There's a lot of new content that we need to keep you updated on. It's a been a very busy few weeks for us with creating more artwork, 3D rebuilds, item pickups, and more! We also secured our spot at the Phoenix Comicon Convention happening May 25-28! We are extremely excited to have our own table there to promote our tiny, but growing gaming company. Make sure you stop by our booth to come say hey and check out our products and maybe play some Frank from Earth!

As we stated, we will be having our own table at the Phoenix Comicon Convention this year. About a month ago, my local IGDA chapter was promoting an indie room at Phoenix Comicon. After sending a few messages, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get a table. I decided to take a shot at sending the Phoenix Comicon’s Exhibitor Hall Manager an email in hopes of securing a spot. I was happily surprised to find that they had relatively affordable booths available. I immediately jumped on the opportunity and reserved a booth for the convention.

After our booth was secured, I informed the team on the great news. This really started to put everyone into gear and focus on getting our game ready. We are now working rigorously around the clock to make sure we have a Frank from Earth beta for everyone to get their hands on and enjoy what we've been working on the past year. It's a very exciting project and game we love, so we cannot wait to share this with you all and receive some feedback on FFE.

Here are the Frank from Earth updates we have been working on over the past few weeks:

Environment Rebuilt in 3D

Enemies Rebuilt in 3D

Melee Combat Started

Weapon Pickups Added (Basic Gun and Placeholder Basic Sword)

Item Pickups Added (Bones, Hearts, Cat Tags)

Unity Humanoid IK Rigging Integrated into Frank

Tile Intro Animation

Rough Storyboard Created

Environment Updates

When Liz joined the team, she told me "NO 3D". Now all she wants to do is 3D! Liz has been hard at work creating our Origami World map in 3D. Here is a sample of some of the assets she's been working on.

We also created a little intro sequence. It's not completed, but is a good start.

Enemy Updates

With one of our artists transitioning to a new work location causing them to spend less time on our models and PC around the corner, we made the decision to shift our enemy art to 3D. Our 3D artist, Wes, was up to the challenge and hit the ground running. He created these initial cat enemy models in a very short time.

Here is a side by side with the old 2D cat and the new 3D one.

Additionally, there were updates to the enemy AI. We now have a very basic system for making decisions. To test I've imported the new plain cat models and created some standard cats.

Red (Shooter) - Gets near player and shoots

Gray (Standard) - Moves towards player

Pink (Blocker) - Moves near the player, but does not affect the player

Green (Rando) - Moves around at random

Player Updates

There are now weapon pickups that the player can walk over to unlock new weapons. Here's the initial look. The sword is a placeholder from this Unity asset: Blade and Sword Pack.

We also added some item pickups! These are created from Unity primitives and will need updating. When I'm working on new features, I'll try to do it with my own programmer art before putting tasks on our artists.

Lastly for items, I created a skeleton system and the cat's now drop their skeleton bones that can be collected by Frank!

Melee Combat

What I'm most excited about in this round of updates is the new melee system. It's inspired by the mechanics in SWORDY. It still needs to be cleaned up, but it is functional and more importantly, fun :).

With this physics based melee system came the need for inverse kinematics. Using the standard humanoid rig built into Unity, I could get Franks rig configured. We can now do foot placement, look position, hand position, and all kinds of neat stuff! Here is a test with Frank where he gets just a little stabby.

Storyboard

Lastly, we have a new story board that I would love to share. This is the basic intro to the game which goes as follows:

NASA Monkey (soon to be launched into space) escapes from facility. Office pug at NASA is snatched up to take monkeys place. Pug is suited up for space travel. During travel, a "COSMIC PORTAL" rips in space Exit portal in foreign solar system. Test cosmic drive is shattered and pieces are scattered throughout planets. Frank must land and explore to retrieve cosmic drive pieces in attempt to return home!

As always, thanks for following along! If you want updates when we post our blogs, please join our community!