gamemakernathan

[gamemakernathan]

Our Kickstarter is live (as of like, 12 hours ago) and is already 80+% funded! Would’ve posted earlier, but I had to go to my retail job. SURE WOULD BE NICE TO NOT NEED TO DO THAT NEARLY AS OFTEN HINT HINT NUDGE NUDGE! For real, though, I’m so happy this is finally happening! Mike, Chris, and everyone else on the team worked super hard to get the demo ready for the Kickstarter’s launch. Go ahead and download it here (You don’t even need to back to get the demo!*) Demo available for PC and Mac: https://chrisniosi.itch.io/tomedemo *You totally should anyway, though. $30 gets you or a character of yours in the game as a background NPC!

[gamemakernathan]

I’ve been helping out on this project for the past few months. Like it says here, kickstarter launches in a week! I’d really appreciate any donations thrown our way. We’ve been working really hard on the prototype demo and would love to see this become a fully funded project we can really devote ourselves to!

We will be officially launching the Kickstarter campaign for the Terrain of Magical Expertise RPG project on SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30TH AT 9 AM (PST). It will also include a FREE DEMO of the game’s prototype for you to try!

More details regarding the donation tiers in the video linked here!

The Kickstarter will run up until SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4TH. Spread the word, get your money ready and…wish us luck.

[gamemakernathan]

Man, it’s been forever since I’ve posted here, hasn’t it? And for good reason! Here’s the short version: - I’m a real Game Dev now working on an awesome project!!! - I’m still been doing pre-production/design work on SkyClash, and got some sweet character art commissioned by binaryowl and tekknicole, who are still taking commissions and totally deserve your business! Wanna see the sweet art and hear about my sweet new job? Hit the read-more!

I’ve been working with NostalgiCo on their upcoming game “Cryamore” since November! I was super psyched to be brought on for this project. I never dreamed I’d be working on a project like Cryamore so soon out of the gate! I figured I’d be stuck working on ports of “Imagine Horsie Races 5″ or something for a few years first. It’s been rough going, but that’s par for the course for any indie project, right? And the chance to work on a tight team of awesome people where everyone gets a say is well worth the occasional pipeline hiccup! As great as working on Cryamore is, I haven’t forgotten about my own projects and ideas. I haven’t had time to do code work on SkyClash in awhile, but I’ve been taking time to hash out game mechanics and character concepts. Pictured below are some bits of concept art I had commissioned from my good friends binaryowl and meira/tekknicole!

- I shared a picture of Fylis, my UFO-piloting alien character awhile back, and asked Binary to draw a picture of Fylis in their super-well done disguise. She also made a sketch of Fylis in an action pose and threw it in as a bonus, so hooray for that!

- Awhile back, around the same time as the first Fylis pic, I asked Meira to draw a picture of Kwale, who’s meant to be the closest thing to a main character SkyClash has. She’s got a magic wind-fan and a love of the open sky! AND I NEVER SHARED HER! How terrible of me! Better late than never, right?

- Way more recently, I asked Meira to draw up some concepts for another character, a hobbyist Super Hero called The Cerulean Jay (CJ for short)! His wings stopped growing when he was a kid, so his parents got him a jet-pack! Pictured in each Meira work is my own sad excuse for concept art, made in MSPaint. Binary got similar references. Amazing what actual artists can do, right?

Both are actively taking commissions now, by the way. Click their names anywhere to go to their blogs and put in a request! Pro-tip: Did you know you can write off art commissions like this on your taxes if you’re a Freelance game developer? I get to pay my friends properly for their art AND write it all off as a business expense! HOW COOL IS THAT?! :D That about covers things for now. I’ll be putting my all into Cryamore, as well as polishing the design and character docs for SkyClash. Who knows? Maybe SkyClash will even end up being a future NostalgiCo title? I’ve got some steep internal competition for the honor of Project #2, but you never know! Wish me luck!

[gamemakernathan]

Some of my old college buddies are tryin’ to get this monster-mash card game up and running. Send ‘em some cash, some encouragement, or some friends of yours with cash and/or encouragement!

KICKSTARTER IS LIVE!!  Spread this like the plague my beloved followers it really helps me out.

[gamemakernathan]

I’ve made an important discovery.

[gamemakernathan]

I commissioned my buddy BinaryOwl to draw a character I have planned for a game I’m working on. I’ve been busy with ProGen’s commission work, so MY game is still far from presentable, but it’s great to have some professional-grade art for one of my characters! Now that I think about it, I haven’t talked much about the game at all yet. I suppose I can talk a little about it now that I’m serious enough to commission artwork for it. “SkyClash” is a 2-player aerial dog-fighting game in a fantasy/sci-fi setting. That’s the elevator pitch, essentially. Each player selects one of (ideally) 9 characters, then they fight each other in aerial combat. I wanted more interesting characters and vehicles than a bunch of military planes. One of my character concepts is Fylis: an alien sent to the SkyClash tournament to study the native populace’s combat capabilities. Fylis pilots a flying saucer and uses laser blasters and cloaking devices in combat. I’d say more, but then I’ll just start gushing about a game still in its early stages, which is a game-dev no-no. Maybe we’ll be lucky and my next post will be a SkyClash prototype. More likely, though, it’ll be more character art. Also, did I mention Binary is still taking commissions? Find more info and her rates here.

[gamemakernathan]

This is what I've been wrapped up in for the past three months: Working for Pro-Gen studios as a contracted UI Developer for their game, "Advent Saga"! So far I've put together the game's Log-In screen, Hub Menu, and Deckbuilder Menu, and you can see all of them in action in the game's Kickstarter video OR the free-to-play Open Alpha! Working for Pro-Gen has been tough, but also a great experience that I'd like to continue. Donating to the Kickstarter will give Pro-Gen funds to continue development of the digital version of the game, as well as continue paying me (and possibly even hire me on as a more permanent employee). It'd mean a lot to me if you guys could back this project!

[gamemakernathan]

So this "what I've been up to" post's taken longer for me to write than I would've thought. Then again, they kinda always do, so par for the course, I guess. So there's a couple of things I've been up to between now and when I released CitrusMancer.

I've been sending out more voice over audition reels for various projects, and I was finally cast for one! I was cast as Marco, the main character of a Web Serial called Fooled, for a storyboard animatic thing the author made. I've linked the video to this post, and you can read the web serial for yourself here: http://fooled-story.blogspot.com/ It's a pretty good read and updates fairly regularly! This was my first time getting cast in a VO role and has done wonders for my confidence in pursuing this kind of stuff further. Here's hoping I can get cast in some paying projects and make some sweet side-cash! :D

Course I'm "GameMaker" Nathan first and foremost, and I've been doing some GameMaker-ing as well! Which I'll talk about...next post. Here's hoping I actually write the dang posts soon-ish instead of having another 2-month quiet streak.

[gamemakernathan]

CitrusMancer Post-mortem

Remember when I posted that CitrusMancer game me and some friends made in a month and said I'd do a post-mortem on it? Me neither. :T In all seriousness, though, I never expected the judging period to take as long as it did. I wanted to wait until after the game was judged to talk about problems during development, but it's been so long and the problems were so minor that I can't really remember any of it! WHOOPS! Still, it's been too long since I posted any game-dev stuff here, so lemme try to remember... Well, our game finished in the top 20% in the popular vote! That's good! Amazing for a team with just one person with prior game-dev experience on it. That said, there's a few lessons I learned: 1. Write your post-mortem right after the game ships, when everything's still fresh in your mind. (Oops. :X )

2. Advertising is key. I put my game up hoping a facebook and tumblr post would be all I needed and that the quality of our game would do the rest for us. Nnnnnnnope. I doubt we'd've won anything either way, but if we'd done a better job of drawing attention to our game, I feel we'd've climbed a few percentiles in the rankings at least, and we'd've definitely gotten some more feedback. We really didn't even get enough people to play the game to have people telling us how it sucked, let alone people who really liked it. As for HOW to better advertise our game without spending money? I don't have much of an answer for that yet. I heard at a convention I went to that Reddit's great for generating buzz, but the odds of it being GOOD buzz are pretty dicey. Also, if you can get gaming press outlets on Twitter to tweet about your stuff, your work pretty much gets done for you, and there's a "big list of youtubers" that might be interested in playing some games. Definitely stuff to keep in mind for my next project.

3. If you're doing a project without contracts or payment or anything really formal involved, have backup people in mind. A buddy of mine said they'd work on our games' sound effects, but after one day and one sound effect, I couldn't get in contact with him again. The other designer and I ended up making the sound effects using this chip-sound creator called sfxr, and it was basically just us mashing the "random sound" button until we found a sound we liked. I wouldn't recommend this method. Also, one of our artists made great concept art, but their personal life sorta exploded on them and they were unable to continue helping. Actually: 3b. You can never have too many artists. Or, if you can, literally more than half your team is not too many, and you could go for more. Also related: 3c. If you're the project lead, don't be afraid to contact your team often and see how they're doing with their tasks. I feel like I did an all right job of this. Considering everyone on the project was working as volunteers, I didn't feel like I could hassle my team too severely. I also get the feeling, though, that I'd've never gotten what I needed if I hadn't hassled them at all. I guess the important thing is to be firm but not be a jerk. :T 4. Having a library of open-source music to draw from can save you a lot of trouble on a small project. We were fortunate enough to have a friend who offered their body of work in exchange for their name in the credits. They had great stuff, but wading through it all to find songs that fit our game was rough. I feel that if I had a large library of songs I'm already familiar with and allowed to use on hand, we could've saved a lot of time in the long run.

5. No aspect of your game cannot be improved through research. I had no idea how many different kinds of oranges and other citruses there were before making this game. Nothing is too stupid or silly to research further. That's about all I can remember. Next post will probly be about what I've been up to during all this silence. I wasn't just twiddling my thumbs waiting for CitrusMancer to finish getting judged. I've actually been very productive! :D

[gamemakernathan]

So...I don't usually weigh in on stuff like this. I try to keep this blog about my game development and, on occasion, my voice over work, with a bit of silliness thrown in. This whole business makes me feel sick, though, and I want to do SOMETHING. It's not much, but here's a link to the Grand Jury court docs I found on the New York Times's website. It's something I didn't see among all the reblogging and rallying going on, and I think it may be helpful.

[gamemakernathan]

Remember two posts ago when I mentioned "FruitMancer Orange", the 2D Action-Platformer I was working on with a friend? The one where you're an Apprentice Orange Mage who must craft the Ultimate Orange for her thesis, but had her notes stolen by the forces of Scurvy and must reclaim them by hurling rotten oranges at them? Well it's done, been renamed "CitrusMancer: Quest for the Ultimate Orange!" and is up for free download here!: http://contest.rpgmakerweb.com/game/view/id/422#.U7MhevldW-1

I'll probably do a post-mortem thing where I talk about how development went and give kudos to everyone involved (In the meantime, the game has a credits page on the Main Menu with links to everyone's tumblrs, deviantarts, youtubes, etc.). For now, though, I need your help! Yes, YOUR help. The one reading this right now. Yes you. I need you to: 1. Play my game. 2. Make a free account on the website so you can vote for my game. 3. Vote for my game. 2. Like/Retweet/Share/Reblog/Instagram/Snapchat/Friendster/E-harmony/whatver it. Social media the crap out of it. Why do I need these things when I haven't asked this for any other game I've made? Because if it gets enough votes, our team wins $2,000 on top of any other awards it wins! Even split 7 ways, that's a nice chunk of cash for everyone! More than the money, though, being able to say I won an award off a game I developed would be just amazing and, hopefully, do wonders for getting me a job in the industry! Even if it doesn't win anything, you can still help! Send me feedback on the game! Tell me about bugs you found, parts of the game you thought were no fun, that kind of stuff. With this strong a foundation, I think we can polish it to a point where we can go for some kind of commercial release. Maybe put it on Kongregate and get some ad revenue off it or publish it on the Ouya my sister gave me. Maybe sell a standalone version on my website for PCs. But I want to make sure it's WORTH money before trying that, so send me all the feedback you've got! Do not spare my feelings. That will only leave me weak and unprepared for the horrors of true game development. >:P

[gamemakernathan]

This girl's done art for my games and is wicked talented, and her fiance is a guy I've known for over 9 years and, by introducing me to a small forum that was making an RPGMaker game, is kind of the reason I got my start in game design. They're both great people and could really use some help right now. I'm sick of our skype calls being interrupted by Katie's sis and brother-in-law yelling at them for stupid stuff that shouldn't be their responsibilities in the first place and want them to get a place of their own. If you've got anything to spare, I'm sure they'd appreciate the help.

Over the last 6 months living with my family I have lost about $20000 of my life’s savings given to me by my mother when she died because the people I live with never paid bills on time so I was in charge of late fees and they always asked for money, even though they knew I didn’t have a lot. Whi…

I’m so sorry to bother you all but I’m in a horrible situation. If you have even a dime to spare it will help me get out of this home. Please, it would mean the world to me if you all can help.

[gamemakernathan]

So What Now?

When I first said my next post would be about what's next for me, I thought I had a good handle on what I was going to say, but I've realized I really have no clue. I could whine about my uncertain future, but I'd rather focus on what leads I have and what I'm doing with them. So, without further ado, here's the GameMakerNathan state of affairs!

1. FruitMancer Orange! (tentative title) My last post was about an RPGMaker Humble Bundle. Turns out, part of the reason it was happening in the first place was the folks that distribute RPGMaker are hosting a game design contest! Any engine goes, and we've got just one month to complete our entry. I was worried I'd spend too much time working out a concept, so I asked some of my friends if they had any low-scope game concepts clunking around their heads. My friend Taiko had a silly idea about a mage that shoots rotten oranges and is on a quest to craft THE ULTIMATE ORANGE. So that's what I'm focusing on now. It's a 2D Platformer, and so far we've got a working player character, camera movement, and one enemy. Taiko's focusing on level design while I man the coding. He and I have one friend each interested in helping with music and sound, and one of our mutual friends may be doing the art. She's doing some concepts of the main character at the moment.

2. Fated Paths Since I last mentioned this 'ol RPGMaker project of mine, I've gotten the party swapping menu functioning just fine!...That's about all so far. Mooooving on...

3. Voice Acting! A friend of mine told introduced me to an independant dev in the Netherlands who was looking for some VO work for a trailer. I sent him my reel and he seemed quite impressed! Not only that, but he'd be willing to pay me for my work, to boot! Unfortunately, it seemed he was just testing the field at the moment. Didn't have his trailer storyboarded out or knew exactly what he needed voiced just yet. He said he'd get back to me once he had it all figured out. Fingers crossed that that's soon! I've also sent out an audition or two besides. If I could get some money from Voice Acting to tide me over while I develop my games, it'd be a phenomenal help. One of those auditions was for a horror game. I decided to include a VO page to my portfolio you can only get to by link, and included a short clip of me screaming. Because horror game.You can check those out here: http://nathanlindleygamedes.wix.com/home#!vo/c1ybp

4. Last Wishes This project has been shelved for now. The more I thought about the lead character and her story, the more I wanted to give them the attention they deserved. Which is bad, since I really need to get a game out to market I can make some pocket change off of. Coupled with my artist's life getting crazy complicated, it looks like this project will have to wait until we're both at a more secure spot in our lives. Apologies to anyone who was looking forward to this game's release. :C

5. Miscellaneous I've volunteered to help one of my (former) classmates with a project he's working on, but have yet to hear more from him. If something comes from that, I'll make a post about it. I've been doing video/sound editing work for 100,000 Strong for MegaMan Legends 3. Awhile back they released some English Dubbed/Translated videos of the Japan-only Rockman DASH 5 Island Adventure, which you can watch here. They covered the first island before the project lost its team, and I volunteered to give the second island a try. First episode's set to go, but the second one's got a nasty problem. Much of the video isn't long enough to fit the VO I've been provided with. A character's speech bubble will be on screen for 2.5 seconds when the audio for it is 6 seconds long, for example. I can edit the video to be longer, but then I need to re-do the BGM track, and the only tool I have to apply audio to video is Windows Movie Maker. It's not fun. One last thing: I have an Ouya now! My sister got me it as a graduation present. Here's hoping I can get one of my games on the Ouya market sometime soon! In the meantime, that's about all I've got to talk about. Expect a whole lotta nothing while I try to get something presentable made!

[gamemakernathan]

Humble’s weekly bundle this week contains RPGMaker VX, some bonus dev assets (art, sound, etc.), and some games made using the software. At higher levels, you get more games, more assets, and RPGMaker XP.

To a lot of my game-dev friends, these games may seem, at best, cute or quaint, and, at worst, primitive or generic, but I’ve got a special soft spot in my heart for it all. RPGMaker XP was my first step into game development, and it taught me a lot about scripting long before I attended college. To any game-dev hopefuls, fans of retro RPGs, or folks that just wanna give Humble and the charities they’ve partnered with more money, I strongly suggest shelling out the pocket change to get this stuff.

Also, To The Moon is in there at the $6 and up range, in case you haven’t gotten it yet.

Oh, wait. I said next post was going to be about what I’d be doing next, didn’t I? Um…Oops. Next post. Promise.

[gamemakernathan]

What I've Been Up To, Part 3: 3D Composition for Interactive Media

I think this might've been the most useful class I've taken at Columbia that didn't directly result in a game for my portfolio. It was a fast-paced crash course in 3D modeling, texturing, and animating. The only downside is that it was all in Maya. Great for understanding the tools of the industry! Not so much for making stuff I can actually use in-game, because the educational license doesn't allow for commercial use and the commercial license is something to the tune of $3,000. While I try to figure out Blender, here's what I made in the class:

Assignment 1 was to make a crate. I tried to make something like the cargo-crates from The Misadventures of Tron Bonne's puzzle-stages. This one has Top Hats in it. Because Tuttle.

Assignment 2 was pretty vague. It was to create an "Architectural Asset" I ended up making some stairs with railing like you might see on a fancy college campus (that isn't in Chicago) or in a Tony Hawk game. There's some chalk drawings on the side, but they didn't come out very well in the renders. :C

Assignment 3 was to re-create a still-life using 3D assets. The one I used can be found here: http://digital-art-gallery.com/oid/81/640x535_14313_Gear_2d_fantasy_illustration_still_life_picture_image_digital_art.jpg 

We only had to recreate 5 items in the image. I was never really happy with the coin bag, and glass was a heck of a lot harder to make than it should've been, but I really like how the sword came out.

Assignment 4 was to create a model that we'd later animate. I thought really hard about what to try modeling. I didn't think I was good enough to make anything that organic yet (the coin bag was hard enough), but I didn't want something too easy. In the end, I made this nutcracker soldier guy with hinge joints. I'm pretty dang proud of how he turned out!

Assignment 5 was to animate him, of course. I had to give him a walk cycle and an idle animation. You can check those out in action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SFzVJet5CE

Assignment 6 was to make a level in UDK that'd be used as the basis of our final project. The level would need to showcase our walker model, one of our other models, and a bunch of UDK stuff like Post-Processing Volumes. I wanted to make a toy shop or carpenter's bench for my toy soldier, but the default UDK assets didn't have much in the way of that sorta thing, so cartoony castle village it was!

Part of Assignment 7 (the final project) was to make a 30 second fly-through camera movie of the level with all the stuff it needed in it. I made this fly through movie, but couldn't figure out how to export it out of UDK. And since neither could anyone else in the class, I think that just having it in our UDK map file was enough for the teacher. Maybe I'll figure out how to export the movie later and post it here. For now, though, I'm content to leave UDK alone. Either it's a lot less user friendly than Unity3D, or I'm too used to Unity to use it properly. Either way, I think I'll stick with Unity for now.

That's about it for 3D comp. Next post, I'll talk about what I'll be focusing on in the days ahead.

[gamemakernathan]

What I've Been Up To, Part 2: AI Programming

I learned a couple of neat tricks in AI Programming this semester, although most of it was just listening to my teacher talk theory that went way over my head without any proper experience with code optimization or memory allocation. Still, I made progress on three projects:

Speech Sight Sound is dungeon crawler where the player commands a three-person team. After entering the dungeon, each member lost something dear to them. The Warrior lost their sight, the Rogue lost their hearing, and the Mage lost their voice. As the Mage, the player needs to guide their allies through the dungeon using the only spells they can cast without an incantation: creating lights and sounds from thin air. The sounds help guide the blind warrior, and the lights help guide the deaf rogue, but they also attract the attention of monsters. The current prototype doesn't really hold up as a game, unfortunately. It's mostly a tech demo of a bunch of disconnected concepts the class introduced. As such, I won't put it up for download just yet.

Also, since disabilities are a touchy subject to some people, I'd like to make it clear that I don't think being deaf, blind, or mute means you can't live a normal life and basically be a totally awesome person. But if you've gone your whole life taking something like sight for granted and suddenly lost it, it'd take a good bit of work to adjust, I think. Anyway, I don't plan on going all-in on this project until I've done more research on the disabilities in question. Not just to be sensitive to those who have them, but also because I think the game and characters would benefit from me knowing more. Also, I need to figure out how to make it playable by the deaf and blind. I figure that'd be kinda important for a game like this.

I learned a bit about pathfinding and state machines and have been trying to re-make RoTAC to be more flexible and polished. If you played the first version of RoTAC, you may've noticed everyone just teleports to the spots they're moving to. In this version, they actually move there! And they don't get stuck, either! Tony (the Astray website guy. He's also a game dev. Here's another link to his website in case you didn't click it yesterday: http://www.tonyvle.com/) was pretty impressed with the prototype so far and we may be working together over the summer on refining it.

Finally, we spent one week in AI covering scripting languages. Our assignment was to pick a scripting language like lua, python, or ruby and just sorta...do something with it. I remembered RPGMakerXP used Ruby, so I tinkered around a bit with the back-end code for the first time. Turns out it's not as scary and incomprehensible as I remember it being! For the homework, I made a prototype that allowed a 5 person party instead of RPGMaker's default 4, and added a feature where the map music would continue unimpeded into and through battles. Getting these features working gave me the confidence to try something more complex. I've been working on getting Fated Paths to a stage where I wouldn't be embarrassed to put it on my portfolio website. For now, it's still sort of a cookie-cutter RPGMaker game with no unique or custom features. To fix that, I want to do two things: - Get a party-swap system in place where you have a group of reserve characters and your active party and can change them up as you see fit. - Have a menu screen where the player can buy overpriced emergency supplies from Merch, an eccentric arms merchant that accompanies the protagonist throughout the game (it'd also be used for getting refreshers on the main quest and sidequest goals the player has) Both these features have KINDA been in for ages, but it's currently done through using a key item in the inventory and navigating an awkward series of dialogue trees. Not intuitive at all. Once I've got that, I'll go over the dialogue to make sure there's nothing I'm TOO embarrassed of (a running gag about Merch wanting to buy a hot tub comes to mind) and finish adding content to a map that's currently half-done. Then I'll put up a download link here and add it to my website. That about covers AI Programming. Tomorrow'll be 3D Composition. Ever wanna see me try 3D Modelling? Well, tomorrow you'll get to see everything I modeled in the class! Personally, I think everything came out pretty well, but I'm not experienced enough to recognize bad modeling and texturing when I see it. :P

[gamemakernathan]

What I've Been Up To, Part 1: Senior Large Team Capstone Project

As for why I'm only NOW posting about what happened after GDC (or anything, really), I was too busy throwing my all into my projects. GDC made it clear there was a lot of work left to do on Astray, and I'd be damned if I didn't do my part! Speaking of "my part" I don't think I ever talked about my role on the project! I was the team's UI/GUI designer/Developer. I coded all the menus, set up the start menu scene, got things like button prompts and objective notifications in place, got the inventory system and mini-map working, and all the fun little bits that go with that. You can check out some screenshots of my work here:

Or better yet, you can download the game for free and play it yourself! Columbia College Chicago puts each year's Large Team Capstone up for download and hosts a website for it (the website is created by a student. This year it was done by a friend of mine, Tony V. Le, and I think he did last year's, too.) Astray's website can be found here: http://game.colum.edu/Projects/astray/

The capstone wasn't my only class. I also had AI Programming and 3D Composition for Interactive Media. I'm gunna milk this inactivity thing a bit and split each class into its own post. Tomorrow will be AI Programming and the projects that've advanced because of it.