Actually, running away from school is probably a bad idea. Think of all the physics bugs we’d have if nobody had taught thewreck the arts of science.

With tests and exams all over the place, I’ve been unable to procure this week’s intel. Boo. Before running away from the fierce assault of rotten tomatoes however, I’m leaving you with a fresh community map that gives you something proper to escape from. Appropriately, it’s called The Escape, a challenge map by FabiotheTurtle! His species is not the fastest to run away from mad scientists, so he’s giving you an unusual escape method: The Predator. Here’s the trailer!

Featuring cutscenes along with some quite unique gameplay, there’s definitely an amazing amount of work put into this. Get this map and many others at the Cobalt Vault!

One more thing

Librus is arting! I love art. Do you love art? He’s currently taking requests—check out his thread on the Cobalt Forum!

Last week, I promised to steal Oxeye’s level art creation process. I can’t believe it, but the lab technicians actually discovered my intentions! They hired a team to counter–hack. Turns out they’re pretty cool people, so we joined forces and formed the Cobalt Investigation Agency! Comrades, get out your inner Leonardo. We’re going to the gallery.

…Just pretend that was cool, okay?! What do you think I am, a wandering wizard of words or something?

First, here’s my favorite piece of fan art as warm–up!

The Creation of Mona Levela

We have tons of cool community maps, many of which can be found in the Cobalt Vault, but our favorite game of guns has its share of official maps as well. Fact: They look pretty good! But how are they made? I’ve managed to dig up a few pictures from the process.

Here’s a level that our beard overlord jeb designed:

It has quite a few doors!

While these locales may be prettier than the scraps of mapping I’ve attempted myself, they’re nowhere near the quality level of finished maps. What happens next?

Kinten, the great art magician, steals the map and beautifies it. With his pen and Photoshop, he takes a close look at the map and crafts custom tiles specifically tailored to it. See those doors? I don’t, because they just got changed.

There’s a lot more where it comes from! Click this for more! And this! Another! Even more! Interesting, I say! …Oh, there’s one more.

Throw these in the mix and touch it up a bit, and you get…

Is this even the same level?! ‘Cause it’s on a whole different level of quality! Get it? Level? Never mind.

This map isn’t in the game just yet, but if you manage to break free of the state of trance induced by its coolness, you’ll probably notice the level name—and prefix. It’s a Puzzle map! There are currently none in the game, but I checked up on the Challenge submode, and surprisingly, it’s a game mode featuring puzzles! The details aren’t completely decrypted yet, but it’ll feature a different way of racking up points than we’re used to.

In Other Nets

Our frenemies at Oxeye Labs like to keep logs of everything they do there, which is quite fortunate for us, but thewreck’s log was quite short this week. He’s been doing a bit of field work at Fatshark, and there are very good news:

Networking! Progress!

Nothing is certain yet, but it seems like the shark will be getting online multiplayer, and if the shark gets networking, the PC & Mac versions of the game will too. Hopefully, we’ll all be able to roll around together someday!

A Cup of Community

I mentioned the glorious map sharing site known as Cobalt Vault earlier, which is a great way to fill up that User Maps list in–game, but it can be hard to keep track of all the new maps and works in progress. Fear not—Janeator is here to save the day with a new Twitter account! Follow @CobaltMapmaking for the mintiest of minty maps!

For more community news, the Cobalt Forum Content Team has just gotten a new member! FabiotheTurtle has written his first post, featuring the brilliant Multikill mod which has just been updated to work with the newest edition of Cobalt. It’s one of my favorite mods, so go check it out!

Two weeks ago, we took a look at a cool map. That was fun; let’s do it again! However, I won’t be the one doing the talking here. One of the members of the Cobalt Investigation Agency may or may not have threatened to publish those pictures of me dancing to Caramelldansen which he may or may not have snatched, and to avoid the absolute annihilation of the human race, I’m going to let him write a few words each week. My dear friends, I bring you the self–proclaimed Duke of Cobalt, and the map he’ll enlighten us about is…

“Overall a very fancy ‘n very compact map. A bit fruity with all the shadowy surfaces. Random loot is lel, makes map control hard. Good thing I’m the duke of map control.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. It feels like there’s a tad bit too much Phaser action going on, but overall it’s a very cool map with interesting gameplay!

That’s all for today, folks! Come back next Friday for more metallic babble!

Hi all!

Apparently a metalface has been marooned on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere. Surviving in harsh environments with no food or water is not an issue for cyborg metalfaces but how will it avoid succumbing to insanity? How can it trust what it sees with its own two eyes/light bulbs? How will it return to civilization? These questions needs to be answered! (Looking at you Fabio).

I’m Trif, and I’ve decided to go in.

Oxeye Laboratories. As you may or may not know, this dark organization attempts to hide its research activity in the realm of battle droids. There are some who believe they truly only use their human brain interface technology for authorized arena entertainment. I seek to find out what’s really going on behind the scenes.

Ladies and gentlemen, after a tedious fight with security layers, evil hamsters, and twenty cups of hot chocolate, I have successfully infiltrated their research network and communication channels.

However, cautious as they are, all research data seems to be encrypted with a unique key. It is my goal to steadily unlock the secrets at the bottom of Oxeye’s repositories, but it’ll be in small bits every now and then. I will share my gatherings in a weekly report. We start Friday.

So far, I’ve only been able to decrypt this picture. It appears to be pretty normal, although I’m certain I’ve seen something like this at Valve Laboratories too…

It seems pretty innocent to me, but who knows what we’ll find digging a bit further?

Until then.

• The last couple updates
• A new reload related feature
• Outdoor climate colors
• A community lead map making contest

Hit the jump for the full read!

The last couple updates

During the week that has been we have seen 2 Cobalt updates and a number of bugs! It always breaks my heart to hear about bugs that slipped by, even so when they are critical crash bugs… To all of you who have been reporting bugs, making suggestions and suffering through crashes, thank you very much! Without your help these updates would be so much harder to get done and the quality of the game would not have been able to reach as far as it has today. The reported bugs should be fixed now and the update containing the fixes is planned for the beginning of this coming week.

A new reload related feature

If you have been following frall on twitter you might have heard that we added a new gameplay aspect:

Reload Boosts! – By pressing the reload or use button at a specific time during the reload (unique for each weapon), the remaining reload animation becomes twice as fast! (usually the rest of the reload)

The reasoning behind this feature was that I have for a long time been feeling that the gameplay aspect of single shot weapons was skewed. Their gameplay was focused to a single instant, and then a bunch of waiting. Along with that, i’ve had a long reluctance towards automatic reloading of single shot weapons because it takes away part of the immersion of “controlling” the character. Unfortunately I for a long time did not know what to do about it. This was until I saw a video of War of the Roses and noticed that they had a minigame for the reloading of crossbows. Instantly the problem and the solution seemed so obvious.

Our take on the feature offers a number of things that fit so well with cobalt:

• It raises the skill ceiling further
• It evens out uneven distribution of gameplay with certain weapons (mostly the single shot ones)
• It allows us to place the reload boost point at a unique position for each weapon which in it self decides how much of a bonus we want the reload boost to potentially have (late in the reload is less of a bonus than early in the reload)
• It fits well with the main focus in cobalt: Timing!
• It severely adds to the tension in a fight, where for example two metalfaces are reloading their single shot rail guns. (who will reload first?)
• It adds a sense of mastery when you start to manage to get the timing right without even looking at the reload progress bar
• It becomes an emergent combo system, where you feel like you are more and more in “the zone” for each consecutive successful reload boost (when me and kinten was playing, getting three in a row in a hectic situation felt incredibly satisfying)

I know I’m hugely in love with the feature. I hope you will be too!

Outdoor climate colors

Kinten has for a long time had his worries about the outdoor lighting system in Cobalt. Mainly the fact that all levels in cobalt tend to be somewhat red… A couple of days ago we finally decided it was time to fix some problems and the way we did it was by adding:

Climate! - In outdoor theme settings you can now pick a climate which will control the overall color of the sky and the hills in the background

We also tweaked the way the actual gameplay layers are colored from the sky, and once we tried it out…

To me the first one looks washed out and strange, and the new one looks warm and deserty! Like you are actually at that location. This is a great step towards creating a really atmospheric experience and is an important part towards creating a great adventure mode. Now, don’t worry, your old maps will still look like your old maps since old maps will by default get the “alien” climate, resembling the old colors as much as possible.

A community lead map making contest

Over at the cobalt forums community member Aconitin is hosting a map making contest! This time around we have offered to include the winning map into the official release of Cobalt! So if you ever wondered what it takes to get a map officially in, here is one way!

Even if you don’t make it to the winning spot, this could be a great opportunity to familiarize yourself with the editor and perhaps talk to other cobalt mappers! You can usually find them in the #Cobalt channel on espernet! If you don’t want to download an IRC client, you can use the webchat! If you are just looking for custom maps for cobalt, the cobalt file database is a great resource!

Cya next week for v111 Alpha!

/thewreck

Puffdot on the cobalt forums has a great post that summarizes the hot-keys as well a number of other tips!

http://www.cobaltforum.net/topic/1659-tutorial-how-to-use-the-editor/