polisummer

[polisummer]

    I haven’t posted progress in a while because I am getting a new demo sorted out but I recently got several flags against my tumblr from this new situation we find ourselves in. I plan to start posting frequently again come the new year when I have more to show but in the mean time I will drop my twitter here. I will update my tumblr but I will also be paying much more attention to my twitter than ever before so you can follow there if you would like.

https://twitter.com/ThirdKeyOfSun

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PANIC

Everyone and their mom in a panic about tumblr so I GUESS I should be in a panic too

https://twitter.com/Weaver_Dev

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The timeline where we can realistically pet Kobolds has never been closer! Praise lord Gaben!

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Rooms & decorations!

Each room transitions fancily and room objects can have their colors changed or have a statue placed on them

These will affect a beauty stat which determines how much $$$ people are willing to pay to stay in that room for the night

Next up is filth to clean up and a menu, then I’m moving on to employees! Shortly after employees are working I will polish it up a bit and post a demo!

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made with babylonjs

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June Updates

Another tiny game is done!

Why? Where is Arborgore? What about Smol RPG? Still being worked on. I do freelance programming for other people’s games in-between my job and my own games in-progress. It’s tough when things take so long. And there are less things you can show off since all of the progress is in code. So occasionally I make these tiny games for a game jam or a contest or something. They do not require much more than a week of dev time. It’s something that keeps me motivated and gives feedback on how my skills are improving. (And hopefully is enjoyed by someone for the small game it is.)

https://polisummer.itch.io/vauquer

But back to cramming for deadlines. I’m going to Anime Expo in a month and hope to have not too many projects looming over my head.

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The game is now on newgrounds too!

A Small Game is Completed!

Twenty Forty Ecchi is now done! The UI artwork was done by FlynnFlann and the character artwork was done by Bizu. Both are excellent graphic designers (and nice people) at TinyHat Studios. You can play the finished game on itch here. It will go up an newgrounds shortly as well.

That completes my side game that started from a game jam all those months ago. The development on Arborgore is still happening but it has been going slow. I think I need a proper pixel artist to make up for my sub-par ability and do the semi Aria of Sorrow style justice. (They will be paid of course.) I apologize for the inconvenience but I will absolutely finish Arborgore. I hope people will continue to have interest in the game and stay with it a little longer.

[polisummer]

A Small Game is Completed!

Twenty Forty Ecchi is now done! The UI artwork was done by FlynnFlann and the character artwork was done by Bizu. Both are excellent graphic designers (and nice people) at TinyHat Studios. You can play the finished game on itch here. It will go up an newgrounds shortly as well.

That completes my side game that started from a game jam all those months ago. The development on Arborgore is still happening but it has been going slow. I think I need a proper pixel artist to make up for my sub-par ability and do the semi Aria of Sorrow style justice. (They will be paid of course.) I apologize for the inconvenience but I will absolutely finish Arborgore. I hope people will continue to have interest in the game and stay with it a little longer.

[polisummer]

Whoops! This was supposed to go out earlier.

The UI updates for Twenty Forty Ecchi are mostly done now. The color scheme shifted from dark blues and purples to a warmer pinks and oranges. I want to use the purple motif for a later game. The number one goal of the redesign was to abandon all Unity defaults but still keep that curved compact look. It kinda makes me wonder if a tablet version would be cool.

I’m also pleasantly excited for Demo Day 20 coming up on May 4th. There looks like some cool games will be there!

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Something I learned the past few years is “do not try to be a one-man-army when you do not have to”. This is doubly true if you have some kind of perfectionism like me. Nothing will ever really be good enough to release so you end up with (literally) a few dozen near complete projects on your hard drive and too much fear to show them to anyone. I’m fighting against that with increasing success. I remind myself to do just one tiny thing today and then do something else the next day without looking back until the feature is done.

So, by checking off tiny goals, one of them was an art update for a side lewd project I did. The gameplay is as complete as it will be but the art could be better. It’s called Twenty Forty Ecchi. Here’s a peak at the new art.

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I’ve decided to change Smol RPG into a first-person dungeon crawler. Why? Because grid-based games + recycling assets is wildly easier to manage. The game will now be like Etrian Odyssey but more concentrated and psuedo-retro like old CRPGs. A party of four characters chosen from six classes. The class affects what weapon types can be used, which spells can be learned, and the character’s stat progression. The weapon types have their abilities and advantages in battle and are able to be used only by certain classes with some overlap. Like DQ8. Each class learns unique abilities and possibly spells at different rates. Many of which are used to assist team members. The actual magic system is inspired from Wizardry’s, plus a lot of simplification so it’s easy to pick up and use. There is also a time, day, and month calendar that draws inspiration from Morrowind and Etrian Odyssey. Some random events can only be seen on certain days/seasons. Enemies and esoteric spell properties are affected by the time of day. Some dungeons change during the seasons. And so on. Lastly, the alchemy will still be in there of course. That will operate similar to the system in Witcher 2.

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Just wanted to show this amazingly cute (and smug) low poly 3D model that Ludomyth made of Lore! You can see more of their works and follow their progress @ https://twitter.com/ludomyth !

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Since updating Arborgore with crossbows I went to tie up my other projects that I showed off in some capacity before. It was a long process, with a number of setbacks along the way. But between hacking away at those I helped out a number of people with their own projects. Some of these were quirky web apps. A handful were visual novels of some type. And a few were growing Unity games. Working like this became almost sustainable income on the side, and it was starting to take over my personal goals and work. I guess the positive of this was that I could always come back to my work after building a name for myself all over.

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Remember that clicker game? It turns out clicker games are deceptively hard! To keep interesting anyway. The base code is simple math, and then you have to think of a dozen subversions to keep the game interesting while you play it. So I spent time enhancing the visual novel element by adding Live 2D, made the art style my more comfortable pixel-ly look, and added more juice to the UI interactions. Then I started prototyping some tile sliding puzzles to add in and I thought, “Am I even making a clicker game anymore?”. I set the project down to re-plan this and worked on simpler things. What do people really like about clicker games? What do I really like about clicker games? I want it to appeal to people who enjoy the genre and still be fun to come back to. I’ll have to think about this.

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I posted it elsewhere a while ago, but my license to 3DS Max expired. I was using it for some character animations, and environment modeling. Since then, Blender was what I used for my personal projects. I recently got into Pro Builder tools for Unity, and it’s like a much simpler 3DS Max but already in-engine! My favorite part is the much-desired grid snapping for 3d objects. The Smol RPG dungeons can get as complicated as I wanted them to now. 

ღ (*~▽~)

The next demo for Smol RPG will be the Dungeon Demo. I had a crazy idea to do procedural generation, but for a game like this the handmade touches are really important.

Examining older RPGs like Wizardry, Daggerfall, Ultima, Breath of Fire, Suikoden II, Valkyrie Profile and more recent ones like World of Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy XIII, and Final Fantasy XV has helped me to put my work in perspective. Smol RPG is still intended to be “smol”. The goal is to learn each part of an RPG and combine it into a short one that I would love to play over and over again.

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I’ve had a draft of a giant post sitting on my computer for months now. I just continued to add to it little by little as I discovered something new or hit another minor milestone in on of my projects. I kept myself from posting it because I felt like it wasn’t ready. At some point I realized it would never be ready. There would always be one more thing I wanted to complete so I wouldn’t disappoint people. But that way of thinking is what delayed this tumblr blog for a year.

（；へ：）So after writing a lot more code than is healthy in such a short span of time, I’m going to update this tumblr with parts of that post. A few days at a time. If I put up a giant wall of text no one is going to read it. This is the first step to getting back to regular posting.

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Inside of a giant mechanical flying fish. Cozy but comfortable Added in a few stills by request from: @smirkingravens