No Plan Survives

Despite all the testing, a handful of people have reported crashes when starting the game. My current hunch is that this is controller related. If you're having this problem, try unplugging your controllers, and running the game. If anyone having this bug can verify the cause for me, it would be much appreciated. People have also mentioned the general unresponsiveness of the character's jumping. This issue has been dealt with, by almost completely removing the "crouch before jumping" animation, and I'm told it's a lot more pleasant. I've also added a controller button for jumping, as well as a configurable button for menu related actions.

With any luck, these new fixes will be released late tomorrow afternoon, Atlantic Standard Time.

Unfortunately, I have not solved the issues with Xbox360 controllers, as I do not have one available for testing yet.
For anyone who's been complaining about the mouse/keyboard combo being difficult, just think of it like a 2d FPS. There's a bit of a learning curve getting good at aiming while jumping and dodging, but it does get to feel natural. For me, it's part of the fun trying to do 2 things at a time.

For all those enjoying the game, let us know what you'd like to see in chapter 2. For those having difficulties, I'll keep working on this. Thanks to everyone for supporting our indie game. I'll post again when the patch is up, even though steam will probably alert you.

The support email is support [at] silverspherestudios [dot] com

Joshua

[Update]
The crashes are due to some controllers. You can unplug them to verify you're having this issue. To avoid the hassle of having to unplug your controllers until I fix this problem, you can add the following to Eternity's Child.ini , in steamapps\common\eternitys child

Find the line near the end that says [Gamepad]
Underneath it, add a line saying disabled= true
Change the line beneath that to say name= disabled

I finished Eternity's Child (Chapter 1) on saturday. I then decided to add gamepad support too, on sunday. Personally, I hate playing with the gamepad, since it's bloody hard to aim compared to the mouse.This proves two things in my opinion. 1: I still hate playing games in general with gamepads; 2: This game was designed around the wiimote/mouse; That said, despite my relative inexperience using analog sticks for games, I got the control style to the point where I find it nearly as easy as using the mouse. This was the last new feature I'll be adding to the first release of EC, hopefully the testers find it useful.

All that's left for EC is minor dialog changes, there's no code left to write. It's been a while since I got any crash reports, and there are no bugs left which I'm aware of. I also had time to add 2 maps of my own, not counting the training map. One of them is the classic "stay on the moving platform or die" type of level, with a small twist. The other is a forest/swamp style map which turned out very well. In all, there are 20 levels in this chapter, counting the smaller map used for the boss fight.

Eternity's Child: Steam Version

Allright. So if you've found this blog, you probably already know that I'm the coder for Eternity's Child. I'm normally not too interested in speaking up, but the game is nearing it's first official release, and I find Luc has trouble expressing himself in english, and he gets mixed up sometimes.

The version we're releasing to steam soon is the first chapter of EC. It's over a dozen levels (we have 16 right now, we may trim some out, or add a couple more). It is going to be $5, and that price will include the next one or two chapters for free, when they're ready. Why is it so cheap? Well, to gain attention, and because the whole team agrees that most games are overpriced. Basically, because we can. Chapter 1 doesn't have all the features we intend to have in place for chapters 2 and 3. For instance, it doesn't have any "action levels" yet, where Angel (the main character) would be flying or racing on something while the level explodes behind him. Chapter 1 is a very solid (and in my opinion fun) platformer, somewhat in the style of Earthworm Jim on the SNES. While Chapter 1 is certainly a good game by itself, it's only the beginning of what we have planned for this series.

The engine I've written is called PlaneD. It will handle any resolution your computer can run (widescreen too), and will probably run it very well. It's been heavily tested on dozens of systems, and seems to be bug free for all the parts required in Eternity's Child. The map editor has a random crash under odd circumstances, but that doesn't affect the game at all. The recommended requirements for Eternity's Child as of this moment are Windows XP/Vista, a 128mb video card, capable of OpenGL 2.0, and 2ghz CPU. If you bought your computer in the last 5 years, you should be able to run the game.

So what's left for me to code? Not much. I need to write code for multiple save slots, keeping score when the player blows something up, and we need to add dialogue between the two main characters. I also need to write the code for the final boss of Chapter 1, but her art and animations are already done.