser mod which beefs up the Phaser a bit.

You can find the source of the black magic on the forums, and if you want to get technical, download the mod files and place them in daisyMoon\controls\ in your Cobalt game directory (You may have to create the controls folder yourself.).

It’s A Map!

The Hoarding Helixian Hero of Hope runs on delicious bytes of data, and I ran all out of them. In my quest for a refill, I stumbled upon a fresh map—not the treasury kind, but a battlefield! Turns out it’s cursed with a spell that makes me share it here. There are many excellent–looking maps I haven’t had the chance to play yet, but perhaps we’ll look at those another day. For now, behold: It’s a Deathmatch collaboration between Janeator and phaser master Isogash, and it’s called Abandon Hold!

You can find the Cobalt Vault project page here.

I like this map because it does what I expect of a good battlefield: It has areas for different types of brawling, a good selection of power weapons, and it makes sense.

These two fellow community crafters did a pretty good job, but if you truly want to earn my love, make parkour maps. More parkour maps. Mó̷̧r҉̨e̸ p͏͘͜͜a̷̡r̷͢͞͡k͜o͢u̴͠r̷̶̛̕ m͎̕ą͈̘̋̊̂̃̏̉p͚͆͘s̖͎ͦ͊͗̂̓͑. We need them.

Until Next Time

This week’s report ended up being pure community content, but as I’m getting back in the groove, I’ll hopefully be able to snatch something fancy for you next time. Until then, keep on rolling!

Happy birthday, Kinten. We demand cake!

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

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

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!

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