I've been doing character AI for James and Alex, which are now mostly done, and work as intended.
More work will be done to them, but in general they are now behaving in a satisfying manner now.

Next to be fixed is the AI of Jordan the gunman, he has less complex AI than James, but more than Alex in that he is using a ranged weapon and in the fact that he gun fire in stand, crouch and flat postures.

Once fixed, then Toni the rifleman should be quick to do as  he shares behaviours with Toni.

There will be one last character left, which is Brix the knifeman (which is not yet shown in here, but I'll upload a picture of him soon).

Characters are being finalised,  I resumed gameplay programming and now mostly the work is for me bug fixing, and making the game play better, and for the artists fixing animations, and making the game look better.

Toni will start on the sound effects soon, and do any revision to the backgrounds.

I leave you here with more pictures from the game, these are not representative of the demo level and are more for test.

Hope you like it!, more new pictures in the gallery.

I've been working on AI and gameplay, especially James AI.

I can say that on one screen, one James in it's strongest AI settings is a challenge for the player, 2 James and things gets very hard, 3 James and chances of survival are near zero.
This is of course in the hardest settings, but I will make sure the gameplay is balanced so there is enjoyment more than frustration.

This is what I wanted to do, enemies that poses a challenge, and will make you think and use your fast reflexes to make your way.

I also have now all the special graphics effects assets, nearly all the demo level background assets. The move soon will be to do the special sound effects .

Meanwhile I leave you with a new sprite of Dan, and promise you new level screenshots by the end of next week.

I am now resuming the process of coding the gameplay until it feels good.

This includes AI programming too, and is a lengthy process, especially if we want to have great gameplay.
Each character is to be tweaked, and his actions programmed as their behaviour is different.

Everything is done in C++, there no scripting, no LUA etc...just pure C++ and a desire for pixel perfect precision.
This game won't have weired looking physics, jumps or flaky controls etc...this won't happen.

The frame timer is also fixed, so no frameskipping will ever happen, each frame will advance by the same amount of time internally no matter the speed of the CPU.

This is important for precise gaming, this also means that if your machine is slow, the game will run in slow motion.
But this of course won't happen, I have run test with over 10.000 of James characters on screen, and had no slowdown on a 2.5ghz machine.

I thought I'll give a quick update for anyone interested in this game.
I started tweaking the gameplay of Dan, things like jump, shuriken rate, physics, animations timing etc...
Still working on it, this is a very important area of the game as the gameplay will need to feel good and exciting.

So many good looking games were let down by a bad controls and frustrating or boring gameplay, this will not happen with Shadow Gangs, that's the only guarantee I can give for 100%.

On the art side, Alex the street fighter is getting animated now and now sports a mustache :)

More updates coming soon!