#gunkid99

I’ve been hard at work making more (unusual) weapons!

Some weapons are familiar projectile types with a twist whereas others are more...interesting. Hopefully the variety will encourage players to experiment with more weapon types and find the ones that suit their play-styles.

I call the one above the ‘Popper’. It fires bullets that explode into smaller bullets upon reloading of the gun. It makes for an effective (if albeit chaotic) crowd control weapon.

And here’s a Fireball, inspired by Mario’s flower powerup. Although not especially powerful, the Fireball’s ability to bounce a few times before it extinguishes means that it demands less accuracy from the player while inflicting maximum chaos.

The Void-gun functions in a similar fashion to the aforementioned Popper. It shoots ‘bullets’ that explode into a black-hole like vortex upon reloading. The resulting explosive blast will instantly kill any enemy (unless your damage has been significantly reduced from equipping certain items) but will also damage the player as well. Incredibly powerful, but also incredibly tricky to use.

The Wheel-blade shreds all enemies it touches. The catch is that it spins entirely on its own and the player has limited control over it. Holding the ‘shoot’ button will increase its range and speed and releasing the button will return the Wheel-blade to its default state.

Laser-beam! Perhaps the most powerful weapon in the game thus far. The laser pierces through absolutely everything unless stopped by solid wall. Although not shown here, it actually has a huge draw-back: you’d receive TWICE the damage if you get hit while your active weapon is the Laser-beam. It’s a high risk, high reward kind of weapon.

That’s it for today’s weapons update. Game is now called Gunkid 99 if you don’t already know.

If you’re interested, please WISHLIST on Steam, that’ll help a lot :)

I've made some changes to the Training room! Along with unlocked weapons, weapons that are ready for sale in the Shop will also appear in the Training room with a little note above them.This will allow players to have a taste of the weapons before deciding if they wanna buy em. Makes a lot of sense to me!99999 is now renamed as Gunkid 99 !!

Why the name change? Well, I'm sure a fair number of you have thought that 99999 was a bad idea for a name. And you'd be right.

Let's first put aside things such as a sense of identity, 'catchy-ness' and other more subjective aspects of a name. For most indiedevs, we simply to not possess the marketing capabilities to "make a name ours". That means if the name of your game is generic, you'd risk being drown out by similar words/term from other search results.

Take my game for example, if you search 99999 in youtube, you'd likely end up with a whole list of videos of other games with 99999 in their titles (with a particular Plants vs Zombies being especially popular). Even if you intentionally search for my game by pairing '99999' with 'game', it'd be useless as the other popular videos with 99999 in their titles are already that of games (just not my game). That means the few play-throughs that I got from releasing my demo are already lost in the sea of youtube videos (sorry guys). You might do ok with a generic name if the name doesn't appear often with the word 'game'. Take for example, the game Bleed. Bleed, on its own, has terrible SEO. But it is mitigated by the fact that if you search for 'Bleed game', it becomes a more unique title, and most gamers are smart enough to do just that.

Googling Gunkid on the other hand, gives you near zero hits on anything videogame-related, so it has a higher possibility of standing out from the get-go. The 99 is mostly a remnant of the previous name, but by pairing it as Gunkid 99 it will hopefully be more easily searchable. I guess I'd find out soon enough.

So to fellow indies out there, spend more time to mull over your game's name. Do some basic research by seeing what comes up in your google searches. Don't be like me (lol).

*if you already have a Steam-page, you can still change the name of your game easily enough. BUT if you've already released a demo, you'd have to contact Steamworks developer support to change the name of your demo.

On to some updates for the game:

I've made some changes to the Training room! Along with unlocked weapons, weapons that are ready for sale in the Shop will also appear in the Training room with a little note above them.

This will allow players to have a taste of the weapons before deciding if they wanna buy em. Makes a lot of sense to me!

Health UI has also been tweaked to make it less cluttered.

I've also recently added Steam Achievements into the game. But I know achievements by themselves are rather meaningless to some players (I'm one of them). So I added actual in-game rewards for said Achievements!

Some of the more quirky Achievements add real tangible effect to the game by unlocking unique Ability Items. There's only 3 now, but there will be more to come.

That's it for this update. If you interested in Gunkid 99 it'd help a lot if you can wishlist!

Steam-page!

Today's post will be a technical one: fixing the mouse issue.

Or more specifically, the issue of disabling the game when you click outside of the game-window. It is almost bound to happen when playing in windowed mode (especially for action-heavy games), but can also happen even in full-screen if there is more than one monitor.

This is an especially common feedback I've received from my game's demo. It is very disruptive when it happens in the middle of the action. Definitely can get annoying real quick, so I fixed it!

Crosshair can no longer go beyond the game-window. Pause and you'll regain control of the mouse:

The following is what I came up with. (Disclaimer: I'm not entirely sure if this is a good solution so if anyone has any better implementation please enlighten me!)

*language is in gml. using gamemaker studio (1.4)

var cursor_x = window_mouse_get_x() - window_get_width()/2; var cursor_y = window_mouse_get_y() - window_get_height()/2; //Keep mouse to Screen's center window_mouse_set(window_get_width()/2,window_get_height()/2);

//Mouse.x relative to camera view_x += cursor_x / global.mouse_offset; x = view_xview + view_x; //Limit x to screen if (x < view_xview) {     x = view_xview;     //Cut back view_x's value     view_x = 0; } if (x > view_xview + view_wview[0]) {     x = view_xview + view_wview[0];     //Clamp view_x's value     view_x = view_wview[0]; }

//Mouse.y relative to camera view_y += cursor_y / global.mouse_offset; y = view_yview + view_y; //Limit y to screen if (y < view_yview) {     y = view_yview;     //Cut back view_y's value     view_y = 0; } if (y > view_yview + view_hview[0]) {     y = view_yview + view_hview[0];     //Clamp view_x's value     view_y = view_hview[0]; } So basically what happens is that the actual mouse will be locked to the center of the screen with: window_mouse_set(window_get_width()/2,window_get_height()/2)

Any movement of the mouse will then be calculated and the mouse object will be moved accordingly instead of the actual mouse. The x and y position of the mouse object is also relative to the camera so it'd work even with a moving camera. Because the game's base resolution is 640x360 and scaled up approximately to the monitor's resolution, global.mouse_offset is used for calculating the actual movement of the mouse. If there is no offset, moving 100 pixels to the left would translate to moving 200 pixels if the monitor's resolution is at 1280x720 (twice the base resolution).