Reflex – Dev Diary 20 – Videos

Work continues on the level designs for world 3 this week, but I also took some time to put together an ARSoftware video ident that will play at the start of the game, and I’ve also upgraded the title menu screen.

So, first up the actual game content. Level 3.3 has been added to the game (awaiting testing) and I’ve sketched up levels 3.4 to 3.9. These later levels take longer to put together because you want to make them harder than the previous world and include new challenges and all those things take time to work out and place.

Next up was the Title Menu screen of the game. Previously this was a black screen with the missile and game title at the top of the screen (exactly as it appeared in the original version – in fact it was same assets) and the menu items at the bottom of the screen. What I wanted to do was make it a little more personal, so I hit on the idea of adding in a background that changes depending on the highest achieved world in the game. A kind of, ‘This is where we were last time’, sort of thing. When the game is first started the background will show the space station that is used for training in world 1, when the player unlocks world 2 the background will change to show that planet, and so on. The game title and missile have been recreated so that I could animate them in and add a nice particle stream in the missile trail to give it some extra movement. Take a look and see what you think:

The next side project was to put together a logo ident video to show before the game starts. I’ve had an idea in my mind for months and months but wasn’t sure the best approach to put it together. I was going to use GameMaker Studios Sequence feature to build it but at the moment, for some very strange reason, they do not allow you to animate sprite opacity in sequences – very odd, but hopefully they’ll add that in at some point. Anyway, I ended up deciding to put it together as a video in HitFilm Express (free video editor). This is a superb video editor that allows you to create all sorts of visual effects with 2d elements. Because I already had the idea in my mind I just had to create the elements (I used Affinity Designer to create the final screen) and I then exported each element separately so I could bring them into the video editor and animate them. And here is the final result: