Mushin Games

It took us 2 weeks to get the trailer done, 3 days to get all the art assets and text done for the Steam page, and 2 days to get a new website up and running.

Those who’ve been waiting to add the game to your wishlist on Steam can do it now!

The trailer is on YouTube as well. Please watch, like and subscribe!

Tobimaru’s on Kickstarter now!

If you’ve seen this game and thought even a bit that it looked fun. Give it a go! You can download and play the demo via this link:  https://mushingames.itch.io/legend-of-tobimaru

There’s a new trailer as well. Be sure to check it out:

Simple Weather System

My journey as an indie game developer began 2 years ago today (23rd December 2015). Didn’t even think it would take 2 years to get this far when I wrote this blog post about starting out. I was confident I could get it done in half a year and I thought I was an expert at estimating projects at the time.

So, what have I learned so far as an indie dev? Well, tons of stuff. But I thought I would just share the ones that I reckon the most important lessons I’ve learned. Here they are.

1. Stay excited about your game

This is the driving force of everything that you do as an indie. For most indie games, you are probably the only one who’s truely interested in your game, at least for the first 6 months, and if you want to ever release your game you really need to try and stay excited about it otherwise no one will.

Tips:

Stick posters of your game up on the walls.

Wear clothes with your studio’s logo on them when you work on your game

Make a quality trailer every 3-6 months when you have enough new content and watch it often.

Basically immerse yourself in the world of your game.

2. Secure your finances

The reality is, if you can’t pay your bills, feed yourself, and keep the must-have’s to keep working on your game like a laptop, a desk and internet, you basically can’t do it.

I was a full-time indie only for the first 3 months, but I decided to go back to my old job on a part-time basis. Not because I’d run out of money, but because it was getting scarce and I was getting really stressed out.

Whether it is regular earned income or cashflow, you need it. When it’s not there, you will get stressed out about it and won’t be able to fully focus on your game.

I had a year’s worth of savings when I started out. Now that money’s all gone. Not a cent left. Although it’s not a lot, my old, and current part-time job is paying the bills and I don’t need to worry about money too much.

So you have a little bit of savings and you think you can release your game in 3-6 months… NO it will take way longer, you need to keep your job and work on your game in your free time. Because, money will run out quicker than you think, and the game will take A LOT LONGER to finish no matter how simple and easy it seems.

Tips:

Come up with a budget and try and meet it (you’ll get better at it each time you do it)

Keep your job and work in your free time if you can to begin with

3. Keep it small

If your studio consists of one or two people, I reckon it’s extremely important to keep the scope small. Focus on creating a simple but unique and fun experience, rather than a full-on game with tons of content.

Tobimaru started out being a SIMPLE 2D PLATFORMER with fighting elements in it. But overtime, my vision got a little too ambitious, especially after playing amazing metroidvania games such as Ori and the Blind Forest and Hollow Knight. I revamped all the sprites, added Dynamic Scene Loading and a Cutscene Editor, and then tweaked the hell out of the combat system just so I could feel better about Tobimaru. But at the end of the day, I can never compete with these games for the overall quality of the game, music, graphics, the amount and variety of content, and even the complexity of the game mechanics. What I really should’ve focused on is to keep the game small but polished to the max to make that experience an epic one that’s unique and memorable, and this is what I’m gonna try and focus on going forward.

Tips:

Create a simple but unique and fun experience

Make that experience super easy to understand for the players

Start play-testing and getting feedback from real people early in the process

4. Be around like-minded people

Be part of your local game developers’ community, and get to know aspiring indie devs like yourself, or people in the industry. It’s especially priceless to meet and talk to people who have already been there and done it, because you realise it’s actually possible to make a living by making games, and you get to study the habits you need to adopt in order to become a successful indie game developer (success means different for everyone though).

Tips:

Attend meetups for game developers regularly

Have your own game project that you’re excited about

Take note of what other people have done to get the results you want e.g. 1000 followers on Twitter.

5. Keep a consistent, and healthy work schedule

Don’t crunch. You’ll get burned-out, and either get sick or end up giving up. Outside your set work hours, make time to let your mind rest, get some exercise and feed your mind with creativity. Game development is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s more important to keep a steady pace and finish the race, and you need to stay physically and mentally fit to achieve it.

How you spend your work hours is critical to your success. Try and block out the distractions and get the most out of your work time.

Tips:

Get into a habit of blocking social media sites and turning off your phone when you work on anything creative like coding and art. You can download all the references beforehand.

Whatever your schedule is, stick to it. If you have to change it, write down why you had to.

We use inheritance quite extensively for convenience' sake but now when we want to give a game object functionality that already exists in another base class, we need to either switch the base classes around or do a cringy copy-and-paste of the functionality into the current base class.

It's pretty obvious to us now that the way we've done it isn't scalable and it's gonna get harder and hard to extend it as the project grows.

We will spend a bit of time in the next few weeks on re-structuring the codebase so all the different types of behaviour are in separate independent classes that can be added in as required and are managed by the game object's main class (e.g. Enemy).

November went very fast for Mushin Games. We spent a countless hours on designing and coding new combat moves and abilities for Tobimaru. Some of them were changes to existing moves, and the rest were added to fill in the gaps so the move set would feel more complete. We’re planning to finish all of Tobimaru’s moves and abilities by the end of December so that we can move on and work on the levels for the final release.

Here are two of the moves that we’ve implemented:

Dash (Previously Sabaki)

A post shared by Mushin Games (@mushingames) on Nov 20, 2017 at 3:43am PST

Sabaki was Tobimaru’s signature move. It was unique and felt great... Why did we need to change it then? Here are the reasons:

You need to be facing an enemy to pull it off

It force you to turn around to face the back of the target enemy

You have no control over how far you travel

Once you knew how it worked, the move felt great but until then it was frustrating.

Now it’s been changed to be move of a Dash, and the issues above have been resolved. You can pull it off at any moment, and how far you travel is always the same length. You can turn around to face the back of the enemy manually and it feels pretty much like the Sabaki move, you just have a bit more control over what happens.

Dodge

A post shared by Mushin Games (@mushingames) on Nov 22, 2017 at 2:47pm PST

Dodge is a brand new addition to Tobimaru’s move set. Now you have the option to move back to dodge attacks. The animation were actually quite tricky to get right, and we took 3 attempts until we were happy with how it felt.

Dash and Dodge Together

A post shared by Mushin Games (@mushingames) on Nov 26, 2017 at 1:25am PST

With the new Dash and Dodge, you can now dodge an attack, and quickly come back in to beat an enemy like a Ninja master. It feels truely amazing to be able to think of a combo and actually do it. Also, the combat feels a lot fairer because the moves are move predictable and you know it’s your own fault when you screw up.

Experiments

We did spend most of our time on new moves and abilities, however, we also spent a little bit of time on improving the look of the game. One of the things we did is to try out some shaders to give the game a different look. Here’s an example of it:

A post shared by Mushin Games (@mushingames) on Nov 6, 2017 at 1:13am PST

We did like this quite a bit but there are few things that we need to sort out with the plug-in we used for this, so we aren’t sure if we would use it at this point. But it’s pretty cool either way.

Plans for December 2017

As some of you may already know, we launched our first public alpha late October. This has been a huge milestone for us as this is the first time we’re revealing the features of the second level, and also there have been a countless number of changes to the combat system, enemies’ AI, and everything.

Preparation and Launch of the Public Alpha

It took us about 3-4 weeks to prepare for the public alpha. There were actually quite a few obstacles to overcome:

Generating a unique copy of the build for each sign-up

Setting up an SSL certificate on the website to secure communications between the build and the server

Setting up email authentication on the hosting server to prevent emails from ending up in the spam folder

Cleaning up the second level so it’s presentable

Each of the above ate up a good chunk of time and delayed the launch. We were very keen to include some of the features from the second level in the demo but it only had sprites for the base platforms and didn’t have anything in the foreground or the background, it was in a very, very rough state. So we spent 1.5 weeks to quickly pixel up some tiles to make the level look… at least presentable. We are glad we did this though as we have collected some interesting data for the second level.

There’s still about a month until the public alpha is finished. So if you haven’t played it, please sign up and play it!

Improvements to Enemies’ AI

Patrol Mode

Enemies can now actively search for intruders to eliminate. The following video clip shows a Knife Master running between the left edge of the platform and a rock. If you watch closely, you can see a bright green line appearing when the enemy goes near the edge of the platform, and the rock. The line indicates that the enemy has detected an obstacle and it needs to turn around. It sort of feels like a stealth game sneaking up to an enemy from behind :-)

A post shared by Mushin Games (@mushingames) on Oct 27, 2017 at 4:47pm PDT

Knife Masters no longer just stay still

They were very simple enemies that stayed on the same spot, and attacked only when Tobimaru was right in front of them. The main script that controls them is even called StaticEnemy. Ironically, they now run around to find Tobimaru and also proactively get closer to him to attack like maniacs.

A post shared by Mushin Games (@mushingames) on Nov 2, 2017 at 4:23pm PDT

Once they’ve seen you, they will persistently follow you and attack you proactively. But it’s not all bad news for Tobimaru, because now he can make one follow you and single out the guy so it’s easy to smash him.

Plans for November 2017

We didn’t even have a day of rest since the launch of the public alpha, and we’ve already fixed tons of bugs and added few new features for the second level. Although there’s still an overwhelming amount of things to get through for the final release, we are getting through them one by one, slowly but surely.

Public Alpha of Tobimaru is open til 30th November 2017

Sign up to download and play the demo

If you like the game, please fill out the feedback form (link will be given to you by email). Also it would be great if you could help us spread the word by sharing this post with your friends and followers.

September was a huge month for us, and we made TONS of progress, especially in the art department. Mainly, we’ve done the following things:

Add a new attack move to both the Skilled Swordsman (aka Light Enemy) and the Giant Swordsman (aka Large Enemy)

Polish/Tweak existing animations

Add particle effects to some actions

Start on the second level’s environment sprites

Add a new attack move to both the Skilled Swordsman and the Giant Swordsman

We actually wanted to do this for quite a while, but it wasn’t part of the original plan. With just one type of attack for each enemy type, the enemies were predictable and easy to beat, and combat was super boring. Changes to the move set of 2 characters mean a whole lot of work that would involve creating new animations, adding them to the state machine, making changes to the enemy scripts, and an countless hours of balancing. But we had to do it, to turn the game into something that’s actually fun.

Here are the animations we’ve created for the new moves:

Skilled Swordsman’s Close-Range Attack:

Giant Swordsman’s Spin Attack

These animations took about 9 hours to draw altogether. We actually experimented with two different approaches.

Approach #1 (https://youtu.be/9XWDvIkb_PM)

Speed-sketch all frames

Polish them one by one

Pros:

Suitable for creating a smooth and flowy animation

You get to see the whole animation in action at a very early stage in the process, and it helps you to make it even smoother

Cons:

Too many in-between frames added without much thought make the animation sluggish and uninteresting

You need to polish all the frames from scratch

Approach #2 (https://youtu.be/axwKr2yCXEg)

Draw just the key frames right at the beginning, with all the details

Create in-between frames by copying the key frames, twisting ‘n turning the limbs, and cleaning up jagged lines

Pros:

Suitable for an animation that’s based on a small number of well-defined poses with snappy transitions

It allows you to focus on cleaning the lines and making each frame look good, because the in-betweens are fully-coloured and half-polished to begin with

It’s relatively easy to add in a key frame in the middle of the process because each key frame tends to be completely separate, and the in-betweens are similar to it

Cons:

It simply doesn’t work well for a move without well-defined poses, or a move that requires too many key frames (but I guess it really depends on how well you can figure out the key frames of a move)

The new moves have already been put into the game, and they are looking really great. Here’s a clip of the Skilled Swordsman showing off his new attack:

These Skilled Swordsmen can side-slash you if you stand too close to them. Previously they could only jump up and stab you from above no matter how close they were to you. It felt weird then, but it feels right now.

Polish/Tweak existing animations

Along with the two new animations we did this month, we also spent quite a bit of time polishing, and tweaking some of the existing animations in the game. Although it’s very easy to miss, some animations that you might’ve already seen were done very, very roughly, and they had jagged lines, no outlines, the wrong colours and all sorts of other flaws.

Add particle effects to some animations

A lot of the effects were previously just done with a single animated sprite. But, we’ve added particles to amp up some of the effects. We didn’t spend too much time on it but we’re pretty happy with the outcome.

Start on the second level’s environment sprites

We’ve been working on the second level for quite a while now. We were focused solely on the level design until recently but since that’s starting to take shape, we decided that it’s time we start designing the environment. We won’t reveal the theme of it yet, but here’s part of a new spritesheet we’re creating for the level. The tile indices are shown because we don’t wanna show too much of a wok-in-progress.

And that’s a wrap!

This is it for Semptember 2017. There’s actually a whole lot of stuff that’s currently in the works. Hopefully we can share it soon.

It’s already September, and there are only 4 months left this year. Crazy. Time goes ridiculously fast. We’ve worked on quite a few things in August.

Trap/Platform Edge Detection

We made a lot of small tweaks to the game, but one that has been bothering us the most is the enemies’ AI. Pretty much all enemies just kept following you regardless of what was ahead of them, so they used to walk right into a trap, and fall off the platform and sometimes kill themselves by falling into spikes. We really didn’t like it and decided it’s time to sort this out.

Now all the enemies can detect a trap that’s in the way and stop before killing themselves, and also detect the edge of the platform they’re on and stop before falling off it.

So this is how they behave now:

A post shared by Mushin Games (@mushingames) on Aug 18, 2017 at 3:24pm PDT

And this is how it looks in the Scene View of Unity. You can see a bright green line appearing from the eyes of the enemies, and them stopping before a trap, and the edge of the platform:

A post shared by Mushin Games (@mushingames) on Aug 30, 2017 at 12:48pm PDT

The enemies seem a lot less retarded just with these changes. But we actually have a lot more exciting changes to the enemies in the making! Hopefully, we can share these with you all soon!

Level Design Madness

Our level design extraordinaire Ken has been working hard on the design of the 2nd level. There’s still a lot to do there, but we are making progress, slowly but surely.

Our level design process starts off with coming up with the theme for the level, and then goes like this:

Draw up random ideas

Pick up the ideas that are aligned with the theme and flesh them out

Give each item (a fleshed-out idea) a number

Draw a map and place the items on it in a manner that makes sense (the picture below shows how it looks at this point). Some items appear in a specific order, and some can appear at any point in time.

Once the map is roughly done, redraw the map on graph paper

Create the map in Unity, test it and make any adjustments it needs

This process seems to work pretty well. The best part of the process is that we can lay all the bits of paper out on the floor, discuss them with the team, and quickly add/remove bits as necessary. We can’t do this easily on the computer as far as we know, but if you do, please let us know!

July was a very busy month for Mushin Games. We worked on many aspects of the game, but we spent the most time on lighting, particle effects, combat.

Simple Lighting System

We implemented a custom lighting system that attaches a directional light to the main camera, and a point light and a spot light to Tobimaru. The brightness and colours change depending on the light settings of the scene. It has added depth to the look of the game, and we reckon it looks heaps better now.

The game has cutscenes where the camera shifts off the player to focus on another game object (could be an item, or a character). In these cases, the point and spot lights leave Tobimaru and attach to the camera, and then the camera shifts to focus on the game object. The lights re-attach themselves to the player once the camera shifts back to show the player in the centre.

Improved Footstep Effects

A post shared by Mushin Games (@mushingames) on Jul 21, 2017 at 4:35pm PDT

Previously, we had only one effect for footsteps. It was yellow and didn’t quite fit the theme of the game, and the same effect was used for all kinds of surfaces, rock, wood, or grass. This was annoying the hell out of us. So we decided to give it a face lift. We now have different sets of particles and sound effects for different surfaces. Dust and bits of grass fly out on grass, and dust and bits of wood pop out on wood, etc. It’s now a little bit more fun to just to running around in the game :-)

Major Changes to Combat in Progress

We were proud of what we’d done with the combat system in Tobimaru. But we needed to make some pretty major tweaks to it to make it feel right. We didn’t know exactly how to fix it. So we roughly implemented all the ideas we came up with to see if they would fix it. It’s way too early to reveal the actual changes we’ve implemented but... it feels a lot more engaging and fun now. We’ll reveal some of the changes without spoiling too much once they are finalised.

Some of you may already know, and this is NOT one of the changes to the combat, but the following video shows Tobimaru punching an enemy off the platform off onto a trap. It’s such a satisfying feeling when you manage to do it.

Simple Lighting System Implemented

Hello everyone!

We haven’t been posting updates as regularly as before. Sorry about that! However, there has been quite a bit of progress on the development. Here’s a quick summary.

Level design

1st Level (The Forest)

We have already finished designing the first level, and it is looking pretty solid. It takes us about half an hour average to get through the level, and we’ve played it like a thousand times so probably it will take about an hour for a first-time player.

Cutscene Editor

In order to make the first level more of a “proper” level with cutscenes where a sequence of events occur such as spawning objects, shifting the camera and showing dialogues, we had to build a custom cutscene editor. 

To create a sequence of events, you drag and drop an event runner object into the scene, and add events to it in the order you want them to run in. You can choose to run them synchronously or asynchronously. We’ve created a wild range of events so most cutscenes can be created using the editor without writing a single line of code.

2nd Level (Theme to be revealed later)

Although we haven’t revealed anything regarding the 2nd level, we have already been working on it for 3 months. The first 2 months were mostly spent on creating a whole new set of assets for the level. As mentioned in a recent social media post, the level is going to be quite different gameplay-wise from the first one. We know it’s pretty hard to tell what sort of level it is from the image below... but we aren’t quite ready to show off what’s in it or how it’s gonna be yet... hopefully we’ll be, soon!

Music redone by our music magician

Our music master Pau Damià Riera a.k.a Otomaru has kindly revisited the songs he’d done for Tobimaru, and re-mixed all of them. We’re super excited to share a new version of the main theme (or the title theme), and also the mini boss theme for the Forest level. We wanted to embed the SoundCloud player in the post but we couldn’t figure out how. So just click on the links below:

Main/Title Theme

Forest Mini Boss Theme

Current workload, and release date