Incinious

Hi everyone,

This is a small post just to give you all a few free games to play!

Firstly, we recently made a short game prototype over a weekend in a small ‘game jam’ style. In it, you play as an organ surgeon who specialises more on the side of collecting the organs than in giving them:

His method of collection is very messy

Take a look at it, and let us know what you think of it!  https://incinious.itch.io/dr-transplanter 

Another announcement, is that we have also recently released a new mobile game for Android, called Splat Tennis (I mentioned it some time ago, if anyone remembers). It is a fast paced, arcade game, with several unlockables and incredibly accurate tennis physics*. 

Also take a look at this one, I tried my hand at making some music. Not sure how good any of it is though... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.incinious.SplatTennis

I hope this helps reach the itch that only free games can satisfy, and that it doesn’t feel like I am bribing any of you...

Until next time

Hey all, this post is a bit late. Life has been generally busy this time of year, but it’s starting to ease up again, so I thought I should put out a short post, just to keep up my monthly posting streak...

Not a bunch has been worked on, but I can still show some things;

When developing the payload gamemode, I discovered the issue of trying to sync up the coordinates of AI objects, namely the payload itself. In order to improve the accuracy of the payload, I modified how AI objects are displayed, so that their positions are updated based on the nearest player, rather than just having the Host calculate their positions. This way, the AI object will always appear most accurately to the player who is more likely to be interacting with it.

Think of the payload as an AI object that runs away from the player

A less interesting part, which took me a while because it was so boring to work on, was implementing a full Options menu. The way I programmed it made it easy to also add access to it while in-game.

I’m proud of some of these GUI elements, they’re very smooth to interact with

Some other big-ish additions are;

- Gamemodes are now retrieved from the Host, so a player can no longer be have a different Mode to the other players

- Explosions are properly implemented, with damage / knockback falloff working

- Players can no longer get stuck inside each-other when solid. If they do end up getting stuck, they will stop detecting collisions with each-other until they are no longer near one another.

I feel like I say this every time, but it is so close to being done. I am aiming to have a few gameplay videos / trailers releasing soon, so look out for those.

This is going to be super long, so prepare yourself. There will be a point where you will wonder if you should even continue, but in the end the reward will be the journey we have taken together.

Now, as this post is pretty full, I am going to divide it into sections, starting with something cool;

VoxEdit

We have released a new development Tool!

VoxEdit is a tool for editing and viewing image strips in 3D. If you are experienced with this style, then you will also know that drawing in this style can be quite difficult, especially when you don’t know what the finished product looks like. Using this tool means you can edit an image, and view what it looks like in real time, making it easy to draw in this ‘3D layered image’ style!

VoxEdit is currently available for purchase, but there is also a free demo version available;

https://incinious.itch.io/vox-edit

Give it try, and have fun!

Now, on to the rest of this post...

I have realised that enough time has passed for another post to be in order, so buckle yourselves in because this post is definitely going to be super exciting, and not be another one of those boring technical posts...

To start off with, I have recently created a new map to be part of the initial release. This one has a focus around a “payload escort” game-mode, where each team has to move the “cart” from one teams side to the other. The cart is moved when someone stands next to it, and the game is won when a team pushes the cart into the other teams goal 3 times:

The setting is in the sky, for some reason

The reason for adding this map, and for adding a few other maps that I have planned, is firstly because these game-modes are fun to play, but secondly as a way of demonstrating the types of game-modes that can be created yourselves, using the in-game editors. And now that I’ve hooked you with an interesting gif, it’s time to talk about technical things...

Now, while I was testing the new map in multiplayer, I came across a variety of issues. Players were not able to shoot each other, people would be disconnected at the end of the round etc. I worked out that each of these bugs all stemmed from the same issue, and that was the method that client’s were being ID’d by wasn’t working properly. Let me elaborate...

When someone joins a game hosted on a server, that player, or “client”, needs to receive a unique ID number. This ID number is used to differentiate players from one another, and needs to be the same value on each players computer. The way these unique ID’s were generated previously was using a “stacking” method. When a new player joins, they receive the largest ID number not currently taken, and when a player disconnects, all other player’s ID’s update accordingly;

Player with ID 2 gets new ID 1

Now, this ended up causing a few issues. While it felt like the most efficient method to provide ID’s to players, problems occurred when step 3 was occurring at different times on different Client computer, for example if a client still has the ID 2, and sends it’s actions to the server, who has that client stored with an ID of 1, then those actions would not be performed.

In order to fix this, a new method of providing ID’s is now used, which follows a more basic approach. Instead of reshuffling the player ID’s when a client disconnects, the ID the player had instead remains available, so that the next Client that connects will be given the first available ID to use;

The new client takes the first available ID, which is 1

This new method means that Client ID’s are no longer varying throughout the game, making multiplayer interactions as a whole a lot more stable.

Another major change that was made was in regard to optimising the actions system. Each object can be given a list of actions that can be performed, based on test-cases. For example, a door can be opened when within range of the player, or a bomb can explode when a timer runs out. These actions are all saved in an objects file, and are loaded in as a string during the game when that object is created. Now this may sound pretty stupid, but previously these actions had to be decoded each time they were performed by the object. This means that every-time a player went near to the door, for example, it would have to go through each loaded action, and decode the ‘string’ that they were saved as in order to work out what kind of action it was.

Naturally, this was extremely inefficient, and caused noticeable lag when an object had a larger number of actions to perform. The change that I made was to optimise this action system, making actions to be decoded only once, when the object is created. These decoded actions can then be easily accessed later on, without having to go through the loaded string to get the saved values.

That should be the super technical changes out of the way, so here are a few “smaller” improvements I have made;

- A kill-feed/alert system has been implemented, detailing when someone has been killed, or when players join and leave a game;

That Old man really likes leaving

- The Point system in multiplayer is now purely server-side, meaning that it is a lot more reliable keeping track of these scores across all the connected players

- Support for controllers has started, with movement and basic aiming implemented;

Like I said previously, the game is getting very close to finishing, and I plan to have it done by the end of this year. 

Hopefully this post has been an interesting read, unless you hate technical stuff, in which case my apologies,

So I have finished the very short “Story Mode” for Party Animal. 

Trick-shotting it up in the story mode

To be more specific, I finished designing and creating the maps, drawing the backgrounds, and implementing the game-play features/bug fixes to allow the Story Mode to work properly. If this is the first post you’re reading, this “Story Mode” is not intended to be the main aspect of the game. In fact, the only reason I created it was so that if you were unable to experience the multiplayer properly, you would still have something to enjoy. It is a very short experience, averaging around 50-60 minutes long, but I am still happy with how it turned out.

The big reason that this is so good is that now I can finally turn my attention fully onto the multiplayer of Party Animal, which is the main, and hopefully the most enjoyable aspect of the game. Of course this will not be some massive ground-up implementation of multiplayer, it is actually fairly close to being finalised, but there are still quite a few features I think are necessary to include in order for the finished game to feel like a good product;

Multiplayer with the ‘Prop Hunt’ gamemode

Things such as Steam API integration and a larger variety of gamemodes are left to do before I am happy to release the first version. That and bug fixes...lots and lots of bug fixes.

That’s about it, you can now feel updated,

Infernobomb

here’s a bonus picture, because I worked hard on drawing the map backgrounds

Hey all,

So that game we made a while back is alive and kicking once more. I have pushed out an update for Squidge on the google play store that includes more characters to unlock, and a High Scores table. Take a look at it if you haven’t before! 

https://bit.ly/2HhvuLS 

Oh, and I also put together a little promo video for it:

so professional...

And now back to your regularly scheduled program. I have managed to get my current development process for Party Animal down to a fine art. I work on a story level, and fix any bugs I find along the way. At the moment I am working on the obligatory underwater levels. Of course everyone hates them, but if I have put water into my game, than you are going to have to enjoy it!

wow, look at all those pretty corals!

Currently I am up to implementing the Giant fish boss you will have to run away from, but there are naturally so many bugs to get past to do with swimming, AI, and physics in general.

For example, one issue I resolved had to do with swimming specifically. I mentioned in a previous post that I implemented the feature of sticking to slopes when you walk down them. Now this came back to bite me, as it only worked on slopes underneath you, but when you swim upwards into slopes, you would get stuck. Adding the ability for the player and ai objects to slide along roof slopes is the kind of thing that no-one appreciates, but is annoying to implement:

Featuring scary fish monster

One other feature that I implemented was a smaller one, but I think it is one of the nicer looking ones. It is as simple as being able to choose where a player will carry an object from when they pick it up. But it adds so many options; You can carry weapons from the handles, hold a swinging lantern, carry a bottle by the neck etc.

Almost finished with the Story mode now, and then it will be on to some final multiplayer maps and features, and then hopefully I can look forward to releasing it!

Thanks for sticking with us all these years, it really means a lot!

Hey all,

I have finally been making some headway on the “Story Mode” maps, and I think the short adventure is over halfway done. I recently added in a cat-boss:

Smart kitty

My ‘development process’ while doing this has been to work out what I want to do, and implementing it if it’s not currently possible with the game. The idea is if I add enough variety of features, it will be useful for someone who may want to make their own “Story Mode”.

More often than not however, I end up discovering that features I thought worked don’t actually. The most recent example of this was room ‘warping’. One of the actions that objects can perform is to ‘warp’, or teleport, the player to a different level. This is quite a commonly required action in the Story mode, and it seemed to work fine with single player.

It was when I tried using it with multiplayer that things started acting weird:

No, this ground obviously can’t be stood on

The way loading up rooms works is that if there is someone in the room that the player is currently ‘warping’ to, the game will request that players version of the room. If there is noone in the room, it will instead ask the host to send the file version to them, and use that instead.

To begin with, the game was simply crashing when you attempted to join a room that the host was not part of. I fixed that by working out that the request for the room was never being sent properly, but then the real fun began. I ran into a variety of issues which meant I had to change how ai positions are sent, change how rooms that have been sent over multiplayer are loaded, and make client objects leave and rejoin different lists. To give an example of what it’s like fixing these issues, one of the bugs I found was that sometimes when a player shot another player, they would damage them twice instead of once;

notice the two damage numbers (4)

Now this took a good hour and a half to work out what was happening, and it ended up requiring two lines of code to fix. TWO!

So that should hopefully explain why this game is taking so long to finish. There’s so many features that it takes forever to work out what is causing a particular issue. It hasn’t just been bug fixing and story mode-ing. I did add a few other things;

- I made walk speed animations dependent on speeds ie. moving really slow means you look silly

- I gave AI and Client objects a different walking sound to the player, so it’s less confusing

- Added these sweet flips

Trick shot

But yes, mainly bug fixing and Story mode-ing. I’ll try to keep the next post shorter.

So my main focus for the past few weeks has been getting some headway on “Story” maps. Prepare yourself for another ‘technical’ post.

My past experience has shown me that it is best when releasing a game to have an option for a “solo” experience, even if the game is designed to be multiplayer. Because of this, I am trying to include a short but hopefully interesting ‘Story Mode’ in the final release, if nothing else but to demonstrate the capabilities of the map-making tools.

To make it easier to create these maps/levels, I spent some time improving the current map-editor. The first of these changes was to do with adding objects to a map. When placing objects onto a map, you can choose from a list of available objects found in the resources folder. Previously, this list was only a list of object names. While this works, it sometimes made it difficult to find the object you were looking for, especially if you forgot the name of the object:

Wow so much variety, I bet all those objects 100% useful

In order to improve this, the map editor now also imports the image for each object found in the resource folder, and then displays that image alongside it in the list.

The next change I made was to the way the room size was set. Previously the width and height of the map could be manually defined within the editor, however once objects had already been placed on the map, resizing it would only increase the far right and bottom sides of the map, without changing the location of the objects accordingly.

In order to make this process more efficient, the editor now allows resizing of the map by clicking and dragging it’s borders inside the editor. This drastically improves the efficiency of map making, as the user no longer has to guess what size the map should be, and instead can easily change it on the fly:

What a visually pleasing map editor...

I have also recorded a much too long video of me using the new map editor to create a level for the “Story Mode”. Hopefully one of you will find it interesting to watch:

Aside from these changes, I also worked on some improvements to gameplay such as improving how npc’s weapons work, making climbing ladders better, and adding ‘random item’ objects for maps, which can allow for a map to be different every time you play it.

Thanks for reading,

Hey all, time for another update.

I have been working on making a few more multiplayer maps, as while this takes a bit of time, it is not as tedious to do as some of the other things I have to do. I will try and walk you through the process of how I went about creating this “Pirate Ship” map;

A lovely time of day to be a pirate

First off, I start by sketching out a basic layout of the map. This helps streamline the process, as it takes a lot longer to work out how a map is meant to flow while you’re actually making it, compared to when you are simply drawing it down on paper;

Mind my terrible drawing abilities

My next step is to first transfer the sketch to the in-game editor, setting up the basic layout of the map “in-engine”. Once I have done this, I am able to test how easily a player can navigate the map, and whether any last adjustments have to be made. The next step is to fill the map with all the objects and lights that can be interacted with;

From basic shell, to populated with objects

Finally, I draw the foreground and background images for the map. This is the part that takes the longest and requires the most minor adjustments, as I am really not a great artist. For this map however I was extremely satisfied with how it turned out;

Sweet parallax backgrounds make everything better

Hopefully this process was interesting enough to read. Other things have been worked on as well, but most of it has not been very interesting. I decided I just wanted to power through and try and fix all of the bugs I have found at once, and they’re almost all gone so that is nice. Some of them were pretty entertaining as well, such as this gun that shoots itself;

Or this moving platform that took me way too long to get working;

For now that’s all of this small update,

Infernobomb

The things I have been working on have been very interesting recently. Oh sorry, did I say interesting? I meant technical. Most of these changes and additions are being worked on firstly to fix/improve multiplayer, and secondly to make it easier for me to make objects for games.

I will start with some graphically interesting changes, for attention grabbing sake:

I decided to add a visual representation of where a player will be hitting when they are carrying a melee weapon. I felt this was necessary, as having only an icon was a bit misguiding when the actual way melee works is using a line to detect collisions;

Additionally, I updated how servers are displayed when searching for a server to Join. Saved servers will now show a ping value, so you can actually tell if they are active, and now all servers will display what map and gamemode is being used;

Now on to some less visually interesting updates.

The first big feature I added was the ability for clients to request files from the host. This will allow players to play on the same maps, with the same objects and game-modes, even if those maps or objects are uniquely made by the host. For example, if you decide to make a custom map, you no longer have to manually transfer the files to your friends computer. They can now just connect to your hosted game, and they will automatically download the map from you. While doing this, I realised I could use this system to also send images, as GameMaker offers the option of converting images to base64, which can then be sent as a string over the network.

With this new system, clients will no longer load maps from their own files, but rather when they connect to a server, will always retrieve the servers map layout by default.

Another big-ish change I made was to add a new action for objects called “do actions”. If you weren’t aware, the way objects work is you can give them a list of actions they can perform. For example, one of the actions could be that when you press the interact key on it, you pick it up. Or another could be that when it collides with a specific object it is destroyed, and so on. This new action allows the object to either trigger a set of actions with one trigger, or choose between a list of actions to perform. This will hopefully allow more complex objects to be added into the game;

Thanks for reading, hopefully some of you found this a bit interesting!

Infernobomb

I also made this cool looking shotgun

Hi all, here is a post about our game, what has been happening, and what is yet to happen. It’s been a bit since the last post I did here, so let me start off by laying down some excuses...

To start off, I haven’t been posting on this blog for a while because honestly there wasn’t much to post about. Like I have said countless times, most of the work I have been doing on “Party Animal” has been bug fixing. This is pretty boring to read about, so I don’t post about it. Secondly, last year I was very busy studying as I had the biggest subjects of my degree to do. And finally, for the past 7 weeks I have been travelling overseas where I didn’t have much access to my computer or the internet.

Now that I’ve got those excuses out of the way, hopefully some of you are still with me, so I can share some of the things I have been working on that are more interesting:

First off, pretty well all the sounds for the currently implemented features have been added. This required me to write a system that would allow me to easily choose which sound would be played and at which location, without it being hard coded in for each individual action. The game now has a much “realer” feel to it;

I’ve felt this for a long time, but atmosphere and “game feel” is made up at least 60% by the sounds of a game, so this was really important for me to add properly. There is still a little bit of work to do here, as I don’t like all of the sounds currently, but that might have to wait until later to be improved.

I have done some work redoing a few GUI screens, such as the Main Menu and Map Selection screen. The new Map Selection menu allows the option to have a “Map Roster” for map rotations during a game. Before it was only possible to have one map or all maps selected to rotate through;

Easy use for those games where you only want to play X number of maps

Some smaller features were improved as well, such as changing how particles interact with the player. Particles such as fog will now shift and change directions when the player moves through them;

Wow, really impressive and game-changing feature alert

Additionally, optimisations of objects, and improvements to networking were also made.

Now then, what on earth am I still working on? How much more could there possibly be to add to this dumb game? Well let me tell you oh super interested individual:

- Music Needs to be written and added - Multiplayer through Steam will hopefully be implemented - An option for the game to run at 30 fps is needed for lower-end computers - More Maps/Gamemodes need to be added + Story mode still needs completion - A few Menu updates (e.g. Controls changeable through settings) - Bug Fixing (Currently I have 27 major known bugs to remove)

And then, once all this has been done, I will finally be rid of this project that I have spent too much time on!

Thank you all for not leaving me during these ‘dark ages’, I should be posting more regularly once again, depending on which of the aforementioned features I have been working on! If you want to see more regular posts / updates, you can always take a gander at my stuff on twitter: https://twitter.com/theInfernobomb

Infernobomb

Here are some basic visual effects I added in to give the game a better ‘feel’:

The player sprite will rotate smoothly and accordingly when walking up and down slopes:

just like real life...

The player’s arm get’s thinner the longer it gets:

I also improved how physics objects ‘settle’:

It’s these minor things in games are things that I think players wont necessarily notice consciously, but will still make the game ‘feel’ better.

First off I haven’t written a post in a while, mostly because I don’t feel like there has been much to tell you all about. However, every day I don’t write a post I feel bad, so i’m mainly writing this so I can not feel bad for another few weeks :)

I’m going to keep this short and sweet, because there isn’t much to talk about;

I implemented the option to give particles a colour;

Not much reason for doing this, except that I think it looks cool.

Next, I finally added the option for a “Server” mode when hosting a game. This allows a player to set up a server, without counting the computer hosting the game as a player. This leads on to my next point, as I also managed to get a dedicated server set up through amazon web servers. When I initially release this game, the plan is to have one or two dedicated servers that people can play on, so that hopefully they can experience the full game properly.

Finally, I created a few help messages that appear when a player first runs the game, in order to hopefully tell them what buttons do what:

And that’s about it...aside from fixing a constant stream of bugs, I’ve started making the story mode again. Out of those two, there isn’t much to show you, but who knows, maybe i’ll post another update within a month!

So this week I created something that in my opinion is pretty cool: A game launcher.

The game launcher uses a server to access the information it displays, such as game versions, change logs, and also what games are available to download. This not only means that anyone testing doesn’t have to manually download a new version of the game through something like Dropbox, but that I can also easily provide a different game for them to test, without the hassle of updating the launcher itself. Who knows, we might end up using this launcher when releasing future games.

While on the topic of downloading updates, I also finally implemented the long planned feature of requesting game resources from a Host game. This allows players who are joining a server to access all of the objects in the servers map, even if they don’t currently have the files for the object downloaded. Unfortunately this doesn’t include images, so if you do end up joining a server, and don’t have all the servers resources, you will probably end up with a lot of missing textures around the place:

Very thin, useless bottles

Finally, I added in the option to save a custom server address when joining a game. With this feature I also am beginning to set the foundation for dedicated servers, which I am hoping to have working by the time of this games release.

Hey guys,

This week i’m going to attempt to go a bit more in depth with the changes I’ve made, just so you can appreciate some of the ‘Design Choices’, as well as what had to be done to fix some bugs.

First off, I improved a manoeuvrability aspect of the game. In a platforming game, the most basic movement options for the player are a horizontal speed and a vertical speed. Obviously the vertical speed is affected by gravity, while the horizontal is affected by the players controls. In order to include things like walking up slopes, you need to do separate calculations which take into account movement speeds and have collision checks for vertical displacement, which the game already had. What I found though, was that when a player walks down slopes, their forward momentum stopped them from sticking to the slope, causing jumping while walking down slopes to have some issues. To fix this I replicated the walking up slopes checks in order to keep players stuck to the ground when walking down slopes:

A lot stickier

Next up I made a huge decision, at least for me, to include the feature of guns having an ammo counter. I’ve put off doing this for a while, because I was worried it would make the game-play more complex than it needed to be. What was happening however, was that in game modes like the “Hunted” game mode, players were able to just constantly shoot down one direction of a corridor, preventing the hunter from approaching them. Now that all weapons have a reload time, it should hopefully prevent this from happening.

Finally, I added a couple of graphical feedback’s for the player when doing certain things, such as when you are spectating, or in prop hunt. What I have found through testing is that generally when a player can’t do something in the game, they assume it’s the games fault, unless something tells them otherwise. In this case, sometimes when you attempt to turn into a prop in the Prop Hunt game mode, you will not be able to, as the player would get stuck in a wall. Now instead of it just preventing the player from changing, it also provides some visual feedback, which will hopefully be enough for the player to work out what is going on:

No, you can’t do that there

From the other end, players often didn’t realise they could walk through doors while spectating, so I also changed how they look visually while the player is spectating, in order to help the player realise something is different.

That’s about it for this update. I also fixed a bunch of important bugs, like I finally removed a collision bug that had been around for over three months (yay), and I stopped super long guns from shooting through walls (boo).

Until the next delayed post,

This week we’ve continued testing the game in multiplayer, which has provided me with an abundance of bugs to fix, and balance changes to make. 

Remember a couple of posts back how I said I was adding sound into the game? Well that’s all broken, so forget I said that. I also found that players could shoot through walls if they stick their gun through it...which is weird because I had already fixed that problem like twice.

Anyway, one of the cool changes I made, at least for me, is that the client will now check for updates and download the local resource files from a server. Previously with the demo I released, the files had to be exported from the executable, so this change makes it so much easier for me to provide updated resources to anyone with the game installed.

Super interesting stuff, I know.

Here, have a pic of a little voxel-map experiment thing I threw together: