(WIP) Work in Puddledock

What a weekend!

I officially finished my first Ludum Dare yesterday! I still can’t believe how fast the weekend flew by. 

Friday night, once the theme of “Sacrifices Will Be Made” was announced at 9:00, Sam and I got straight to brainstorming. Even though I was developing the game solo, Sam was crucial for idea generation and gameplay feedback. With her help, I went to bed Friday with a full fledged game design, broken down into tasks even!

The basic idea was to make a shooter where you have 5 lives. Each life you can carry 1 gun and 1 type of potion. Guns and potions are lost when you die, which means your pool of items reduces each life, so you have to be careful how you divvy out the supplies. The sacrifices come into play based on the potions you take, and choices you get when you die. For instance, you can choose to keep your gun and unused potions when you die, but you have to give up 1 life to do so--which might be beneficial if you were using your best gun. 

Each potion has a sacrifice too. Taking a health potion means you can’t fire your gun for 10 seconds. Taking a shield potion protects you from harm, but it means your bullets shoot in the opposite direction. The explode potion means you blow up when you die (no visual effect for this unfortunately) to cause extra enemy damage, but you won’t get the option to get your gun back. And finally, the invincibility potion makes you invulnerable to enemies, but only until the next time you shoot your weapon--so good for escaping danger.

Having the physical cards helped to get my Trello board set up quickly so I could easily track tasks, progress, and bugs!

Saturday morning I got straight to work, starting with the basics of just getting a character (a word which here means “red square”) drawing on screen and moving around. In hindsight, I wish I had done this initial work on Friday night so I could just hit the ground running on Saturday. 

My goal for the day was to get the core gameplay loop completed. Aside from quick lunch and dinner breaks, I worked all day, staying up until 11:30. I had the core game loop in and working, and other than a few potions missing from the game, I was content with my progress for the day.

I woke up at 7:00 Sunday morning, showered, and went straight to work. I was hoping to get the 4 potions added into the game before I broke for breakfast (and more importantly, coffee) with Sam. I wound up only getting half of them done, then wrapped the rest up after breakfast. Unfortunately I ran into several bugs around the sacrifice system and spent a couple hours trying to fix them all.

After a super fast lunch break I got straight to work cleaning up the UI, which admittedly could still use a lot of love. But it was good enough...it had to be. Unfortunately I had only around 4 hours to get all the art assets into the game, and it shows. My plan had been to spend most of Sunday working on art so I would have something halfway presentable, but that fell to the wayside quickly.

A little after 8:00 pm I wrapped up work on the tileset and got the final room layout designed. It was a mad dash to the finish line.

With around 40 minutes to the deadline, I finally started playing the game in earnest, tuning enemy levels and spawn rates. Fortunately I made all the tuning variables that would affect the gameplay a list of macros in a single file. So I didn’t have to waste time going through objects to tweak their numbers--I could just do it all in one place super quick.

Sam playtested for a bit as well, and we were able to spot some bugs that we could quickly squash or at least lessen their severity in the final 10 minutes of the jam. 

Overall I’m very happy the final product. We didn’t have time for audio or particle effects, which would have made the gameplay feel much much better, but that’s just the way it goes sometimes.

I learned a lot from this experience. I honestly never thought I’d actually participate in a Ludum Dare, partially because I never thought I had the skill to pull off a finished game. I’m super glad that I did it, and I would definitely consider doing it again in the future.

I love the idea we came up with for the game and I think there’s a lot of potential if we decide to go back and make it a full game. So all in all, a success!

A big thanks to Sam for making lunches and dinner and generally taking care of business around the house while I remained upstairs typing code like a madman. I couldn’t have done it without her <3

And if you made it this far...thanks for reading!

Guess what? I’m participating in Ludum Dare 43 this weekend!!! 

I’m super excited! This will be the first Ludum Dare I’ve participated in. I’ve been wanting to join the jam for a while now, but I absolutely love watching other devs stream over the weekend and see their games come together. This time I’m pulling myself away from spectating and am finally joining in the fun.

Here’s how I voted in the final round of theme voting:

Having watched a bunch of Ludum Dare’s in the past, I feel like I have a good idea of what I need to do in order to be successful--though I’m sure most devs feel that way going in.

Here are my personal goals/rules for the jam:

Don’t stress on the theme. I’ve seen a lot of devs get way too fixated on the theme and fail to produce a game because of it. I’m fully prepared to just make whatever game I want if I can’t think of something that fits the theme. At the end of the day, I just want to make a game.

Just get it working. I don’t want to waste a ton of time trying to make super clean and efficient code. Whatever’s the fastest/easiest way to get a feature working is the route I should be taking 100% of the time.

Keep it simple stupid. I’ve seen a lot of devs run out of time due to over-scoping. It’s so easy to run into that trap, even when you think you are avoiding it. So I’ll have to make sure I keep assessing my game and determining if my design is realistic based on time remaining. The plan is to come up with a single mechanic, get it working, and use it as much as possible in the game to avoid having to get too many systems working together in the final product.

Have fun. The whole point of this is to have fun and make whatever game I want. So if I find myself frustrated and miserable, then I want to have the presence of mind to switch gears and make something else. If it starts to feel like a chore that I’m forcing myself to complete, then I’m approaching it wrong.

I’m taking time today to get a blank project ready to go that has my up-to-date core scripts that I use in all games. I don’t know if this is considered “cheating” or not, but I don’t really care. I want to focus on game design and building that game this weekend--not wasting time on writing camera logic and other utilities that aren’t gameplay related. I’m being up front about it, so people can judge it as they please. If I come out of this weekend with a finished game, then I’m happy.

The theme is announced at 9:00 tonight, so my ideal scenario is to have an idea of what I want to make before going to bed. If I can get started on some basic implementation tonight, even better. Then Saturday I want to focus on getting the core mechanic working as quickly as possible, and building the game around it. Then any time left on Saturday and all day Sunday will be dedicated to art, sound, and testing. 

Last week Sam and I took what is pretty much now an annual trip up to Virginia to visit with family for Thanksgiving, and spend some much needed time in the outdoors. 

Last year we went to Shenandoah National Park for the first time and stayed at a resort at the top of a mountain and did some hikes during the day. It also happens to be where I proposed to Sam, so it’s an extra special place for us.

This year it was just as amazing a trip as we happened to be on the mountain right after they had a snow and ice storm a few days prior. We live in Florida, and neither of us had seen snow probably for a decade or more, so we were loving it. It was looking like we wouldn’t even be able to go due to the road that runs through the mountain being closed on account of ice and fallen trees. Sam was literally booking a hotel in Colonial Williamsburg the morning we were supposed to leave for Shenandoah when we got a notification that the road would be reopening that afternoon. And just like that, our much anticipated trip was saved!

We got to hike through snow!!! It was by far the coolest (pun not intended) hiking we have ever done.

We saw plenty of deer on the trip as we drove over the mountains. We even found deer tracks along the hiking path we were walking on.

The view from the Stony Man Trail was incredible. It’s a hike to the highest point on the mountain. The temperature at this point in the day was below freezing, and so the entire trail was covered in frozen snow and ice. There was a sign warning of bears active in the area (though in this weather we had our doubts) but fortunately hiking over snow and ice means lots of loud crunching, so any animals in the area would be well aware of our presence. 

It was definitely the coldest we had been during the day, with a constant frigid blast of wind blowing at the very top of the trail. But it was 1000% worth it when we saw the view. This was around 4:00pm and the sun was beginning it’s decent. We could not have timed it more perfectly. Seeing the sun’s rays pierce through the sky was magnificent and unreal. We could see where each ray was landing on the earth below, and they were just like giant spotlights lighting up and warming fortunate far-away parts of the little towns far below the mountains, while other places remained untouched and cold. It was a sight we will never forget. 

We even braved climbing up the rock at the very top and edge of the mountain, which was more than a bit scary when you look down, combined with a strong wind that seems intent on preventing you from finding your balance. But as you can see, Sam conquered the mountain...

And at last, our traditional hike through Pocahontas State Park was the perfect way to spend a Thanksgiving morning in Virginia. Away from the mountains and away from the snow, Pocahontas was still brisk, but much warmer in comparison to our Shenandoah hikes. And it was as beautiful as ever. I’m pretty sure I take pictures of the same parts every year, but I can’t help it. I always want to take the peaceful feeling of being in the woods with me.

We hope your Thanksgiving/week was just as amazing. Now it’s back to gamedev for us! Thanks for reading!

Howdy gamedev! (I’ve been playing a lot of Red Dead Redemption lately)

We made some good progress last week, defining how the mines will work in the game, and trying to add more gameplay elements in. 

In the game you can find followers that will hover around you and probably provide some kind of bonus or do something cool...once we figure it out. You can only have 1 active follower at a time, so I added in this nifty device that will let you choose which of your followers you want with you.

Yesterday I added some spooky cobwebs into the mines. I probably should have added them before Halloween, but I didn’t think of it :(

The cobwebs will slow down the player when they pass through them. They also slow down enemies, but there’s a bug right now where enemies won’t even go into the webs 90% of the time because they view them as impassable objects...and I don’t want the enemies to be that smart, for now.

This week my brother is getting married (woop woop!) and we have family coming into town for the wedding, so gamedev may be a bit sporadic for us. I’m focusing on adding different obstacles and traps into the mines to make them more difficult to navigate. Not sure how much I’ll get in this week, but hopefully I’ll have something to show off by this time next week.

Sam and I decided we would wait until after Thanksgiving to record a video showing off the state of the game since we’ll be preoccupied this week, and then we are heading up to Virginia for the week of Thanksgiving to visit family and go hiking in the Shenandoah mountains! Which means I have a bit more time to cram some more features into the game and fix some lingering bugs.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading!

Last week was a great week for art. I managed to get assets in for the large list of placeholder art that was in the game. And while the new art is still very much considered placeholder too, it’s way less placeholder-y looking than the boring circles and squares I had in there before.

Here’s some of what went into the game:

mine entrance:

dirt processor:

smelter:

mineral deposit box:

updated dungeon entrance:

for comparison, here’s what the old dungeon entrance looked like:

Sam and I also spent a few hours over the weekend doing some brainstorming and planning to get a better idea of the game we’re making. Up until now we’ve kind of just been working on stuff that seemed cool and felt like belonged in the game, but we really wanted to have a better focus going forward.

Friday night we watched this awesome talk by Zak McClendon where he breaks down the framework he’s developed over his career to help get everyone on the same page about what game is being made. I highly suggest giving it a watch. We definitely got a lot out of it and will be using this method going forward for all of our games.

By determining our Creative Promises and Values we were able to not only brainstorm new features that would deliver on those things, but we also were able to inspect all of the existing features in the game and see if they actually added anything toward those goals. There were a few features that we wound up cutting because we found they just didn’t fit anymore. Which is great! No more wasting time on features that don’t add value to our design. 

Here’s what our board looks like:

The board is now hanging on the wall beside my desk for easy access. So now as we come up with new ideas, it’s super easy to run them through the filter of our current promises and values and see if they work. The features are also ranked in priority order so we always know what should get worked on next. And since it’s just note cards and thumbtacks, it’s very simple to re-prioritize items as the project dictates. 

This process doesn’t replace actual progress tracking like you would do in Trello or another program. It’s meant to be super high level to provide a working language for everyone on the team to agree upon to ensure everyone is working toward the same end goal.

So yeah, even though no code or art was done over the weekend, I feel like the game overall took a giant leap forward just by taking the time to do this planning. 

The plan for this week is to start tackling the board and cleaning up what we decided to remove from the project as it stands now. It’s nice to have focus!

Thanks for reading! 

I spent last week focusing on getting one of the core gameplay loops finally working. It’s a bit janky, but at least the core loop is in there and the game is kinda playable. Once I had that in and working, I spent some time just adding in some easy wins, like torches:

and collectibles that magnet toward the player:

Sam and I also brainstormed name ideas for the game, and I think we landed on one that we are both happy with. We’re looking to do a first-look gameplay video soon, at which point we’ll also announce the title. 

This week I plan to spend some time on art since a lot of crummy placeholder crept it’s way into the game since the last time I did an art pass. It’ll be a good coding break for me, and I always feel much better about a work in progress once we throw some better art into the game. So even though the game won’t get many new features this week, I think it’ll be well worth the time.

So that’s it for this week. A short and sweet update so I can get straight to work. Keep and eye on Twitter this week as I’m sure to be posting in progress pixel art!

Thanks for reading!

puddlelang is finished! You can download it on itch.io here. 

This is the esolang I mentioned I was working on in the last blog post. I’m quite proud of it, and feel like it turned out pretty well considering I only spent a couple days working on it. There’s more that could be added to it, but at this point I need to get back to our main project. 

The whole  reason for trying to make puddlelang was a proof of concept to see if it had some gameplay application. Having finished it, I do think there’s some ways we could work it into our next game--though I would probably tweak the language a bit to simplify how it’s used. The good part is that the way I wrote the parser, I can easily modify the functions it handles to support however we decide to use it in a game. 

The language is extremely bare-bones, and it’s complicated to perform even the simplest of tasks...which is the point of esolangs. It actually felt good to work on something that isn’t meant to be user friendly for a change. Which is also probably why I was able to finish it in two days.

Here are the functions that the language supports. My goal was to keep the final function count at 10 or fewer.

Here’s an example of a nested for loop where both loops run twice--causing the inner loop to run 4 times:

The code is on the left side of the screen. When running in real-time mode, you can see the results of your code on the right side of the screen--each cell in the grid represents a block of memory.

You can also print the output of your program, which will display in the bottom portion of the screen.

The language is ascii based - so if you wanted to write a program that prints out text, for instance the letter ‘M’, you would have to make the cell you are telling the program to print equal to 77. You could just enter a bunch of plus signs into a single cell to make it equal 77, then print it. But the fun is in trying to optimize that operation to make the code as efficient as possible.

So yeah... that’s it. I don’t expect many people to actually try it. But if you do, hit me up on Twitter to let me know what you made.

As a side note, I first heard about esolangs last Friday (a week ago today), started brainstorming my own esolang that night/Saturday, started coding it on Sunday and by mid-day Tuesday I had it wrapped up. That’s what happens when my brain becomes fascinated with something :P

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Last week was a shortened work week for me since Sam and I were up in Pensacola visiting with her family at the beach. It was a great time. We made tie dye shirts and everyone agreed that mine was the best.

Despite the short week, I did make some great progress with my lighting system. The way it originally worked was by drawing a dark overlay on a surface that filled the entire viewport, and then I used draw_circle to essentially punch a hole out of the surface leaving a non-dark circle over the player. Which worked, but didn’t look very good. Since the circle was relatively small, it made the edges of the light look very pixellated, and there was no smooth gradient fading out to darkness.

The new method is actually very simple, using a sprite to define the shape and gradient of the light. And then I just use a couple of different blend modes to color objects that appear in the light radius. No shaders being used at all in this method.

And this is what the final effect looks like:

Last Friday I learned about esolangs -- which are esoteric programming languages.@ENDESGA was tweeting about them, having just discovered them himself, and expressed his interest in making his own. To which I thought “that sounds like fun!” 

So yesterday I started developing puddlelang. At this point I basically only have the text editor portion of the interpreter working. The plan for today is to actually process the user input and make it work for the functions I want to implement. Right now I have 9 functions planned, with a potential 10th function that I’m undecided about.

What excites me about esolangs is that they are super bare-bones and not meant to be user friendly or even that useful. The act of writing a program in an esolang just to print text to the screen is a feat in and of itself. But the final product of code written in the language is cryptic and beautiful. For example, this is what “Hello World!” looks like in Brainfuck (one of the most popular esolangs):

My end goal/hope is that puddlelang will have some gameplay application that I can maybe use in my current project as a fun side activity for players to try their hand at. I’m not super knowledgeable about compilers/interpreters or how code works at the machine level, so all of this is just one big experiment and challenge for myself. 

I may put the final product up on itch for anyone to try their hand at writing puddlelang programs. I’ll update the blog/twitter whenever that happens.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

The first half of last week was working the kinks out of the inventory system, and then getting everything in game using it. The original implementation of the inventory had it so all inventories in game were “infinite.” But once I slapped a hard limit on how many items an inventory can hold, plus a limit on how many items each inventory slot can hold, plus the addition of some items being stackable but others not....YIKES! So many combinations to test and ways to break it.

I think at this point I have the most obvious cases handled and now it’s just a matter of continuing to test the system as I play the game and add more into it. The upside is that we got some pretty cool bugs out of the transition.

For instance, the ability to infinitely clone pickaxes because they weren’t actually being removed from your inventory when dropped:

I had a similar bug when I added a portal to the inventory and was testing placing the portal and removing it from the inventory...oops! 

Toward the end of last week I started working on enemy AI because even though they can pursue the player, it’s only due to the minor fact that they don’t collide with anything. So I’m working on figuring out a good system to get them to intelligently avoid obstacles while pursuing a target...which is a lot tougher than it sounds.

So far I think I’m on the right track, but there’s several more test cases the enemies need to be able to handle before I know for sure my current plan will work. I’m trying to avoid using mp_grids because the way the game is set up I can’t just make  single grid for the entire game room, and those get costly fast. And I want to do something simpler than A* path finding, but I’m not opposed to giving it a shot if I need to. Hopefully I’ll have some GIFs to show off over the coming days on Twitter, so keep an eye out!

As always, thanks for reading!

It’s amazing what a week of vacation will do for the brain. Whereas the week before we left I felt like getting anything into the prototype was a slog, this past week I experienced quite the opposite. Not only did I get the rest of the placeholder art into the game that I wanted, but I also slammed in a couple new features that I hadn’t anticipated having time for.

One of my favorite pieces of placeholder art is the dungeon entrance. Very much inspired by the original Zelda game. I didn’t want it to be just a static structure, and I think the addition of fire gives it an ominous look and feel.

Something that wasn’t even on the list of things to do last week was a roll animation for the player. But for some reason it just popped into my head that I should add it, and much to my surprise, it only took about an hour to get in and working! And of course now this is my main mode of movement through the game when I’m testing.

One of the big tasks for last week was adding attachments. I want the player to be able to hold a lot of items in the game, but I don’t necessarily want to have to make animations for the player holding and swinging every possible item. Solution: attachments. So here you see the player holding and swinging a pickaxe. However this GIF is a lie. A LIE!!!! The player character is actually composed of 4 separate elements: the body, the front arm, the back arm, and the pickaxe. We attach all the parts in relation to the body in code, and by having a specific draw order, we can make it look as if the hand is holding onto the pickaxe and the pickaxe will even appear in front of the back hand when it’s swung. It’s all very quick and subtle, but it helps to give the player depth. 

Naturally we couldn’t just stop there. Once we had one hand holding an item, it was only too simple and obvious to add in DUAL WIELDING!!!!! I even gave different swing speeds to each hand so it wouldn’t look so robotic, swinging at precisely the same rate.

The final major task I worked on last week was getting the inventory set up in a more complete way. I had a basic inventory already in and working, but in order to truly be able to test holding different attachments and switching between them on the fly, I needed to have an inventory in place. 

I really don’t want the inventory to become a pain point for players where they feel like they are just constantly managing it rather than exploring the game world. So Sam and I had some brain storm sessions and I think we came up with some interesting ideas to help alleviate constantly going into your inventory. Hopefully more on that soon...

Thanks for reading!

That’s right, Sam and I are back from our honeymoon voyage across the sea to undiscovered lands!

No gamedev updates this week, but here’s a glimpse into our travels...

We traveled aboard the Carnival Magic...because if it ain’t magic, it’s tragic.

I bought this shirt specifically for the cruise and it worked like a charm, garnering much praise and enthusiasm from everyone who looked upon it. This was my attempt at posing like a t-shirt model you always see on websites. Was I successful? I’ll let you decide.

Sam’s love of sea turtles knows no bounds. We even managed to see several (real) turtles throughout the week, aside from this clearly magical flying turtle that Sam found in Amber Cove.

We took a catamaran from St. Thomas over to St. John where we spent the afternoon snorkeling off a beach that could only be accessed by boat, or by a perilous hike through untamed wilderness. No boardwalks here! We both agree this was our favorite day, and by far the best excursion we have ever been on. We will definitely be coming back one day.

Our reward after a fun and exhausting day of snorkeling was a beautiful sunset over St. Thomas. The view from our cabin was extraordinary. While we are advocates for always picking up after ourselves and leaving a place the same as it was when we arrived, I think it’s safe to say we both left a piece of our hearts in St. Thomas. 

In San Juan we explored forts built in the 16th century. Our imaginations ran wild as we roamed the many tunnels and overlooked the ocean from watch towers, seeing fleets of great wooden ships on the horizon making their approach. We tried to warn everyone, but nobody seemed to listen.

Atop Castillo San Felipe del Morro we found a lighthouse that looked straight out of Harry Potter. Needless to say, this was right up Sam’s alley.

And in Grand Turk we enjoyed some more snorkeling and explored a rocky beach before finally relaxing on the beach with some fried plantains and of course nachos and queso before returning to our humble ship that would ferry us home.

I’m writing this update on Friday, and setting it to post on Monday. I’ve never done this before so we’ll see if it actually works.

As I mentioned last week, Sam and I are on our honeymoon cruise for the week, so you won’t see many (if any) updates on our social media this week. Once we come back with rested brains, we’ll be ready to hit the ground running and have lots to show off.

Until then, here’s a sneak peek at some art I’ve thrown into the prototype in preparation to start showing gameplay soon. It’s all still considered placeholder at this point. But I figure it’s better than solid color rectangles and circles moving around the screen.

Potential player character - when Sam first saw this guy she said he looked like toast. So we may end up naming him Toast lol

Enemy the first

Some sort of crafting machine

Last week was nothing but prototype work. It was mainly more systems work, but more for gameplay elements and less for things like dialog systems and whatnot. Still no art has been done for it yet, I’m sad to say. Depending how things go this week, I may take some time in the second half of the week to do some basic placeholder art.

The reason I’ve been pushing so hard on just getting systems in is because Sam and I leave on our honeymoon cruise this Saturday. So my focus for all of August has been to get as much of the foundation made as possible so when we get back I can really sit down and focus on design. It’s been a bit of a struggle to be honest. We’ve both been going at full steam for the past several months wrapping up games and starting new ones. Our brains are very much ready to just check out and relax. 

My hope is switching off for a week will allow the creativity to come rushing back and I’ll be able to generate new and interesting ideas to implement in this new game.

So not much of an update this week, and more than likely there won’t be an update next week since we’ll be on the cruise. If I do get some art done this week maybe I’ll just post some teaser images just so I don’t lose my weekly posting streak.

I promise we’ll have some cool stuff to show off soon. Thanks for reading! 

- Matthew

Slamoids is out and doing well! Sales have definitely been coming in quicker than Star-Pit Starship. I didn’t do a launch discount with Star-Pit so that could be part of the reason why Slamoids is performing better during launch week...but at the end of the day I don’t really know. 

Just the fact that we have 2 games on Steam now makes me super happy. Our goal from the beginning was to make several small games and build up the Puddledock library as quickly as possible without skimping on quality, and so far I think we’ve done just that.

The game is discounted to 85 cents until August 15th, so hop on over to Steam and pick up your copy if you haven’t already ;)

In lvlDown news: there’s no new build this week (again). I did make some updates to the game over the weekend, but nothing too drastic. Mostly I worked on getting achievement art squared away for Steam, and added the demo gating that I mentioned last week. Once I turn the build into a demo on itch.io, you’ll only be able to play the first two levels of the game, and it will prevent you from going to level 3 or beyond. I don’t think I’ll put that into effect for a little bit though. You can play the full game on itch.io here.

I did add a custom mouse cursor for the game. The standard Windows mouse cursor just felt out of place. What do you think? (sorry for the potato quality GIF)

And here’s a sneak peek at the achievement art (cheevos as I call them in code because it’s easier to type). Mostly they’re just icons from the game, but there’s a few unique ones in there. And what could the ? ones mean!?!?!

In other news: I spent the majority of last week working on the new prototype. Normally with prototypes my goal is to get basic gameplay working in a matter of a few days so we can see if the game is fun, but with the plan of making this a much larger game, there’s quite a bit of setup to do before we can even see what the game is. 

One thing that I did though was integrate a dialog system made by Friendly Cosmonaut into the build. I’ve tried writing my own dialog systems in the past and they always turn out super janky. And since Cosmonaut always does high quality work, it was a no-brainer to just go with her system from the get-go. It’s super robust, and I was able to write some wrapper scripts and objects to make it even easier to use in my game. If GameMaker is your thing, be sure to check out her YouTube channel.

I want to start showing off the game and doing dev videos soon. Right now it’s literally rectangles and circles moving around the game world. So I may take a day soon to get some half-decent placeholder art just to get the basic ideas across. 

That’s pretty much it for now. If you’ve read this far, be sure to tweet the word “cheevos” at me so I know. Until next time!

Today’s the day! Slamoids! is officially live....like right now!!!! Woo hoo!!!

You can purchase it on Steam here

I remember prototyping this game back in March. Sam had to travel to Boston for work for a couple days, so I decided to start a small new project since Star-Pit Starship was wrapped up and I needed something to keep me occupied. The idea for dodging incoming objects while your area of movement continually restricted and expanded came to me right away, and within an hour I had a playable concept.

This is what the game looked like back on day 1:

At this time we were calling the game “Circle Grower” because the concept of a slamoid hadn’t been invented yet. Also I’m lousy at code names for games :P

Sam and I both found the gameplay to be quite addicting, even with the crappy placeholder art. So we decided this would be the next Puddledock release. 

This is why I love working on small games. It’s super fast to see if they are fun or not, and it allowed me to spend more time just making crazy art and honing my pixel art skills. I use the terms “skills” and “art” loosely here.

Working on these small games also gives us more practice at finishing things, which is super important and often overlooked as a necessary skill when gamedev is discussed. Coming up with ideas and working on them is one thing, but being able to say a feature is complete, polish as best you can, and get it onto a storefront is a whole other aspect of gamedev that is only learned over multiple games and with sheer persistence. 

One thing we learned from Star-Pit Starship that we tried to employ in Slamoids was making sure it was super fast to get back into playing the game after a round ended. We knew rounds had the potential to end very quickly in Slamoids, so we wanted to make sure the player was just a button press away from being right back in the thick of the action. 

I also wanted to make sure the scores were less crazy. In Star-Pit you can build a super powerful ship and just wrack up a seemingly insurmountable score (until someone else does the same thing). But it only comes after a bit of a grind. In Slamoids there are no powerups or bonuses. Your score is purely based on your skills at dodging and destroying the higher point value slamoids. Which means when you look at the leaderboards the scores tend to be pretty close. My hope is that it will drive more competition and give that urge to last just those few seconds longer in a round to squeeze out some final few points and put yourself a rank higher on the leaderboard.

We’ll see how it goes. And rest assured, we’ll take the lessons from this game and roll them right into the next just as we did with Star-Pit. 

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! And please consider picking up Slamoids! and maybe even telling a friend.

That’s right, Slamoids! officially launches this Wednesday! Awwww yiss!!!! If you haven’t wishlisted it yet, you can do so here. The game is only $0.99 and will be discounted for the first week. You can’t steal it for cheaper! I mean...technically you could, but please don’t.

In lvlDown news, there’s not a whole lot to talk about this week. Last week was mainly just doing gameplay tweaks and updating/adding audio here and there where I thought the game could use some more feedback. I was also busy working on getting Steam integrated into the build. 

That’s right, lvlDown will be releasing on Steam....eventually! There’s still playtesting and balancing to be done, not to mention bug fixing for anything new that crops up. Plus all the Steam store assets that need to be created. So I’m thinking an October/November time frame is most likely. Sam and I have a lot of traveling coming up this Fall, so I don’t really want to promise a hard date until we are absolutely ready to press the Launch button.

What does this mean for the itch.io build? Here’s what we’re thinking: I’m going to turn the itch build into a demo, probably cut the game off at level 2, so players can get a peek at the game without seeing everything there is. That way I can leave lvlDown on itch even after the game is live on Steam, and continue to use that as a source of potential feedback.

I’ll probably work on implementing the demo gating this week, but I’m not sure yet when I’ll make it active. For the time being anyone can play the entire game all the way through on itch.io. 

I’ve also continued to work on the prototype I mentioned last week, getting more of the core systems in place that I know we’ll need: inventory, crafting, etc. Sam and I have had a few brainstorm sessions to figure out the direction we want to go, and while it’s still up in the air, we both agree that we want this to be our biggest game yet. My goal is to show video of the game in action from pretty early on in development, and continue to keep the development process very open. So be on the lookout for that.

And just to prove that we mean business, I’ve set up source control for this new project. So that means we’re real devs now, right? Before I was using Google Drive and manual backups on an external hdd. I’ll still be doing the manual backups, but having revisions on bitbucket feels super nice. I’m just super paranoid haha.

Until next time, thanks for reading (and buy Slamoids!)!

Not too much to update from last week actually. I spent most of the week just adding sound effects into lvlDown...which were sorely needed. I’m always amazed how much better a game plays and feels once sound effects are added. Unfortunately it’s never a quick process for me to figure out what the right sounds are. It’s a lot of adding in sound files, playing the game, taking out the sound, adding a  new one, repeat.

I also took some time on Friday to add in a few new particle effects to help the game feel juicier. Prior to this, when enemies or world objects were destroyed, they would just disappear and spawn some collectibles. Having the particle effect not only makes it more dynamic, but it’s also like a little reward/celebration for the player. I really like it! I also made objects shake when the player is hitting them. Gotta have that juice!

You can check out all these updates in all their glory over on the game’s itch.io page: https://puddledockgames.itch.io/lvldown

Unfortunately HTML seems to have some quirks with how it handles audio, so there may be some issues that I haven’t caught yet. Just let me know if you run into anything!

In other news: I did spend some time doing some tech tests for a potential new project. I want to make something a bit bigger, and so I worked on created a chunking system to split a large game world into individual chunks that can be saved and loaded on the fly. So I have that working now, and running at a good FPS, which means my game design plans might be feasible. I even have everything saving out to JSON already since I learned how to do that with lvlDown. 

I’m still not sure what the game is yet, but with lvlDown I wasn’t sure for a while, but just kept adding stuff until I figured it out, and I think it worked pretty well. So I may just end up doing that again. I kinda like that fluid process. There’s a good chance I’ll spend some more time this week trying to implement some other systems I want in the game--nothing really gameplay related, mainly just back-end tech. So we’ll see where that all goes.

Until next time, thanks for reading!