SPIEGELWORKS

2020-01-06T18:23:00.041-02:00

Welcome to ! Formelly known as Visual Atrocity.

This is our new name. Expect some links to be broken. We're working on it.

We're an independet game maker group specialized in 2D shooting games. This is the source of information for all things SW. Please feel free to visit us anytime to look for updates on our project, new artworks, music and everything else related.

-Cris Spiegel

Games we are currently working on:

M uhon no Kaze - Winds of Rebellion DEMO OUT NOW!
A homage to many shooting games, not only commercial ones but also doujin ones. Take the role of a falsely accused pilot along with her rioting friends to uncover the truth about the relations between war companies and the governments of the world. Experience massive waves of bullet hell enemy offensive with polarity system - not only negative and positive (red and blue), but also neutral! Download the demo with the first three stages.

Lichtgestalt Batoru DEMO OUT NOW!
An abstract shooter with a twist: you've got 4 cardinal directions to shoot. That's right: a cross button set to allow for full action in 2 axes, 4 directions. This is both horizontal and vertical shooter, changing orientation in the middle of the action. A full-of-attack-patterns bullet hell with elements not uncommon in more methodical games like Gradius, Salamander and R-Type. First stage and two thirds of second stage done.

GoGoMaki Dai-Jo-Bu - ON HOLD

Still in its firt production stages, this project is being made on request. Would we be able to realize a shooting game with a design that is appealing not only to the beginer, but also aesthetically to the female public? Why not! We know that many girls do love blood and action in their games, but it is also true that some of women has been alienated by approaches that are often even male chauvinistic. So we want not really to make a girls-game, but a game that welcomes the newcomers in the videogame world and is also fun to anyone regardless of gender, age or previous experience in gaming.

Production Blog:

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Tuesday - March 23rd, 2010

Sunday - February 21st, 2010

Saturday - February 6th, 2010

Wednesday - January 27th, 2010

Monday - January 11th, 2010

Misc.:

Spiegelworks - game music by Cris Spiegel featured in Visual Atrocity Games
Please, visit Spiegelworks and listen to some good music. The styles range from Metal to Psy-Trance through orchestral.

Spiegelworks FAQ
Yeah, it's all made up since no one asked anything, so these questions cannot be frequent. But we will open it for new questions soon.

Cris Spiegel's YouTube personal channel
Watch some game videos on YouTube.

Cris Spiegel's Personal Blog (in portuguese)
Up again!

Wanna contact me? spiegelworks@gmail.com
State your subject as SW - XXX, where XXX is what you have to say.

..

Muhon no Kaze - Winds of Rebellion

2010-10-10T17:52:00.025-03:00

HOW TO PLAY:
Note: The sprites of the ship here are old and no longer used in the game.

Use the directional to move the ship (default: arrows)
Press the following action buttons:
A - Main attack (default: Q) B - Bomb (default: A) C - Polarity change (default: W)

Options Menu: use the mouse when in it. To change keys, hover the cursor on the function and press the desired key.

Tap A:
Main fire

Holding A:
Holding A, you activate the lasers. Though more powerful than bullets, they slow the ship down.

Press B:
B button unleashes an 1-sec duration bomb that hits all enemies on screen and also destroy enemy fire. During bombing, your ship is invincible.

A +B Pressing A and B at the same time, you fire the MEGA LASER, a very powerful weapon that lasts for 2 seconds but with limited area. The ship movement will be capped and it will be pushed back. During this attack, the ship is safe from danger.

Press C:
C button defines polarity, setting offensive and defensive capacities. The ship is able to absorb enemy shots of the same color and will be stronger against enemies of the opposite color.
Player firing lasers in the red polarity.

Boost Mode

While absorbing bullets, the gauge in the second line on the top of the screen grows. When maxed, player is able to use BOOST mode that triplicates current power. In order to do that, B button must be pressed, with no loss of bombs from the stock. The effect lasts either 10 seconds or when a bomb is released and then the gauge backs to zero. During Boost, every enemy down will release a star bonus. Hit bosses will produce star bonuses if the attack is sustained.
Boost mode attacks.

BLOCKING ENEMY LASER:
Some enemies have lasers too. They can't be absorbed, but blocked. In order to do that, just use any kind of laser.

Enemies and obstacles that shine green when hit are immune to attack and may bounce normal shots.

BONUSES:
There are three main itens that raise the player's score:
Coins: when enemies explode, they turn nearby bullets into bonuses. When player's polarity is the same as the beaten enemy, the bonus produced is of coin type. They give the player points and raise the value in the numeric display at the second line on the top of the screen. The more you gather coins, the higher their value.
Rings: when player's polarity is opposit to enemy's, rings are produced. They give the player points and lessen the number of gathered coins. But after certain coin count, rings give much more points than coins. So the player should collect rings preferably when his coin count is high.
Stars: they appear when an opponent beaten is neutral or mixed. Its value is multiplied if the player keeps the interval when he collects them short. They also come from secret sources that must be hit with muzzle fire or from enemies during Boost mode.

Those three bonuses are attracted to the ship every when polarity is shifted. In case the player do not wish to attract bonuses, he must not change polarity while they are on screen.

POWER UP PODS:
Destroy this mixed pod and collect the power up it releases.

2010-07-11T20:20:00.003-03:00

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

Yeah! More Lichtgestalt Batoru! Now main fire goes to power level 4. Incoming enemies that once were cheap now have their entrance indicated. Once I finish the second stage, I'll tone down the difficulty.

I'm now the fortunate owner of a digital piano! Also, I've bought new strings for my guitar although I cannot really play it. I also have in sight the Behringer UMX25, a 25-key MIDI controler full of knobs that will help me doing vooosh, wiiiiiiish, peeeew and the like.

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

2010-04-21T12:30:00.002-03:00

Working on Lichtgestalt Batoru now. I'm in a torrent of ideas, so I knew I should take Batoru out of the hold. First stage Konstrukto done, now it's time for second stage, Kubo.

I'm still keyboard-less, so all I can do is to play some notes on my guitar pretending it's a keyboard. A-string broke, so I'm limited in the chords department. I'm limited anyway, because I can't play the guitar to be true.

"You cheap ass, buy a new set of strings!"

Did you donate? No. NOBODY has donated a buck. So I'm not buying the strings.

I'm thinking of creating a Twitter page for Visual Atrocity. Do you think it's a good idea? Show me some love thru spiegelworks@gmail.com and maybe I'll start twitting.

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

2010-03-23T20:40:00.004-03:00

Back to work. I won't be as free as before, but I feel better now.

Also, people from GameVício wrote a preview for Winds of Rebellion. Great! Thank you!

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

2010-02-21T19:41:00.001-03:00

Due to health issues, production is on hold.

..

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

2010-02-06T15:59:00.006-02:00

GoGoMaki Dai Jo Bu: production has started!
\o/

\o/

\o/

(...and there was much rejoicing!)

Doing now everything the game needs before level and enemy design.

Lichtgestalt Batoru is on hold, but still I decided to add some music to it. I produced a song called Puti-Puti (pronounced poochie-poochie, an onomatopoeia for trance drum beat, the most ridiculous name for a song ever, even more because the song goes into d'n'b for most of the time). It's only something to loop in the background, having no keyboard now, it's not wise to compose complex stuff without a proper instrument.

2010-01-27T07:16:00.010-02:00

In the last days, I made adjustments to Muhon no Kaze - Winds of Rebellion. Those include a new title screen, proper music loading and some corrections, most of them graphic.

Works on GoGoMaki DaiJoBu may start soon, because I'm willing to wait feedback from my testers for Winds of Rebellion before working on it again. So GoGoMaki should fill my spare time.

I've been to development boards introducing my work and giving people my demo for Lichtgestalt Batoru. One or two people demonstrated interest, but most others who liked it were net friends I invited to see the threads and try the demo. Others were like "didn't play and don't like it" or "I was unable or unwilling to understand, to leard and play well, so you need to make something better than this". Some useful advices I've read (in fact, one comes in mind now, maybe a second one too), but it made me sad that there are only a few people that access development boards. So in order to divulge my work, I'll have to hit other foruns outside the development ones.

One important thing I need is more testers, but trustworthy ones. I have to get to them through connections, but things are not going this way.

Also, in a big Brazilian development forum, it was a total disaster. I read the rules and in the reception there was this guy insistently doing what the rules tells him not to do. Saying things like "the abstract game is too abstract" or "sorry, but what abstract means to me is 'inexistent' or 'nonsense'" - the guy of "didn't play and don't like it". The rules of this board tell people to be constructive and not only thread fillers. One other guy was very positive, but seeing how things go in this board, I did'nt bother returning there yet.

In the real world, things are dire. No money and no job until now and other personal issues, all this things would point me to stop making these games and giving my face to the public, but this is a situation where I get at least free time, although I don't want to have so much free time and my mind is not good enough to indulge in hobbies and doing PR. Anyway, I don't want these works here to go to waste, but I'm no good with publicity otherwise I could divulge my site properly. It would be sad if all the good little things were for nothing, leaving me with all the big unpleasant ones. I can't even start positively asking for donations (although the Donate button is already there - that's negative asking, I think) if no one comes. Not that I'm willing to live on donations, duh, but there are things I need to buy to ease the production of my games. The most important good I'll be able to buy only if I get the job I was being promised, and that is a new instrument, for my synthesizer is broken since day first of this year. Yeah, great way to start the year. Otherwise, my games will not have music.

I've being listening to piano works by Maurice Ravel to soothe my pain. In better moods I'm able to listen to Brian Setzer Orchestra. I'll soon resume my search for a honest Heavy Metal band, because I'm sick of all this non-commercial-true-metal speech that turns into a joke with overproduced bands built over market strategies with "operatic singers" who actually can't deliver or worse, like Dragonforce, a circus act where no member actually delivers. Really, you grow up into this 'Metal religion' but when you see the light (adulthood?) it's all disappointment. Maybe I should stick with the 70's for rock music. Anyway, it's funny to realise that after all those Metal singers, the one I think is the best is really Bruce Dickinson, but after he returned to Iron Maiden. People are too blind (deaf) to see how nontechnical was his singing before. In Maiden England, he wasn't able to use the higher part of his range due to technical issues, but from Rock In Rio III on, he is the only one I can witness delivering even in bootlegs. Other bands, they either hunt bootlegs to bust them or leave a trail of overdubbed videos on YouTube.

My mood: there's no emoticon to express how I feel...

-- Wednesday - January 27th, 2010. Cris Spiegel - spiegelworks@gmail.com

Monday - January 11th, 2010

2010-01-11T11:23:00.006-02:00

Hi, this is Visual Atrocity news.

When I was creating the characters for GoGoMaki Daijobu, I played with kanji, phonetics and meanings. I was giving a damn to real naming conventions and governmental rules, but I later felt that using Nanori reading for parts of last names was too far beyond the boundary of ridiculous. So I decided I'm going to partially rename them soon and erased the kanji from their profiles. A worse case was the character now named Nana Kurosawa, although that was her real name from conception, she used to go by the nickname Kuro-chan, because she's a kuro/gothic lolita. But a friend of mine warned me that kuro-chan is the japanese equivalent to nigger and what I thought was a cute name now is gone. Or is it? Is it really too bad to call her Kuro-chan? Maybe it's better to avoid trouble for now.

--Cris Spiegel - spiegelworks@gmail.com

..

GoGoMaki Dai-Jo-Bu (see Secret Character no. 2's profile below)

2010-01-07T20:15:00.005-02:00

An incarnated evil spirit claims to be Izanami-no-Mikoto, godess of death reborn. Her apparition coincides with a rise of violence and intolerance through humanity.

SELECT YOUR CHARACTER:

?????
17 years old
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GoGoMaki Dai-Jo-Bu (see Secret Character no. 1's profile below)

2010-01-07T20:14:00.012-02:00

An incarnated evil spirit claims to be Izanami-no-Mikoto, godess of death reborn. Her apparition coincides with a rise of violence and intolerance through humanity.

SELECT YOUR CHARACTER:

?????
Age: that which one is in his own heart...
..

GoGoMaki Dai-Jo-Bu (see Taitou Namukosegawa's profile below)

2010-01-07T20:14:00.011-02:00

An incarnated evil spirit claims to be Izanami-no-Mikoto, godess of death reborn. Her apparition coincides with a rise of violence and intolerance through humanity.

SELECT YOUR CHARACTER:

Taitou Namukosegawa
17 years old
..

GoGoMaki Dai-Jo-Bu (see Jean-Paul Foucault's profile below)

2010-01-07T20:13:00.013-02:00

An incarnated evil spirit claims to be Izanami-no-Mikoto, godess of death reborn. Her apparition coincides with a rise of violence and intolerance through humanity.

SELECT YOUR CHARACTER:

Jean-Paul Foucault
28 years old
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GoGoMaki Dai-Jo-Bu (see Nana-chan's profile below)

2010-01-07T20:13:00.012-02:00

An incarnated evil spirit claims to be Izanami-no-Mikoto, godess of death reborn. Her apparition coincides with a rise of violence and intolerance through humanity.

SELECT YOUR CHARACTER:

Nana Kurosawa
19 years old

GoGoMaki Dai-Jo-Bu (see Niichi Minokotsu's profile below)

2010-01-07T20:10:00.005-02:00

An incarnated evil spirit claims to be Izanami-no-Mikoto, godess of death reborn. Her apparition coincides with a rise of violence and intolerance through humanity.

SELECT YOUR CHARACTER:

Niichi Minokotsu
16 years old
..

GoGoMaki Dai-Jo-Bu (see Maki Minokotsu´s profile below)

2010-01-07T20:05:00.006-02:00

An incarnated evil spirit claims to be Izanami-no-Mikoto, godess of death reborn. Her apparition coincides with a rise of violence and intolerance through humanity.

SELECT YOUR CHARACTER:

Maki Minokotsu
16 years old
..

Who are Spiegelworks?

2010-01-06T18:12:00.003-02:00

The ones who make the magic come alive. I mean, the one.

Spiegelworks is an indepent game making group from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Currently there is only one member, Cris Spiegel. He is responsible for design, art, sound, music and programming. As of now, we use Game Maker by YoYoGames as the main engine. Also, SW use fmod as sound engine for background music.

Lichtgestalt Batoru

2010-01-06T18:11:00.028-02:00

This is an abstract 2D scrolling shooter that's not really vertical or horizontal: the player is free to shoot any direction he wants and enemies come from everywhere!

.............................
You not only control the movement of the ship, but also the direction it will face. The function buttons, arranged as a cross, not only fire but turn the ship in the respective cardinal direction.

Beware of the enemy's entrance! Action forces you to the middle of the screen.
Graze enemy bullets to rise score multiplier. Every time multuplier levels up, a powerup item appears. Choose to raise firepower or to get a specific kind of bomb.
Refrain from firing to set a shield. Fire again to release it as a bomb. There are 5 types of bombs: the standard one, simple but of long duration, and the others that release varied fire patterns.
All sound fx done through FM synthesis, just like in the old days.

Options menu is accessed by mouse. Here, player can change settings, controls and colors of his own ship, enemy fire and bonus.

DEMO! DOWNLOAD HERE! And COMMENT HERE!
JoyToKey by Ryo Ohkubo is included in the archive in case you want to play with a gamepad. Just run it before running the game. You may have to configure it to suit your controller.

If you experience low framerates, please send us an email. The usual framerate goes from 60 to 50, but it should not be an average drastically lower than that (let us say 30 or 20fps). If you have any issue like that, please let us know so we can devise a solution in your case.

How to play:

In title screen, press start (enter) to move onto Options screen. Use mouse here to change settings. To change controls, hover the cursor on the function and press the desired key. Default configuration is:

Arrows: movement
WASD: direction of fire and attack
Enter: start and pause

After done with this screen, press ok and go on to stage 1.

In top left screen there are two gauges: horizontal one measures shield and bomb power - refrain from fire for it to grow stronger; vertical blue bar reports grazing done - scratch enemy bullets to increase the bar and its level. Anytime this level goes up, a powerup falls from the top of the screen.

Tap any of fire buttons to shoot normal attack. Hold it to unleash concentrated fire and slow down your speed. If you shoot while grazing enemy fire, your attack will be stronger. Refrain from fire to rise shield - after charging it press any button to release it as a bomb in the desired direction. Bombs have 2 levels depending on accumulated power (horizontal screen).

Destroyed enemies turn into coins. Coins value is increased by grazing level.

With the powerup item, you can choose whether you powerup your main fire or equip one of the 5 bomb types available. Bomb types vary their durations and fire patterns, such as none, lines, waves, homing missiles and concentrated foward fire.

PROGRESS: 1st stage with music done; 2/3 of the 2nd stage done, bgm done; total of 3 stages plus final boss special stage and 2 loops originally planed.

GoGoMaki Dai-Jo-Bu

2010-01-06T18:10:00.008-02:00

An incarnated evil spirit claims to be Izanami-no-Mikoto, godess of death reborn. Her apparition coincides with a rise of violence and intolerance through humanity.

SELECT YOUR CHARACTER:

PROGRESS: A lot of cool doodles; started coding.

Muhon no Kaze - Winds of Rebellion

2010-01-06T18:09:00.020-02:00

In the future, after the world has run down out of oil and new fuel was devised, PMCs and weapons manufacturers are the de facto powers of the world and wage war against the central government of the planet. After a failed mission, one female japanese pilot was arrested as scapegoat and waited for trial until she managed to flee. She and her rebel mates take away a huge aerial carrier called Stormbringer and go out on a journey gathering clues to discover the relations between war companies and local governments, especially the Japanese one.

Travel around the world fighting companies that rule only to perpetuate war and increase their production output - battle in Rio de Janeiro, Andes mountain chain, North American east coast wasteland, Pacific Ocean and Japan.
Manage the offensive-defensive polarity system: be invulnerable to same-pole fire and absorb enemy bullets to boost your fire 3x current power!
Repel enemy lasers with your own.
Dodge manic enemy offensive that strategically uses the polarity system with a catch: neutral bullet that you cannot absorb.
Destroyed enemies turn near bullets into bonus defined by polarity affinity with player's ship. Collect as many coins as you can to raise rings value. Use strategy to gather many points.
Fight evil while listening to one of most exciting soundtracks in a shooting game ever. From rock tunes that pay tribute to 70's heavy rock and 80's german power metal to pumping electronica, the songs of this game never dull the action down.

HOW TO PLAY? CLICK HERE!

1st STAGE:

3rd STAGE:

Cris Spiegel's personal channel on YouTube has some videos of this game:
http://www.youtube.com/user/CrissSpiegel

DEMO! DOWNLOAD HERE.
COMMENT HERE!
Use the mouse to interface with the options menu. Instructions will be added soon.
Thanks to torigara for ExecuteEx.dll used in the game launcher app.

HOW TO PLAY? CLICK HERE!

PROGRESS: Complete to 2nd stage; 3rd stage enemy positioning incomplete; 4th stage in the making; 5th stage in the concept; needs songs for later parts; needs a definitive title screen.

Some background graphic elements were based on images from Google Maps and Google Earth. We make no profit out of this game and have no intention to harm Google. May it be known that Google deserves credit.

Thanks for coming by! Be sure to check for updates!

FAQ

2010-01-06T13:44:00.011-02:00

Why the name change?

From VISUAL ATROCITY (the funny name of my old fotolog) to SPIEGELWORKS (by Cris Spiegel): do I need to explain?

This work of yours is it one of love or is it for money?

It's one of love definitely. Unfortunately love is not enough, but for now love is all we have to give and receive. Well, if you want to give us more than love, Donate button is over there <--.

If it's a work of love, how long does love last?

We always hope that it's forever, but life is not made only of hobbies. College will be in the way and it really is more important, but as the fun part of life is what keeps us sane, we will try and make it the longest we can.

How much love do you receive in reply to your work and from who?

Most love comes from friends and acquaintances, but also some people who reply in YouTube. Sometimes we receive no love at all, but instead demonstrations of how some adult individuals long for the time when they were twelve or younger. Some people think that calling your work "worse than my dog's shit" is encouragement for you to improve. But you start to think if "should I improve just to please this little bastard!?". All we need to do is to stick with those we know we can trust and take their opinions and advices in account, for we know that they are really the ones hoping for our success.

Is it true that there is only one in this boat? So what's with all the majestatic plural?

As of now, Spiegelworks is only Cris Spiegel - the same way Team Shanghai Alice is only Zun and ABA Games is only Kenta Cho. We, better saying I, usually don't discard help, but there's no other person available now to commit to current or proposed projects. And more people may nod to bigger project and bigger project nods to longer produtcion period and huge files to download. Maybe I could use some help to speed up things that are already usual, like spriting or background design, but I have nowbody as of now.

About the "royal we" stuff, it is just that if more people join SW, I won't have to edit all the text. :-P

Have Spiegelworks tried other genres of games?

I was creating the skeleton for 2D platformers. It was very nice, but the source code vanished from this dimension for unknown reasons. Yeah, I lost it. Bad me. I love platformers but none is in the plans because of life commitments. Also, it's a good thing to try and finish what I have started before begining something new.

This is the platformer basic skeleton I was building. It could've evolved to a classic Castlevania, Metroid, Metroidvania, Megaman, Ninja Gaiden, etc -like game.

It would be a real hard work to create all the graphical elements plus level design. Of course the sprites are all "borrowed" because it's a skeleton (avoiding the term 'engine' here). I wouldn't steal rips from commercial games in a final product.

Are you, Cris Spiegel, a professional artist? What's your education

As of now, I'm a amateur illustrator that gives some classes for money. I attended to some semesters in Fine Arts School, but dropped because I was not happy there and oil paint made me sick. And also cigarette. Try to paint in a dump of an atelier standing not only oil and solvent scent but also smoke from mates and teachers' cigarettes. Cigarettes are the ultimate insult from the selfish.

Are you, Cris Spiegel, a professional musician?

No, not even an amateur one. Well, I used to play keyboard in a Blind Guardian cover band (only 3 gigs with no pay), had classic piano lessons and studied opera singing, but I'm not a capable player. All I have created was possible only because of my knowledge in theory and aesthetics.

Do you think your games are works of art?

Although we have some wacky theories about the ontological status of art, in the most practical sense, we do not claim our games are art themselves. We believe that games can be art forms, such as Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, but we are not trying to do that. Our games are works of entertainment with pieces and aspects of art in them. We have music, visual art, storytelling and aspects of artistic design that cannot be separated from the basic idea of the game, but in the end of the day, we are just embellishing the core experience of playing a digital sport.

Are you part of an old-school revival?

Yes, that we are! Not that we are saying that the world doesn't need all the fancy and new stuff, but we worry about the survival of what we once traditionally knew as gaming. We believe in facing challenges and dedication to our little pleasures, but we fear that one day game will only be the name for the riskless masturbatory fantasy of power for lousy actors, the players. We don't agree with that I-payed-I-gotta-see-the-ending consumerist's way of thinking - we think this guy should use YouTube to spoil himself with the ending or read a book. We don't really get the all games-for-adults talk when we see how childish all the hype only for super-hi-tech hollywoodian play of pretend is.

Not that we dislike all the cinematographic stuff of now, but we fear that future will bring lack of variety in exchange of ammount of particles per explosion or acuracy of lighting. We fear the end of what we love since youngsters because profit is more important to the makers. We can see their side but this doesn't make us happier.

Maybe it's because we speak a language that distinguish games with rules and objective and games without that but in English they are both games. Maybe we are getting too old. Or maybe we are to broke to pay for all the new stuff.

Shouldn't you realize that industry reaching for more people is better than catering for niche public?

Everybody has the right to have fun. Lots of people now say they love games the same way almost all say they love movies, but most are only into it for a limited amount of superficial stimuli (physical action, special fx, character design, easy humor, racy sex scenes, etc.). Even more obvious it is when we talk about music. Given the opportunity to work with something big, I'd definitely do it. But as a personal goal, I'll try and help to keep alive the niche part because I think it helps everything from getting too trivial. It's not about the number of people in it, but how engaged they are. To believe that core 2D shooting gamers will not hit YES after asked to continue out of honor and to be able to compare scores and progress with friends is amazing.

Don't take it bad but your English sucks.

We are trying to reach as many people as we can. This pages are read over and over in our search for mistakes. As we keep updating it, more mistakes are made, but we try to correct it again and again. A more useful way of talking about my skills in English would be emailing me reporting those nasty errors.