Indie Dev Ben's Blog

Hi, I'm Ben! I'm a indie game developer based in Brisbane. I'm pretty new to managing social media but I've been creating games seriously for 3 years now, and casually for almost 8. And now that I'm in my 3rd year of University studying game development, I felt like it was better late than never to start posting on my social media accounts, so here it is. I like doing gamejams and developing games in teams, and chances are that whenever I finish a game it'll be posted. I'll also be posting dev logs for gamejams and other projects I'm working on on itch, bluesky, x and tumblr so check those out if you are interested!

Making this game was fun to say the least. There were definitely issues with it (mostly GDevelop being a funky engine) but it was a fun experience and learning opportunity. Will I try to make this game in a different engine? Maybe. Will I try to further develop in GDevelop? No. Frankly the only thing that I was primarily disappointed in was the collision and animation system of GDevelop. It was more than unintuitive and it frequently broke for little to no reason whatsoever. But it was a wonderful unit and a wonderful end to the semester, especially the playtesting party which let me play a bunch of my peers games. All that is left is to submit and finish up the report but once that's over, so should this tumblr account (probably). I might return to it one day, but I don't think I will be soon at least. Although the future may change so who knows lol.

Playtesting went great! There were a load of bugs that the playtesters found and quite a few other things, but everyone enjoyed the game itself and it was very fun to get feedback for it. People conducting playtesting is often split into 3 groups, the communicator, the note taker and the event logger. I was the note taker who simply enough took notes on whatever the playtester mentioned, found or other. Our first 2 playtesters were more adept with platformers and didn't struggle that much but had plenty of feedback all the same. Our 3rd and 4th playtesters were less experienced gamers and they both struggled with level 7 and specifically the wall jumping. The most commented thing for feedback was that the wall jumping felt bad, clunky and unresponsive. In addition level 6 and 7 needed a rework as the wall jumping wasn't explained well enough and level 7 had a massive difficulty spike because of it. Overall we got a lot of good feed back from playtesting and have fixed quite a lot of things from it. The focus of it was definitely the wall jumping and level 6/7 but we also changed minor things as well like making the movement more fluid and aligned to the player animation.

We've developed the levels, and changes some sprites to more fit with the theme the game is going for. We have also lined up our playtesters to playtest said game, which we plan to do near the end of this week. Each member of the group will take a different role in playtesting, one person communicating to the playtester, one person noting, and one person logging the events that occur in game. This is how we'll be moving forward with the playtesting, then afterwards it's simply report writing.

Assessment 3 is a relatively straight forward assignment. In a group of 3-4 people we need to choose a game we've worked on and then further develop into a useable prototype for playtesting, and then have people playtest the game. The game we chose was Running Out of Time (which is somewhere in this blog), and our main focuses were minor improvements to the assets, more obstacles, and most importantly enough levels to playtest. My peers that are working with me for this project are Liam C. and Violet R. To start with, we each plan to develop 5 levels each, with each of us having more specific roles in reference to other elements.

This game was by and away the easiest to make but also the most boring. The game system was easy to setup, the gameplay was completed quickly with minimal difficulty. The only thing that really needed any significant amount of work was the assets as they were heavily lacking. The playtesters found it relatively fun but also not very responsive to input as well as very quickly repetitive. Overall, this game wasn't particularly interesting but it was still a good bit of experience to create.

Citations: Fesliyan, D. (2018, December 12). funny chase music A. Fesliyan Studios. https://www.fesliyanstudios.com/royalty-free-music/download/funny-chase-music-a/284

McConnell, R. (2018, March 30). Dungeon trap tokens by 2-Minute table top. 2 minute tabletop. https://2minutetabletop.com/dungeon-trap-tokens/

Also even though this assignment is over, I would still appreciate if anyone wants to tell me anything that I could do to improve it.

[email protected] Citations: Google Images: Carriage. Retrieved from: https://opengameart.org/content/medieval-cart-prop Google Images: Pixel Art Ghost. Retrieved from: https://opengameart.org/content/spikes-0

And as promised (kinda), the postmortem. This game project was really fun, it was dumb, it was simple and honestly just a interesting thing to work on. Now with that said, the game very clearly had it's flaws and issues. One of the biggest ones which one of my playtesters found and then proceeded to exploit, was going to a large blue asteroid and shooting it to create a game-breaking amount of asteroids which would then give him a ridiculously amount of points and therefore extra bullets to do it more. This ended up breaking the collisions somehow and caused the blue asteroids to just stop entirely, or the fact that there wasn't a cap on the speed limit. But in saying this, the game also apparently had a lot of positives to look back on. The playtesters all became very competitive both between eachother and themselves trying to get a highscore, in addition the power-ups were beloved and were a large focus on the strategy they all employed with some preferring extra bullets and others preferring piercing (and some just taking the restore healths). The playtesters also provided a large amount of ideas on how to improve the game with more mechanics like more meteors, one of my testers suggested turning it into more of a roguelike sort of game with random powerups, to different mechanics like being able to get a powerup that lets you destroy blue asteroids on hit. In all honesty this round of playtesting actually made me really interested in improving this game in the future, but chances are I won't be going back to it for a while (and probably on a different engine).

All that is left now is to setup some playtesters to try out the game and see how things go from there! I'll make and post the postmortem after the playtesting so that way I can discuss it but overall fun prototype (and way easier to make than Running Out of Time but I do kinda prefer that one). Citations: Maytas, E. (2014, February 7). Soundimage.org. https://soundimage.org/ Vrenko, S. (2016, February 14). Laser Pistol/Gun. Freesound. https://freesound.org/s/336501/

After setting up a base asteroid game, I immediately decided I wanted to improve on the diversity of the moment-to-moment gameplay. My first thought to this was to add different kinds of asteroids. This led to me creating both Red and Blue asteroids. Red Asteroids: - Home in on player rather than moving in a random direction - Slow moving Blue Asteroids: - Are destroyed by running into them rather than being shot - When shot, it creates more blue asteroids After creating them I spent some time changing and modifying their spawn rates to increase as the game progresses as you don't have to deal with them right away. Things I want to work on next: - Provide some way to "power-up" - Sound effects/music