#chax2

I'm still here!

If consistency was a person I would be the executioner pulling the lever on their poor innocent soul. ...That's a dark way of saying I've been inconsistent.

Maybe this year I can try something different and make a blog update every 3 months. This might be easier for me to do. Let's see if I can do that.

Phasmophobia

Mid-January I started the year off in the right direction with my belated release of Phasmophobia: Hall of Specters 3D for the New Nintendo 3DS™!

This was my first release on any console hardware of any type and I ABSOLUTELY LOVED IT! I can't wait to release our next 3DS title in development, Small World Z.

See the trailer:

Small World Z

Hall of Specters 3D was a port of our existing title so it was easier to develop. Small World Z is actually a whole giant expansion to it's original predecessor. So, it's been taking quite some time to finish.

It has actually been in active development and making a lot of progress. A lot of this is documented on our Kickstarter page.

In January I was making a game mode called Horde Mode where you and some party members are pit against endless waves of zombies.

(can't share any more images in this post because Tumblr's limit, maybe I should have split this post up into smaller ones :p)

Then in February I did some graphical updates like lighting and new health bars.

Then in March I had put it together some more, added a dodge roll ability (among other abilities), and even implemented the first boss fight.

At this point I had already typed everything below but Tumblr decided to erase it so I will be retyping it with less details and context and mostly summarize what I had originally written.

Altruism: Matchmaker

Matchmaker has been really fun to develop but tricky at times with a lot of hard to clean bugs. Alyssa has helped out a lot with these concept art character designs that I ended up turning into pixel art with her help and made the game look a lot better.

Really happy with how this is coming along. Haven't worked on it since the end of January but that's because SwZ is priority right now.

Other stuff

We decided to scrap our online action-packed top-down shooter game, Arena 51, previously announced on another blog post. In favor of a similar idea that we will execute later down the road. We are currently in the design phase.

I also have been working on a point and click game kit for Unity 3D to help me or anyone else it could help. Will post more about it in the future if I release it

Nothing new to announce yet, we got Small World Z in the works, then Altruism: Matchmaker.

Exit is on hold until I find time to expand upon it more.

CHax is also due for an update as I have to rewrite it's networking code in lieu of Unity deprecating their networking api. I will hopefully do this after Small World Z is released.

Conclusion

I have been working on a lot of stuff but it's hard to make updates here sometimes because it's always difficult to do on mobile but it's more convenient to be able to do it from my phone especially since that's where I have most of the media I want to upload on.

This will most likely be my last year on Tumblr, I will find somewhere else to document my development.

My apologies that this re-cap is almost a month late. I have been pretty busy with personal life and a 2nd job. May is my birth month, I turned 21 on the 19th. I have kinda been taking this month as a break, unintentionally of course. 

Happy birthday to me!

I do not have a lot anything to show this month 

=(  

Okay, sorry, this is VERRRYYY late!! Exactly the same lateness as the last log entry!! (18 days!!)  WHOOPS!

...

CHax 2!

I do not have a lot to show but there has been a lot done! I am working on a small update for now, and then a larger update should follow. Behind the scenes of all these updates there is even more going on. There is a lot to the game that I am working on without making it publicly accessible, but still leaving it hidden in the game’s source (a lot like Pokemon GO).

What I am working on however, is no secret. Modding Support is coming to the game!

I have talked a little bit about it before, but not in depth As it is developed I will explain more, little by little.

So let’s just ask what this means for CHax 2...

This means:

Custom props, 

custom npc’s, 

custom weapons,

and soon game modes, vehicles, and more!

How is this done? The simplest way possible.

After the initial setup, we plan to optimize the process to be beginner friendly. I have many ideas that I wish to execute in the near future. 

The main things mods will work off of are:

Scripts. (Placed in a specific designated folder.)

and included files. (3d model assets [.obj], texture files [.png,.bpm,.jpeg,etc], and possibly some sort of configuration files [maybe .xml])

I have not decided how everything is going to work together yet, and I will let you guys know as soon as I figure it out. I am currently working on the scripting support, and I love the API that I chose. It is very similar to Lua, and it’s called Miniscript. This is the scripting language for writing CHax 2 scripts. I will talk about it more next month. Miniscript is planned to hit the asset store pretty soon, so it was fitting to implement the early version of Miniscript to the early-access version of CHax 2.

This is the Debug Log from the Unity3D game engine, logging the process of importing script files.

Long story short, the scripting will be event oriented, similar to TBOI: Afterbirth Plus. Events in this context will be referred to as Callbacks, and I will explain more about them in the future. For now, just know they are events that run at specific situations in the game. This one is supposed to be initiated only when the match begins, however there is an obvious error. (This image is outdated)

I believe this image is more up-to-date. Either way, it shows the OnMatchUpdate callback which happens every frame of the game. The script contains a function that prints “Testing OnMatchUpdate()”. That function is then added to the callback, in order to run every frame of the game. Since the actual script is only launched once and waits for callbacks in a hidden while loop.

This is the greatest part so far. Using the OnMatchStart callback, I can register a new entity to the game, classifying it as a prop, the game will automatically load all prop entities into the spawn menu, and voila! We implemented a custom prop. 

The custom prop is essentially a clone of the crate but it’s properties can be modified. For example, we can make it larger, heavier, bouncier, and even indestructible.  Eventually more properties will be able to be modified. Important properties, such as what 3d model represent’s it, and animations for NPC’s.

CONCLUSION TO BE CONTINUED?!?!?!....

There will be much more to come but for now checkout our new website 

http://www.indgaming.com/

Wow, sorry that this post is over a week late. Anyways, this is my 2nd December re-cap, whoo! 2015′s december re-cap was my FIRST Re-Cap and it was only focused on our game, Greg Green. Since then, development of Greg Green has came to a pause and we have been working on other projects. I am going to write a 2016 re-cap blog post after this talking about all those games that we worked on in 2016, but for now let’s talk about December.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

Oh! Circle, Dot.

“Oh, Circle Dot.” is a game I developed in about 6 hours for the Ludum Dare 37 Game Jam. It is a simple game, yet my idea was to challenge myself (not the player), to create a game in one day, in one sitting. I also started this project the same day the jam started without knowing the jam had started (because I forgot), and that is why it did not fit the theme very well.. because it wasn’t originally made for the jam. 

Anyway, I started with the idea of something simple but challenging, that was to have enemies spawn in from a random point in a radius off-screen, as a circle in the center is growing, while the goal was to grow your circle, as your enemies were to try to stop it. This caused for the player to constantly be involved with no breaks (also because I didn’t add a pause button), which is good and all but not for the long run. The game is going to receive a major update before publishing so expect a pause button and break periods to buy some powerups to help you out in the harder waves. The idea was really simple to build upon and gave me a lot of room for expansion, however with the time I had, I produced what I could. As I said earlier I forgot about the jam, well, the game’s original dev time was 5hrs, then learning about the jam, I squeezed in an extra hour to make it a little more challenging and appealing and fixed whatever bugs. 

Got decent feedback, checkout the entry here. Our best score was in audio, thanks to my cousin Joshua, our elite In-D musician. I can talk more about this game but to save some walls of text for other topics, I will save it for the actual release, for now feel free to checkout the early prototype here: https://indgaming.itch.io/oh-circle-dot

CHax 2

THE HOLIDAY UPDATE......

was awesome! a disaster!

Sadly even after all these cool new features were added, it was almost for nothing considering this update broke the game for a lot of players. It saddens me soo much, and I am truly sorry for everyone affected. Anybody not knowing what I am talking about, click to read here. Or don’t, basically it stopped a lot of people from being able to connect to servers, and for some people, even stopped them from hosting servers. I am working on a new big update to fix this, but in order to release this update faster I am going to have to make it a little smaller than originally planned. It is my fault for planning such a big update in a crisis like this, but I was trying to remedy the issues and I was very ambitious. 

EDIT: On the brightside, We also reached over 20,000 downloads!

To make up for it here are some screenshots of stuff:

New Match Finder:

New Create Match Menu:

Beautiful rendering on PC:

I am working very hard to get this update out.. soo hard that I have made a lot of sacrifices, such as Phasmophobia.. read the next section.

Phasmophobia: Hall of Specters

I have done some graphic improvements, along with getting the game running on Gear VR with a more “VR-Friendly” experience than the current Cardboard port. Also maybe some AI improvements ;) but the thing is, I originally planned to release this update before New Year’s.. and then I had a very special update planned to release after that on the 13th of January for “Friday the 13th”.  Well plans failed and fell short with issues with CHax in the way. So sacrificed had to be made and we won’t be seeing a Phasmophobia update for a couple months. I don’t know who will mind but I still thought I would let anybody know the status. Just know it’s gonna be worth the wait!

Conclusion

No conclusion, I have already talked too much. Haha, well, this was a good year and I can’t wait to write the 2016 re-cap. Stay tuned for that! 

Next month marks a whole year of consistency!  A great achievement for us. As a game development team, we have been active for around 5 years, but it has been on and off. Some months of no progress whatsoever. I think in high school I hung out with friends a lot and that would take away time from development. 

Anyways, this year has been pretty much completely consistent, I have had stuff to showcase or talk about and discuss every month. This has been our biggest year ever. After the December Re-Cap I will have to make a 2016 Re-Cap to kind of sum up all the bs we went through this year. 

So let’s get back to the recent routine, let’s talk CHax and Phasmophobia!

CHax 2

CHax 2 has been really fun, as always! I love that all month I would occasionally check the game 1-2 times a day and usually find players to join! It’s awesome! I love being able to play the game and talk about it with people who are also passionate about this idea like I am. It means so much to me.

I want to add so much content to this game and do so much with it already but I hope people can understand that the updates are rather bi-weekly because I can’t find myself to only work on one project at a time. I go crazy, I need to shift from project to project in order to stay passionate and creative. So I apologize if it seems like things are moving too slowly. I also want to address the ads in the latest update. See, we have a patreon, but we do not make very much from it. We need as much as we can get so we can help speed up development by being able to afford new assets and hire people. It will also allow us to get CHax 2 on iOS. The ads have been helping us more than nothing, and we know if CHax 2 was a paid app then it wouldn’t be the same and we don’t want to build this wall in front of our beloved players by making them pay a dollar to play our game. We are planning to add an option to donate and remove the ads from the game. I am also very humbled that nobody has voiced any negative opinions about the ads, it shows that our players understand.  Long story short, I am very excited for the development of this game.

Phasmophobia Update

We released an awesome update that fixed a lot of things. The game is a lot more challenging, playable, and enjoyable. 

To add to this, I’d also like to announce another update coming this month that will bring Hall of Specters, or “Phasmophobia VR”, to the Oculus/Samsung Gear VR!! So, if you are expecting to get a Gear this holiday, now you have Phasmophobia to look forward to!

Now listen, we want to make this clear. Instead of simply porting the game to the Gear like it felt like we did with the Cardboard port, we want to improve even more on our VR support. We want this new update to feel like it was meant to be played on whatever device it’s on. We promise to take careful consideration when designing the VR mechanics in this new update and promise to deliver a natural experience whether you are playing on the Gear VR or Google Cardboard. 

Did you guys have fun on Halloween? I sure did. Guess who just released a game! 

Phasmophobia: Hall of Specters

AS the picture above insists, this is only chapter one. There is more to come. Phasmophobia as a game series is something bigger than we originally imagined. How many chapters will there be? Well, as of right now, Chapter 2 is pretty much ready to put on paper, whereas Chapter 3 is not completely thought out yet, but is definitely planned. Anything after that has not been discussed but that does not mean it ever won’t be.

Play it here if you haven’t tried it yet!  https://indgaming.itch.io/phasmophobia

HELP! Although it was fun to create Hall of Specters with all in-house assets (with an exception of a few royalty-free assets), that will not be feasible for the amount of quality content we wish to include into the next chapters. Specifically with Chapter 2 in mind, we need experienced 3d and 2d artists to help us out with that, as the image above portays. If you wish to help us, send us an email showing what you can do at [email protected]

We intend to start development of Ch.2 within 5-6 months from now.

Now, let’s talk VR! It was my first time developing ANYTHING on any VR system. Google Cardboard was the chosen target because it was the only headset I owned, and it is a popular headset in the Android community. I do plan to develop for more platforms soon, especially Google Daydream. Designing the gameplay for the VR headset was something that came to mind very easily for me, and was fairly simple to implement as well. I only started having issues when I wanted the game in VR to look like how it did on my PC, but due to complications and limitations with Android and the GoogleVR SDK, things kept looking different regardless of what I did. This calls for more tinkering and more updates in the future. 

Speaking of updates, this isn’t the final build of Hall of Specters. I hope to touch up on some aspects of the game here and there, and also add more content to play. What types of content? I will let people find out when the time comes, but I will say I am going to work on making the game look even better, add more replay value, and keep things fresh. I will try to push out these updates once a month before Spring arrives. 

I can talk about Phasmophobia, and the development for days. I had a lot of fun working on it with my cousin. If you don’t know, my cousin Joshua “Josh” Zepeda, produces all the music and trailers for our games. He also helps create sound effects and 2d assets. Be sure to checkout the awesome trailer above, that he made for Hall of Specters.

CHax 2

Since we are coming back to working on CHax 2, there is good news and bad news. Good news is we got a brand new logo and are excited to release a new update for you guys! Bad news is the update might be delayed (like always). The thing is, I could probably release the update on time, but it won’t be filled with as much content as the update you guys deserve. 

I don’t want to make any promises in this update, but it should be worth the wait. Here are a couple development pics, to apprehend for yourselves. Make any assumptions you feel, but remember, they are just development pics. ;)

Oh, and we got a new app icon!

Sorry that this recap is kinda late! I’m going to try to keep this one slightly more brief. So let’s start.

CHax 2

We just released update v0.3.2 and it wasn’t as big as I was hoping for. Honestly, there has been a lot of problems here and there and everywhere. It’s a lot more manageable if we are focused more on fixing those issues rather than adding new features that create more issues, however the demand for features is rising exponentially as our player base grows. 

We got a lot of hate reviews about there not being anything to do in the game, well it is in early-access so that should be expected. The problem with that is a lot of popular early access games are to show off what the game will do, ours is a little different, we are just allowing you guys to play the game as it is being developed and helping us with feedback. That is the point of early-access games however most tend to be more flashy in order to get the player to be sold on the game’s full release.  

I’m ignoring that kind of stuff for the most part since the players who understand what we are doing are very excited and are (for the most part) waiting patiently. I think I might release updates less often so there will be bigger changes and we can meet more expectations, but... we will see how things go. 

There is a lot more I can say but I feel I am almost ranting a bit. These monthly dev logs are really turning into vent logs!

Phasmophobia

3 weeks until release so this is going to be the last re-cap about it until release day. Essentially I want to finish the game in 2 weeks to give me a week to plan release without any problems, also to give me some leniency time to fix any bugs. So we will see how it goes, here is another screenie, try to guess what it is!!

SOME MORE RELEASE INFO: 

We are releasing the game for FREE on Itch.io on Oct. 31st for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Then for $0.99 on Google Play for Android. However, we have a VERY special offer!!

If you download the game on Itch.io ON RELEASE DAY then you will get a FREE download code that can be redeemed on Google Play so you can get the game for Android too! Just be sure to be quick on release day, October 31st, to receive the free code.

Thank you everybody

So August was kinda hectic for me. I have adjusted to my new job and I have a lot of days open where I don’t work, meaning I have more time to work on games. Well unfortunately my phone was stolen which put a halt on things... I have a replacement now, its a new phone (Galaxy S7 Edge), so we are back in business! OK! Lets talk progress!!

Phasmophobia:Hall of Specters

Phasmophobia, we want to release this on Halloween and I am determined to make that happen. If it doesn’t then it will all be for nothing and I will wait another year before it sees the light of day (or the dark of night). 

This is probably, and if so, accidentally, the most visually attractive game that I have created. We are working more and more but there is still a lot to do. We want to have a brand new trailer to show you in the next recap. That’s the goal. 

Lighting can affect how a game looks drastically! So that is one thing we have been tinkering with a lot since day 1. 

The ghosts have been going through a lot of changes. Our first demo had a quick sketched ghost that was supposed to resemble the quirky ghosts from Pac-Man, but were changed soon to be more scary looking. Which was what most players saw in the newer demo released a day or two later. (The old download somehow made it into somebody’s let’s play if you want to find a video) We are now working on making the ghosts 3D, and we will see how that turns out. Here are the last two renditions.

CHax 2! Chax 2! Chax 2!

Chax 2 is all I have been talking about lately. Sadly since my phone was stolen we missed the September 2nd update so I pushed it to the 23rd. It is going to be the only update of September, and we will not release another update until after October, because of Phasmophobia.

The game has been getting more and more attention. I have started getting a couple people emailing me personally requesting features or asking about release/update content. Also somebody that actually wants to help with the progress of the game. The game has reached over 5,000 downloads. I really want to try to build a community but that will need to wait until more customization and modding tools come into play,

The newest update has brought bowling balls, a more heavy spherical prop. Sort of like an opposite to the beach ball. Also, an early prototype of ragdolls have been implemented, a highly requested feature. We want to touch up on it more and start to introduce more highly requested content such as weapons and vehicles.

To answer a very common request, YES WE DO PLAN ON ALLOWING PEOPLE TO IMPORT MODELS!! The reason we can’t guarantee a file type yet is because it really isn’t in my department. The original developer of CHax is going to work on that, and I have no idea how it will turn out because I have yet to seen it be implemented. Obviously, the goal is to import .obj files, but I can not promise that capability yet, we will have to wait and find out. I am just as eager as the rest of you!  

Conclusion!

We will see one more update to CHax 2 during September, and then development will be on hold until November. Then hopefully we will see a new Phasmophobia trailer in the next re-cap. We are going to continue to work hard to bring the best of our abilities!