Some kinda Game Maker man!

I’ve been working with NostalgiCo on their upcoming game “Cryamore” since November! I was super psyched to be brought on for this project. I never dreamed I’d be working on a project like Cryamore so soon out of the gate! I figured I’d be stuck working on ports of “Imagine Horsie Races 5″ or something for a few years first. It’s been rough going, but that’s par for the course for any indie project, right? And the chance to work on a tight team of awesome people where everyone gets a say is well worth the occasional pipeline hiccup! As great as working on Cryamore is, I haven’t forgotten about my own projects and ideas. I haven’t had time to do code work on SkyClash in awhile, but I’ve been taking time to hash out game mechanics and character concepts. Pictured below are some bits of concept art I had commissioned from my good friends binaryowl and meira/tekknicole!

- I shared a picture of Fylis, my UFO-piloting alien character awhile back, and asked Binary to draw a picture of Fylis in their super-well done disguise. She also made a sketch of Fylis in an action pose and threw it in as a bonus, so hooray for that!

- Awhile back, around the same time as the first Fylis pic, I asked Meira to draw a picture of Kwale, who’s meant to be the closest thing to a main character SkyClash has. She’s got a magic wind-fan and a love of the open sky! AND I NEVER SHARED HER! How terrible of me! Better late than never, right?

- Way more recently, I asked Meira to draw up some concepts for another character, a hobbyist Super Hero called The Cerulean Jay (CJ for short)! His wings stopped growing when he was a kid, so his parents got him a jet-pack! Pictured in each Meira work is my own sad excuse for concept art, made in MSPaint. Binary got similar references. Amazing what actual artists can do, right?

So this "what I've been up to" post's taken longer for me to write than I would've thought. Then again, they kinda always do, so par for the course, I guess. So there's a couple of things I've been up to between now and when I released CitrusMancer.

I've been sending out more voice over audition reels for various projects, and I was finally cast for one! I was cast as Marco, the main character of a Web Serial called Fooled, for a storyboard animatic thing the author made. I've linked the video to this post, and you can read the web serial for yourself here: http://fooled-story.blogspot.com/ It's a pretty good read and updates fairly regularly! This was my first time getting cast in a VO role and has done wonders for my confidence in pursuing this kind of stuff further. Here's hoping I can get cast in some paying projects and make some sweet side-cash! :D

Remember when I posted that CitrusMancer game me and some friends made in a month and said I'd do a post-mortem on it? Me neither. :T In all seriousness, though, I never expected the judging period to take as long as it did. I wanted to wait until after the game was judged to talk about problems during development, but it's been so long and the problems were so minor that I can't really remember any of it! WHOOPS! Still, it's been too long since I posted any game-dev stuff here, so lemme try to remember... Well, our game finished in the top 20% in the popular vote! That's good! Amazing for a team with just one person with prior game-dev experience on it. That said, there's a few lessons I learned: 1. Write your post-mortem right after the game ships, when everything's still fresh in your mind. (Oops. :X )

2. Advertising is key. I put my game up hoping a facebook and tumblr post would be all I needed and that the quality of our game would do the rest for us. Nnnnnnnope. I doubt we'd've won anything either way, but if we'd done a better job of drawing attention to our game, I feel we'd've climbed a few percentiles in the rankings at least, and we'd've definitely gotten some more feedback. We really didn't even get enough people to play the game to have people telling us how it sucked, let alone people who really liked it. As for HOW to better advertise our game without spending money? I don't have much of an answer for that yet. I heard at a convention I went to that Reddit's great for generating buzz, but the odds of it being GOOD buzz are pretty dicey. Also, if you can get gaming press outlets on Twitter to tweet about your stuff, your work pretty much gets done for you, and there's a "big list of youtubers" that might be interested in playing some games. Definitely stuff to keep in mind for my next project.

3. If you're doing a project without contracts or payment or anything really formal involved, have backup people in mind. A buddy of mine said they'd work on our games' sound effects, but after one day and one sound effect, I couldn't get in contact with him again. The other designer and I ended up making the sound effects using this chip-sound creator called sfxr, and it was basically just us mashing the "random sound" button until we found a sound we liked. I wouldn't recommend this method. Also, one of our artists made great concept art, but their personal life sorta exploded on them and they were unable to continue helping. Actually: 3b. You can never have too many artists. Or, if you can, literally more than half your team is not too many, and you could go for more. Also related: 3c. If you're the project lead, don't be afraid to contact your team often and see how they're doing with their tasks. I feel like I did an all right job of this. Considering everyone on the project was working as volunteers, I didn't feel like I could hassle my team too severely. I also get the feeling, though, that I'd've never gotten what I needed if I hadn't hassled them at all. I guess the important thing is to be firm but not be a jerk. :T 4. Having a library of open-source music to draw from can save you a lot of trouble on a small project. We were fortunate enough to have a friend who offered their body of work in exchange for their name in the credits. They had great stuff, but wading through it all to find songs that fit our game was rough. I feel that if I had a large library of songs I'm already familiar with and allowed to use on hand, we could've saved a lot of time in the long run.

Remember two posts ago when I mentioned "FruitMancer Orange", the 2D Action-Platformer I was working on with a friend? The one where you're an Apprentice Orange Mage who must craft the Ultimate Orange for her thesis, but had her notes stolen by the forces of Scurvy and must reclaim them by hurling rotten oranges at them? Well it's done, been renamed "CitrusMancer: Quest for the Ultimate Orange!" and is up for free download here!: http://contest.rpgmakerweb.com/game/view/id/422#.U7MhevldW-1

When I first said my next post would be about what's next for me, I thought I had a good handle on what I was going to say, but I've realized I really have no clue. I could whine about my uncertain future, but I'd rather focus on what leads I have and what I'm doing with them. So, without further ado, here's the GameMakerNathan state of affairs!

1. FruitMancer Orange! (tentative title) My last post was about an RPGMaker Humble Bundle. Turns out, part of the reason it was happening in the first place was the folks that distribute RPGMaker are hosting a game design contest! Any engine goes, and we've got just one month to complete our entry. I was worried I'd spend too much time working out a concept, so I asked some of my friends if they had any low-scope game concepts clunking around their heads. My friend Taiko had a silly idea about a mage that shoots rotten oranges and is on a quest to craft THE ULTIMATE ORANGE. So that's what I'm focusing on now. It's a 2D Platformer, and so far we've got a working player character, camera movement, and one enemy. Taiko's focusing on level design while I man the coding. He and I have one friend each interested in helping with music and sound, and one of our mutual friends may be doing the art. She's doing some concepts of the main character at the moment.

2. Fated Paths Since I last mentioned this 'ol RPGMaker project of mine, I've gotten the party swapping menu functioning just fine!...That's about all so far. Mooooving on...

3. Voice Acting! A friend of mine told introduced me to an independant dev in the Netherlands who was looking for some VO work for a trailer. I sent him my reel and he seemed quite impressed! Not only that, but he'd be willing to pay me for my work, to boot! Unfortunately, it seemed he was just testing the field at the moment. Didn't have his trailer storyboarded out or knew exactly what he needed voiced just yet. He said he'd get back to me once he had it all figured out. Fingers crossed that that's soon! I've also sent out an audition or two besides. If I could get some money from Voice Acting to tide me over while I develop my games, it'd be a phenomenal help. One of those auditions was for a horror game. I decided to include a VO page to my portfolio you can only get to by link, and included a short clip of me screaming. Because horror game.You can check those out here: http://nathanlindleygamedes.wix.com/home#!vo/c1ybp

4. Last Wishes This project has been shelved for now. The more I thought about the lead character and her story, the more I wanted to give them the attention they deserved. Which is bad, since I really need to get a game out to market I can make some pocket change off of. Coupled with my artist's life getting crazy complicated, it looks like this project will have to wait until we're both at a more secure spot in our lives. Apologies to anyone who was looking forward to this game's release. :C

Humble’s weekly bundle this week contains RPGMaker VX, some bonus dev assets (art, sound, etc.), and some games made using the software. At higher levels, you get more games, more assets, and RPGMaker XP.

To a lot of my game-dev friends, these games may seem, at best, cute or quaint, and, at worst, primitive or generic, but I’ve got a special soft spot in my heart for it all. RPGMaker XP was my first step into game development, and it taught me a lot about scripting long before I attended college. To any game-dev hopefuls, fans of retro RPGs, or folks that just wanna give Humble and the charities they’ve partnered with more money, I strongly suggest shelling out the pocket change to get this stuff.

Also, To The Moon is in there at the $6 and up range, in case you haven’t gotten it yet.

I think this might've been the most useful class I've taken at Columbia that didn't directly result in a game for my portfolio. It was a fast-paced crash course in 3D modeling, texturing, and animating. The only downside is that it was all in Maya. Great for understanding the tools of the industry! Not so much for making stuff I can actually use in-game, because the educational license doesn't allow for commercial use and the commercial license is something to the tune of $3,000. While I try to figure out Blender, here's what I made in the class:

Assignment 1 was to make a crate. I tried to make something like the cargo-crates from The Misadventures of Tron Bonne's puzzle-stages. This one has Top Hats in it. Because Tuttle.

Assignment 2 was pretty vague. It was to create an "Architectural Asset" I ended up making some stairs with railing like you might see on a fancy college campus (that isn't in Chicago) or in a Tony Hawk game. There's some chalk drawings on the side, but they didn't come out very well in the renders. :C

Assignment 3 was to re-create a still-life using 3D assets. The one I used can be found here: http://digital-art-gallery.com/oid/81/640x535_14313_Gear_2d_fantasy_illustration_still_life_picture_image_digital_art.jpg 

We only had to recreate 5 items in the image. I was never really happy with the coin bag, and glass was a heck of a lot harder to make than it should've been, but I really like how the sword came out.

Assignment 4 was to create a model that we'd later animate. I thought really hard about what to try modeling. I didn't think I was good enough to make anything that organic yet (the coin bag was hard enough), but I didn't want something too easy. In the end, I made this nutcracker soldier guy with hinge joints. I'm pretty dang proud of how he turned out!

Assignment 5 was to animate him, of course. I had to give him a walk cycle and an idle animation. You can check those out in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SFzVJet5CE

Assignment 6 was to make a level in UDK that'd be used as the basis of our final project. The level would need to showcase our walker model, one of our other models, and a bunch of UDK stuff like Post-Processing Volumes. I wanted to make a toy shop or carpenter's bench for my toy soldier, but the default UDK assets didn't have much in the way of that sorta thing, so cartoony castle village it was!

Part of Assignment 7 (the final project) was to make a 30 second fly-through camera movie of the level with all the stuff it needed in it. I made this fly through movie, but couldn't figure out how to export it out of UDK. And since neither could anyone else in the class, I think that just having it in our UDK map file was enough for the teacher. Maybe I'll figure out how to export the movie later and post it here. For now, though, I'm content to leave UDK alone. Either it's a lot less user friendly than Unity3D, or I'm too used to Unity to use it properly. Either way, I think I'll stick with Unity for now.

I learned a couple of neat tricks in AI Programming this semester, although most of it was just listening to my teacher talk theory that went way over my head without any proper experience with code optimization or memory allocation. Still, I made progress on three projects:

Speech Sight Sound is dungeon crawler where the player commands a three-person team. After entering the dungeon, each member lost something dear to them. The Warrior lost their sight, the Rogue lost their hearing, and the Mage lost their voice. As the Mage, the player needs to guide their allies through the dungeon using the only spells they can cast without an incantation: creating lights and sounds from thin air. The sounds help guide the blind warrior, and the lights help guide the deaf rogue, but they also attract the attention of monsters. The current prototype doesn't really hold up as a game, unfortunately. It's mostly a tech demo of a bunch of disconnected concepts the class introduced. As such, I won't put it up for download just yet.

Also, since disabilities are a touchy subject to some people, I'd like to make it clear that I don't think being deaf, blind, or mute means you can't live a normal life and basically be a totally awesome person. But if you've gone your whole life taking something like sight for granted and suddenly lost it, it'd take a good bit of work to adjust, I think. Anyway, I don't plan on going all-in on this project until I've done more research on the disabilities in question. Not just to be sensitive to those who have them, but also because I think the game and characters would benefit from me knowing more. Also, I need to figure out how to make it playable by the deaf and blind. I figure that'd be kinda important for a game like this.

I learned a bit about pathfinding and state machines and have been trying to re-make RoTAC to be more flexible and polished. If you played the first version of RoTAC, you may've noticed everyone just teleports to the spots they're moving to. In this version, they actually move there! And they don't get stuck, either! Tony (the Astray website guy. He's also a game dev. Here's another link to his website in case you didn't click it yesterday: http://www.tonyvle.com/) was pretty impressed with the prototype so far and we may be working together over the summer on refining it.

As for why I'm only NOW posting about what happened after GDC (or anything, really), I was too busy throwing my all into my projects. GDC made it clear there was a lot of work left to do on Astray, and I'd be damned if I didn't do my part! Speaking of "my part" I don't think I ever talked about my role on the project! I was the team's UI/GUI designer/Developer. I coded all the menus, set up the start menu scene, got things like button prompts and objective notifications in place, got the inventory system and mini-map working, and all the fun little bits that go with that. You can check out some screenshots of my work here:

Or better yet, you can download the game for free and play it yourself! Columbia College Chicago puts each year's Large Team Capstone up for download and hosts a website for it (the website is created by a student. This year it was done by a friend of mine, Tony V. Le, and I think he did last year's, too.) Astray's website can be found here: http://game.colum.edu/Projects/astray/