Sir Wiggly Games

I’m happy to say Fight Fund Forge is now available free on Itch! Grab it now for Windows or download the apk to play on Android. It’s ad free and has no IAPs whatsoever.

https://sirwigglygames.itch.io/fight-fund-forge

After a bit of time away from the game and getting back to it, things are really coming together and I’m enjoying play testing.

I keep saying the game is done and then adding a little more. At this point I’m just trying to do some final balancing and maybe some promotion before pushing the game out. I also need to throw a credits page in somewhere for a few of the free assets used that want attribution. Pay what you want on itch.io is the plan along with probably throwing it onto mobile devices as a freebie(and maybe directing people to itch). 

I’m still bad about updating here and on reddit, so Twitter is definitely the best place for news and info about the game. https://twitter.com/SirWigglyGames

As of today, I’ve started a tournament of daily polls on there so people can vote on their favorite enemy names. See my twitter link above for the current poll and full bracket.  As of posting this, the toothiest meatsack is in the lead with a colossal cobra  in second and no one voting for the great hare or fangy fuzzball.

As for specifics regarding the game’s progress:

* Numerous changes to balance, how demand changes, how reputation and skill points are earned and spent

* character is animated per weapon

* stat differences between weapon classes have been magnified to make them feel less similar

* help screen overlay works

* music and sound are in and volume levels are adjustable

* a report for recent market stuff(items sold and exported, imports, demand changes, gold earned) is view able and updates frequently 

* more clear notifications of what has leveled up 

* various bug fixes including the ever annoying tab spamming issue where the player could cause a variety of problems by rapidly swapping between the games different windows

* save and load works by dumping a bunch of variables into an ini file. It’s easily edited if anyone wanted to cheat and/or ruin their save file I guess.

* player can take a more active role by clicking on the the blacksmith, hero, and merchant tabs to speed up the forging(build speed), fighting(search and combat speed), and funding(increasing demand) respectively.

* probably other stuff that isn’t coming to mind. It’s been WAY too long since I did an update like this.

Fight Fund Forge(aka 3F) was originally planned to be feature complete by May 18th. That target was missed, but not by a whole lot. Not much has been done on it the past week because of other obligations. So where are we on 3F? First off, what is done:

The core gameplay loop and controls are in place. Player can control and upgrade all three tabs. 

Blacksmith tab can set projects to work on, unlock new projects, upgrade build speed and supply storage, purchase adjustable amounts of supplies. Project progress and supplies held are shown on functional fill bars.  There are currently 5 weapons.

Hero tab is fully playable as well. The player can select weapons to use and enemies to seek. Weapon durability, hero experience, searching progress, and enemy HP are on fill bars, the last two sharing a single bar. Skill points are gained when the experience bar is filled and a window for upgrading three hero stats can be brought up to spend said points. Buttons to buy points show the required number of points needed and light up if said amount is reached. There are currently 15 enemies.

The merchant tab shows all items earned from defeating enemies as well as weapon inventory. Prices can be set individually for each item and a percentage mark up or sale can be applied to weapons. Selling weapons can also be toggled on/off. Reputation for each item type increases and levels up similar to hero experience. Demand adjusts for each item every minute to reflect how many were sold. Advertising can be bought to increase demand growth. Regardless of demand, items can be sold in bulk for a reduced price by exporting them.

So what’s left to do? 

Music has been composed but needs to be added along with a mute button. 

Sound effects for leveling up hero and item reputations needed. Other possible sfx to add may include ambient sound per tab, button press noise, card flip/page turn sound for changing tabs, bringing up menus, swapping in and out of export mode. 

Help screens per tab to explain the game to new players and possibly show current stats.

Save system needed. Nearly all required variables are in one place and it should be easy enough.

12 more weapons are planned with currently held assets. These are pretty quick and easy to put in.

A pile of enemies, maybe 100+ should be added. No assets are needed for these, so each is little more than a handful of pieces of metadata. A spreadsheet makes their stats easy to populate. The hardest part is really just thinking up names.

Current upgrade prices and some stats are gobbledygook and need something sensible put in. This is mostly a matter of game balance and will be done after weapons are put in with preliminary stats. Additional tweaking may be needed to demand growth/decay for balance.

Ads need to be implemented as the game is intended to be free and without IAPs. The plan is a small banner ad and occasional optional video ad with demand boosts as incentive.

Final tweaks for export to HTML5, Android, and possibly IOS.

Hero character is to be animated at the bottom of the hero tab. Art asset is done(older in progress pic below) and rigged but walk, fight, and idle animations are needed. 

Additional features and improvements are planned but will be added later as free expansion updates. Details on those will be given in the next post.

Follow development on: 

Fight Fund Forge Dev Update #2

For anyone that’s attempted to make their own game or pursued some other creative goal, finding a balance between realistic goals and big dreams can be tricky. Because this is such a huge issue solo and small team developers like myself face, I figured I’d talk a bit about how Necroventure and Beijing Crosswalk have been impacted by it and where I’m going from here. True to the topic at hand, none of this was what I originally intended to write about, but we’ll get to that later.

I have A LOT of game ideas written down that I want to make someday, likely more than I’ll ever really have time for. After initially working through various tutorials in books and youtube series, I picked one of the simplest ones for my first original game. That was Beijing Crosswalk. As the name implies, it was originally going to be a tiny game about trying to cross the street in Beijing. I’ve visited the city often and my wife and I had often compared it Frogger or similar games. As an aside, at the time we didn’t even know there were dozens of games almost identical to Frogger called whatever Crosswalk, but that’s ok. We weren’t actually looking to make a game like Frogger beyond the goal of crossing a street. 

So Beijing Crosswalk was going to be about getting across the street and before we ever began working it quickly became about helping old people or tourists across the street while dodging locals that could effortlessly rush across and bump you. My wife thought a proper game should have a proper story, so we decided it’d be neat if Guan Yu were thrown into modern day Beijing  and needed to collect souvenirs for his brothers. They would slow his movement down to add a layer of difficulty. We had recently taken a trip through the Sichuan province so lets include various locations from both Beijing and Chengdu. There’d be puddles and oil slicks and fans to avoid. There was a list of power-ups planned for different situations! It quickly ballooned beyond what I could reasonable pull off with my nearly zero experience at the time. 

A lot needed to go. other pedestrians needed path finding beyond my skill to work as intended so they’re out. Added difficulty by progressively slowing the player was the opposite of fun so that’s gone. Power ups were neat but each one required totally reworking balance issues so those got scaled back to something very simple. The hazards were a neat idea but got put on a  “if time allows” list and by the time time allowed, I was more eager to publish and move on from my little starter project.

While I trimmed a lot, other things ended up getting added over time; some for the better. As it turns out, dodging sparse traffic that just moves side to side was incredibly easy with 8 directional movement so I decided to add coins that needed to be collected before the player could advance and kept very rudimentary power ups that gave the player some choice between beating a level sooner or spending more time collecting coins to have it easier later on. Adding a second game mode was just too tempting and it turned out to be more fun than the original story mode with significantly less work required. Balance was tough so the game could feel unforgiving. To rectify that, one of the things I did was add a level select screen to any previously beaten levels. Without the power ups earned from earlier stages it was difficult to start on a later level but there was still some sense of progress for having beaten one more than you had before.

What I did cut wasn’t always the right stuff while other parts should have been trimmed back more. The story, while cute even after being trimmed, didn’t really add anything and probably should have been dropped entirely in favor of putting all my time into a better game closer to the endless mode. The different locations just meant having to buy some custom assets I couldn’t draw myself. Some of those cut power-ups and hazards probably would have benefited the experience quite a bit more than I thought too. 

In the end, I was quite happy with what I made. Beijing Crosswalk is fun for me and it serves as a neat little scrapbook for a part of my life when I was starting something new and different from my old comfortable boring office job. I like it, but it’s far different from what I planned to make or even what I thought I was making at times during development. That said, carefully mapping out the game’s scope early on and making better decisions about what to cut or add probably could have resulted in a better game with a significantly shorter dev time. Who knows, a few people may have even played it without me explicitly asking them to.

So that brings us to my big project, one of the more ambitious games from the not so little ideas list I keep. Beijing Crosswalk was a great stepping stone but it isn’t the kind of game I dreamed of back when I decided to take my life in this direction. Necroventure on the other hand is one of those games. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to exist but no other game I’ve seen quite fit. I’ve learned a lot, I’ve grown as a developer, and I could probably remake something of Beijing Crosswalk’s scale in a fraction of the time it took. So is the sky the limit now? Well... no. All that being true, I’m still a long ways off from any kind of expert. People with decades of programming experience talk about how they still feel like they have no clue what they’re doing and I suspect that never totally goes away. My modicum of experience from one rough title isn’t going to easily propel me through a huge ambitious task. After the lessons learned making Beijing Crosswalk, it would be stupider of me now to dive head first into some grand magnum opus than back when I had zero experience. I should, and hopefully do, know better. 

So what is the big dream I call Necroventure and how can it be scaled to a reasonable scope? At it’s core, the game is about greed and necromancy with the player treating hero units as semi-disposable tools. Living units that get killed can be revived as a singular related class undead unit(eg. wizard to lich) or a pair of weaker more generic units(eg. any human to a ghost and skeleton). The player goes through a series of strategy based battles with a hired team before returning to town to sell loot, buy upgrades and hopefully turn a profit. Every purchase is an investment and every decision a financial risk. Sometimes it may even be preferable to let a unit get killed off just so you don’t have to pay them after the job is done.The closest I’ve come to having that itch scratched would have to be Darkest Dungeon or one of the many Disgaea universe SRPGs. Those are wonderful games in so many ways, but they have their own systems and directions that keep them from being the game I dream of.

If time and resources meant nothing and I was the master coder so many fellow nerds have dreamed of being, Necroventure would have 100+ character classes, each with complex skill trees, novels worth of grandiose lore spread across a dozen towns each with a handful of dungeon types. The battle system would be an a amazing hybrid of FTL, Ogre Battle, and Ring of Red with a splash of DnD for good measure. There would be an incredibly deep yet streamlined and accessible business sim that engaged the player every bit as much as the battle system. Artists and animators would fill the screen with wonder and excitement in a unique and carefully crafted art style. All with a grand orchestral soundtrack, obviously. Of course, pretty much none of that is going to happen without a AAA budget and significantly more experience than I have. Even then it’d probably prove overly ambitious and poorly execute a little of everything to come up with something somehow worse than the sum of its parts.

So there’s the big dream, how about the scaled down version I actually started working on? 

I initially listed about 40 classes I’d like. That was later cut to 23 and now 13(5 human classes, 4 related undead, 4 common weaker undead). 

I wrote plans for 5 towns each with 3 dungeon types, quickly cut back to 3 towns still with 3 dungeon types each, and now plan on a single town and 3 or 4 dungeon types. I’ve come up with some ways to maintain parts of the variety in earlier plans without adding significant work or assets.

Leveling and skills amount to simple progression from level 1 to 10. Each class starts with 1 skill and learns 3 more as they progress towards level 10. I may simplify this further by having it be 4 levels so a skill is learned each time and stats are more easily balanced, though that raises some additional concerns about the rate of progression throughout the game.

Figuring out the battle system was the first thing I did and it’s been the biggest part of development thus far. I actually scrapped two battle systems early on before coming up with something that is unique, easy to code around and design levels for. What I came up with turns the battles into something a bit like a board game with area control influencing how fights pan out. It has none of the things from the big dream. Well, nothing apart from perhaps a splash of DnD, though I suppose damn near everything does if you look hard enough. 

One big piece I actually added to scope comes between the battles when the player can make a decision or two in random text events. This was inspired by a childhood fondness for choose your own adventures like the Lone Wolf gamebooks. In practice it’s not unlike something you’d see in many games like FTL.

I don’t currently plan to do a lot with the business sim side of things, but I do plan on having a nice variety of uses for the game’s two resources, gold and souls. They’ll be needed for recruiting and improving units, the player’s ability to profit from missions, and actually progressing in the game. Using resources will still be more investment than your typical RPG equipment shop, but it isn’t going to be some complex stock-like trading mini-game. 

Art is still TBD, but obviously the number of assets needed is hugely scaled back through the decisions laid out above. I had a wonderfully talented artist excited to work on the project, even doing a bit of sample work, though a rather successful serialized project they have got renewed and it just wouldn’t be realistic for them to juggle game art with an already full plate. 

The plan has and continues to be for my wife to make the music, though the style and complexity is up in the air. She really enjoyed making the handful of short tracks for Beijing Crosswalk. That will have to wait until I get a new computer though as we can’t work on the same one at the same time and her laptop simply can’t handle the processing needed beyond a few tracks in LMMS.

Because a core feature is recruiting, reviving and splitting units, to make use of those collected beyond the few you may bring on missions, I had also planned on a sort of base building/defense aspect that flipped the missions on their head. That’s been scrapped in favor of far simpler mini-game of sorts that would periodically thin out the number of extra units you have while also helping provide some direction for the game progression.

I’d love to talk about pieces of the game and how ideas have changed throughout development in greater detail, but that will have to wait for another day. It is after all beyond the intended scope of this post.

And that brings us back to what I originally intended to talk about and alluded to in the opening paragraph. Even with things scaled back as they are, Necroventure is still a big project. It’s rather ambitious for one person to code. Spend any time reading or listening to the experiences of other indie developers and you’ll quickly find people talking about the swings between being filled with hope and motivation, and being crushingly depressed by the daunting task they’ve taken on. While I wouldn’t go quite as far as saying my work has me depressed, it can at times feel a bit like a hopeless overreach and during those periods my progress slows a bit. 

Streamlining the game to bring it down to a more manageable scope is important and can even lead to a better game than originally planned. I saw that firsthand with Beijing Crosswalk, not only with decisions I made but also in lessons learned where I made the wrong call. I feel it’s important to continue applying this approach with Necroventure to narrow it’s scope. Changing the battle system was a huge reduction of scope that ended up giving the game something unique. Removing the multiple towns in favor of a single one consolidates a few goals and has a number of benefits I could go into great detail on. 

However, I still need something. It was suggested to me to do a gamejam and take a break from Necroventure, but I worry that shelving the project completely would ultimately be the death of it. Instead I’ll continue working on Necroventure as I have been, but, I’ve drawn up a very tight scope mini project. I’ll work on it at most a few days a week for the next couple months. Having a small separate project should give me the break and sense of progress that can be hard to find when chipping away at a bigger goal. 

I somewhat begrudgingly love little games like Universal Paperclips and Tap Titans so what I’ll be working on is essentially a passive game with some inexpensive purchased art assets. With about two days on it, I already have a detailed plan for how the game will work at both the high level player view and nitty gritty programming side. It should be a fun way to let off some pressure without halting progress on Necroventure.