One more thing:
after way too long, I’ve redone my commission posters with new example works, new prices and tiers. If you’re interested please don’t hesitate to message me here, on twitter or on Discord (SquareAnon#9593).
Speaking of Twitter, I’m holding an art raffle there, so if you have twitter and want to try your luck to get a free model, click this link, and retweet, follow, comment!
Only 2 days left! (I would have posted this sooner but tumblr didn’t let me post).
Last month I (hosted and) took part in a game jam about princesses and witches. So after brainstorming for a bit I came up with an idea for a point-and-click adventure game about a little princess trying to escape from a castle.
It’s been a fun change of pace to create a tiny game like this, and it’s been an interesting challenge to implement the features needed for a point-and-click games since I’ve never done anything like this before. It’s also been fun trying to come up with puzzles that are both ‘creative’ and relatively logical and intuitive.
When I do game jams I always try to challenge myself with types of games I don’t make usually, and this time it′s been no different.
It’s been quite a while so it’s time for an update.
As you may remember, at the end of last year I set out to add a series of new features to my game Knight & Witch in the hope to make controlling the two characters more fun and engaging. After a brief pause during which I spent most of my time thinking how to implement these features, both from a design perspective and a code-related one, I finally got back to gamedev in practice.
So as you can see in the video above, I have successfully implemented some of the features I listed in a previous post.
I’m currently working on the last point. It took some time to come up with a good way to handle this but I think I’ve found the right solution.
I’m probably forgetting something but this should be all the major things I have done since the last post.
Now there are a few more things I’d like to mention so I’ll make a separate post for that.
Me and Liq made a game for Ludum Dare 43! go play it when you have the chance.
This is the LD link if you want to rate it. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/43/no-brakes-on-the-train-of-life
If you also entered LD and want me to try your game out, post a link in the comments!
By the way, since everyone is doing it, I’ll also link my Twitter: https://twitter.com/SquareAnon
Of course I’m not happy with what’s happening to tumblr, but it probably won’t change how I used it until now. I will keep using Twitter for smaller and more constants updates and use Tumblr for longer ‘recaps’ simply because 140 characters aren’t always enough.
So yeah don’t expect many posts here from now on, if you’re interested in my stuff I suggest you follow me on Twitter instead.
Right, I also wanted to talk a little bit about this game.
I stumbled across this video last week. Before then, I had no idea this game was even a thing (although I sort of remember seeing some gifs which looked more like mockups some months/years ago). Needless to say, I was a bit shocked when I started watching, at least when the gameplay part finally started.
This game is pretty much a carbon copy of Knight & Witch. The number of similarities is uncanny. You have:
While watching I felt pretty depressed. Someone was making my game except better! However after watching the whole thing carefully, I started to realize the difference and flaws that Eastward has compared to my game, at least gameplay-wise.
First of all, the second character has no AI. They just follow the player around but they can’t attack on their own, they won’t be targeted by enemies, etc. They’re pretty much invisible until you make them stop moving. This could be considered a plus by someone, as you won’t have to worry about them getting killed by an enemy while you’re busy somewhere else, but I think that this way, the character feels pointless and kind of a dead weight with no real role.
Second, from what I saw in the demo footage, whoever was playing used the old man to fight every single enemy, and only switched to the little girl in a couple of instances where her ability was required. I’m not a fan of this, and this is something many people did in my game’s demos too because they felt that the witch was too hard to control to be useful. I’m working to fix that in my game, so I think I have that over Eastward. If you have 2 playable characters, both should be equally useful.
Lastly, the boss fight. I’m not sure if this is scripted only for this one fight or what, but here the old man was forced to fight the boss on his own while the witch just went off-screen. This is stupid and again wastes the 2-character mechanic.
Now, these flaws I noticed had me relieved somewhat, but then I looked at some of the comments on the Youtube video (yeah yeah, Youtube comments but guess what? those people are the average consumers, and they decide to buy your game, so their opinion kinda sorta matters, no matter how dumb it may be) had me worried again. To summarize, many people see Eastward as another case of ‘game made by an artist’ where the art and story are pretty and the selling point, but the game part has been neglected. “Pretty but boring” This worried me because that’s kind of the same way some people described my game after playing the demos: they liked the art but not the gameplay.
Anyway, I won’t let this discourage me! In fact now I have a reason to work even harder, to create a better game than Eastward!
Now for Knight & Witch, I’ve scrapped both overworld and dungeon scenes from my demo as they were only for the demo itself and won’t appear in the final game.
As you can see here, I set up a way for the knight to raise his shield. Right now this is only a visual change, but adding an actual guard effect that nullifies damage received from the front is not going to be hard. Also, I’ll make it so the knight will walk slower while guarding.
Next up, I started prototyping yet another spell casting system for the Witch. This one is inspired by how top down Zelda games do aiming with items such as the bow. When you start aiming (and charging), you can still move around (although you will move slower. also don’t mind the placeholder animations), but your aim will be locked in place until you release the button.
I struggled quite a bit to find the right control system for the Witch. Something not as OP as the one I had in the first demo, where she could spam magic projectiles all the time, but not as cumbersome as the one I had in the second demo (aiming while standing still sounded good on paper, but against moving targets it was unusable). I think this one might be the right one, but people around me have been kind of pushing me towards a TPS-like aiming system. I want to keep the game top down-ish, but I can’t deny the temptation to go third person. In the future I might try prototyping an aiming system like that too.
I also implemented a very rough kind of dash/roll-dodge thing for both characters. I’m not sure whether they’ll have i-frames during it or not. Of course, they will have the proper animation once I’m done.
Since this post is about K&W, let me talk a bit about the kind of changes I plan to make to the game, specifically the combat:
Partially related, I decided to split the AI behavior for the companion character into 2 states: ‘combat’ and ‘exploration’:
in combat, the companion will behave as usual, attacking nearby enemies, fleeing from danger, etc. I intend to make the AI smarter, for example making the knight raise the shield to protect the Witch, or making the witch choose the right elemental spell to defeat a particular enemy;
in exploration the companion will be invulnerable to things like traps, and will stick close to the player, teleporting next to them if too far away.
The change between ‘exploration’ and ‘combat’ states will happen in the presence of enemies, and if the player will use their weapon. This means that the change won’t be triggered if the player hits a switch with the sword, for example. Inversely, the absence of enemy will make the companion go back to ‘exploration’.
This is not everything I have in mind, but I think it should be enough for now. You can imagine that implementing all of this will already be quite the task. I’m still debating about some of these features so if you have ideas, suggestions, critiques and whatnot, be sure to comment and let me know! God knows how much I need feedback.
As promised, some visual progress for the games I’ve been working on recently, starting from ColorFall. I forgot to mention i the previous post that I added a white theme to the game, and you can switch between black and white from the main menu.
I’ve also made changes to the difficulty, lowering the ‘dead zone’, so that losing 20 balls will mean game over. Before, the limit was 50, but now with the addition of the various special balls 50 was way too much and it’s way too easy to get a combo going and keep it forever.
Oh yeah, the game has a proper soundtrack now! It starts mellow and slow, but it builds up and adds more instruments and beats as you keep a combo going. I wanted to let you have a glimpse at it, but ShareX is not playing nice today…
Okay, I think it’s about time I give a small update on what I’ve been doing the past few weeks, what I’m doing now, and what I plan to do in the coming months. I said on Twitter I would make a post about it like a month ago and then of course I completely forgot to actually do it. Anyway, on to the important stuff:
What I’ve been doing:
After the second demo for Knight & Witch back in September I was feeling burned out and frustrated with the game and with myself. I rushed the demo out, in a very buggy and incomplete state, and had to go back to fix it many times before people could actually get to the end. I didn’t have enough time before the deadline, so I skipped playtesting almost completely, which led to a huge number of bugs and just things not working properly.
Even after fixing (almost) everything wrong with the demo from a technical standpoint, the feedback I received was very mixed, and worst of all, I agreed with it completely. Controlling the characters feels clunky and slow; attacks (especially the Witch’s spells) aren’t fun to perform; putting lots of enemies everywhere is not good; a certain puzzle can soft-lock the game if you leave the other character behind; ironically, leaving a character behind makes the game easier because you can stop worrying about them running into traps or getting killed; at the same time, the character you left behind might get attacked while off-screen… The list goes on (and on) but you get the idea.
So anyway, the rush for the demo didn’t pay off and I was feeling down. I needed a break, and I wanted to pursue other projects to kind of relax and take my mind off of it for a while.
So I decided to pick and old project of mine back up: if you’ve been following me for a long time you might remember ColorFall, a mobile game I was working on around 2 years ago. Back then I was close to done but I stopped right before publishing (I’m not completely sure why, maybe I was just bored with it). Anyway, with the programming skills I acquired during this time, I managed to do some major upgrades to ColorFall, starting from refactoring the whole code base to be more efficient, performant and extensible. From there, I went ahead and added some new gameplay features such as special ball types, each with its own effect, implemented online leaderboards and greatly improved the UI design to feel more responsive and ‘juicy’. At this point the game was (and still is) ready to be published, both on PC and Android. The only thing still missing are the sound effects, which I’m waiting for from the same person who I commissioned for the music.
What I’m doing now:
As you can probably guess, working on ColorFall wasn’t really hard or taxing, and it was actually refreshing to get into a project where I could make quick and steady progress, something I had been missing for a while. So in the mean time, I also spent time thinking and thinking and thinking about how to fix the gameplay for Knight & Witch, how to make the combat deeper and more engaging, and just dumping every idea I had regarding the game on a paper notebook I have just for this purpose. Recently, after releasing a game for agdg’s Halloween Jam (SpooQuest), I finally decided to go back and resume work on K&W. Among my priorities, I wanted to finally let the Knight use his shield to guard himself and the Witch from enemy attacks. I don’t have much to show, and in the last few days I’ve been busy with other things so progress is slow, but I think I’m starting to see the path in front of me again.
Also in the last few months I’ve been coming back time and time again to the idea of asking for help to a programmer. But this time it’s different (sort of): now I’m not as non-confident in my coding skills as I used to be. I think I can code all the features I need for my game. However the thing is, I also want to work on the art. So like, I can, and want to, do both things, but obviously this means the game will take a long time to complete. Having a programmer by my side would mean that while he’s coding, I can make models, thus ‘doubling’ the pace of progress.
Anyway you know how it goes, it’s not easy for me to just leave the code-side to somebody else so for now I’m just going to keep working by myself, asking for help only when I need.
What I plan to do next:
Now, what will I be doing in the future? Well, obviously I will keep working on Knight & Witch. I have quite a lot of features planned that I couldn’t implement in the past either due to time constraints or due to my lack of knowledge/skill. I’m feeling slightly more confident now, and the feedback I’ve received with the last demo put me in the right direction I think. As I said above, progress is going slow and the fact that I will be doing it alone, at least in the foreseeable future, means things will take time. A lot of it.
I remember posting my New Year’s Resolutions around a year ago, and I planned to make a ‘real’ game by myself and publish it by the end of 2018. Well, I guess that’s not going to happen. But it’s for the best. A lot of things happened, the scope of the game grew a whole bunch while I was developing it, and for several weeks I had other matters keeping me away from gamedev.
Now with the wall of text out of the way, I will make a follow-up post with images and videos of ColorFall and Knight & Witch to kind of show what changed since my last post here.
There’s also another thing I should talk about, but I’l do so in a separate post to keep things more focused.
I released the second demo for the game. It’s pretty different from the first one but at the same time, not that much.
Go give it a try. I hope you’ll have fun with it, even just for 5 minutes.
(btw I added some secrets in this demo, I wonder if you’ll be able to find them)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/breathing-room
Me, barondev and mobiusdisco made a game for this Ludum Dare with the theme “Running out of space”.
Try it out if you want. It’s not perfect but it should be enjoyable for a few minutes. We’re planning to make a post-LD version which fixes some stuff with the gameplay (the game is 100% playable already though).
Wew I haven’t posted anything here in a while. I should really learn to keep all my media outlets updated together. Oh well.
Anyway, in the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on AI for the ally character. Luckily, because I set up the AI system for the enemies using Scriptable Objects, I could just reuse that, adding specific actions and states for the ally characters. It’s not perfect yet, and the characters do some pretty stupid things, but I’m happily surprised at how fast I managed to get things working at a basic level. You can see a bit of it in action in the video above.
However the biggest thing I’ve worked on this week is data persistence. Specifically, saving and loading the state of different objects in the scene. So, as you see in the video, things like opening a treasure chest, flipping a lever or moving a gem will get saved when you leave an area, and loaded when you enter it again.
This is kind of huge for me, because one of the things I didn’t like about the first demo of Knight & Witch is that the player could only go from A to B unidirectionally, and this goes against my vision for the actual game. I had to set up the demo like that simply because I hadn’t implemented any kind of data persistence system. So if the player could go back to previous room, everything would be reset to what it was at the start.Now that the system is in place, I can set up actual exploration with backtracking and whatnot, like I always intended.
Apart from working on my own game, I’ve been kept busy by commission work as well. The workload is slowly rising, which definitely makes me happy because it means more people like my style (and my prices? more on that later), but it obviously takes away from my dev time.
Anyway let me quickly showcase some of my latest 3D commissions.
As I said in the previous post, I’ve been working a lot on commissions. So much that it’s actually impacting the time I have to work on my own game. So I thought I’d show some of my latest works.
I think I might have to close commissions soon-ish if I want to seriously get back to my game, so if you were hesitant to ask for a model, now’s the time to come forward!
So, lately I’ve been working more on commissions than on my own game. Why?
I’ve been having some troubles (code-related, of course), and I’ve kind of bumped into a wall, so I lost motivation to work on it because I’m afraid of wasting time trying to implement something, only to find that it doesn’t work and having to scrap everything, effectively going back to square one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not dropping the game or anything like that! It’s just that I find it hard to actually overcome the fear of failure and just get working. Since I haven’t really made a lot of progress since the first demo (visible progress that it) I’m not sure if I’m going to make it in time for Demo Day 21. I might scrap the features I’m having troubles with and move on to something else, but I’m honestly not sure.
I’m even considering giving up on the idea of making the game by myself, and collaborating with an actual programmer. Sure, this would solve all my problems. I could rest easy, focus on just making models, textures and animations while somebody more competent than me takes care of the code. But I feel, as silly as it may sound, that this would be like giving up in front of my problems instead of improving myself to overcome them. I like that my game is 100% mine, and that everything there was made by me. So in the end, I’m really not sure what to do. I have fun coding, I really do enjoy thinking up systems and implementing them, making things do things, but the truth is I’m not as good at it as I would like. It’s frustrating. I’ve definitely grown a lot compared to even a year ago, but I still bump into seemingly unclimbable walls every now and then.
Sorry for the literal blogpost.
Back to deving, redraw the bandit leader
Oh, Touhou… I should really get into it someday. Sure, Aunn looks very cute and as you said, her hair will be a nice modeling challenge. I have some other stuff to model right now, but I’ll get to this as soon as I have some time.
Look forward to the result!