I've been kind of hesitant to make much in the way of update posts because we haven't had a lot of visual changes to the game. I''m going to throw that out the window though, because we have been working on some cool stuff. We've added a load of weapons and enemies to the game and we're currently doing some of the basics of NPCs. NPCs shouldn't be too complex, but me and Nick always find a way to make things more complex for ourselves than we need to.

We're also planning on getting an official Enkian Games website launched 

Anyway, most of this post will be dedicated to showing off a number of the enemies recently added to the game and talking a little about what they do.

Fruitbugs

Fruitbugs. Half fruit, half bug. Fruitbugs!

I'm sure most of the people who've played Land of Enki are familiar with the applebug (just look at the Enkian Games logo) and maaaaybe the Plumbug who appears in a secret level of Land of Enki 2. New additions to the bowl (heh...heh) are the bananabug, kiwibug, orangebug and pearbug. They all function similarly to each other, but get progressively stronger as you move up the ranks of this devious race.

There's another type of fruitbug, the peachbug, who only appears in the game as a pet and never an enemy. He's not shown here, but he'll probably be one of the first pets implemented because he's quite simple to handle.

Green Glob and Red Glob

Next up are the globs! More specifically, the green glob and the red glob. As soon as you go anywhere near them, they mindlessly charge you down. Why? To devour your flesh, of course. They're functionally similar, but the red globs are both faster and takes more hits than the green globs does so they'll appear more often later in the game.

Tortle and Spearhead

Up next is the tortle, the little green creature hiding inside his spiked shell. If you played Land of Enki 2, you maaay recognise this creature as a smaller version of the third boss in the game, Tor. Functionally, tortles are pretty similar to Tor too. They spin constantly and bounce off the walls. They're decently fast and annoying, but their shells are kind of fragile so a few swift hits will keep you right. Just don't get caught up in corners.

The spearhead is the red guy wearing the metal mask. He's not much of a problem if you give him a wide berth, but in smaller areas, he's deadly. His whole deal is that if you walk across his horizontal or vertical path, he'll immediately charge at you a lot faster than he usually walks.

Ogres

Ogres are usually a somewhat civilised race in Enki, but on Horru Island where the game is set, they're violent nudists. So if you go near their territory, they'll follow you and throw spears at you. Your best bet is to take them from a distance, but they're still manageable in melee range with good tactics and quick reactions.

There's also an upgraded version that's not yet implemented, but is fully designed, who wear gold plate armour and they're some of the toughest non-boss enemies in the game.

Hopefully this big post makes up for my lack of massive updates on Enki Adventures. Rest assured though, we're constantly working on it and have a lot of music and promo art in the works too. The promo art is almost finished so here's a sample of Kon drawn by 4taken for you to enjoy!

Me and Nick have been working hard on Enki Adventures lately and I'm very happy with the direction that we've been heading. We still have a long way to go, but we're making nice progress for sure. One of the biggest changes we've made is changing from a resolution of 4:3 to 16:9 so that the game fits most monitors when the game is fullscreened. You can see the new resolution here:

Another big thing that's happened is that the borders of the maps have been fixed up to be basically how they'll be in the final game. That includes the use of the bigger trees and mirroring each other on linked maps. That means that if you transition from one area to another, the gaps will be mirrored when you enter the next map so you don't end up getting forced into a tree.

You'll also probably noticed that we've got a basic combat system in here alongside your health bar. In the current version, the only thing that you can fight are the applebugs, but we're working on implementing some of the other enemies that have already been designed too. The deader (basically a wandering zombie) is probably next along with the other fruitbugs (plumbug and pearbug) which are more powerful versions of the applebug, meaning they'll be able to deal more damage and withstand more hits, possibly be quicker.

From an art perspective, most of what I've been doing lately is creating new items and bosses. Here's a quick sample of some of the bosses that you'll fight:

L-R: Ghuul, Mertons, Clemps, Horsey, Maulerus and The Accuser.

I'll not go into detail on how these bosses will be fought, but their patterns won't be 100% consistent each time you fight them. You can memorise their attacks, but you won't be able to predict when they'll use each of them. These aren't all of the bosses in the game, I'm aiming for there to be 12 bosses in total, but that's subject to change. Some may even be cut and others added in their place, we'll see! I like how these ones have turned out so far, so expect them to appear.

Something that has been finalised quite recently is the playable character roster. There are going to be 10 characters in total:

L-R: Kon, Tehrok, Junior, Lucia, Moon, Orzor, Greybane, Geonar, The Salesman and Incarnate

The characters are going to largely have the same range of customisation (with a few exceptions), but their starting stats and equipment will vary wildly. Kon will start with average stats as well as a sword and bombs, but Geonar will start out with high health and 3 varying magic spells to attack with. Kon is the only character which will be unlocked from the start, but I'm toying with the idea of making Tehrok and Junior usable from the beginning too.

Any particular character design appeal to anybody so far? If so, leave me a comment and let me know. If you have any thoughts in general on the project, go ahead and comment anyway!

Hi everyone, it's been a busy week for me considering I've got various projects to work on, my job to attend as well as the release of Ender Story: Chapter 1. The support we've received for the release has been amazing and it's also my first Newgrounds Daily Feature! Thank you to everybody who gave the game good scores, reviews and to all of you who simply just played and enjoyed it. Myself, Cat and Matt are all very grateful to have seen everything go so well for this game.

My main focus at the minute is continuing work on Enki Adventures (see my previous post for more details) with Nick as the vast majority of the artwork for Ender Story: Chapter 2 is finished already. Just to give you the general jist of thing, it's a roguelike action-adventure game based around the mechanics of the 2D Zelda games with plenty of our own spins and additions.

As for Chapter 2 of Ender Story, we're taking a short break for the rest of the month on that series and as soon as March rolls around we'll be back at it. We're aiming for a summer release and considering that I've finished about 90% of the art for the game already and we have the engine in place from the first chapter, that should be achievable. The programming for the second chapter hasn't officially started yet, but I've still got some screenshots and info that I can share for those of you who've commented in reviews about the second chapter and also for those who've sent me private messages asking about it.

The game takes place in the neighbouring region of Ederra, Arandor. It's a region that's about 60% desert with plenty of ancient ruins to come across. We'll be delving further into the role-playing aspects of the game giving you more choices you can make to help define who Erion is to you. Will you make him a righteous hero or will you make him a bit more ruthless and cruel as time goes on?

There'll be four new party members that can join your group, three of which can be seen here, as well as brand new locations and strange side quests that can lead to big rewards, if you play your cards right. The party members will all of their own motives for joining you as you hunt down the one called Sceptre and his allies. Not all of the party members will be obtained through the main story, as in the first game, so it will benefit you to explore areas off the beaten path to build as big of a team as you can.

Unlike in the first game, the summons will be more plentiful and have various abilitie that will come in useful. Levelling them up will be less tedious as there are new ways to gain SP for each summon. There will also be a variety of new creatures which offer you more SP for using your summon in battle so don't worry about grinding them too much.

The bestiary will be massively expanded in Chapter 2. You'll fight many strange creatures both natural, like the Swam Dragon (pictured above), and unnatural like the first of the titular Enders (I'll say no more ont his one). Your arsenal of attacks and abilities will expand too with new weapon types such as spellbooks and axes as well as the use of your new summons that you can obtain. The new characters will have different strengths such as Kara (pictured) and her speed and quick striking attacks and Kellar with his scanning ability and spells. Magna will be particularly useful using his dark knight powers granted to him by the God of Shadow, Seocrux. He'll be particularly susceptible to light-based attacks, but high HP and attacking ability will make up for that if you use him correctly.

Anyway, hopefully this assures everybody that Chapter 2 won't be too far away and it's already had a lot of progress made even if the programming hasn't began yet. I have most of the quests and the full plot planned out, it's just a matter of writing the cut scenes and getting that implemented. Expect more updates over the next couple of months and if you have any questions feel free to PM me or comment down below!

Thanks!

So alongside my current main projects, I've been preparing for another game that I really want to make. I've talked about it before and posted  a few screenshots about, but I really want to go into a bit more detail on it. The game is called Enki Adventures, as I'm sure you've guessed, and it's an overhead 2D action-adventure. It takes a few idea from the first Zelda game, but the more that I thought about it and fleshed out the idea, the more it's spun-off into it's own thing.

I want it to have a lot of roguelike elements too which is what makes it a lot more ambitious than a standard action-adventure. The main roguelike features will be the mostly randomised overworld (maps will be somewhat pre-assembled and slotted together), the location and quality of treasure chests, the items in the treasure chests, monster formations on maps and which bosses appear in which location. The game will be very much open world in that you can wander around 80%+ of the map without having to venture into a single dungeon. The dungeons can also be tackled in any order except for the seventh which is always last.

This screenshot gives you the basic idea of how the overworld will look. The interface is kept very minimal, it shows you your health, kupons (currency) and the two items that you currently have equipped. These can be customised to your preference so you can keep a sword on Z, X or even not have a weapon equipped at all, maybe give yourself two different potions to heal yourself in case you're trying to speed through maps. It's all up to you.

The world has three biomes at the minute: forest, desert (doubles as a beach) and snow. I currently have 20 enemies designed and sprited so there's a decent variation of what you'll encounter in the world. Some enemies will appear more often in other biomes, others may be exclusive. For example, the zombie and various spirits that you see in the screen above will mostly appear in the snow and desert biomes.

See the devil-like dude standing on the stump who looks like he's up to no good? Yeah, he's one of the dozens of NPCs that you can randomly encounter in the world. In this screenshot, he's a pet egg salesman, but I've since changed his purpose to a gore magic vendor (I felt that fit more). The people will be of varying race and function. There are currently 8 NPC races across 21 NPCs. Their functions vary wildly from vendors, gamesman (for gambling minigames), item givers or simply people who'll give you information like the locations of the dungeons marked on your map. The information givers might sound useless, but bear in mind that the game is largely randomly generated so the chance of you ever having the same overworld twice is so close to zero it's not worth trying to remember map layouts.

Another big feature of the game is the ability to find, buy or win monster eggs and hatch them into pets which will follow you around. They'll all have functions from going up to enemies to attack them, shoot at them from a distance or maybe just have support abilities like finding you extra money. Shown here are 9 of the 10 planned pets. I have designed the 10th and after having gotten permission from Tom Fulp, I can now say that it's a Newgrounds themed pet. It's being kept as a surprise for now though. You'll be able to assemble a small army basically, but I'm likely going to limit how many pets you can have out at once. I'm currently thinking that 3 will be the maximum.

You can also probably see here that Kon isn't anywhere to be seen, that's because the armoured guy in the centre is another playable character. I currently have 3 playable characters designed and I'm considering maybe making another one or two. The character you play as will vary your starting stats and equipment. Kon will start with 4 hearts and a sword, Greybane will start with 3 hearts and a gore magic spell. The other character that you haven't seen, Tehrok, will start with a boomerang as his weapon. The other two characters will presumebly start with bombs and radiant magic, respectively.

Anyway, I've talked about the game for long enough now and given plenty of detail on what it'll look like. I haven't found a programmer for the game yet, but I have talked to a very good musician that I've worked with before about making tracks for the game. I don't know if the game will come to Newgrounds or not, my current thought is that it'll be downloadable through some services like Itch.io and Steam (if I'm lucky) so we'll see how that goes. At the very least, I'd like to have some version of it on Newgrounds, maybe a non-randomised one to give the player an idea of what to expect from the graphics and gameplay?

If anybody has any thoughts on this, please feel free to let me know whether that be suggestions, letting my know if it interests you or even pointing out some of the things that you don't like about it. Any advice will help out!

Ah, it's been a while since I've posted an update. I've been fairly busy with real life stuff as well as spending the rest of my time working on projects, but now that things are freeing up it's news post time!

Land of Enki 2

So progress with Land of Enki 2 is very good. It's taken a little longer to get the game finished than I'd expected (eh, that always happens, no big deal), but it's been worth the extra time because it's looking pretty sweet at the moment. We've redone the pause menu from the previous game to include the damage of the swords and our new item (the crystals) get displayed and described too.

The game is basically finished except for a single music track as well as a few minor fixes (like changing the crystal numbers to 5-0 instead of also 1-4), but then we'll test the game without having max kupons, bombs and health to make sure it's not crazily difficult.

We implemented new controls too and, damn, it just plays so much smoother now. You can also do mid-air attacks and attack while moving so that the game flows a lot better rather than being a very stop-start affair. I'm much happier with them this time and I think anybody who's played the first one will notice a massive improvement too.

Power of Four

The next big project that I'm actively working on. I've mentioned it briefly before, but we have a much clearer idea of where we're heading with it now. I've done only a little work on the graphics, the main focus now is getting levels built. MSGHero is having the time of his life with the lightning grappling gun that we have (still needs a more flowy name though) and I can't deny that it's so much fun to mess around with, even in what little sample level I've provided so far.

There'll be a lot more big news for this soon now that I've finished the GB Jam and most of my work for fixing up our project is done. Screenshots to come soonish.

Enki Adventures (working title)

Something that I've always wanted to do is an overhead game in the style of the old Zelda games, but upon playing games like the Binding of Isaac and Lenna's Inception (Google it, it's really good and also very cheap right now) I've gotten quite interested in roguelike elements. I want to make something like that myself only rather than have story focus, I'd want it to be very focused around exploration and adventure as well as interacting with some goofy and weird NPCs. Treasure hunting would also be a big part of it and there'd be a load of different collectables like weapon upgrades, potions, power-up crystals, a couple of monster eggs to hatch, etc. You would be able to get these all in one playthrough, but it'd require a LOT of gambling with different NPCs I have planned.

If you've been following me on Twitter, you'll have seen this screenshots, but it's one that I like:

You can probably tell that the game features Kon and Sheepadeep from the Land of Enki games along with a couple of other soon-to-appear characters and races, but they'd basically be completely different characters an an completely alternate universe. Yup, I think into my own game lore a little too much.

I decided I'd save my fornightly front page news post for after JUGGERNAUT II: Uprising came out and wahay, here it is!

First of all I want to thank the 30,000+ viewers who've taken a look at the game. An even bigger thank you to those who've voted on it, left feedback for us, reported the bugs we'd missed and been playing away at the game. I've had a couple of people ask me if there's going to be another one either in reviews or PMs and I want to confirm that yes, there is. There's not a lot of news for it right now as we're taking a bit of a break to work on other projects to recharge a bit. RPGs take a lot of work and I'd like to have a lot of artwork prepared before we begin anything else for it. I'll post some updates of a few of the sprites, maps, etc. as they come so be sure to check out my Twitter for those.

Also, just have to mention, Daily Third? That's awesome! Big thanks to the Newgrounds team themselves for front paging the game. I'm not certain who to thank for that specifically, but if I knew, I would do so.

Secondly, Land of Enki 2 is making good progress at the minute. We're currently working on having different layers of scrolling backgrounds so that the world looks a bit more interesting. Here's an image of one of the early levels in the game. You may also noticed a much requested feature, an aerial attack. Unfortunately, I've only just realised that Kon is in one of the first frames of it, so it looks like he's awkwardly holding it at his side rather than actually thrusting the sword in front of him. 

Once we finish the backgrounds, there's one more enemy to add and the five bosses to add. There's currently 20 levels in the game so I hope that'll solve a lot of the issues with the first game regarding length. You should hopefully get double the time out of this game, not including grinding. To prevent grinding, the treasure chest rewards have been increased and the drop rate of Kupons has been increased significantly. Now that people will have plenty of money, we've also dropped the heart drop rate so you should have a bit more of a challenge in the game itself and also have spare money to buy them from the shop for a change.

My Power of Four team is now officially assembled and we've got a good idea of what we're doing with the game. I've started some art concepts, but that was delayed due to JUGGERNAUT being released. Now that I've got much more free time, I'll be able to steam ahead with that and hopefully do a few blog posts about that for those who are interested.

Our game takes elements of a run 'n gun like Metal Slug and gives the player the option of being able to utilise stealth to make their way through the game as well as a trusty grappling hook to aid that. Not entirely certain how that'll turn out, but it should be a blast to see regardless. I'm pretty psyched, this is the first time I've done any sort of game jam and I hope it's the first of a few over the next year or so.

It was in production for a good 10 months, but now it's finally been released:

Play it here on Newgrounds

Very proud of how it turned out and it's been both front paged and won the Daily 3rd place award right here on Newgrounds. It's not been released on other sites yet, (except the ones that stole it from here, ahem) but I'm going to start putting it on other websites right after I finish writing this.

I have to admit, I'm glad the production is finished. Don't get me wrong, I loved making the game, but 10 months is just a long time, haha. As for when the third game is going to be come out or even start being made...not a clue. I'll be starting work on some art for it, but we're still months from even coming up with a date to start work on it. RPGs take a long time to make so we'll be taking a break to work on smaller projects.

So yeah, hope you enjoy the game.

So to copy MSGHero I'm going to start blogging about some progress as we get underway with the Power of Four game jam. Who all is going to be in the team? Not a clue. What's our team called? Not a clue. We've got an idea to roll with for the game concept though, Metal Slug meets stealth game. How's it going to work? Not a clue. God damn though, that's what makes it exciting. Seeing how it's going to take shape over the next couple of months!

On another note, Land of Enki has been doing pretty well for itself! It's got pretty good reviews (minus a few common complaints), it got front paged and the Underdog of the Week award here on Newgrounds, it was front paged on GameJolt and has had numerous YouTube videos from people playing it or reviewing it. Sweet!

We're going to be making a second one and as of today, we've "officially" started working on it. All that really means is that the programmer is getting started with assembling the game. I've already done a lot of work on the assets and LloydeSorrow has made a start on the soundtrack for it. I'd imagine that we'll have the game finished in early-mid July and hopefully have it released in early August if all goes well.

So yeah, I'll make sure to post screenshots on Twitter once I've got some to show and once we get properly underway for Power of Four you expect some more of that too.

It's been a couple of months since my last post saying the game would be out soon, but now it's actually here!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/640476

Let me know what you think in a review or in the comments below, I'd really like to hear what people think of the game. Good or bad.

It looks like the next game of mine to be finished will be Land of Enki. It's a platformer with some adventure elements in there too. Hack and slash...and bomb your way across the land, defeat the boss of each zone and find all of the secrets!

It's about 95% complete at this point. All of the levels, sound effects and features are in place, it's just a matter of getting the music (which is almost finished) in the game and tidying everything up a bit. Then we sponsor hunt, then we'll hopefully get it released not too long after that.

So yeah, that's pretty sweet.