Hello and thank you for visiting the Gemi Games development blog.  My name is Marios Kalogerou and I’m currently working on a fast-paced pure platformer called You can double JUMP.

The game will be spread across 80+ levels over 5 different areas all set in the bright and colourful world of Gradienta.  It’s scheduled for a late 2013/early 2014 release on PC via Desura and Xbox 360 via XBLIG.

Blurb

You have absolute control of Gigi as he must save his family and his grilfriend from the evil clutches of Lord Leo.  Skillfully navigate each of his menacing monsters and treacherous traps while finding all the hidden secrets and bonus levels.

Anyway on the admin side of things the sites which were specifically for the game You can double JUMP (the Youtube channel and the old dev blog) will now be going through Gemi Games related sites.

This should focus all my online activity into fewer areas and in turn have fewer sites to represent what Gemi Games is about and to show off current projects, which conveniently brings me to my main point.  My first screenshot (on the new blog anyway :D)

The First of many

Finally completed the first level with most of the decorations.  I still have a hill and mountain paralax object to add but the idea is laid out.

I’m still a bit unsure on the level exit sprite but I’m happy with how the trees, grass, etc… work together. The problem I will be working on next is the rather large unsightly gradients on the world tiles.  These layers will need a nice pixel shader to break up the solid gradients and to add a bit of variety to each tile layer.

At one point I did have a large (8×8 world tiles) tiled marble effect applied with an overlay blend on everything bar the paralax and sky layers.  This gave the world a silky velvet effect which was great but it didn’t account for moving objects and thus I abandoned it.  However I think it’s definitely time to bring that effect back but have a different effect applied to each tile layer.  This way the back layer could have a rock like texture and the active and front layers could have a grassy one using the first level as an example.  Of course this would mean the objects (which are rendered separately from the world tiles) will need a detail effect applied to each individual sprite.

I think the extra effort will be worth it though to achieve that velvet feel that seemed to tie all the graphics together before. Anyway I shall leave the first post there.  Thanks for reading.

More screenshots soon and a small hands on video with one or two of my current favourite levels.  Until then please like and follow us on Facebook and Twitter and/or subscribe to the RSS feed at the top of the sidebar for updates on new posts.  🙂