So I know it's been ages, but since I have some physical games on the Itch.io winter sale, I figured I'd break my silence and post about what I've been up to!
The main reason I haven't been posting here is that I haven't really been doing much game development. It's been my day job as a web developer and personal web development projects for quite some time! The most significant project has been building Feather Wiki, a tiny (55 kilobyte), self-contained, single-file wiki/nonlinear notebook that runs in any browser!
If you're interested in my day-to-day postings, my primary social media is the Fediverse, which you've likely been hearing about in terms of Mastodon thanks to all the Twitter nonsense (I'm on a Pleroma server, but that's neither here nor there). If you're on a Fediverse server, you can follow me there at [email protected]! I also have several other accounts linked in my description there for various more specific topics I enjoy.
Anyway, I hope you all are doing well on your gamedev journeys, and I wish you great creativity and drive in all your current and future endeavors!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
âś“ Live Streamingâś“ Interactive Chatâś“ Private Showsâś“ HD Qualityâś“ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Cameras are kind of hard to explain in GMS2, there’s still views but now you have to assign cameras to views or something like that? I was actually able to fix it though thanks to the kind folks at the YoYo Community, basically there’s default view_cameras that are created anyways and you can just apply those to your views without having to create or delete them. This fixed my memory leak issue entirely. Now I’m not sure what I would do with custom cameras though?
It’s been a long while since I did any real work on game development, and the small amount of game development I’ve been doing for the past year has been on physical games. I’ve had an updated version of the board game that I’ve been developing for a couple months, and I finally sat down to play it by myself today. While it still needs a bit of polish, I’m happy to announce that it didn’t suck to play like the previous versions have!
I applied some of the ideas I had after playing back in March, and I feel like it’s so close! Beyond shifting to a sci-fi theme, I expanded on the exploration element by making the board itself have exploration benefits. Now, the landmarks on the board are flipped over at the start of the game and when you land on them, you get a reward for discovering it.
The pacing of the game is improved in that there is now a hard 30-turn maximum. The treasure itself takes a back seat until the end of the game, where you only have 10 turns before the treasure is lost. This makes the rest of the game more about gathering the money and resources you need quickly enough to collect the special resources needed to collect the treasure once its location is revealed. This also enables players to decide whether they even want to try going for the treasure or if they simply want to try to trade their way to victory.
I played a 2-player game, and I found that gambling, shops, and even scrap collection was not really used at all. But I still believe they will be beneficial elements with 3+ players or with players who want to try different strategies. I did decrease the cost of setting up a shop from 10 to 5 Muns and increased the amount of scrap rewarded to shops from 1 Scrap per Mun paid by another player to 3 Scrap per resource purchased to make them more attractive to players. I think that this will make them much more useful and competitive when more players are going to different planets.
The other thing I’m going to try is to decrease the amounts that Relics (the treasures) are worth from 30, 35, or 40 to 15, 20, or 25. That way, they’ll give whoever collects it an edge, but it will still be possible to win by doing nothing but trading resources. I think counting up the score at the end of the game will be more exciting this way unless there’s a really clear winner.
I’m hoping to playtest it again with a friend either this week or next, so I’ll hopefully have more notes soon! Much sooner than last time, at least I hope. And next time I’ll remember to take some pictures of my prototype so you can see what it looks like!
Well here I am again with my inconsistencies. Yesterday, I discovered the works of Alexander Shen (website, Itch.io—Check out his stuff! He’s got some really fun, simple games like Spar, which I’m kinda hooked on, and Good Day, which is an impressive micro virtual board game), and while I was playing around with Spice Catcher (an iOS and Android-only game), I suddenly got a spike of inspiration for AlcheMasters! You know, that AR game I was working on and suddenly stopped! I’m excited to start working on it again now because my idea is actually within the scope of something I can do myself!
Instead of having a map and trying to emulate Pokemon Go or some other AR game like that, I realized that I could do something much more within my scope with the same kind of effect: Use geolocation but NOT a map! Crazy, I know.
Here’s my idea: you can scan the area for things and depending on your geolocation, the time of day, and other factors like that, I can have things appear on the screen that you can interact with. This will remove the “go-to-the-item-to-interact-even-if-it’s-in-the-middle-of-the-road-because-the-app-isn’t-linked-to-a-map-or-anything-and-can’t-prevent-that” problem and will allow me to put in more interaction (read “gameplay”) with the items themselves! When a leafy ingredient appears, you need to pluck it. If there’s a bug, you need to catch it. If there’s a liquid, you need to bottle it up.
Collecting resources would be a simple micro game (a-la Wario Ware) to add a slight level of difficulty to collecting items, and you can get better at collecting certain types of resources because each resource type will have its own kind of collection game. And having certain tools in a limited inventory before scanning will help the effectiveness of certain actions. For example, if you pack a pair of clippers and you find a leafy ingredient, you can clip it with a much greater retrieval success rate than plucking it would. Using a net with a bug will give your tap/swipe a much larger radius.
I’m not sure if I would still include fights and things like that, but I would love to try to add that in, blocking, dodging, and swiping to attack with different types of weapons that you can imbue with special traits using the potions you create... I feel like that would help the game a lot so it’s not just selling potions and collecting stuff. It would also give money a reason for existing—you could buy equipment to adventure with... Hmm. I guess I’ll just have to see how scope plays in when I get the basics finished.
The only thing I would need real help with is the art. I have a couple of artists that I would love to approach about working with on game art, but I need to collect enough money to pay them for their work first. I am getting a new job in a couple weeks, which should help with that, so depending on how quickly I’m able to make progress on the game, maybe by the time I’m ready to approach artists, I will have saved enough money to offer to them... But I guess we’ll see!
At any rate, I’m excited and now I only want to work on my ideas because that’s when I actually get stuff done! And maybe I’ll have something to show for my work so this blog isn’t so dead. Again, I guess we’ll see!
Here’s the art I’ve got so far for the Trade Winds Board Game (resized to show details)! I’m almost done with the rules, I just need to finish the cards! I like how the resource tokens turned out, though, so I may re-used them for Trade Winds 3D!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
âś“ Live Streamingâś“ Interactive Chatâś“ Private Showsâś“ HD Qualityâś“ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
In addition to Trade Winds 3D, I’m also secretly developing a print and play Trade Winds board game! It should be pretty cool, but it’ll be a while before I finish all the art and stuff for it... The first version of the rules is almost finished though! Once it’s finished, the playtesting betings! Yay!
I’m going to try adding some super basic vertical bobbing to the boat model, but I’m not completely sure it’s necessary. I got the restricted boat tilting idea from this video, but that video is much more complex than the wheel setup I’m using. I also used the MultiPurposeRig camera from Unity’s Standard Assets and modified the SimpleCarMovement script from this Unity tutorial, which automatically applied the tilt I needed. And all of the art is modified public domain art from OpenGameArt.org!
At this rate, it’s going to be super easy to expand upon the original Trade Winds code and idea!
I have 3 projects all vying for my attention, and it’s really stressing me out because I want to work on all of them but they’re all too different!
AlcheMasters (a.k.a. MOBILE AR POTION-MAKING GAME)
Lexiconga rewrite into ReactJS (like a “““REAL PROGRAMMER”””)
Trade Winds (3D???)
What follows is something of a ramble about different ideas and more specific information about what I want to do with those 3 projects, but I won’t force you to scroll if you don’t want to read:
I’m considering combining AlcheMasters and Trade Winds into some kind of weird hybrid game because that would be SO MUCH EASIER to make. Think about it: You sail around from island to island on your phone using touch (or tilt??) controls, then when you land on an island, the GPS starts tracking your position, and wherever you are in the real world when you land is where your ship is and you walk around the real world to move around the island map on the screen (even though it doesn’t match up with the real world environment around you), but you can collect things, visit towns, fight monsters, and all that good stuff within like a 500 meter radius, then you go back to your ship and sail to a new island and trade and repeat.
While this is a really cool idea in my opinion, it also sounds extremely dangerous since the game map and the real world map don’t line up and would probably cause important things and places to appear in the middle of the street or something like that. Which is bad. But if you lived by a really big field or something where it’s safe to wander aimlessly, then it could be awesome!
But at the same time, I have this idea of converting Trade Winds into a 3D game with like PS1 graphics/textures and 3D water motion pestering me, and I don’t want to make a mobile game in Unity, so I’m kind of stuck using Phaser, which only does 2D. Arrgh! Trade Winds 3D would have the same exact premise as the jam game, but instead of being confined to the lowrezjam screen resolution, I would use low resolution textures on low poly models and build it in full 3D (though the gameplay would essentially function as if it was 2D with 3D only serving for vertical visual decoration). I think if I started working on it again, I’d be able to transfer a lot of my previous work fairly easily so I could spend more time working on the features I wanted to add but never got to.
Then there’s Lexiconga, which is a whole other animal. It’s a webapp instead of a game, and while it’s already working well, I really want to finish the transition from straight HTML and JavaScript to ReactJS because React is super snappy and awesome. It’s been a couple months since I worked on it last, so I need to read through all my old code and re-acquaint myself with what I was doing, but it’s a really special project for me that I’d love to finish (so I can put it on my resume). Then there’s also my conlang that I want to keep working on that sort of goes with Lexiconga since most of my conlang work happens when I’m updating and fixing the Lexiconga code base. Haha!
So here I am with my heart pulling me in (at least) 3 different directions. I haven’t scoped AlcheMasters at all, so I’ll probably reach the point where I realize I’m way in over my head working on it alone really soon, but until then it feels sort of attainable when I don’t think about all the art the game will require and how many different kinds of programming styles I’m going to have to work with! It’s inspired by this Extra Credits video, which is a super cool idea that I’d love to play. But I’m really only working on it because I want it now and haven’t heard of anyone else making a game like it. I don’t have the resources or the knowhow to do everything for it, but dang it I want that game so bad. I threw in my own idea about a potion-making mobile game because it fit well with the video’s idea, and viola, the idea for AlcheMasters was born. But I haven’t written a design doc or done any real planning at all, which means that it’s probably not actually going to be finished. So if you know of a game like this being created for mobile, LET ME KNOW SO I CAN SUPPORT IT AND BE FREE FROM MY MADNESS!
Anyway, yeah. I really want to make AlcheMasters, but Trade Winds 3D has a far more realistic scope for me and Lexiconga isn’t completely necessary... so I think I’ll drop AlcheMasters until I come up with a more realistic plan for it and start working on Trade Winds 3D while I make sure my breaks from working on Lexiconga aren’t as long as this last one was. Sorry for the tumultuous development cycle! Heh.
