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#12 - New Little Jam Game - 31st January

Heeeeey, so I've been working on a game jam last two weeks and we're finally finished! Development got a bit bogged down as we all had previous commitments, but be sure to check it out below!

You are the sword of a great and powerful warlord, you're living life to its fullest until they decide to repent for their actions and turn to a life of peace, pathetic! Discarded into their basement, you find you can move, now you can kill all by yourself starting with your warlord-turned-hippie owner!

-- Jacob

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#11 - Updated - 10th December

Imagine saying you were gonna post more and then not posting more, how embarrassing. This is just a quick update to remind everyone I'm alive and show off a few things I've done over the past months.

Lately, I've been spending my free time learning the Unreal Engine, it has its ups and downs but it feels good to be learning something new. I'm creating a small multiplayer fighting game where players control different islands and ram them into each other. Maybe this won't go anywhere, but it is teaching me how to utilise the pairing of Unreal's blueprints and C++ programming as well as its network capabilities. Below is a small preview.

Two Honshu's fighting for territory inside a default Unreal Engine 5 Map

I've updated my website too, I felt it was a bit cartoonish before, but now it expresses the clean simplicity of a programmer, check it out here if you want to know more about me.

I'm coming to the end of my limit break mentorship, It has been a pleasure to talk to an industry professional and it helped inspire me to keep pursuing a career in the games industry. I'm planning to upload some of the Catlike Coding tutorials I did for this to my Itch.io, though I'm having difficulty using compute shaders on HTML5.

Hope to have a more substantial blog post soon, but for now this is all you get.

--Jacob

Mix of the Day: Cool album created by Andy Samberg's wife, Joanna Newsom, she has an incredible voice and it pairs wonderfully with her invocative lyrics.

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#10 - Well, how did I get here? - 2nd August

My Limit Break work has continued over the last month under the tutorage of John Kennedy, a vastly experienced programmer currently working as a producer at Auroch Digital. The opportunity to speak with him has been a pleasure and his guidance has uplifted my abilities.

I dipped my toes into learning the Unreal engine, looking at the sample game 'Lyra'.

The project acts as an engine of its own, allowing expansion of the base FPS game or reshaping it to entirely different genres. I followed a short tutorial that saw me implementing a new map and a new weapon to the FPS portion, this taught me a lot but I still feel the need to work on fundamental Unreal skills.

The bulk of this month has been spent continuing to traverse the world of Catlike Coding, this time following a tutorial on creating random noise. The first part involved creating a hash, using it to display a grid of varying colours and amplitude and allowing this to be wrapped around shapes.

Hash grid, with the same hash pattern transformed into a sphere

The rest of the tutorial saw the use of this hash to generate random noise which looks far more natural than the designs above, I'll do my best to explain how this was done, but to say it melted my brain is an understatement. The first task was creating value noise, which involves placing various points with various heights across a line, plane or cube (depending on how many dimensions you want) and then sloping between them. It creates a result that looks like a World of Warcraft mountain range.

See if you can tell which one of these images is a Value Noise plane and which is the Redridge Mountains!

This is better but still looks blocky, so the next step is to implement Perlin noise (also known as gradient noise). Instead of the same progression for each, each point uses the hash to create a unique function, making the slopes bumpy.

Extra settings were introduced allowing special types of noise to be generated. Tiled noise, creates a repeated pattern over a domain, fractal noise repeats the function at a smaller level and turbulent noise flips negative values so the whole pattern points up.

From left to right; tiled noise, fractal noise and turbulent noise

Then, an extra type of noise was added called Voronoi noise which looks angular and artificial. It's created by placing various points in a space and drawing to the nearest point. You can then combine this by misusing the closest point from the second closest to create a neat-looking pattern.

Voronoi noise using the second closet point minus the closest point

Finally, the tutorial saw the implementation of Simplex noise, which uses adding multiple, limited, values on a simple shape grid rather than a more complicated kind. The UK heatwave had started by this point so I apologise for this vague explanation, I had trouble understanding it myself.

Simplex noise, pretty but confusing

I just want to speak briefly about the fact that I am not a genius. A lot of my time with these tutorials has been reading something, not understanding it, reading it over and over, sorta understanding it, implementing it, not understanding it. Sometimes, however, you have to be dropped into the deep end and learn to swim to shore. My hope is trying my best against harder problems will make all problems easier in comparison. Will see, but until next time.

--Jacob

Mix of the Day: hasn't Balatro got a weirdly good soundtrack? It's all just one track, but it just sounds so funky, I'd highly recommend it.

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#9 - Freedoms and Limits - June 24th

It feels as though it's been far longer than it has been since I last posted, but so is the way of things. I've recently been accepted as a mentee for Limit Break, a scheme dedicated to connecting underrepresented groups interested in game development with mentors! I've had the pleasure to speak with a senior programmer in the industry and we've discussed what steps I can take over the next several months to push my abilities.

My first goal - which I've been focusing on this month - has been to push myself out of my comfort zone of 2D development and into creating 3D projects. I've been working through the tutorial "2.2 Basics" from Catlike Coding, these guides are made by Jasper Flick and they're utterly incredible at pushing your Unity knowledge!

(I highly suggest checking them out here)

So what have I learned? Well, the first part of the tutorial sees the creation of a 3D clock, this was all pretty straightforward and helped give my some practice with 3D meshes and the like.

From here on though, my mind would be pushed to its limit. The Catlike Coding tutorials are more than just tutorials, they are fountains of knowledge that delve deep into the heart of Unity. I would learn much about not just game creation in 3D, but optimization, shaders, GPU control, jobs and storing complex objects.

The next part of the guide saw the creation of a 3D graph, first along two axes and then into three, however, the bulk of this part was spent refining the program's running speed. I learned much about the difference between the Built-in Render Pipeline and the Universal Render Pipeline, creating shaders in both frameworks. This was pushed further by limiting communications between the CPU and GPU, allowing the GPU to do most of the work. In the end, you get a very cool looking visual which runs really well on my crappy little laptop.

The fps counter shows, from top to bottom, best FPS, average FPS and worst FPS

Finally, the tutorial takes a lot at creating a fractal, again emphasising efficiency. Originally, each part of the complete fractal was made up of a single object, but this was changed to everything being stored as one. This is further streamlined using Unity's job system, splitting tasks so that they may be run simultaneously. It finishes with some bits on randomness, colouring and calculating 3D rotations to create a final product that looks organic.

If you'll indulge me a second, I wanted to talk about the cool aesthetics that these tutorials have. Tinkering with cubes and spheres in big empty spaces makes me think of early CGI or the kind of work you'd find for Orion's Arm. There's a lot of beauty here, be proud of anything you create.

SCS - Steve Bowers

Anyway, this blog post was mostly to remind the world that I'm not dead, I'll be continuing to update this as I continue to work though the Catlike Coding tutorials and make further progress through Limit Break! See ya!

--Jacob

Mix of the Day: I've been enjoying this weird, funky video game music mix, it's got lots of music from fan games so it makes for a novel listen, the second to last track was a significant standout.

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#8 - YEEEEEEES! HELL YEAH! HEY COME ON BABY, COME ON, YES, COME ON! - 6th March

Yeah it's released, play it at the link below please and I will love you forever! Post any feedback you have anywhere, I'd love to hear it! Sorry for not posting in ages tee hee, I will proceed to not post for ages now until I come back with a new project.

Have fun!

Step into the black-and-white world of Creechymon,  there are no moral conundrums, no choices, just Creechy's. Explore the world using a text-based interface and battle other trainers through strategic planning and mastery of your Creechy's special abilities.

-- Jacob

Mix of the day: No clue man, go outside and kiss people will listening to Welsh Bubble gum pop!

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#7 - Magical Mystery Post - 4th January

Hello, I'm back from Christmas! So yeah, we're in the closing days for this project. I'm doing some preliminary work on my next project (Which I'm very excited about) but still making sure to finish features in Creechymon and iron out some bugs.

But lets not get depressed! Why don't we meet another Creechy, this one is all about being wacky and whimsical and full on crazy! The magic planty, Mmmmmmbf (Yeah that is their name)

Almost every ability they have leads to random effects, they'll give a random boost to your party at the start of the battle and apply a random debuff on attack.

Their special sees you casting a magical spell with Mmmmmmbf, they'll utter a word and you need to type as many different words that rhyme with it to channel the magical energy! The implementation is incredibly scuffed right now as the "spells" are just random status effects from within the code. Oh well! Here it is in action.

Oh yeah, and notice how Mmmmmmbf is a planty just like Vombebom from post #2? Well, that's a Creechymon's equivalent of type! Notice how the enemy above (A buggy type) deals boosted damage, that's because Buggy's are strong against Planty's! Remember type effectiveness is easy, it goes as follows.

Buggys' eat Plantys'

Plantys' absorb Creepies'

Creepies' scare Doggys'

Doggys' swallow Fishys'

And Fishys' drown Buggys'

I hope that all makes sense, Creechymon battling is incredibly important. Hope everyone is having a wonderful start to their new year, my theme for this year is "productivity" so I'm hoping to be getting more work done more efficiently, it should work out but it hopefully means more stuff to come! Alrighty, ta ra!

-- Jacob

Mix of the day: I've been really needing some "head empty" music to get me into the spirit of working, this has worked super well for that and I'd recommend it if you just want to think about nothing.

[loadofoldjuk]

#6 - Meet Idiot Fish - 21st December

So yeah this is my first update after, erm, three weeks, I have been doing stuff just none of it has been very exciting. However, with Christmas coming up, I figured I'd do a little update to prove I'm still alive and just show off some Creechy's!

So here we are, the sobbing grand marshal of the seven seas, meet Idiot fish! (The name is not a work in progress, it is perfect).

As you can see, this creature lives a pretty bad life, will you be the one to show it love and turn its life around? Hopefully no, It doesn't deserve it.

In battle, idiot fish acts as an impregnable wall while also reducing an opponent's morale, how depressing! Their special is fun little test of skill, sad thoughts will start spinning around the Creechy which you need to type in to activate. The more insults your hurl, the more damage the projectile will do at the end and the more defence Idiot Fish will gain! Have a look at it below.

This special is also interesting for how it works when facing an opponent's fishy friend, in this instance you'll have to enter the words to make it deal less damage! How cool!

Of course this creature may be sad, but it is sad that they can eventually accept the fact that everyone hates them and begin to grow as a fish, when this happens they'll evolve into

IDIOT WHALE

They'll get much stronger in every stat and as a bonus their increased size will make their tears much more dangerous. Check out the gif below to see an idiot's tears begin to fill up the battlefield and drown their opponent, nifty stuff! Wish my tears did that...

Anyway, I'm taking a break for Christmas, game should be in a finished state by mid-January, might get delayed who knows. Keep your eyes and ears pilled Creechy trainers. Happy holidays!

-- Jacob

Mix of the day: Oh wow look it's the greatest Christmas album of all time! Simply having wonderful christmas time, tee hee

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#5 - Looking cool Joker - November 30th

Hello people! I said I would upload more, then I lied, but now I have lied again! Here's an update I think is really neat.

This is my Vombebom Joker. He looks uncool.

But, by going into the "modify creechy" page, we can give Joker an item! Have a look below

Wow! Looking cool Joker

Objects can be moved using the arrow keys and scaled up and down with - and + allowing you to find the perfect fit! Here's a couple other examples of Creechys showing off their fashion sense!

Oooo a beautiful medal! Well done!

A dog collar?? To each their own I suppose...

A fishbowl!?!?!

Held items also have effects, sometimes this is very minor, for example glasses give a simple attack speed boost. Effects can be more flashy though, normally the Creechy above us, Akatarata, is a 'doggy' type but by giving them a fishbowl they gain the bonus type of 'fishy'! I'll explain types in a future dev diary along with hopefully sharing some more wacky held items.

I'm working on creating the third area for the game then releasing that as a sort of, proof of concept deal. Give me some space to work on other things while still having a technically complete game. Who knows, maybe one day I'll come back to it. Anyways, goodbye!

-- Jacob

Mix of the day: Huh guess I was just listening to Minecraft music today, you all know Minecraft music, it is wonderful. Go listen to it to remind yourself.

[loadofoldjuk]

#4 - Emoji Fever - November 10th

Helllooooo, sorry it's been a while but I'm back! What have I accomplished over the past like two weeks??? EMOJIS!

Beautiful aren't they. People who control creechys are the only ones who speak with emojis because they're sick in the head, that includes you! You can unlock emojis by defeating difficult bosses or finding them in the world!

This also means that you can name your creechys with emojis, for example, meet my beautiful Akatarata "😂😔😇"

Akatarata is all about big hits, they get extra damage after being attacked and boost the rest of your team's attack! Their special requires you to button mash as hard as you can to shout words of hate at your enemies

Finally, we can see their description below. Emojis will show up in the description as each is written by a Creechy professor who has the power of emojis.

Emojis are really small, but I think it adds a lot to the feel of the game, got this silly, manic energy which I like a lot, if you have any feedback on them let me know. I plan to do more substantial updates starting from now, the last few weeks have been busy but I'm back on schedule! Watch this space for more info!

-- Jacob

Mix of the day: This stuff is beautiful, makes you feel like you're in some weird alternate future or something. Making me fall asleep right now, good night!

[loadofoldjuk]

#3 - Baby Update - October 17th

Hello,

So I've been spending some time finishing some uninteresting things like saving and bugs and the like so there isn't anything exciting to show off, instead we'll have a look at some smaller concepts.

First off, what does the world look like?? Like white lines on a black background of course. The below screen gives you an idea of how navigating in the world of Creechymon goes.

Sadly, this isn't like that Louis Armstrong song, it's dull and grey and moving around requires typing, just like an old adventure game! You'll be going between multiple towns and helping solve problems using your Creechymon.

(Note that the art is temp, It was done by me and does not look very nice)

Now that we've got that set up, why don't we meet a new Creechymon, Krattokriller the Screamer buggy. Their bio reads;

"AAAAAA THEY SO NOISY AND SCREAMY >:(((( My poor ears are in so much pain, I will sit down and have a little cry to relieve myself"

Krattokrills love screaming, and being in a prolonged battle with them can really hurt an enemies ability to defend themselves. Here are their stats.

They're flimsy and slow, but give them enough time and they can break down even the toughest walls on an opponent's team. They're special is one of my favourites and I'd like to give a little backstory behind it.

This project started when I decided a text-based, creature-collecting game seemed like a good idea, but I was having trouble deciding how battles should work. At first, I had the idea of little scenarios, you could perform actions with creatures (such as swipe, or block or run) and little skits would play out on the screen. This would have been a look of work and would have made battling the same as exploring. It then came to me, the idea of giving commands to your party through a command line, the concept was a perfect pairing of text adventure and Pokemon battles.

Krattokrill's special is one of faves because it uses the medium of the command line to create something that would be otherwise unachievable. By holding down a key, the text you enter is spewed out by Krattokriller creating a scream effect!

I think the final effect could look a bit better, but over all, I just think it's neat. You can use different letters to provide different effects, but you'll have to discover those for yourself.

Anyway, I'm going to go back to looking after my Krat-

Hey, wait somethings happened to them?? They're in some sort of cacoon?? How odd, I wonder if this could be a part of their evolution, I guess we'll have to wait and see! ;)

-- Jacob

Mix of the day: Ah I do adore Aphex Twin, from what I've heard this mix is less fun if you don't have an ad blocker but if you do, it's brilliant. Seamless transitions and some tracks slowed down for extra viiiiiiibes.

[loadofoldjuk]

#2 - Evolution - October 12th

So being a Pokemon "inspired" game I felt that adding a way to change Creechy's into a new form was a must. I've tried to fix some nitpicks I had with Pokemon's evolution system while also giving my own spin on it.

Let me introduce you to one of my friends, Fresh Foul. They're a Creature known as a Vombebom, which the professor describes as so.

"MMmmmmm…. So tasty, I want to gobble them. I want them in my belly so bad. They all want them, so they scared. I will get them first >:)"

Some actual information on them is shown below, they're a bulky creature which can be difficult to deal with quickly.

Lets take a quick look at their special "unique blend", depending on their taste Vombebom's can have many unique properties! My Vombebom, Foul Fresh, has a foul taste which damages the opponent while also having a fresh taste which heals their HP. Here's it in action below.

This can have some powerful effects, but it's not very proactive. We can't change our nickname in battle so we're stuck with the effect we have.

That is until Vombebom evolves.

Introducing Vombebom's evolution, Quimblebip! Their description is;

"Many babies fall from this! I will just eat one >:), and maybe another, and another. They sit in a pot, lazy flipper!"

And their stats are the following.

Evolutions improve your Creechy's stats and passive, one stat will be decreased a little though (In this case Quimblebip has a lower attack) to give some fringe cases where you might want to choose Vombebom over their evolved form.

The most important change is the special though, every evolved Creature gets a remixed version of their old one, in this case, we can now create our own decoy Vombeboms! Best of all we can name them whatever we want allowing us to adjust to the battle at hand. Quimblebip will swap back in after our Vombebom dies.

There's no levels in this game, every Creechy evolves in its own unique way which you'll have to discover on your travels, some have incredibly esoteric methods so see if you can figure them out. My hope was to have evolution feel like a more defining moment, having it be more like the Pokemon anime where evolution happens at key moments.

I'm hoping to get another build to playtesters soon, and hopefully begin cracking on with some more areas and stuff. I've just realised that I've never shown the world part in this blog, meh, maybe I'll do it another day.

-- Jacob

Mix of the day: Help me just grind today, utterly spacey atmosphere. One of my friends described it as vaporwave, but focused on the vapor aspect. Perfect description.

[loadofoldjuk]

First Post - October 10th

So I always found when I was interested in a game that a regular blog post thingy would keep me engaged. Binding of Isaac blog, super smash dojo, that sorta stuff. So I am doing it, my desire for marketing has out weighed my social anxiety.

Here's a little clip of my current project, Creechymon, in development, as you can see it is very epic (But also unfinished). You'll travel the world collecting Creechies and learning to battle with them as well as love them. I'm hoping it can lead to some fun places, but really I made it as I wanted to do a Pokemon inspired game.

So what is a Creechy? Lets take a look at one of them a bit more deeply, introducing Huggyhuggy the friendly spooky. The professor of Creechyology describes them as a:

"a friendly thing, they sure does want a hug, however, they should probs be behind a window, they looks weird and all. bleh :P".

Which tells us next to nothing, so lets have a look at some more objective details.

Every creature has a stat value from 1 to 12. From top to bottom, the stats are; attack, attack speed, health, defence, speed and luck. For example, Huggyhuggy is very speedy but is weak when it comes to attack and defence.

There are three kinds of unique properties each Creature holds, again from top to bottom they are; passive, active and special. Huggyhuggy gains an extra 10% speed at the start of a battle and has double the attack speed when swapped in.

Creatures also have a unique special, a little minigame to add some input to the battles. Below is the special for Huggyhuggy where they'll ask you questions about the creatures in your party!

The better you know your friends, the more powerful they can become!! There are many more Creechys each with unique abilities but we'll take a look at them another time.

I've currently been focusing on completing the AI for the game at the moment and allowing some basic decision-making. The program will run through possible actions and determine which one would be the most effective at this moment. The trainer will then either select the best possible action or choose a random action based on their IQ value, the higher this is, the more likely they are to make a good decision. Feelings can also be assigned to their party creatures so that some will be considered fodder or a vital tool to add some extra depth.

I hope this system is deep enough but it's something I'll have to find out through testing, if you have any thoughts on this method please let me know!

Anyway, thank you for making it this far is this first little blog post, I hope to keep this up but who knows, maybe I'll get bored or forget or something worse.

-- Jacob

Mix of the day: Good chill tunes to work to, never finished Yume Nikki as it seems like a game you gotta be SUUUUPER stoned to properly enjoy, music is nice though, especially recommend celling.