Posts from year 2016:
Weekly progress post #7: Boss cutscenes, for real Tags: Games, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates Weekly progress post #6: Boss cutscenes Tags: Games, ESA 2, Other, Plans, Streaming, Regular updates, Other jams 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
Posted on 2016-03-24 03:52
I went and finished the boss in one go! It still lacks some visual polish, but the fight can be fought from start to finish and the boss pattern is fully realized (although maybe in a need of some tweaking). I also implemented conveyor belts today. Very productive, so productive in fact that I think I’ll stream again this week, on Friday or Sunday.
Bonus funnies:
Posted on 2016-03-21 00:14
So, my 7drl entry ended up being late due to me being busy on the weekend, which kind of drained my will to keep working on it. Maybe one day…! I’m pretty happy with what I have now, though, because I implemented many features I had never done before, it’s cool.
I was really tired after all this theatre stuff last week so the stream started early and also ended somewhat quickly. However, I managed to implement a pre-boss cutscene and maybe-kinda settle on the design of the boss! Also added a button to change the level editor’s background colour to magenta, woo!
No picture today because I didn’t really do anything that visual, but next wednesday should be better in that regard!
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!!
