dungeonboy

[dungeonboy]

Pixel art is hard.

[dungeonboy]

[dungeonboy]

[dungeonboy]

oh shit waddup

Working QA and learning C++ isn’t very showy, so I’ve kind of dipped from AGDG and Tumblr. But I miss my little steps into gamedev, and I ran into something neat in the last few weeks. Pico-8 and the Pocket C.H.I.P.!

If you don’t know, Pico-8 is a fantasy console for making and playing games. It uses a form of Lua, and also includes all kinds of tools for creating art, maps, sound, music, and everything else you need to completely finish a game.

The Pocket C.H.I.P. adds a touchscreen, keyboard, and other features to the $9 C.H.I.P. computer. Pico-8 comes pre-installed on the Pocket C.H.I.P., allowing for GAME DEV IN YOUR POCKET!

The simplicity of Pico-8 and the portability of the Pocket C.H.I.P. will let me work on little games alongside my work and studies. I’ll be posting progress just like the good ol’ days, and hopefully have some completed games to show for it.

Good to see you again!

[dungeonboy]

Update

The new job is going really well! It's been a couple of months and I'm still here and I'm still getting paid full time, which is great. It's weird to be surrounded by people who are into games all day. It's good energy and it's making me feel more confident about making games a bigger part of my life.  It's been pretty difficult working dev into a full work week, but I'm getting a little better at it every day. If I can work full time and keep devving on my independent projects in my free time, I will be 100% satisfied with my quality of life. Stay tuned. Also, approaching 300 followers. You guys did not slow down when I got this job. Thanks for the interest, I'll have something pretty to shove in your face soon!

[dungeonboy]

plushmayhem said:

Nicalis is currently teasing Rebirth for Wii U so, no, it doesn't look like Nintendo is currently saying "no" to BoI:Re due to religious reasons. https://twitter.com/tyronerodriguez/status/519270613836652545 I can believe again <3 I thought they would never reconsider.

[dungeonboy]

I’VE TAKEN A BIG LEAP AND DECIDED TO GO FULL TIME ON MAKING PLUSHIES! Thank you ever for your support and giving me the confidence to take this leap!

As such I’m making a new commission post, and I would very much appreciate it spread as far and wide as you could manage! 

I am currently only offering Chibis but I hope to expand my options once I get my feet on the ground!

What are you commissioning from me?

Chibi plushies of your favorite character or OC!

A lovingly hand made, high quality doll

10 inches tall!

What are the costs?

The very base cost is 65$! This is for a very basically detailed/outfitted doll(like a plain dress). For a better pricing example, most dolls come to 80$(common)-100$(fancier designs).

Shipping costs 14$ to Canada and America.

I ship outside North America, but please contact me so I can get a quote for you

All prices are in USD and through Paypal

How do I order one?

important -> Get reference images for your character! <- important

Send an email to plushmayhem(at)gmail(dot)com with your references!

Once we agree on the price, full payment must be given before I work on your doll. (I have no problem slotting you in before payment but I’ll have to skip over you if you don’t get to me by the given date!)

What else so I need to know?

I currently only have natural skin tones. I might be able to do pastels, but they will be extra and you definitely need to contact me about it. No promises yet okay!

The hair of my plushies are most commonly felt, and sometimes fleece. I am offering minky hair(like the light blue haired girl) for 10$ extra. Minky is a very soft, lightly furred material that is amazing to the touch, and usually comes in more vibrant colours. (I do not have a guaranteed stock of colours so please ask. I will always have red and white though)

IMPORTANT: I ONLY TAKE ESTIMATES OVER EMAIL, NOT TUMBLR THANK YOU

PRICES CAN CHANGE AT ANY TIME SO PLEASE CHECK THIS POST’S ORIGIN TO SEE IF IT’S BEEN UPDATED! Nothing will be changed for a good while so don’t worry. (It is Nov 5th at time of writing this for reference)

Remember, Christmas is coming up so if you’re looking for a perfect gift get your order in soon!

[facebook] [store] 

[dungeonboy]

Combat in Dungeon Boy

I'm working hard on finishing combat! I don't really want to show it off until it's completely finished, but since I'm in the process of implementing a finished concept, I thought I might take some time to describe how combat will actually work in the game. At least for now!

                                                    Certain rooms in the dungeon contain Encounter Slimes, which are inspired by the Ghosts from Pac-Man and chase the player relentlessly through the room. In contrast to random encounters that halt your player character in place and break the action at unannounced moments, I think representing encounters with entities that can interact with and pressure the player adds a lot of decision-making and risk-reward elements to an otherwise simple mechanic.

These encounters give no experience and no reward to the player. This is to make sure there's no incentive to grind encounters whatsoever. It's a big decision, and there are a lot of reasons not to agree with it. Experience, gold, and other goodies for winning a battle feel good. However, I want the emphasis of encounters to be survival and not reward. Every encounter has the potential to damage and even down members of your party, decreasing your chances of making it further in the game. Fight at your own risk! Now, this poses an obvious problem. What's to stop a player from avoiding every encounter? If there's no experience or reward, why risk my party members in combat? Well, you can do that if you want to! If you really think the best thing is to avoid as many encounters as you can and try to be as cautious as possible, I want that to be a viable strategy. Especially if your party is particularly weak or damaged. HOWEVER, I also want to reward people who decide to face danger head-on. So, in every room where encounters spawn, there will be ONE locked room. The only way to UNLOCK that room is to find the key, which is dropped by one of the encounters in the room. Any time you walk into an encounter room, you'll have to think to yourself: "Can I risk it? How badly do I want in that room?" Nobody likes skipping things they could otherwise explore, so I think it's a good enough carrot to entice people to fight.

There are also special encounters involving plot-related characters, these may drop special equipment and unlock new playable characters. 

Now, for how combat actually works.

The player team consists of you and two minions. The core premise of the game is through politics and power forcing your way through an evil dungeon and attempting to overthrow the resident dungeon lord. You'll have to recruit minions along the way, and you can recruit ANY minion you run into, though some are more straightforward than others. The enemy team can be anything from one to six enemies. 

Participants take turns in order based on a speed stat. I tried to keep the process of a turn as simple as possible in order to keep gameplay intuitive. On a friendly turn, you can FIGHT, use an ITEM, or TALK.

FIGHT lets you choose from one of six moves, which you can set outside of battle. The current plan is to be able to swap these out freely if you have more than six, but not within combat. Each move can have one of a number of expected target patterns, such as a single target attack, a row attack, a full-party attack, and friendly targetting. 

Damage is calculated with a simple formula that subtracts or adds a offense/defense contest modifier from a base damage value. Certain moves are affected more or less by weaknesses and stat modifiers than others. An attacker's STR or POW stat is contested with the defender's appropriate damage resistance (crush, fire, evil, etc.) and multiplied by a scalar representing how much of a factor resistance should be for that move. That number is combined with the move's base damage number to create a true damage amount. Other modifiers come into play with special attacks, but those are more designed case-by-case. Whether or not a condition is applied to the defender is handled the same way.

Items can be used within combat one at a time, and take up an entire turn. Unlike moves, which are limited to six in combat, all items are available for use. However, once you use an item it's gone forever, and they're not that easy to come by! Deciding when to use an item and being as efficient as possible is an emphasis of the game. Items can have various effects including health and mana recovery, one-battle stat buffs, consumable moves, and conversation effects.

Conversing with the enemy is the one non-standard mechanic that will be included in combat, and will be where I spend most of my time trying to get right. It's shamelessly inspired by Shin Megami Tensei, but I feel like it could have been taken further in the series. It's a cool mechanic but always felt a little shallow - more of a combination lock than a conversation. I need to play a few VNs and other text-based games to figure out how I want the dialogue trees to work! I really want every minion to have personality, IMP's created some great characters and I really want them to come alive when you talk to them! Oh, and there's no running away in a dungeon. Sorry. Everything here knows its way around better than you do.

Anyway, transparent excuse to take a break from dev - over. 

[dungeonboy]

It seems I've hit 250 followers while nodevving at my new job.

I'll get some work done this weekend so I have something to show.

The job is going very well by the way! We had a costume contest today, the cosplayers stole the show.

[dungeonboy]

I have a bunch of non-AGDG followers, I'm sure they'll be interested! Check it out, this is one of the good ones!

So, uh, here’s my Kickstarter for Aerannis. ( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ektomarch/aerannis )

For those who don’t know, it’s a game about an assassin in the distant future. She resides in an all-woman society, and being a trans woman, she’s often treated as subhuman. After a series of unusual missions, she comes to realize that the government is entirely controlled by some mysterious shapeshifters that’ve been guiding humanity’s fate since the dawn of time. She sees that these entities are steering society towards collapse, but she has to wonder: does she have any duty to save those who look down upon her, or should she let these creatures steer society into a new era?

basically it’s lots of killing and sneaking around and HUGE BOSSES and gender identity issues and politics are interwoven

For anyone wanting to know more about the plot (or potential journalists), here’s a link: http://ektomarch.com/aerannis/

so yeah reblog and share if you’re interested

Forgot to add the Greenlight link: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=334030576

[dungeonboy]

Now my activity is a fox.

[dungeonboy]

New job is going really well. It's going to pound in the principles of polish and bug hunting, great tools to have. More progress coming this weekend. I'm going to try to work in an hour or so of dev every night, and full days on weekends. Starting now I don't plan on working anywhere or on anything that isn't game related, fingers crossed I can keep that up.

[dungeonboy]

New Job?

Got called today by a company in my area that does QA for games, I responded to one of their ads a few weeks ago. I start tomorrow as a full-time software analyst. Great news, it's just happening so fast it hasn't sunk in yet!

[dungeonboy]

Do you love the vidya?

Want to see some cool ass gamedev projects?

Search agdg on tumblr

[dungeonboy]

This game only uses 4 tones, so pallet swaps are easy. When you call the shader you give it pairs of colors consisting of a source value and a target value, and the two are swapped throughout the next draws. It can easily be scaled up to any number of colors though, if you're going with a lot of colors it might be best to work in greyscale or a default pallet and save the values of those colors for the shader to reference. If you're applying the swap to the entire screen it's easier, you can draw everything to a surface and just apply the shader to the surface.

New shader can replace any color with any other color. Now I can silhouette sprites, use different colors of text, and eventually offer customizable pallets. I could probably come up with some cool visual effects too, like swapping the lights and darks for a ‘negative’ filter. New toys are fun!

[dungeonboy]

New shader can replace any color with any other color. Now I can silhouette sprites, use different colors of text, and eventually offer customizable pallets. I could probably come up with some cool visual effects too, like swapping the lights and darks for a 'negative' filter. New toys are fun!

[dungeonboy]

My activity is a dinosaur.