Twixel has been Greenlit!
It’s happened! After almost 2 long gruelling years, Twixel is going to be made available on Steam! While this is cause for celebration, it’s also a time for introspection. I admit, I have not been a good developer. Given how lacklustre Twixel sold when it was released on PC, and again on iOS and Android, I kind of gave up on the idea, and started working on other prototypes. But here I am, a year later, realising I was a fool and regretting the fact that I should have continued to work on Twixel well past it’s release date. I knew it still had problems, and I had feedback others recommended. It was just easier I suppose to look forward to the next project rather than support the one that had already made it. Thinking about it, and looking back, it seems that in not updating the game I actually…
2015 New Years Resolutions: The Conclusion
So, with half the year officially over and done, I wanted to take a look at my new years resolutions and see how far I’ve come towards accomplishing them so far. Without further ado, the list below will be crossed out or numbered depending on how close I am to completing it: Get a new job – Success! Success! I managed to get a new job (Product Specialist & Project Coordinator) with a nice pay rise 🙂 Hard work certainly pays off eventually. Put Twixel on iOS & Android – Success! It took a while, and still has a few bugs, but Twixel was ported to iOS and Android! It was hard; having to work out how to fix performance issues was certainly hard, but helped me in tidying up my code for future updates. Read 12 books – Success! I’ll list them all now: Halo: The Flood The Science of…
Weekly Update: The Hell That is Steam Greenlight
Hi all, I do apologise, but I think for the first time in almost 2 years I am not going to be writing a review for this Friday (SHOCK HORROR!) due to the recent release of Twixel on Steam Greenlight. Because of this gargantuan undertaking I am putting myself through, I thought I’d share some thoughts and feels on the whole process, and what I hope to do from here. So, on Sunday I done it, I pushed the button to share Twixel with the gaming community that is Steam. I had been considering doing this for a while, but was concerned about the state of some of my promotional material and whether the game was actually finished enough yet to apply for greenlight. In the end, I decided that the sooner I get my game shown to millions of potential customers the better. Alas, as you can see from…
Latest Build of Project Dandelion (play in fullscreen recommended)
Hi all! Over the next few days/ week I’ll be working on making sure my player doesn’t go off screen (still a bug I haven’t fixed yet) and also adding enemies and pollen to collect (for points). Once the above is done, the game will be complete in a simple state, and will just require to be polished on top. Polishing will require remaking the menu’s using my own art style rather than the built in unity code, making stages other than open field and forest, and making lots of animations for the player. I plan to have this game finished and released before Christmas, and will continue to support it afterwards with updates that improve functionality. (such as online leaderboards rather than local high scores.) Either way, enjoy the latest build!
Its Been a While…..
It’s been a while since I updated my Game Development section, so I thought I’d post my latest build: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55177814/project%20dandelion%20site.html I’ve now made a main menu, which will be updated to be more polished when the game is complete and done. I’ve also added a score system, which isn’t currently saved, but will be in due time. Let me know what you think and by all means give feedback. This is very early, and I’ll soon be adding enemies and items for you to collect and get more score with, so keep coming back for more builds.
What I spend my Saturday doing.
So today I spent the whole day watching The Wire (A fantastic TV show from HBO) whilst also working on my main playable character. The screenshot above is the outcome, which I’m quite pleased with. It’s now just a case of working it into my project, which will require me learning how to properly export the player so that my character collides with the world like before (Previous attempts at importing objects always led to physics and rigidbodies not properly being implemented).
Help and Advice from Reddit
So the other day I asked the great community of Reddit for help and advice on where I should go next in terms of optimisation for my current project; Project Dandelion. If you want to try the current build, click the link below and install the Unity web player: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55177814/project%20dandelion.html I do apologise on the quality of the current build. There are 2 different types of level to be generated, one with trees and one a open field, but due to the frequency of the instantiating, it may take you a while to see both levels. Everything also needs to be tweaked, so try not to hit the booster too many times. The one great thing about this build though is that most of the core mechanics are there and working, they just need to be tweaked and expanded upon, so bare with me as I continue to progress in…
One of my biggest strides in a long time
So I’ve been working on my game today, and I haven’t made any progress in a while, until today that is. I’ve finally been able to make my level randomly generated. I mean it’s rudimentary at the moment, and looks like crap, BUT it’s just a case of art assets not being up to scratch. In theory the logic behind the level generation works and is perfect for what I need. I currently only have 2 levels to choose from, a open field and a forest. My game object travels at a set pace in front of the player, and generates content far enough ahead that the world looks like one continuos level. Once this content is used and goes off screen, it is destroyed and frees up space in the ram. Next I’m going to work on getting the physics of my player set up. Currently the player can…
Shadows!
As you may or may not be aware, I’m using Unity to make my current project as I have experience with the platform from my university dissertation and it’s very easy and fast to get a working prototype up and running. It’s always been my thinking that once I get to a certain point in my game, I would pay for the pro version of Unity, to allow my game to take on a fidelity level similar to that of a PS3 or 360. It seems that’s no longer the case! With unity 4.2, they’ve included hard shadows for free! Take a look: This is fantastic, and allows for my game to finally start taking shape. Every day that I work on it, I get a little bit closer to what I want to produce. It’s amazing.
Screenshot Monday
So I’ve decided to show people what my game can do so far and what I’ve implemented, so here it is: The only problem I’ve ran into so far is working with the iPads accelerometer. When the app first loads up, it grabs the iPads current accelerometer speed on the y-axis, and subtracts that from all further movements. This works fine for allowing the user to keep the iPad in the initial orientation they had, but means moving down on the y-axis is very slow, as it has less room to choose from. This should be fixed soon.
Gaming Tutorials
So recently I’ve been working on gaming tutorials to get me back into game programming, which has been great. My recent project is below, it’s a space invaders clone, where you use z to fire and the directional buttons to move left and right. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55177814/SpaceInvader.html It’s not much, but it’s definitely helping me find my way again when it comes to game development.
How Thomas Was Alone has changed my thinking on platformers and emotion in games.
Thomas was alone is a strange strange game that I’m falling in love with in a weird and wonderful way. Its a game about some programming errors (represented as squares and rectangles) that each have their own personalities, and are trying to find their way through this strange and confusing world. Each character has his/her own opinions on the others, and each have their own motives. It’s really quite crazy how much Mike Bithell has made me care about a mere set of squares and rectangles. He stripes away all of the pretty graphics, and shows that in order to care for a character you need a story/personality, not fancy art. This has really changed my mindset in regards to my own game, and has got me in turmoil at the moment as to what I want my game to look like. I mean, you don’t need a gorgeously realistic…
The problems with game mechanics
Hi all, So recently I’ve been thinking more about the structure of my game, and considering whether I want levels in the traditional sense (Like Mario, or most other platformers in the world.) or whether I want one linear long journey (similar to limbo). Thinking about this comes up with a lot of problems most people wouldn’t dream of when considering how a game is made. I want my game to feel like the player has gone on a journey, that they’ve accomplished something, and I feel breaking the game down into levels would destroy that feeling as there’d be chunks of the journey the player never experienced. There are also disadvantages to having one long, continuous journey though; players can get very bored very quickly, especially if there isn’t much difference in the scenes. My idea for ending the levels was that Jacob would have to board a train in the…
The ideas behind project TimeShift
Hi guys and gals! Hope everyone is all good and fine. I decided I should explore my concept more, and give it a proper working title, so that’s it! Project TimeShift! (working title) The project name gives a lot of the game away, but I hope to still keep quite a few secrets to keep the game fun and new for most people. If you don’t want any spoilers in this game, then I suggest you stop reading, as I’m going to be revealing a lot of the plot devices about project TimeShift. Firstly, I’ve named the main character Jacob McCarthy. He’s an 11 year old boy who’s being evacuated from London during World War 2 (much to his dismay). The year is 1940, and the Nazi’s have invaded and conquered France, so Britain initiates its second evacuation. Jacob comes under the care of an old, abusive man called Jack…
Expansion
I felt I needed to expand on my idea I put forward to other day, as I didn’t really put across any of the specifics of this project. (mainly because I don’t have specifics yet, just a bunch of ideas!) But here are some pics of what I have planned so far: So my initial idea was to switch between realities so that the world changed, and maybe the physics was different (so the character could jump further/higher). I liked this idea, so decided on 3 different worlds that you chose between; Normal, Future, and 3D. (Which for the moment, don’t have any different physics, but this may change in due time.) My thinking was that you could come across stumbling blocks in one dimension, that would be solved by jumping to another dimension. An example of which I’ve provided below: In this example, the character needs to get to…