Super Toaster X: Learn Japanese

Hi there! I sadly must tell you all that I'm leaving team STG, the very reason being that the law of my country restricts me from working too much because of my age, which would mean that future progress would go far too slowly. I could've foreseen this before, but was so stupid to not look anything up. I hope I've brought you enough interesting gifs to enjoy before the next programmer will come. It has certainly been a blast working with you guys, good luck with the project :) *flies away*
-Sahand



Trevor composed a really great version of the Toilet Tank stage. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. If you don't, leave a (polite) comment.

Here's the link, you just need to click here to listen to the song:

https://trevor-black.bandcamp.com/track/stg-toilet-tank-v21

A lot of work went into this, so let him know what you think  :coffee:.



So I thought to myself, how can I give my game some more replay value. So I thought one thing I liked about Flash Games: achievement. Not the kind that just give you a medal and that’s it. No.

So each stage will have the opportunity to earn a medal. The bronze medal will be awarded for simply completing the stage.
The silver medal, will be awarded for completing certain objectives. Those objectives could take on various aspects. I thought a bit about this. It could be finishing the stage under a certain time limit, finishing the stage without dying etc…

The gold medal, would be awarded for something even harder. Not getting hit once for example. Something which would require a lot of skill.

Getting a bronze medal gives you nothing besides indicating that you’ve completed the stage. A silver medal will earn you some extra BNA to invest on Pan. A gold medal will give you even more BNA. I think this will encourage people to replay stages and do better instead of just rushing them.

Medals would look like this:


I also did the Taser animation. It allows you to shock your enemies for constant damage. The trade-off is being vulnerable while you’re shocking someone and a pretty high energy spending. This is a powerful attack which costs a lot of juice (battery) so it’s better to use it sparingly if you don’t want to run dry.



I also did the banner for Goulven, the level designer. I only had mine left to do now! It’s not much of an animation but then again I don’t want to spend too much time on banners since there’s so much to do in graphics. Still, it didn’t seem fair to leave him out.



Apart from that, I also redid the “taking damage” animation which looked kind of cheap compared to the other ones, here it is:


I also starter working on a team logo. Trevor would sometimes joke when writing a message to me and say: “Go Team Toaster!” I thought it was a pretty good name for a team so I decided to go along with it. Then, during the animation, “toaster” felt too long so I just went with “Team Toast”. But then I decided against it. The logo was too plain and too connected to the game. I’d prefer something more general. I can't for the life of me, find that logo on my laptop anywhere anyway.

Then I decided to go for something else, less funny and more about finishing a project is for me: Prevail(ing). And did these versions:







Which do one do you prefer? (usually when I ask for opinions people keep quiet, maybe I'll use reverse psychology next time and say: Don't share your opinions!  :giggle:

I've also given the main antagonist a shot for the concept art. I had two versions but decided to scrap both and I came to this conclusion:

There is no way to give an amorphous character enough character to be a main villain of a game. Period. I challenge you to find one. It just doesn't work. You know the movie the blob? The blob is the antagonist but it behaves like a mollusc, by instinct. It's the very flaw of a character type like this, having many shapes is the equivalent of having none and you can't pin enough personality to characters like this. That's the conclusion I came to anyway.



Hello again Toaster Fans! It’s me Trev, with a behind the scenes look at STG - this time some more about music.
I usually like to pick out references for when I’m working, whether it be a texture, a timbre, or a tune. Sometimes it’s more than one thing: a snare sound from this track, the tempo of another, and so on. Sometimes the worst thing you can do as a composer is to give yourself a completely blank slate.

So after some good chatting with Etienne about the sound of STG, we settled on a less dense texture and focussed on groove and energy. The first thing that came to my my apart from the references E showed me was Justice’s album “†”. The album sort of feels like if Metallica got ahold of Daft Punk’s gear, and the duo even remixed Master of Puppets for their live album “A Cross The Universe.” Check it out if you need something to up your heart rate!


-Trevor