Russian Subway Dogs - GIF dump #2!

We've been past due for another bunch of glorious Russian Subway Dogs progress GIFs!  But first some good news.

Russian Subway Dogs has received an OMDC (Ontario Media Development Corporation) grant to help with production costs! While it doesn't mean we have full funding for every aspect of the game it helps a lot and means we can safely continue working on our odd little doggo game full time! Can't express how grateful we are for this opportunity! 

Second we'll be showing Russian Subway Dogs at PAX East in Boston and a few events at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. If you're a journalist attending either event and want to preview the game and learn more about Russian Subway Dogs give us a shout. 

Now on to the GIFs,
WARNING: there are a lot of them so it may take some time to load!

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The Many Uses of the Hot Sauce Power Up

KC Green's Question Hound eating hot sauce and barking fire!

Juggling hot sauce ups its multiplier for longer lasting fire barking, or you can let it hit the ground to create a 4x fire hazard.

A rival doberman has eaten the hotsauce, it can now bark fire just like the player!

Bears don't bark, but they do get a a double range fire slash with hot sauce!

Pigeons + hot sauce = fire bombs from above!

Our first power up is hot sauce, granting the subway dog the ability to bark flames! As the gallery shows it also has several other uses, not all of them helpful!  Creating a unique effect for every type of wildlife takes time but we think it's worth it for the variety and depth it adds to the game!

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Message from the Proletaricat!

Had a lot of fun animating this squash and stretchy talk cycle. 

We also have special cat expressions for failure and success. Hoping to get these animated soon!

Success has the flashiest animation, with hand animated shine fx and lot of exagerated tweens. 

Once we got missions working we realized we needed a high contrast fast moving effect when the Proletaricat spoke. 

Some of the missions "dare" you to perform moves that break your combo or make the game harder in return for big points.

The Proletaricat can now talk to the player, giving tips and, more importantly, little bonus missions during endless play. There's a pretty complex back end behind this, letting us do things like cue up a series of messages, trigger text effects and take over the otherwise random, procedural passenger spawning system to deliver special hand tuned challenges. 

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They Bleed Pixels Bonus Level

Normal passengers won't be in this level but it's neat that they can still interact with Squidy Things correctly!

After some experimenting we decided this level should centre around bouncing bombs around before they explode.

The They Bleed Pixels level not only has you playing as a demon kitty, but it also adds enemies from They Bleed Pixels and some new twists to the standard gameplay.

This level isn't fully playable in the game yet but it's close!

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Dying Now 100% More Stylish and Less Abrupt!

Not only is your little pupper corpse still effected by explosions and bears, but we actually boost the physics a bit!

Up until recently, losing a game was super abrupt. As soon as your health ticked down to zero (it's constantly dropping so you have to keep eating) it would switch to the game over screen. We wanted to not only stay on the game screen after death but also give it some style.  

There's actually a lot going on here to give the ending visual impact:

• Flash screen white for a few frames
• Remove control of character and play a death animation once they hit the ground
• Instantly slow down the game speed at the moment of death, then ramp back up to full speed.
• Fade in an additive red tint.
• Scale in animated "game over" text. 
• Keep the simulation running throughout and boost impact of any hits to the dog "corpse" (see the second GIF in the gallery).

I'm pretty happy with the results! 

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New Menus for PAX South

While we aren't ready to do the final title screen yet, we needed something nicer looking for our PAX South demo. Since we also had just added our full roster of playable guest dogs and cats we also needed a start game menu for selecting them. 

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Misc Updates and Additions!

Some early work for the campaign mode. Clock can count down and warn the players when the final train is arriving.

Cat fans are now covered, the Proletaricat is playable and even meows in Russian!

A recent tweak to the bark physics. When players are on the ground, barks will always angle deflected objects up so that it's easier to juggle them. 

We're experimenting with different bark effects to make it clearer at which angle objects will be deflected. 

Alina Sechkin's been doing some amazing backgrounds, I felt these mosaics deserved some close ups. 

Of course there have also been a ton of little individual additions and tweaks, only some of which are covered here. 

Hope you enjoyed this animated overview of what we've been up to! If you want to receive these doggy update GIFs in real time follow us on twitter.