99 Levels To Hell enters Steam Greenlight

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“99 Levels To Hell” Starts Alpha Funding

The game has been in pre-alpha for about a month and we are proud to finally release the Alpha.

The Alpha features:

• 1 Pet
• 2 Boss Fights
• 2 Dungeons
• 20 Levels
• 5 Enemies
• 9 Weapons
• Gold
• Bombs
• Shop
• Portals

You can support the further development of the game by buying early access.

The Alpha is live on http://underground.indiecity.com/game/99-Levels-To-Hell

99 Levels To Hell (pre-alpha build 0.0.3)

I've been really busy this week so here is a new build!

http://www.indiedb.com/games/99-levels-to-hell/downloads

Change-log Pre-Alpha 0.0.3:

Enemies:

• Fixed "gets stuck"
• New animations
• New timed shooting and animations
• New Sounds

New Lighting (optimized):

Level Spawn:

• You wouldn't get the same level in the first 10 level
• Added two more levels
• Added more special chests and shops (higher chance of getting new weapons and protectors.)

First Pet/Protector:

• RedOrb, protects you and kills enemies on hit

Art:

• More art for the first Dungeon "The Castle"
• Fixed resolution, Barrels, Boxes, Weapons
• Added shadow, Ladder, Pillars

Weapons:

• BlueStaff got bouncing bullet

First Boss fight:

• Knight On Wheels!!

Build:

• Window mode and more resolutions
• The game ends at level 10.

See how we build levels for "99 Levels To Hell"

The editor is almost done, just added portals.

We made this short video showing how we build levels.




Follow development closer here

New game in development!

This will be good news to the fans of "Angry Viking". Zaxis Games is starting development of "99 Levels To Hell" a bloody DungeonCrawler/Shooter with roguelike elements.

Shoot and dig your way out from a buried castle. The only way out is down, through HELL.

The game will feature:
10 different environments.
20+  bossfights.
100+ levels that spawn at radom.
50+ monsters.
50+ powers ups and weapons
2 player on one screen (old school)
Shops, portals and more..

More info at http://99levelstohell.blogspot.com/

Evolution of a fairy!

When we started development of “Harry The Fairy”, the game was called “You Got Snail” - yeah what a title, right.

The first ideas of the game was to make rather complicated puzzle game with a snail.

The idea was that the snail could swallow objects and take on the objects abilities, or spit the object out and make them stick together.

What we hadn't figured out, when designing the game, was the controls. We were pretty new at designing games for handheld devices, we had only done one title before Angry Viking, which was a joystick and button game.

Our controls were way to complicated to implement on iPhone, and when we had a working prototype, no one could figure out how to play the game.

So we went back, way back, and started with the basic design. Move controls, making the snail fly gave us a lot of freedom. We could use the phones accelerometer to control the snail, so when you tilt the device the snail moves in the direction you tilt.  

This proved to work great. We still wanted the snail to be able to pick up objects and interact with the environment.

But after playing the game with only the move control touching the screen to pickup objects seamed some how unnatural. It was more fun to push things around.

So we kept what worked and killed what didn't, the snail.

The reason for having a snail as protagonist were gone, so we changed setting and hero.

Introducing Harry The Fairy.

Harry is a small forrest fairy, his friends gets kidnapped by some evil machines and dragged under ground.

Harry went through several passes, from a simple ball with wings, through a real hero with a hat, till the final Harry, a happy slightly scared green fairy with butterfly wings.

It was important for us to keep Harry a bit nervous - he is travelling the some pretty scary caves.

First we removed the small wings to give him more room to move. But it was weird to see a green "ball" fly around, and the character didn't really make any sense, so we gave him big butterfly wings. The butterfly wings help Harry stand out from the surrounding environment, and give him a nice silhouette you can recognize even when he is scaled way down.

Harry uses his wand to free his friends from the cages they are trapped in at the end of each level

So how does Harry interact with the environment?

The first element we added was the Barrel and the Breakable Door.

The hero can push the barrel around, if the barrel hits a breakable door the weight of the barrel forces the door open.

This gives way to the first few puzzles, really simple once.

Find barrel push on to door, escape and save friends.

To add even more complexity to the puzzles we added the Hatch.

The hatch works like a door, you can push it from underneath. This way we close off certain parts of the level.

The hatch can also be used to guide the barrels towards a breakable door.

We now added the first real enemy, the Drill. The drill can destroy barrels.

That's all for now, the next post will go even deeper into these game elements and tell how we used them to create puzzles. 

And show more elements of the game.

Thanks for reading.

/Bo

The Art Of The Fairy, Environment

Harry The Fairy is an 2d adventure, action, puzzle game for iPhone, iPad and Android.

To render the 2d graphics and help us make sprite atlases in unity3d, we used Sprite Manager 2 from http://www.anbsoft.com/.

This is a short run-through of how we did the environment graphics for the game.

The game is set in the caves under a forrest. Here our hero has to save his friends from the evil machines.

The idea was that the hero shouldn't feel at home in the caves, he is clearly out of his element.

The caves are meant to be frightening without being too scary.

We wanted the game to look hand-drawn more than 3d or realistic, so all the concepts and art pieces are painted in photoshop.

This early concept shows a dark and gloomy cave. Not many colors and a bit cold.

This captures the feeling we wanted pretty good and became the most importent concept drawing.

But before we could design the final pieces we had to decide on the shapes of the the walls.

We had to find some shapes that could shape the caves organically and overlap without it being to obvious, where they overlapped each other.

It looked great, but it was to dark and colorless.

We wanted to emphasize the difference between nature and the evil machines a bit more.

So the environment needed more color and the machines should stay almost colorless.

The machines used only one “warning” color, yellow.

We made the walls look more like earth/dirt, but still with some gray stones. We also made objects, such as roots, grass and mushrooms to use for decoration.

The focus was to make an organic environment, that looked natural and not made of boxes.

Each of our two walls had their own mesh collider, to make the interaction with the environment natural.

The deeper you go underground the more dangerous the environment gets. Here lava-walls were created from the same shape as the dirt-walls making it possible for us to use the same mesh colliders.

The machines were made of small parts put together to create wheels, levers, doors and hatches.

As a way to close off the cave from the parallax background, we used a dark piece of stonewall. This way we could make some areas seem like narrow tunnels and others like big open caves.

All these elements was build into two sprite atlases.

Finally we added a dark shadow mesh around the level to close off the cave.

I hope you found this useful, feel free to email me with questions.

/Bo