bttnbsh

[bttnbsh]

Pixel Imperfect

(see this blog in its native form here: https://bit.ly/38zaRhD)

This week I wanted to talk about the weakest of my gamedev shortcomings- art, or more precisely, pixel art. ​

DEAD PIXELS

Just look around this page and you'll see the extent of the problem. The logo's okay I suppose, but the self-portrait? Bleurgh. I've never been any good at art, no matter the medium or the subject. It blows me away to see what people can do with pencils, pens or paint, but I never anticipated I'd need it as I embarked on a career of words, so I never bothered to invest any time into improving.

Of course, I was wrong. Even when I worked in books, I still had to be able to describe what we needed from illustrators, or feed back on something that had been submitted. I became well-versed in describing perspectives, critiquing compositions and helping to shape artwork and designs. But I still never improved my own art skill, and now I want to make a game all by myself, I'm royally boned.

The choice to pursue pixel art was made for me really. I see it as the native visual language of the medium. You don't see many cartoons in pixel art, or galleries full of beautifully arranged squares do you? I'm sure there are exceptions but pixel art was born, grew and thrived in games - even to this day while photorealistic graphics are possible. I've been consuming pixel art in games since I was four years old so I've been well educated in the language. And so I made the mistake of thinking it was the easy option. You're just putting squares into place until they look like the thing, right?

​Of course not. Every pixel is a brush stroke, and you can make just as much of a mess with pixels as you can with paint. And I've made a lot of messes, and I'm using some of them in my game right now! But it's still the easiest way for me to go, and I honestly like the aesthetic. I know some people are burnt out on 'pixel art indie games', but I completely understand why there are so many out there.

GALLERY OF HORROR

You can see from any of the images and videos in my previous blog posts exactly how bad I am, but let me showcase pixels for you here. Bear in mind that these are all just placeholder and I intend to improve all the art at the next stage ... providing I improve my pixel art skills in the meantime.

It's not the worst thing in the world, mostly because I used a character from a different game as a template to do the standing poses as a starting point. But why is he so much skinnier when side-on? Can you tell which leg is in front and which is behind? Does he need to squish more with every step? Should his hair move like it does?

In retrospect, choosing a black outfit for the guard was a bad idea, but the shading is so difficult and any close inspection raises question marks over this guy's anatomy. I also can't draw hats. But I do really like the difference between the standard walk and chase  (the gifs are all the same speed, but it still looks like a march of purpose), and the leap still makes me laugh.

THE BEAUTY OF PIXEL ART

From drawing and animating these characters and some other bits and bobs, I've come to realise that, even though I'm bad at art, and I hate the colours and the shading and the animations and the composition and pretty much everything I export from Aseprite, I'm not a million miles away.

Because yes, they are crap and need to be better, but with a little dash of coding magic, does the guard look like he's walking? Yes. Does Damien look like he's becoming furious? Yes. If pixel art is the native language of video games, I'm at least doing enough to get my point across, like an Englishman in Spain, pointing at a beer and repeating, 'Cerveza, por favor'. It's not eloquent, but it's communication of the message I want to send. I want you to know that Damien is walking, and anyone looking at that will know.

It's hard to create something beautiful with pixel art as it is with any artistic medium, but it's forgiving, particularly when it's animated. The human eye sees a character moving down the screen and doesn't really pay attention to those six pixels you call a leg and whether or not they're behaving as they should.

I have a long way to go in terms of the art alone. The colours clash and everything is foregrounded because it's all from the same palette; the animations are a little bit clunky; individual poses don't hold up to close scrutiny. And I'm sure as I produce more pixels, I'll create more problems. But you can't improve nothing. If you have something, anything, on the page, it can be improved and the same holds true of my awful pixel art. ​

THIS WEEK I'VE MOSTLY BEEN ...

https://imgur.com/gallery/mgd1R4o

Feeling low still, and most days I'll write a couple of lines of code, draw something small in Aseprite and shut down for the day. Yes, I'm still pissing about with the guards, but I've mostly been making Damien do sneaky swearwords that will eventually stun and incapacitate the guards when he's snooping through areas he shouldn't be in. And I've also made it SFW because I'm totally backtracking on the whole swearing element of the game. Do I need to rename my game now? Bugger.

I also made it so that Damien has a captured animation when the guards catch him as they leap, but I messed something up in the code and they won't chase him now ...

Thanks for taking the time to read about my shoddy pixels - you're more than welcome to bombard me with tips and tutorials if you'd like to help. If you want to hear more about Effing & Blinding​, come back next week, or sign up for the mailing list.

Thanks for reading!

Craig

BTTNBSH

[bttnbsh]

The Motivation Situation

This week I wanted to talk about motivations - what motivated me to make a game now, what I wanted to achieve, and the day-to-day motivation that has eluded me in recent weeks. Buckle up!

A WAY IN

Like most hobbyists, I'm completely disconnected from the actual industry of video games. I'm 33 years old, have a degree in English Language and Linguistics, and worked in book publishing for ten years. So what business do I have trying my hand at game development? Not much at all. But I can pinpoint exactly the moment when I knew I wanted to start trying.

Because I lied, I'm not completely disconnected from the gaming industry. My job was to make books about games - research them and write them and all that jazz. Pick up an official Minecraft book in a shop and there's a 50% chance it has my name in it. I primarily worked on books for Mojang, 343i, and Roblox, along with many smaller brands - some from outside gaming too. I was living the dream - I got paid to play games and write books about them. In my first year, I played Minecraft, Roblox Starbound, Animal Crossing, DOTA, Team Fortress and half a dozen more games in the office while the other schmucks were worrying about deadlines and stuff. Not to mention all the hours I spent 'researching' on Polygon and IGN.

DREAMCATCHER

But there was one little-known licence that smashed my dream, before building a new one from the smithereens. CoderDojo. If you don't know about CoderDojo, it's a non-profit organisation that runs free coding workshops for young people around the world. Great initiative, great people to work with. As I went into my second year of the job, I was assigned to work on CoderDojo Nano: Make Your Own Game, the second, and unfortunately final, book we created with them, I had been a second pair of eyes on the first title, which was about building websites with HTML and CSS and it didn't pique my interest. But this one was all about making an endless runner game in JavaScript.

So as we were working on this book, I had to do my normal editing and rewriting, but I also had to test it. I had to open up Notepad and build the game to make sure what the book was saying would lead to the finished product we were showing. And when I got to the end and I got that game running with a few images and a couple of hundred lines of code, I was hooked. Writing about games was no longer my dream job - making games was.

I immediately dove into tutorials, bought beginner textbooks for Java, JS and C++ and started to devote all my spare time to working on games. Of course, to begin with I was terrible and didn't really extend beyond anything in the books and videos I was consuming. But all the while the seeds were being sown for what I could do with this newfound hobby. ​

WHAT DO WE WANT? MOTIVATION? ​WHEN DO WE WANT IT? SOON PLEASE.

Fast forward another five years, and life has changed substantially. I'm not happy with my job, I've just moved back to my hometown - which I hate - but my Mum isn't very well, so it's lucky I did get back when I did. I'm alright at this GameDev malarkey. Alright enough that I could have a good crack at making a full game. I was trying to in my spare time still but I just didn't have enough of it. At the end of 2021, work was at its worst, and enforcing office days again after the pandemic briefly subsided. They were inflexible and wouldn't make an exception even knowing my circumstances at home, but working at home had allowed me to save a fair bit of money, enough for at least half a year. So I quit. I didn't immediately think about making a game in the meantime. I was just going to take a break for a few months. But I knew for a long time I didn't want to be in publishing. I wanted to work in games.

Of course, the ideal would be that I make a game that makes enough money to allow me to support myself for many years without needing to work for someone else. But if that highly unlikely scenario doesn't pan out, then I have something to show for it at least; the start of a portfolio to show that I can design a game, or just that I understand the process of making a game. That's the core driver for Effing and Blinding - a switch of industry and some rudimentary experience in the field.

The problem with motivation is that it is ever-dwindling and that initial motivation is about as useful as a chocolate teapot to me now. Everything you do saps away some motivation, whether it's spending hours coding a feature, wrestling with bugs, fiddling with sub-par pixels, or any of the myriad other tasks of game development. Life events too can deplete your stocks of motivation like nothing else. I said in my previous post about how life is giving me a good kicking at the moment, and it's hard to find the motivation to spend more than an hour a day on Effing. But it's still something, and something is better than nothing.

I'm still being powered forward by that initial motivation really. You can still eat a chocolate teapot after all. I still want to be in games, I still want the start of a portfolio, a game released on Steam even if it sells ten copies, and contacts with other devs and people of the industry. What's really driving me now though is I don't really have anything else to do. Boredom is my motivation for most days of the week. But it's not the only one - I've been putting these blogs out for a handful of weeks now, which has had mixed results, but I've had the chance to talk to a couple of people on Reddit and Twitter, which is lovely reinforcement to go along with those upvotes and likes.

I think the trick to motivation is momentum, something which I don't have much of at the moment. I can imagine once I'm past my current sandbox phase and my game looks better, has everything in it, and makes more sense, that it'll be easier to motivate myself because everything you add, every screenshot you share, demo you release, etc. feels like a big step taken towards the end goal. At the moment, it still feels a little bit like I'm dicking about with a toy rather than making any great progress.

Speaking of which ...

THIS WEEK I'VE MOSTLY BEEN:

https://imgur.com/gallery/I1NG64D

Dicking about with the guards again. Not a lot of progress was made, but I did get them to leap at Damien when they're in the chase state now, which I'm pretty happy with, especially creating the collision shapes within the animation (when the guards turn a funny colour as they're diving). But I had another situation of unanticipated work, when I realised that I can't just do a leap animation, the guards have got to recover from the leap too. Cue another two days to finish those animations off (I told you, I'm going slowly - I know it's just a couple of hours' work).

So another slow week, but slow progress is still some progress. That's what I keep telling myself anyway. If you want to hear more about Effing & Blinding​, come back next week, or sign up for the mailing list.

Thanks for reading!

Craig

BTTNBSH

[bttnbsh]

Just A Devlog

https://imgur.com/gallery/ls8FEbxUnfortunately, my personal life got even messier this week so I'm feeling down and I don't have the inclination to come up with a topic to write about this time around. But it didn't get messy until Friday, so I did manage to put in a fair amount of work into Effing & Blinding - at least by the paltry standards I've set myself recently, so let me show you what I've been doing! First up are those darn guards again - they're almost finished, I promise! This week I managed to give them their chase state, so they now run a bit faster and have a different animation once they hear Damien swearing. What's shown in the video below is basically the before and after of the Mad Libs-style tirade typing game, but I haven't had the chance to build that yet. So Damien will swear, you'll play the minigame, then guards will enter the chase state - that's all the guards in the level. They'll abandon their posts and patrols with the single-minded goal of catching the foul-mouthed little shit. They'll eventually pounce at Damien when they have the chance, but I haven't finished the rough animation for that yet.

https://imgur.com/gallery/gTSQAcY

I did begin the tirade game by starting the glossary of swearwords that players will be typing. I've already mentioned some backlash I got to the inclusion of 'fuck' in a video, and while that gave me food for thought, I stuck to my guns. But after I created the glossary, I started to reconsider whether that is indeed the direction I want to go - the super expletive route. Sure, typing chucklefuck is fun - I know it is, because I just did it - but most are just crass in isolation. Would typing a non-expletive insult like dunderhead or numpty be any less fun? Maybe a little, but it's less reliant on the shock value and there's just more freedom when you're not limiting yourselves to swear words. I still maintain that a well-timed silly bollocks would be a welcome addition to any game, but I think I'm leaning towards sanitising my idea somewhat. I also gave Damien some much-needed attention this week - I finally added in his other offensive moves - flipping the birds and the Vs (although it's barely noticeable in the animation at the moment ... I'll give that more attention later). Given the previous paragraph, there might be a suggestion that these moves are incongruous with the more palatable vocabulary I'm veering towards, but I'm happy enough that gestures don't quite carry the same weight as words do. In adding these moves, I got myself into a right mucking fuddle with inputs and had to do a lot of reworking of his code. Basically, because he was player-controlled, I didn't bother with a state machine and I let the inputs act as state triggers using bools as flags for certain actions. However, this wasn't feasible as the inputs grew and I spent hours tidying up the code and giving him states for sneaking, walking, performing actions and so on.

https://imgur.com/gallery/ls8FEbx

And that's pretty much it. It didn't feel like I made much progress during the week, but it seems like a little more now I've written it out and I'm happy that the guards and Damien are almost done. Fingers crossed I can pick up the pace a bit over the next couple of weeks. If you want to hear more about Effing & Blinding​, come back next week, or sign up for the mailing list.

Thanks for reading! Craig BTTNBSH

[bttnbsh]

Time Flies

I'm into the sixth week of working on Effing & Blinding in earnest, and already I'm behind. I knew this would happen, of course. Even if you don't know much about game development, you know that things don't go the way you think they will. Best laid plans of mice and men and all that nonsense. If you do know game dev, then you know that there are a thousand stories of a nice six-month project turning into a five-year behemoth. How am I already behind after just over a month on the project? Let's find out ...

A GOOD START

From trawling gamedev subreddits for years, I'd seen all the horror stories before and they were at the forefront of my mind when I started planning this project. I knew the dangers of scope creep, so I wrote a game design doc, mapped out the levels on paper, - including every item, object, character and NPC that would be in them - and translated that all to my HackNPlan board. A good start in my opinion, and I haven't been tempted to add any features or increase the complexity of anything existing either. BUT, I might not have been as comprehensive as I thought I was being.

Let's take the guards that I'm currently working on as an example. I'd worked out what I wanted them to do in certain situations - some will patrol, others will stand watch, and they won't chase the player until the escape phase, unless you stray into a restricted area - which allowed me to list their states out. As someone more comfortable with the design and programming side of development, I might not have anticipated the different animations I'd need for each state. I'm still only doing pixel art roughly at the moment, but it's the slowest part for me and I still want to use these opportunities as practice and end up with animations that are semi-recognisable. And there is a bit of a mental block for me when I know I have to do more pixel art. Maybe I put the brakes on a bit when I know adding a feature is going to mean more hours in Aseprite, and that isn't sustainable.

MILESTONES

But I'm still not that far behind. I split the project into three main milestones - the tech sandbox, the demo, and the main game. I'm still dithering in the tech sandbox at the moment and would estimate I'm about 70% of the way through. This is the stage where I'm creating all of the different entities, creating the player and all the different abilities and making sure everything is working together as it should. I should be finishing that today, Monday 25th April, but it will likely be mid-May by now.

Once I've tidied up the sandbox and everything is playing nicely together, I was aiming to finish the first of the eight levels that will appear in the game - a minimum viable product of sorts. This stage would focus on creating polished art, coding anything unique to the level, and amping up the 'gamefeel'. Once I'm done, the plan is to put it up on Itch to get some initial player feedback, fix bugs, and polish the experience before I take what I've learnt to the other levels. I gave myself an unreasonably short window for this of two weeks, which would also mean mid-May. But likely to be somewhere in June now.

And that's when the work on the full game begins - this is where, obviously, I'll start broadening the game and implementing the remaining designs, working on better-quality pixel art and making sure all bells and whistles are going to be added. I gave myself until September to complete the full game, which is now only four months away! It's not going to be possible, but I've likely got enough cash to last me until the end of the year, so there's buffer time at the other end. Of course, I wouldn't want to compete with the heavy-hitters at the end of the year anyway, but that's a consideration for another time.

TIMESPLITTERS

So I've made a decent start, and I'm only a little bit behind, but that's likely to get worse with every stage if I'm my cynical, realist self for a second. One of the reasons is just life getting in the way. I always knew when I started this journey that I wouldn't be 'full-timing' this. I can't afford eight hours a day every day due to family commitments. It's more like eight hours every two days if I'm lucky. But happened recently something that I hadn't accounted for and threw me for a loop and I've had even less chance to focus in the allotted eight hours per two days. Best laid plans again ...

But I have a bigger problem, and it comes from having good habits. Yes, you read that right. I'm all about getting into habits, whether it's game dev, practising pixel art, exercising, learning a language, or even writing this blog. In fact I have an app on my phone that I use to make sure that I do all of these things every day - i've done it for years, and it's great. I make progress on my game, run a lot and posso parlare un poco italiano. Unfortunately I still inflict this blog on the internet too ...

Doesn't sound like a problem does it? Well it is to an extent, yes I make progress on my game every day (at least the last 107 that is), but sometimes, I just can't be bothered. If I'm having a bad day or just running out of time to deal with other things in life, let alone my game, I will just fix one bug or add half of a feature and call it done. Same with pixel art - I already mentioned that I dread it, but if I need to tick it off my habit app, then there's probably some boxy GUI element that I can use.

And this attitude has probably trickled into the days when I do have more time. Instead of spending four hours adding a new feature, I might do two, then do some jobs around the house, get my A handed to me in a match of Valorant, eat some food, and so on. I'm not really using my time as effectively as my idealist self wants - he's the same guy who planned the schedules and milestones - and unless my attitude changes, I'm not going to get this game out into the world anytime soon.

There will be those reading this that think that even doing half an hour a day is better than doing nothing, and they're right - i'm not at a complete standstill, but I need to motivate myself more. Writing this blog helps; numbers creeping up on the visitors counter of my website, as well as upvotes, likes and retweets all provide some positive reinforcement. I anticipate the more I complete of the game, the happier i'll be with it too. It's just tough when it's so raw and doesn't match your vision yet, and I'll have to get used to that for a while.

THIS WEEK I'VE MOSTLY BEEN ...

https://streamable.com/12brwp

Working on those pesky guards! Now there are some that patrol and some that stand watch. I've also implemented their viewcones properly, so if they see you in a restricted area (the red translucent tiles), you'll be thrown back out to a non-restricted tile. You can also sneak so that you don't draw their attention in their hearing radius. It's very rough and instant at the moment, but it does what I wanted to!I hope you enjoyed reading about my struggles with time this week - it's not all fun and games! If you want to hear more about Effing & Blinding​, come back next week, or sign up for the mailing list.

Thanks for reading!

Craig

BTTNBSH

[bttnbsh]

INSPIRED CHOICES

https://streamable.com/qggihtThere's nothing new under the sun, as the old saying goes, and dang does that apply to games! Most AAA titles nowadays feel like reskins of the same game, whether it's an open-world action adventure, first-person shooter or epic RPG, but then all games borrow ideas from one another.

I got a bit of flak on one of my posts for suggesting that Untitled Goose Game was an inspiration for Effing & Blinding, which made me want to showcase how that, and three other games, have lent me ideas for my game.

INSPIRATION 1: UNTITLED GOOSE GAME

The reason I got some criticism for my comparison to House House's UGG is because my video of a little kid shouting 'FUCK!' didn't display the same charm as the titular goose in this critically-lauded puzzle adventure. I can see why, without further context, it might evoke that reaction, and it's a fair comment. The goose is mischievous and cheeky, my little guy was just shouting expletives at grannies. Although I still maintain that they're both arseholes.

However, I think that second snapshot of my development might have over-egged how much my game relies on swearing. I'm not shy of including profanity, though I am planning a PG Mode for those that don't want to be bombarded with it, but I'm hoping that the similarities with Goose will become more apparent as development progresses and the swearing won't be seen as overzealous in the final execution..

Basically in Effing, you'll be hunting for items and interacting with objects in different levels to lure unsuspecting NPCs into prime positions for a foul-mouthed tirade. This first 'set-up' section will comprise something like 80% of each level, and barely a single curse word will have passed through my anti-hero's vocal tract. Much like in UGG, where you steal keys and other items, or move stuff about to annoy the townsfolk, you're just causing chaos to move on to the next section.

INSPIRATION 2: HITMAN

The other major inspiration for the 'set-up' section is Hitman. I played the first entry in the rebooted series a few years ago, and while I wouldn't count it among my favourite games, I did really like how open and free it was. Your aim was just to kill person X - if you wanted to go in guns-blazing and try to deal with the target's security deal, then you could, even though it'll be more difficult. But if you wanted to sneak into a kitchen, knock out a waiter, steal his uniform, poison a drink and serve it to the target, that works too! The plethora of ways to complete such a simple objective made it feel like more of a sandbox than most open-world games do.

While I don't have the time or budget to create so many possible ways of completing the levels in Effing & Blinding, I wanted there to be a bit of freedom in that vein too. You don't need to trigger EVERY mechanism and find EVERY item in each level to progress. The extent to which this applies differs per level, but there is one planned level as an example - a wedding of all things - in which there are three completely distinct paths to completing the objective.

Hopefully there'll be some completionists out there who will want to find and do everything in every single level!

INSPIRATION 3: EPISTORY

I don't know how Epistory arrived in my Steam library, possibly from a bundle or maybe it was a purchase on a whim that I immediately forgot about, but it was such a surprising game when I finally sat down with. You're a heroine who rides around on the back of a fox, cleansing a corrupted world that unfolds before you ... literally - everything is origami! But you don't cleave through the insects causing the corruption with spells or swords, but rather words. That's right - it's a typing game!

I think it was probably the first typing game I ever played, apart from some crappy Neopets game back in the 90s, and I highly recommend it. It's fairly short - about 10 hours if I recall correctly - but such a breath of fresh air.

In Effing & Blinding, all the set-up within a level leads you to a tirade section. It's a short, time-limited minigame that will throw up expletives for you to quickly type in order to add to a Mad Libs-style outburst, much in the way that the encroaching insects of Epistory demand you up your words-per-minute. How well you do in this minigame will have a bearing on how offended the lured NPCs of the level are.

Of course, there's ample opportunity for this concept to be lambasted as my earlier video was, but I hope that some will give me the benefit of the doubt until they can see the execution of the idea!

INSPIRATION 4: ENTER THE GUNGEON

Finally, and probably in the most limited capacity, Enter The Gungeon is my last inspiration. Like Hitman, it's not a game that I was ever entirely enthralled by - it's just not really my favourite genre. However, I did have fun with my limited time on it, and when it comes to 8-directional bullet hells, it's up there with Nuclear Throne and The Binding of Isaac.

I don't have a massive amount of 'action' in Effing & Blinding, but the final part of a level, the escape, will incorporate some ranged and AoE 'attacks' - all of which are some form of swearing of course! You can flip the bird to stun enemies, flip the Vs to rend a crowd in two and make a path to the exit, or drop that F-bomb to knock out guards who are hot on your heels.

I see these abilities much like the many weapons in Gungeon - each with strengths and weaknesses, and a right time to deploy them. I also love the enemy designs - and general art direction for that matter - so i'll be taking cues here for character design too.

​THIS WEEK I'VE MOSTLY BEEN ...

​Time has not been kind to me this week and I haven't had a whole lot of it to work on the game, but I did manage to start the guards, give them basic vision and hearing areas (those are just collision shapes you're seeing, not actual artwork), as well as a photofit of Damien so they can investigate the area if he's snooping around

https://streamable.com/qggiht

I hope you enjoyed reading about actually good games for once! But if you're still interested in my fledgling project after it's been stacked beside those heavy hitters, come back next week, or sign up for the mailing list.

Thanks for reading! Craig BTTNBSH

[bttnbsh]

HOBBY DEV TOOLKIT

Over the half a decade that I've been piddling about with Game Development, I must have tried over 50 programs for the varying aspects of the process - from Visual Studio and Unity to Photoshop and GIMP. I jumped around between programs so much in the first couple of years that I never really got to grips with any of them. As the years went on, a few programs began to click into place in my arsenal of apps, even while others were only tentatively holding their place, until finally I felt like I had a full suite of products that I knew and liked enough to start making games. Have a look at my choices below and maybe you'll find one that makes your toolkit complete too!

PLANNING - HACKNPLAN

If you've ever used kanban boards on more popular sites such as Trello, then you might find HackNPlan useful for organising your game - it's basically the same thing but specifically catered to GameDev. Within your personal dashboard, you can create 'boards' for your various games (or even for parts of your game), which you can add tasks to. You assign the tasks to a category, from programming to bugs, set deadlines, dependencies on other tasks, subtasks within those tasks and so on. The columns of the kanban board are split into Planned/In Progress/Testing/Completed, so that you can quickly refer back and update with your progress by dragging and dropping.

It takes a while to set up the initial board for a game (I basically transposed my GDD from OpenOffice to HNP), but it's paying dividends now with the time it saves me on choosing what I need to do next. You can also have multiple users assigned to boards so if you're working in a small team everyone has their own list of work to get on with. I've barely scratched the surface of the features that it offers, but it's worth checking out.

PROGRAMMING - GODOT

Godot has fast become one of the most popular game engines in recent years, so I'm probably banging an already pummelled drum, but Godot is amazing if you don't have a background in programming - possibly also if you do. It works on a very simple node system that has a super-low barrier of entry and allows you to get a simple game up and running within a few hours once you've watched a few tutorials. It uses its own GDScript language, which has extensive documentation, but you also have the option to use visual scripting, or other popular languages like C and C++ instead.

I work purely in 2D, so I can't comment on the 3D capabilities (though I hear it's taken some decent strides in that department during recent years), but it's the only game engine where I've truly felt that I can make something with my limited knowledge. It feels great to have an idea, action it and see it happen exactly as you planned on the screen in a short window of time (usually after 20 minutes of debugging and 10 print statements in my case though ...).

ART - ASEPRITE

Out of all the areas of GameDev, art programs are probably the one thing I've tried the most of. GIMP, Photoshop, ArtRage, PiskelApp, GraphicsGale are all ones that I can think of off the top of my head. And all of them are great, but because it's probably my weakest area, I needed a miraculous program that catered to my shortcomings, and that's how I landed on Aseprite.

It was just so easy to use the tool shortcuts and get going. If I didn't know what colours to use, I'd just pick one from the presets. More recently I've been working on animations and the onion-skinning option, layering (which i use for different animations for single characters) and frame options were all so easy to pick up. Nothing I've listed is unique to Aseprite but it just felt like a great package and I've been using it for YEARS. Check out my Steam stats ...  

MUSIC/FX - 1BITDRAGON

Admission time: I've only spent an hour using this program, which very recently came to Steam but was available elsewhere for a while. I can't say this will be the last audio program that I use, but i can say that again it just FELT right when i was piddling about in it.

Previously I'd been using Bosca Ceoil for sounds and simple music, but always felt it was a little bit more limited in the sounds you can produce. What they do share however is a simple, almost Pixel Art-esque way of drawing your beats and rhythms (some of the marketing images actually show technicolour pixel art arrangements, which i'm sure sound horrible when played). Whereas Bosca had some very confusing controls for making notes longer and shorter, and moving bits about, 1BD is a simple click to add a note, right-click to delete it. I need to have a good play with this soon but I'm confident that I'll have fun with it.

VERSION CONTROL - BITBUCKET

Last but not least, the boring bit. I'm liable to do something stupid and overwrite half my code or misplace all my art, so, taking advice from various subreddits, I took to version control a few years ago and haven't looked back since. I commit every couple of days, which some people is overkill for a solo dev, and it very well might be, but if I lost a week's work, I'd probably cry for the following week and then never work on the project again.

Anyway, I use Atlassian's Bitbucket to store my codebase, mostly because it was the only website that had a simple step-by-step guide to creating and managing repositories when I first wanted to use version control. Do I have to go back and find that guide every time I start a new project? You're goddamn right I do. Do I know more than five commands when using Git? Nope! (cd ~/repos ; git status; git add --all; git commit --m 'message' and git push origin master - sorry for showing off ...). Anyway, I also use GitBash to facilitate version control, but used to use Terminal on an old Mac.

THIS WEEK I'VE MOSTLY BEEN ...

... luring grannies. I'm sorry that my first NPC was a granny and she's had a raw deal two weeks in a row, but that's what I've been doing. There are items and objects in my game that when combined or activated will turn into 'attraction points', which will reel in any unattached NPC to an optimum position for foul-mouthed tomfoolery. The navigation nodes in Godot are playing up until version 4.0 is released (and i might even switch over to A* pathfinding eventually), but I'm glad I've got this feature started and finished within the week.

Anyway, thanks for reading - hopefully that shed a little light on how I'm creating my game and maybe you've found a few interesting programs to explore. If you want to hear more about me and my game Effing & Blinding, come back next week, or even sign up for the mailing list!

Thanks for reading!

Craig

BTTNBSH

[bttnbsh]

Ten A Penny

This week I wanted to talk about ideas, and how I landed on Effing & Blinding, and the wasteland of former projects that started off as good ideas but soon got away from me. After all, ideas are ten a penny: it's the execution that matters. ​I'll start with the old stuff ...

DEAD PROJECT 1: 'BEDROOM DEV'

There were many projects that came before 'Bedroom Dev', but none that I thought were good, marketable ideas. Also none that I kept the projects for, so this is where we start. I spent a lot of time on r/gamedev looking for advice and following tutorials and getting extremely jealous about the folk who had released games already. But i wasn't very good at anything - terrible at pixel art, needed my hand holding with programming, barely touched music and sound effects, and my game designs were MOSTLY just reskins of other games, though I guess the majority of things are nowadays. But on r/gamedev, I found a great list of games to build in your chosen engine (mine's Godot in case you're wondering). Each subsequent game added something to your knowledge, beginning with Pong and then maybe progressing to Pac-Man, with its moving enemies and collectibles, before you try your hand at Space Invaders, with waves of enemies and different enemy types. I worked my way through a few of them and then got the idea for Bedroom Dev: why not turn my learning process into a game in and of itself?

So the concept was that you're playing as a solo dev, someone doing this in their bedroom like I was at the time, hence the name, who's trying to make it in the world of IndieDev. While your skills and money are low, you can only make basic games with bog-standard graphics, terrible SFX and poor game design - all my fortes at the time. But the twist was you'd actually be able to play the games that you make - think GameDev Tycoon by Greenheart Games, but with more than just unlockables in a menu. ​As you released more games, you'd make more money, be able to improve your skills and then release better and better games. But that's when the difficulty started - I didn't have the necessary skills to show a game even as simple as Pong progressing from a level 1 art style to a level 5. Not to mention the complexity of keeping all the permutations straight in my head - all skills had five levels and you could choose to make a game at any of the levels for each skill, so for each of the 10 games there were something like 3125 possible combinations (there's a sixth skill that doesn't affect how the game plays if you're analysing the screenshots). It was too much for my tiny brain to compute.

The screenshots actually show my second attempt at this project, and I'm not horrified by most of it, but the scope was far beyond what I could achieve on my own.

DEAD PROJECT 2: 'PLAYGROUND TACTICS'

After my first attempt at Bedroom Dev, I looked for something else. I was back on Reddit searching for inspiration and found two common themes among a lot of the posts - 'work on something you're passionate about' and 'please don't make your passion project as your first game'. What does that second group of probably seasoned professionals know?

I thought I would be the exception to the rule of course, so I started to build my own tactical RPG. I'd always loved the genre, ever since I played Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on GBA, I've lapped up almost everything the genre has to offer; XCOM, Chroma Squad, Hard West, Wargroove, Into the Breach, and so on. My game was going to be set in the real world, with kids playing make-believe to create the classes - think FFTA-meets-Costume Quest.

I did SO much for this game. I had the nuts, guts and bolts sorted out, from an overworld map and a handful of mission types, to a fully scripted story with cutscene dialogue and hours spent balancing skill powers and health limits. But an isometric TRPG is NOT a clever first game to pick. It took me weeks to get my head around non-Cartesian coordinates, tilemaps, pathfinding, and Y-sorting characters against the various components in a level.

​My main issue was the art. I've never been artistic, and pixel art is about all I can muster on a good day, but isometric pixel art?! Not a chance. And i couldn't decide on a scale, which is why there's one heifer being chopped in half by a fence. See the results for yourself above ...

I did have a friend helping me out at one point (they're the half-decent aliens in the turn order bar, as opposed to the reskins of FFTA characters elsewhere), but with eight different character classes, each with 10 skills, and something like 15 different levels, it was too much to ask someone to do for free in their spare time and I tried to do it all myself. And the sheer weight of the work that lay before me made me think it wasn't such a good idea to go it alone if I wanted anything released before 2025. So I moved on with a heavy heart, hoping I'll get a chance to get back to it one day.

WHAT HAVE I EFFING LEARNT?

So that's two projects down the tube, death by overscoping for the most part, and a lack of skills, particularly in the pixel art department. So why is Effing & Blinding going to be different? What lessons did I learn that will help me out this time around?

Firstly, scope control. I have a limited amount of time to finish this game, and it needs to be shortish. There are eight levels planned, a main character with limited actions, probably two dozen more characters with even fewer actions, 200ish items and objects, a typing minigames and all the extra GUI/menu mumbo jumbo. That sounds like a lot now I've typed it out, but it's less than a quarter of what those other ideas would've required, and it's also not all necessary to hit a milestone. I just need to finish and polish one and then I have a demo! Something out in the wild, even if it isn't a full game.

Pixel art is also still one of my weaker suits, but I've simplified by going top-down rather than iso, and I've been practising whenever I can. I know already that i'm going to have to redraw most of what I'm using at the moment because it's all very rough, but it's a starting point from which to improve!

Finally, the most important thing is time! The other two projects I was making on the evenings and weekends, letting it eat into my free time that should've been better spent elsewhere. This time, I have no job to distract me, and no excuse not to make a big dent in the project, even if I don't finish before I need the pounds pouring in again.

THIS WEEK I'VE MOSTLY BEEN ...

Last but not least, a little update on what I've been up to this week. Last week was all washing machines and making items do things with objects, but this week I did a bit of work on NPCs and the main character. Take a look at this video!

I'm embarrassingly proud of that, though do respect your elders. I hope that gave you a bit of insight into the path that led me here, and where that path will hopefully end. For more sweary antics, come back next week, or even sign up for the mailing list. Thanks for reading! Craig BTTNBSH