More 7drl stuff! Tags: Games, Procedural generation, Small games, Other jams, Plans New art! Tags: Art Weekly progress post #5: 7drl! Tags: Games, Small games, Procedural generation, Small games, Streaming, Regular updates, Other jams Weekly progress post #4: Weird squares Tags: Games, ESA 2, Plans, Regular updates, Streaming, Small games Weekly progress post #3: Headache and animated tiles Tags: Games, ESA 2, Plans, Regular updates, Streaming Weekly progress post #2: More weird critters Tags: Games, ESA 2, Cloud Realm, Regular updates, Streaming, World generator Weekly progress post #1: Weird critters Tags: Games, ESA 2, Regular updates, Cloud Realm Screensaver jam! Tags: Games, Small games, Procedural generation, Other jams Recursive programming, uh oh Tags: Games, Cloud Realm, Other The year 2015 Tags: ESA, ESA 2, Games, Plans, Other, Happenings, Streaming, Regular updates, Article Pages
Posted on 2016-03-12 20:22
I’ve had very little time to work on games this week, and next week looks to be even worse in that regard; I’m working in a student theatre group and our we’ll have our premiere and the rest next Tuesday. Woo!
Anyway! I’ve taken what little time I have to work on the 7drl thing, because it’s fun to take a crack at making a “pure” roguelike (or at least something imitating one). MMF2 really isn’t up to the task, causing slowdown even with just a bit of raycasting & pathfinding (especially pathfinding), but in a weird way I enjoy having the push the program to its limits.
I now have moving enemies with different movement patterns and speeds, field-of-view and a system for enemies noticing players and so on. I was really glad to find out that making the enemies collide with each other wasn’t quite as terribly hard as I feared in this specific case. I probably won’t have time to finish anything actually playable since Sunday will be reserved for theatre stuff, but there’re some features I’d love to see working before the 7drl. Biggest of these is some kind of an “skill system”, in that the player can affect the enemies with spell-like skills and vice versa. We’ll see how smoothly that’ll go.
Posted on 2016-03-10 03:43
After such a long while I ended up making some new traditional arts. I’ve been doing comics for our student magazine over the year, but this time I also made the cover art. The theme was “future”, although a lunar lander isn’t really future at this point. Psychologists in moon definitely are, though! It was a lot of fun making this and I’m happy with the result. Inks and pencil, editing done with computer.
Posted on 2016-03-10 03:31
7drl, aka 7-day roguelike challenge, is upon us again! I’ve been meaning to join this event for at least 3-4 years now, always ending up a bit too unmotivated to work start anything. However, this time around I have not one but two ideas, the latter of which being a bit large to be making in a week.
Here’s some extra info about 7drl if you’re interested!
I had already implemented the A* pathfinding, but added walls and a text engine on-stream. ESA 2 got some pre-boss work done as well as a feebleish attempt at a boss sprite; maybe I’ll figure out a better idea in a week. The little stream visualizer also got some bugs fixed; it now displays comments as well!
Anyway, I’ll try to finish something based on my first RL idea before the end of the week, and have an extra stream about it on Friday.
Posted on 2016-03-03 02:58
Today’s stream included me making a tiny program that displays the stream-watchers as tiny squares with faces. It was fun to make! I’m probably going to extend it into something larger.
In terms of “actual” game progress, I added a new room to the metroidvania and implemented a new type of object, Customtrigger, which can alert the game of custom, manually coded events. I tested it immediately with a tiny cutscene related to another square, seen above. Also tested the jetpack/double jump powerup; it needs tweaking but it’s something. Next week we’ll hopefully get to a boss fight!
Posted on 2016-02-25 17:32
So yeah, I felt pretty awful last evening due to a headache; I tend to get those a couple times a month due to forgetting to sit in a good posture, and they usually require a good night’s sleep to go away. The stream ended up being shorter than usual due to this and I ended it rather abruptly.
Nevertheless, the progress was surprisingly ok! I added the basics of a new room, fixed some bugs in enemy behaviour and added some new much-needed tiles, among them some random animated stuff that will be useful in livening up the rooms. Also I finally made metal pipe tiles that I’m somewhat happy with; the earlier attempts were horrendous. Next up will be a new powerup and a boss fight, which will replace the previously-implemented Skullspider as the first one in the game. I’ve some plans for Skullspider, though – it was probably too hard as a first boss anyway.
Posted on 2016-02-20 04:00
A bit more productive of a stream! I a new enemy and these weird cocoon things for spawning certain other enemies; a new room was also added although it’s very bare-bones right now. I’m still toying around with the player’s physics, and it definitely feels like they will need more work before they’ll feel really properly nice. Getting closer to a new boss and the first real powerup of the game; it’ll be interesting to see how long it’ll take me to get those implemented, seeing how little time I’ve had for my game projects.
I also worked a bit on the snake game, fixing some bugs and adding a feature that’ll allow making better cutscenes; the game’s still a bit hard to work on on-stream because the engine is pretty complicated.
Also did some early touches to a little side-project; hopefully that’ll become properly streamable soon!
Posted on 2016-02-11 02:27
Yes! Let’s do this! From now on I’ll try to do a weekly blog post after every weekly stream to summarize what I’ve been working on and overall discuss the progress of the games I’ve been working on. Expect pretty tiny amounts of information, though, because it’s somewhat rare for me to be able to implement a larger thing on any given week. Whatever!!
This week I’ve worked mostly on the new metroidvania and a bit on the Snake Game; the former was, as usual, the thing I streamed development for. I added a new enemy, tweaked some platforming elements and added a new cutscene (placeholder). Progress was a bit slower than I would’ve hoped; I got kind of stuck on trying to find a cool design for the new enemy among other things. The design I settled on will fit a certain later enemy better but it’ll do for now. I really need to make some new “starter” enemies to set the mood, kinda like how those crawlers work in ESA.
Posted on 2016-01-25 04:42
So, over the weekend there was a little jam organized by JW with the theme of making screensavers. I was really really busy on Saturday and most of Sunday, but I managed to complete a little thing nonetheless:
Island Screensaver!!
Posted on 2016-01-10 03:08
So over the past week I’ve been implementing a simplistic scripting language inside Multimedia Fusion 2 to make it easier to create a versatile in-game editor for a game project. Programs like Game Maker of course already do something like this, but it felt kind of funny to realize that I was augmenting the usability of MMF2 by adding a custom-made scripting language on top of it. Designing something like this has also been an interesting lesson in programming.
Anyway, some examples of the syntax:
1.
if,node,0,3,<,0/else/goto,2
add,node,1,3,1/loop
sub,node,1,3,1/loop
When this runs, an object called "node" with the ID "1" will add 1 to it's variable at index "3" (which is its X position) if "node" with the ID "0" has its variable at index "3" below zero. Else, the "node" with ID "1" subtracts one from said variable. Or in motion:
The teal diamond is the node with ID 0, and it moves above and below the 0 X coordinate, causing the other node to move.
2.
aimrelative,node,1,4,node,0,4,0.05/loop
When this runs, the "node" with ID "1" sets its variable at index "4" (i.e. Y position) so that it approaches the value of node 0's variable 4. The 0.05 defines the speed at which the value changes, being in this case 5% of the gap between those variables. Or in motion:
Again the teal diamond is the node with ID 0.
3.
if,damage,>,1
set,surface,1,19,3/set,surface,2,19,3
set,mask,15,18,3/set,mask,16,18,3/end
This is what I actually use in-game right now. Basically it checks if an enemy is damaged enough (the 'damage' variable counts upwards because SHUTUP SHUTUP SHUTUP), its graphical masks change slightly, after which the code block stops running.
As you can see, the language is very crude and dependent of hand-crafted commands. However, I use it mostly for relatively simple checks and to spice up enemy movement, so I'm sure it'll be more than enough for this job. The fact that it supports if-else functions, and that separate code "blocks" can also affect other blocks via "start" and "pause" commands also adds a lot of versatility.
Posted on 2015-12-30 22:18
Well then! It’s the end of the year, as well as the beginning of the 7th year of my blog! Wow, I actually hadn’t ever counted how long the blog has been around, but that’s pretty cool, I’d say. Lots of stuff has happened over the past year (and sadly most of it not in this blog). Anyway!
Environmental Station Alpha was rated the Best PC Metroidvania of 2015 at metroidvanias.com, along with Axiom Verge and Castle in the Darkness! I’m really glad about the game’s generally pretty positive reception, even despite all the little problems and quirks that unavoidably accompany a larger game designed by a single person. As an extra-cool thing, SmiteTV, who was one of the first to stream the game, has returned with the intention to do a full LP along with his co-commentator, Madithen. There have been lots of neat LPs of the game already, of course, but what makes this one especially intriguing is that it’ll probably be headed to lparchive.org once it’s completed! Sweet!
This year has been pretty interesting also in the sense that in a post-ESA world I’ve found in myself the ability to concentrate on game projects for longer period of time, even during those lulls in interest that have previously driven me away from a project for months; this is neat and makes me more certain about future projects. The weekly stream I’ve been doing since …April? has also helped a lot, although I’ve also noticed a tendency of hurrying and not concentrating enough while making games on-stream due to the feeling that I need to show “cool stuff” instead of working on more technical things.
I’ve been feeling really anxious at times about things happening in different parts of the world over the past year; it definitely feels like there’s a lot of anger, frustration and bad will bubbling in people’s minds everywhere, and I’m scared of the prospect that there are people who believe that hurting others is justifiable who might eventually decide to take the law in their own hands somewhere. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen!
(The year has also had lots of great things going on, though!)
To cap this weird end-of-the-year post, here’s a list of the games I’m working on:
1. The new metroidvania – It’s the thing I’ve been mostly showing while streaming. I couldn’t help it and ended up starting to work on a new metroidvania as soon as the old one was done. What I said earlier about hurrying and not concentrating enough has affected this project the most – I feel it has a lot of potential but I also feel that there are some things that I’ll eventually have to rework pretty heavily to really make the game work. Mainly graphical stuff, though.
2. Snake game – I’ll post screenshots once I get a bit further with the project, but people who have watched the stream have probably seen bits of this. Flying on a plane and seeing snakes, that inspires me a lot. I’ve been very excited about getting this project forward! Alas, there’s a lot of stuff in the engine that’s wonderfully complicated and I feel there’ll be several problems to solve before I’ll get the game to a truly polished-feeling state. Right now there’s one aggravating graphical bug that I dread to touch.
3.-6. Various smaller games that might need a bit more work before being “announced” – Yeah, this list is pretty silly because most of these games are in a pretty early form right now. But yes, there are some secrets projects I’m slowly also developing! These are mostly smaller, too, so it might be that I’ll finish them before my next “larger” project is done. Who knows!
Happy new year!
First Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 Next Last