#indgaming

2019 was a hell of a year

So ambitious. We released two games. Covid didn't hit us yet. It was the calm before the storm.

I never did a full year recap since I went MIA, so I wanted to take the time to commemorate our accomplishments of 2019 before catching up on last year.

Phasmophobia: Hall of Specters 3D

We released our first game for New Nintendo 3DS™ and by our standards we nailed it and it was a success. We were so happy to be able to do this and it felt like a huge accomplishment for all of us.

Altruism: Matchmaker

This game has been very fun to develop and became very fleshed out over the year. When I have a chance I'd love to buckle down and finish this game.

Small World Z

It would only be fair to consider the release of this game as a moderate success as well, however, today I see a lot of things I want to improve in it. It was definitely our largest game to ever be completed and felt like development took ages. It was a great payoff initially to have released it and I can without a doubt say I learned a lot from it's development.

Undergrudge

This is a project that's in the works and is on good priority. Undergrudge development started in 2019 after it's failed predecessors. Since then it has been fleshed out a lot more and I have a lot of exciting things to share in the future.

Other Projects

Various projects began development in 2019, some things like Card Game Simulator have seen a follow-up in development since then. I wanted to make this blog post to finally finish something I intended to.

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.

So I have been slacking hard on updating the old Dev blog! Let's catch up another 5 months like last time.

So the first two games that I teased in my first 2018 re-cap have not seen any development since Small World Z has been in development. However, we have other things on the horizon, and I remember the 2nd half of the year a bit better than I did the 1st so we can have some better chronologicallity at the cost of less consistency. Always with the lack of consistency...

June-August

By the beginning of June, I had already obtained everything I needed to start developing for the Nintendo 3DS and to release our games on the Nintendo eShop digital storefront.

So, I launched an ambitious but small-scale Kickstarter for Small World Z, a full-developed successor of a prototype I made for a Ludum Dare back in 2017.

Flash-forward to July, the next month, and we had successfully reached our humble goal of USD $150.00 which we used to purchase our iOS development license (which was probably purchased a bit too early honestly) and the rest to cover a small portion of our hefty 3DS development expenses that came out of our own pockets.

And through August, the development continued...

Working on titles for a handheld gaming console like the 3DS is very fun and a great learning experience.

August - October

Sometime in May is when I was tinkering with 3DS development and I wanted to see if porting Phasmophobia was possible. And it was.

I had a lot of issues with the framerate when porting Small World Z but a lot of it had to do with my lack of experience in that field, so I didn't have a lot of hope for a 3D game like Phasmophobia. However, after stripping away all the flashy camera effects and tuning down all the texture resolutions it seemed to hit a solid 30fps pretty easily. I shouldn't have doubted it so much but it was coded by me in 2016 and I have learned a lot since then so I knew my code wasn't very optimized.

So in September I formally announced Phasmophobia to be released on Halloween. Unfortunately, plans fell through, and delays after delays have been made. The game is still in the submission phase and we are working out all the problems. We hope to see the release soon.

These issues have taken a toll on Small World Z's development but when we aren't working on one we are working on the other.

Conclusion

2019 is gonna be a good year. I still have to make a dev log entry to go over November and December but it is mostly Small World Z related info and a new game I might want to tease. Please use these Facebook pages to stay up-to-date with Phasmophobia and Small World Z:

Phasmophobia Facebook Page

Phasmophobia Official Website

Small World Z Facebook Page

Getting back into the groove of things so I'm making this post to catch up on pretty much the last (and first?) 5 months of this year.

The beginning of the year was pretty slow and I can't remember what months I did what exactly, but I got back into development in February after getting this awesome idea for a game.

New game! "EXIT"

This is gonna be a crappy Dev log considering I don't want to spoil too much before announcing any games but this one is called Exit. So this is a-(gross my cat just sneezed all over my hand as I was typing this.) This is an informal teaser announcement. I won't talk about it too much but it will be on PC, Mobile, and Web. It will also only have co-op play, no single player.

I can't wait to formally announce this project and release more info since this game is what inspired me to start developing again. It would be finished by now but.. well I'll get to that in a minute.

Another new game!

Whoever knows me, knows I can't be locked down to ONE game. I had fun with the idea of EXIT and it sparked a lot of creativity in me. I craved an action game that I could enjoy playing with my friends. That should be announced soon after EXIT.

You guessed it..

Now let's talk about what I am currently working on. Yes. Another game.

So back in April of last year I had made a game for Ludum Dare called Small World. It didn't do that great but hey, I had a lot of fun making it because I have been wanting to use RPG elements for a while. It also ended up being a very unique idea. After playing over it several times and getting feedback from others, I had decided to make a "sequel" to the game that would be a very large expansion developed on top of the existing game.

Small World Z

The game revolves around the seemingly infinite amount of NPCs and interactions you make with them inside an infinite 2d sidescrolling world.

Now let's throw some more weapons and zombies into the mix and we got ourselves a hootenanny!

This game is going to be our first title to be released on the Nintendo New 3DS handheld system, as well as iOS.

We also made a Kickstarter, which was successfully funded! But I will talk more about that next time since this happened in June, but go ahead and check out the link for more information on the project. Here is a GIF of an early mobile build.

Conclusion

So after May of 2017 I did end up taking somewhat of a hiatus from the public. I was working on different t prototypes over the summer but I hadn't made any new blog updates or shown anything.

Things we're really inconsistent at the time and since then things have gotten a bit better. I have been working on a couple unannounced projects as of early 2018 and am excited to share what has been done.

I will most likely recreate my 2017 year recap that never uploaded due to an error, and I will add some screenshots of stuff I did over the summer.

Monthly Dev logs will be back in order starting with May 2018. I may post some seasonal recaps to cover what was missed out over 2018. In fact the frequency of Dev logs may change overall to be either bi-monthly or seasonal. The point is once that's decided, things should be consistent again.

Aaannnnd... CHax 2 development will start again in early 2019 because of the time I am dedicating to other projects this year.

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 

=(  

I’M STILL GOING!

Let’s get into it.

CHAX 2

I released a bug fix update towards the end of the month. Now I am working on something bigger. Also, I am continuing to work on modding support. Stay tuned for more.

Small World

I made a new game for Ludum Dare 38 called Small World. It was very interesting and I felt like I was free to do something I wanted to do for a long time in a small minimalist fashion. It was nice to make a game I truly enjoyed again. Give it a try on Ludum Dare, Itch.io, or play the latest version on Facebook.

The game randomly generates a population of NPCs as you play. These NPC’s will always exist in the world if you happen to see them. You can talk to them, recruit them, or fight them. There are also RPG aspects. as the actions you do can either heal your hp, earn xp to level up, or earn cash to recruit more people.

Paper Something

I started working on a small game for a mini ld... but I never finished it and i thought I’d still post this funny title screen screenshot..

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