Where I have been...
Hello! Long time no see!
Game development has taken a back seat lately as I have been focusing a lot on my career and doing a lot of training for an Ironman 70.3 Triathlon, which is now finally behind me (till next year) so now I'm able to spend a little less time on the road or in the gym and a little more time at my desk. Though it's fair to say I haven't been completely inactive during this time, so let's take a look at what I've been up to!
New look. New brand. New feel.
Lets start with the obvious. I have rebranded my company from Double One Studios to Fly Games.
Double One Studios as a name and brand wasn't quite sitting right with me and when the name Fly Games came to me while riding my bike, I went and updated the branding later that week. It just felt right.
I chose the phoenix for my logo because of the powerful symbolism of something rising out of the ashes of a previous incarnation, or something that has died and been re-born anew.
This website for me isn't all about games anymore either, as I'm extending the scope of it to art, general programming / engineering musings and eventually music. Just things I generally enjoy really.
GMTK2020
I participated in my first game jam where myself and colleague from work had 48 hours to design, and build a game based around a theme revealed on the day of the jam. That theme was "Out of control".
I came up with the idea of a Lunar Lander style game where instead of controlling the ship directly, you would have to pre-program all of the commands into it before seeing if your ship would complete the level. We set to work on our idea titled Mission Out of Control and did quite a lot of pair programming using Visual Studio Code's Live Share functionality.
The game came out really great, and while we didn't win any prizes (with some 5000 or so submissions we weren't really expecting it anyway) we still had a blast and ended up with something more or less complete at the end.
It's also really fun to watch people playtest your game.
I came out of that game jam with the knowledge that you can churn out something pretty cool in a short space of time if you set your mind and time to it. You can download and play Mission Out of Control here if you fancy trying it out for yourself.
Art & stuff
I finally caved and bought a graphics tablet. I've been wanting to pick up art again for a while and digital art is a great way to churn out lots of small sketches and paintings with very little mess! Growing up I was always more of a creative than a tech nerd so it will be nice to lean into, reconnect with and relearn some of my older passions.
I've started uploading random art and sketches here to track my progress as I improve over time. Eventually I'll start doing some music too.
All of this will feed back round into my game development. I think I will always be working on slow burn projects that will require me to create all the assets for myself. I won't have the luxury of pumping a load of money into contractors to provide assets and music so I want to have the skills to be able to do it all myself. I'm just glad I don't have to teach myself how to code!
Rate my setup...
Game 3 progress
I made a couple of prototypes for a top down hack and slash, for my next game.
This game uses a randomly generated dungeon created by an algorithm inspired by the room generation in a roguelike game called Spelunky. I'm quite happy with the algorithm and the way it generates rooms.
To get it to work the way I wanted, I created a Level Generation object, think of it like a builder that moves from position to position on a grid and places pre-made room layouts semi-randomly. Here is a simplified explanation of logic;
- Given the builder starts on the top left a 4 x 4 grid of possible room positions
- If no rooms, create a room
- Randomly chose a direction, left, right or down
- Check for an existing room there, if no room exists move there and create a room
- Repeat until it can't go any lower on the y axis
- Fill in the remaining space with random rooms
There's a bunch of other fancy logic that makes sure that it is always possible for a player to reach the bottom of the level and that all the entry points to the different rooms line up. But you can always check out the code on my git hub if you're interested.
After that I worked on some actual gameplay. I created a player character with some of the basics, movement, collision detection then implemented a basic attack and a dash. Then threw in some simple enemies that float around and shoot projectiles at you.
The project got off to a reasonable start, but I'm really unhappy with the character art, I think I am trying to run before I can walk from an art standpoint or not spending enough time on the assets themselves simply because I don't want to waste time perfecting prototype style work. I'm going to try reverting to a simpler more stylized aesthetic and see where that gets me.
Fun fact. I spent more time drawing and animating the player character than I did THE ENTIRE REST OF THE PROJECT SO FAR! Art takes time folks! Big lesson for me there.
System raid 2
I've started tapping away at a game design document for System Raid V2. I've got some really great ideas for changes I want to make to the original design. It's still a deck builder, it's still a rogue-like ... but it's no longer turn based! Watch this space
In summary
Yes I'm still alive.
Yes I'm horribly behind any sense of schedule.
Yes I'm having fun anyway.
Till next time.
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