Russian Subway Dogs - GIF dump #3!

It's time again for a big Russian Subway Dogs GIF dump, collecting progress animations from our twitter and giving them a bit more context. Lots of polish, new features, and funny bugs to check out!

We're also taking Russian Subway Dogs on tour this summer, hitting Devcom and Gamescom in Cologne, Germany as well as PAX West in Seattle, USA. More info at the bottom of the post!

If you're a journalist attending any of these events 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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New Wildlife: Subway Elks!

Bears and elk can both stun each other resulting in some fun interactions.

Elk will also stun each other if they collide! This still needs a nice impact effect to really sell it.

Like all wildlife elk will get buffed up if they eat power ups. Here an elk has flaming antlers from eating hot sauce. The orange particle effects is our old buff effect, as you'll see below we've now replaced it with a palette cycle.

Our newest wildlife addition is the mighty Subway Elk. These appear rearing at the side of the screen and if they aren't stopped in time will run across the platform, stunning or eliminating everything in their path. From a game design perspective they also act as a great way for us to clear the stage when things get a bit too packed.

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New Commuter & Food: The Fish Wielding Babushka

BAM! That's what you get for barking at old ladies dog!

Because most other commuters keep walking when they see the dog, the babushka looked like she was performing a funky gliding dance when we first imported her into the game.

Uhhhhh....

While most commuters will ignore you if you bark in front of them, babushkas will slam you hard with their fish attack, making them the only commuter that can actively harm you. We will be using this to our advantage in the game's campaign mode to teach players to bark behind commuters and not in front of them. The babushkas' fish are so fresh, you'll need to cook them with a quick vodka explosion before you can eat them. 

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Coffee Power up and Slow Motion

First crack at slow mo and our pupper is jumping like it's a subway station on the moon!

Interesting dive kick bug caused by triggering slow mo mid jump.

Unlike other buffs, slow mo affects everything on screen, so we had to come up with a full screen effect to convey that.

Experimenting with longer trails... this one was definitely a bit much. 

Final effect, including the buff timer icon and pulsing palette animation.

We are currently implementing our second power up, coffee, which causes a bullet-time style slow mo effect when eaten by the player. Eventually it will also boost the speed of any wildlife that eats it. Getting this right has involved a lot of trial and error, and you all reap the benefits in the form of funky dog physics GIFs. 

Because this power up affects everything on screen, we came up with a full screen visual effect to clearly signal this. This effect is actually built from a whole bunch of smaller elements:

• Flickering blue tint with an additive blend.
• Animated speed lines / VHS tracking effect on top and bottom of screen. These are actually just white tiled textures overlaid on top of each other and scrolling at different speeds.
• Motion trail ghosting for all affected objects. 
• Pulsing blue animated palette on the player.
• Blue glowing motion trail following the player. 

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Text Style Updates

New hunger up text. Not only does it look a lot better, but it also uses shapes and colour to mirror the hunger meter at the bottom of the screen that it affects.

While updating the animation for scoring indicators we ended up with this weird perminent scrawl all over the screen. 

Previously these score indicators would just move up at a linear rate and fade away. Applying tweens to their motion made the movement nice and snappy.

We've been doing a lot of little updates to the text effects in the game. Most of the sound effects are now in actual Russian, and we've updated the look and animation of others. 

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Misc Updates and Additions!

New and improved poison effect, including some snappy tweening on the skull and crossbones. 

Fire bark buff now has a nice golden pulsing palette animation instead of the weird fire particle effect we were using before. It's now much easier to understand what's happening!

Vodka bottles now rotate as they fly through the air. Notice the changes in speed and direction based on the bottle's movement.

Improved explosion with ray particles. We've actually added a bit more polish to the explosion visuals since this GIF was made.

Along with adding new features, we're constantly polishing and improving the existing art and visual effects.

Vodka bottles now spin in the air, making them easier to make out when lots of other items are flying around. While it may appear that fancy physics are involved, it's all a trick! We started out by drawing a full rotation of the bottle by hand (hardware rotation of pixel art is notoriously ugly.) We then play it forwards or backwards depending on its horizontal direction, and alter the frame rate based on the speed at which it's moving. The result looks really great and has no effect on the player's ability to maneuver the bottle. 

One major update has been integrating the Retro Palette Swapper library from the Game Maker Marketplace which lets us do high quality recolours of sprites on the fly, including animated colour effects. Before this we were using Game Maker's built-in Image Blend which essentially does a multiply blend of a colour over top of an existing sprite's colours. This looks ok with light-coloured sprites like poodles, but looks dark and dull when blending our poison purple over darker sprites like the dobermans. Now poisoned animals all have a consistent bright purple that really pops, and buffed up animals have cool pulsing colours. It may seem like a minor change but poison and power ups feel a lot more substantial now!
 

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Russian Subway Dogs Summer Tour 2017!

Here are the dates and info for our summer tour! 

Respawn Indie Game Expo @ Devcom
August 20 - 21
Cologne, Germany.
Indie Game Expo is in a pretty small area so we should be easy to spot!

Gamescom Indie Arena 
August 22 - 26
Cologne, Germany
Hall 10.1 Booth A020. 
We'll be in one of the smaller walls of booths. We're bringing some Russian Subway Dogs and They Bleed Pixels merch and this is the only stop on our tour where we're selling it.

PAX West Indie MEGABOOTH
September 1-2
Seattle, USA
We're in the Minibooth this time so no big merch table this PAX. Also note we're only showing the first two days so be sure to swing by on the Friday or Saturday, otherwise you'll miss us!