Upcoming Updates

Good news everyone! From next week onwards I'm going to be updating Revolver every fortnight. Why? It allows some of the people reading this (and other sites I go on) a chance to play the game as it updates rather than just reading my half-arsed notes on it. This means more chance for feedback and should lead to a much better game overall. Notes on development will be improving again from next week onwards too as I spend more time developing. As for now, here is this weeks dev log:

28/08/2015:

-Coded the basic layout for the note display.

29/08/2015:

-Added a second type of terminal that allows players to find flavour text. To help with using these terminals (as well as the objective one and note collection) a promt to press 'E' comes up when the player can interact with an object.

-Zoomed in the screen view to 1.6 the screen size. Feels better.

-Changed the surface colour from black to an incredibly dark blue, makes the screen a little easier to look at.

-Added a blood particle effect for shooting the zombers.

-Tweaked how the interaction works between the player and terminals. Terminals are no longer children of the oSolid parent object.

Finally I'm able to add story stuff! Players will receive chunks of story/lore/flavour text via collectable notes, readable terminals (blue rather than the green of the objective terminals) and by being contacted by the helper character at the start of many levels. It's a simple albeit a bit clunky of a mechanic but it'll serve it's purpose pretty well I think. It will also offer players a little moment of respite from being chased to buggery.

That's pretty much all the news from me this week. Enjoy the rest of your weekend and if you want to give Revolver a try go here. (Note the updates above aren't part of the game yet!)

-Beau

twitter.com/Bocodillo

Ludum Dare Done & Future Goals

IT'S DONE! I've finished my first ever Ludum Dare game jam. Following the theme of "You Are The Monster" I created a simple defence game called (creatively) "You Are The Minotaur" which you can download and play here (only available for windows I'm afraid). You can also visit the LDJam page here. The game involves exploring a maze and crushing silly heroes who try to steal your treasure. You can also place two varieties of trap to help defend. It's super simple but I did only have three days to build it so what do you expect!

I was going to keep a dev log like I usually do for Revolver but I figured I'd just do a quick write up when it's all over. Kinda like this.

Development Overview:

What went well:
-Learnt loads of new stuff. Improved my ability with path finding, learnt how to clip stuff to a grid (super useful for tower defence games and the like) and improved my graphical ability.
-Got out of my rut
-Managed to create a reasonably well polished game
-Had a lot of fun
-Improved my planning ability

What went not so well:
-Had a real problem with a few mechanics
-Should have spent a little more time developing the idea before jumping headlong into a particular idea. There are many other genres of game I could have made but I ended with another top-down game
-Some sound effects I wasn't able to make decent enough with bfxr and couldn't find a decent alternative in time

Overall I'm proud of what I made, and while it may not the best game ever I feel I've done a really good job and had a lot of fun doing it.

For those interested I spent approximately 20 or so hours of the last three days programming, composing music, drawing graphics and anything else to make it.

Future Goals:
So here's a quick run-down of my plans for the near future.
-Finish Revolver. This is top-priority, I need to get this finished and released because christ it has been way overdue. I still like the game & the ideas, don't get me wrong but I want to work on other stuff too!

-Build a website. Somewhere that connects all the stuff together. Game downloads, this blog, twittet, etc.

-Learn Unity. Game Maker is all well and good but I believe learning Unity will allow me much more freedom in what I make than Game Maker can offer me. We'll see.

-Develop a mobile game/app. This is where it's at. Mobile games are big these days and only getting more popular. If I want success this is the place to go at. On top of all that though as someone who has only recent got a smartphone I really want to try to push the boat out on what games I can make with touch-screen and on smaller devices. This is more distant future though.

All in all, I should be busy for a while yet!

-Beau

twitter.com/Bocodillo

Pause, Progress & Ludum Dare

This week has been better and I've finally made progress in a few key areas. Firstly I finally have pause functionality working; there is an actual freaking pause menu now (I've wanted to be able to write that for ages now) and I've began work with a new music editing software that I'm using to make some simple music to throw into Revolver. On top of that I should be able to use it to make some much nicer sound effects, either that or I'll nip back to bfxr and make some there, I dunno yet.

For those interested the software is called BoscaCeoil and is super simple to use, which is pretty much the main reason I'm using it. It involves making short riffs and then placing those riffs into a timeline. You have access to a decent library of midi instruments and a small variety of other stuff like chiptune sounds and the like. Now the reason I've suddenly decided to find some music software however...

I'm taking part in the next Ludum Dare! For anyone that doesn't know Ludum Dare is a sort of challenge to develop a game within 72 hours set to a specific theme which is only revealed at the start. There is also a competition aspect with harder rules and a shorter time limit (48 hours) but as it is my first attempt, bugger that. It's now its 33rd run and has actually been going on for over 12 years now, which makes it the longest running game jam. Needless to say I'm pretty excited and I'm making sure that I have all the tools I need ready (hence the look into music software) for the 21st when it begins. Wish me luck!

Finally I just realised that I forgot to post the finished version of the pixel art thing I did. Here it be:

DECAYING PLANET:

Pretty glad how it turned out. Mostly it was just an exercise in using GIMP but still, I think it looks pretty neat.

-Beau

twitter.com/Bocodillo

Rutty Ruttington

I'm gonna be honest here, it's been a real uphill struggle these last couple of weeks. I don't know if it's my medication, being back home or my lack of any real plan for next year (I still need to find a 12 month placement for my honours or come up with some other plan for the next 12 months) that have made me into this lethargic beast but I've been getting bugger all done. I mean less than other times I've gotten nothing done. All that said I have managed to get working on Tom Francis' Game Maker tutorials again which haven given me better insight into how I can implement the final big system Revolver needs (pause functionality) among other things. I just need to actually work out how to get my game to pause properly. Once that is done however I'm going to send out some test copies to a bunch of people and see what they think/what they can break and polish the game from there. That's the plan at least. All in all I'm doing alright, don't worry, I'm just going through a little rut as we all do; I just wanted to make sure that communication doesn't hit a total standstill. Oh and sorry for the delayed post, I was at my granddads pretty much all of yesterday.

-Beau

twitter.com/Bocodillo