Cutscreens - Spectrum conversion

I`ve spent the last couple of evenings converting the concept sketches to the Spectrum.

Cutscreen Designs

Here are the designs for the cutscreen images shown after the player completes the first island area.
The temple is the focal part of the second island area so we wanted to base the cutscreens around this.

Enemy Animations

A selection of enemy designs for Gloop Troops 2.

First end of level boss concepts!

Below is Andy's concept sketch for our first end of level boss!

Lots of work still to do to get this guy into the game!

World map and level art montage!

Below is Andy's montage of our world maps and level art! Each of our islands will have its own tile set to help uniquely style it. Each level on an island will follow the island's style. This should help make the game feel varied and consistent :-) In the below images we have each island map followed by a level from that island.

We are able to have this many tile sets as we are targeting the 128k ZX Spectrum for Gloop Troops 2. The extra memory is being put to good use to store all the tile set variations

that we'll need for the game :-)

More Super Mario Bros 3 design lessons!

From an excellent blog post by Radek Koncewicz on gamasutra we have some more lessons on level design by deconstructing Super Mario Bros 3!

Still playing around with the map control at the moment - we have currently opted for a Pac-man style control system whilst moving around the map! This gives the map screen a nice responsive, arcade game-like feel. Perhaps we should add some enemies to avoid on the map?

Still busy working away

Hopefully we'll have some more screen shots and concept art ready to post up soon! Currently we're playing around with the layout and controls of the map screen for Gloop Troops 2. Each world map is currently fully accessible! The player can choose to play any level on the world map - only when they've defeated all that world's levels will they go to a show down with the island's boss. Control wise we have implemented something of a pac - man style control scheme. Pressing the joystick once will cause Pokey or Peeky to walk in the direction indicated. Our heroes will stop only when they hit a level or wall piece. Hopefully this'll feel just right :-)