Hello Veteran pilots and new recruits!

It's been somewhat around 5 years since we uploaded the demo of Triplane Furball to itch.io. So this is as good time as ever to give all of you something resembling an update of the project status.

Excuses and commitment

Time has flown by, and although much has changed, some things remain unchanged.  We used to have a devlog on our homepage, but that has been long gone. Nowadays. as itch.io is our main channel to reach our audiences, all future devlogs including this one you are now reading will be published here. As personal lives, work and lack of interest (and knowledge) got in the way of the project and its launch, we have  been developing something every year and have been attending GMTK game jam consecutively for 4 years now! 

Triplane Furball has been lying mostly dormant for a few years now.. aside from the demo update when we changed the logos and our social media links. We have done some sporadic development work, such as on the single-player campaign and its related systems and some (lot of) refactoring of old components (for example I think the cannon code has  been rewritten now total of 4 times). 

Growing with Gamemaker

We originally started this project with Gamemaker Studio 1.4 and the migration of the project to GMS2 and then GMS 2.3 were not pleasant but not too painful either. Some things were broken, some things broke after refactoring, and some things never worked the way we wanted them to. All the broken things kept piling up and the most unsatisfactory part was the AI system and its shortcomings.

The big one

This year marked a big decision for us: forget or commit? After YoYo Games, the maker of GameMaker Studio, was purchased by Opera, GMS has had a steady stream of updates moving the engine in a great new direction.  So, with all the legacy code from all the way of GMS 1.4  times, we made the big decision to start a migration project AGAIN for the new platform (called only GameMaker nowadays) but this time starting from scratch with a blank project file. For the purpose of leaving all the legacy code behind. Refactor and fix all the broken things  and taking advantage of all the new features the engine provides today. 

State of Triplane Furball

So when was this? About bit over month ago.. and all the assets and objects have been migrated. Everything that was broken is fixed and the new AI system is well underway! There is still lot of work to be done, so no launch dates will be publicly announced. However, this post will serve as reminder and a vague promise of our commitment to see this project through.

TL:DR We migrated to the new GameMaker version and brought this project back from the dead.

Thank you everybody who has played and shown interest throughout the years. Without it the outcome of this decision and the tone of this update post would definitely been different!

Antti & Iiro @ juicy.games

P.S We'll try to post some dev logs in the very near future :)