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I’ve been toying around in the background with the idea of remaking one of my earlier games, Eviction Novice, and I am basically just giving in to my strong desire to have tweened UI right now.

Ultimately, though, my aim with this project is to show how much I’ve improved in roughly a year. Even if this project is incredibly bare-bones right about now, I’ve already been making some major improvements when it comes to presentation.

This game will also probably have environments that aren’t just stretched Unity cubes for the ground. That’d be neat.

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I wrote Sabine’s route!

Snowbound Blood Volume 8: Of Marble And Speakers, Shattered is now available for Windows and macOS.

https://vasterror.itch.io/snowbound-blood

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Minor update to the game: there’s now half a second of delay between death and respawn! It's an incredibly minor feature (and this does technically make it harder to speedrun), but in the end we decided that it would be better for the game's feel to give the player time to process the fact that they've died in the first place.

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BLINK BLADE IS OFFICIALLY OUT!

So I’m going to talk a lot about the last five months because I’ve got some stuff to talk about.

This project is one of the first games I’ve worked on that’s been in development for more than a month and a half (Snowbound Blood being the other project, but I’m only on the writing team for that one), and quite frankly, it really shows. This is a game that I have gotten to polish to high hell and back, and now that I know how to use particle systems, I have gotten to do so much polish. I think I love polish actually.

What’s especially surprising to me is the fact that we got the game done in time. We technically had a minor handicap - we’d started work on an entirely different project for a month (out of the six months allotted for the assignment this game is for, mind you!) before pivoting and shifting gears towards a smaller scoped project.

By the way, never make an RPG in six months.

Before this project started, I was admittedly somewhat cynical about our chances of creating an original experience -- and that isn’t to say that I still am not aware of how rare a truly “unique” idea is, because that’s basically impossible these days -- but something I think this project taught me is that striving for a fun game mechanic first and foremost is still easily doable. I think another reason we didn’t end up going for that earlier RPG project was because the mechanic sounded cool on paper, but didn’t really work out? Rest in peace, sweet prince, you were too good for this world.

I’m actually incredibly proud of this project! It’s the first big game I’ve gotten to animate for consistently, especially with a fidelity of this caliber. I’m used to having a fairly major hand in other projects I’ve worked on, since I’ve mostly been the one responsible for creating/maintaining itch.io pages and creating the final builds of games, so I’m also glad to have had some assistance from other people for marketing purposes.

The reception we’ve received for the game has also been absolutely incredible. This game has definitely received the most compliments out of any of my personal game projects and I can chalk that up to both the primary gameplay mechanic and the level of polish we had the time to put into the game. There were even some seniors in the industry who said that we could just finish the game and potentially sell it?? That still blows my mind and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon.

We may have to build it in a version of the game that isn’t in the educational version of Unity, though. We did kind of forget about that.

Something I do kind of regret a little is having a similar to problem to Sonic’s homing attack, in which the game flows less like a gracious dolphin soaring above the water and instead has a mechanic that, while it brings you forward in space, it stops your momentum unless you hold the button yourself. This does help with the aiming portion of the game, which is probably for the best, but the constant “start-stop-start-stop-start-stop” doesn’t quite match up with the level of flow I envisioned in the game’s initial conception and I want to see what it would feel like to be able to just keep your momentum going.

Then again that may have also not have worked out. Oh well, whatever happened happened.

Anyway, all rambling aside, I really hope you all enjoy the game! We put a lot of time and work into it and I’m very excited to hear what you think of it. Please spam me with details, I will read every last word.

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So it’s no secret that we have a dog you can pet in our game, but did you know we have SIX dogs you can pet in our game???

This here’s a little secret room that you can only get to if you get an S rank on all of the levels in the game. Why? Because if you get an S rank, you get a little box of dog treats.

If you get enough dog treats, the dog out front will unlock the door for you and let you pass.

The significance of these five dogs is that these dogs represent all the devs working on this game. I’m the dog on the very left and I’m the cutest one.

Of course, the fact that we’re working on the secret dev room means that progress is going great on the rest of the levels! We’ve got a whopping twelve levels now, if you count the tutorial and end boss.

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I’m working on an opening cutscene for the game that I think we’re now re-renaming back to Blink Blade? Whatever the technicals are, I would like to stress how glad I am that the Unity Timeline exists, because I just found out that it’s a thing I have access to and I really wish I’d known about it earlier.

The trickiest part about making the cutscene so far is making the characters actually move around (both characters end up walking off screen) - I ended up cutting corners and just making their in-game transforms move as a part of custom animations, even if it may have been more robust to set a function for them to move horizontally and activate it via code. This is the only place I’m actually going to be doing such a thing, and I doubt anybody’s really going to be able to tell in the final game.

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(note: these animations are unpolished and unfinished and won’t necessarily represent the final product!)

We’ve got two weeks until the deadline for beta, and things are starting to shift into focusing on the final boss battle that is probably definitely going to make it into the game, hopefully. The boss is going to go through a whole bunch of different gameplay phases, and to signify that, we decided to have some real twisted fun with his head.

Right now, there’s not much happening with his body, which definitely does need to be addressed soon, but with beta so close we’re focusing on getting something functional in over something that looks nice for the time being. Sprite sheets can be edited pretty easily once they’re imported into Unity, anyhow.

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Introducing: the IMP. This li’l troublemaker will summon balls of energy (probably HAUNTED and CURSED energy) and fire it at you wherever you’re standing at the time. I’ve compiled a quick little before and after we added in the proper animation and effects.

There’s three parts to the “summoning” animation: the surrounding particles, the charging orb and the circular flash for the actual shot.

We played around with the colours for this animation quite a bit. While we initially considered red eyes for the chanting imp, we figured it might clash a little too much with the rest of his red body and especially outline, and decided to go for a bright yellow instead. Originally, the chanting imp had yellow surrounding particles for this animation.

However, we decided that the discrepancy between the yellow particles and the red shot were a little too much, and so we changed the particles to be more of a light red to match.

The imp’s charge time is a variable that we can change, but as much as I’m embarrassed to admit it, the animation is vaguely set in stone - what I mean by that is that the growing orb while the imp is charging is a single-particle burst with a lifetime. The lifetime can be changed, but it isn’t automatically calculated or anything.

Thankfully though, the muzzle flash(?) for the bullet shot is just spawned as soon as the bullet itself is spawned, so it HAS to be in time with it. This is also the source of the sound effect, so that the sound gets quieter if the player is further away. Given that right now, the imps are always firing, even when way off screen, this is definitely for the best.

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Update to gravity particle systems: they’re no longer constant, because we decided that we only really need to give that visual spice when gravity flips as opposed to just. Constantly. All the time. They’re also way faster now, so there’s less of a delay when the flip occurs.

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Also worth noting, we’ve got gravity flipping in the game! We wanted to make it even clearer than it already would be if we just saw the player running along the ceiling, so I got to work on some minor particle effects. These colours probably definitely aren’t final, but I did want to show that I intend to play with a colour dichotomy as well as a difference in direction.

Now that I think about it, maybe changing the particles to little arrows pointing up/down wouldn’t be the worst idea to make the idea even more colour-blind... I’ll play around with that and see how things go.

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Walkin’ in the Dark

This week was mostly spent working on a walk cycle for our game’s antagonist! This was my first draft. The main thing to note is his right arm (our left), which is still hanging up in the air because that’s how it is in his idle sprite.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite translate as well to a walk cycle, so we made the decision to have his arm move behind his back.

This is better, but I was told that the arm looked a little static. I think I ended up misinterpreting this because I ended up going a little too extra down below?

Basically, the angle on the elbow ended up being too sharp and I was told to just angle his arm down a little. I was also told to offset the movement of the cane so it wasn’t synced up to his legs perfectly.

This is our final product for the time being!

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Fun with Enemy Design, Feat. Me and Also the Colour Red

Something you may have noticed is that we outline enemies in RED - we have doubts that anybody would immediately assume that these weird evil looking creatures are foes, but just in case, we wanted to hammer home that they’re bad news for you.

The problem is when we want to make an enemy that is red, and give that enemy a red outline.

(concept art by our freaking excellent concept artist)

When we were designing this demon imp enemy, we didn’t exactly realise at first that we might not be walking into a smart decision.

This was my initial sprite rendition, which looks pretty alright on its own, in my opinion. The problem comes in when...

The outline comes in and changes everything.

On top of the colour issues, there are also quite a few spots on the sprite where the gaps are JUST small enough to not leave any spaces in the pixel outline. Unfortunately, because the outlines in our game are via shader, we can’t really edit the outline. What we ended up opting for instead was to spread the sprite’s limbs out, maybe make him a little bigger, and more importantly change his palette.

Making him more of a darker purple colour did help with the outline issue, but there’s still quite a few concentrated areas of red.

So all I did was make the sprite just a touch bigger and make sure his limbs weren’t so clustered together. It really helps with his silhouette, and also has the added bonus of making him a clearer target for players, since our gameplay revolves a lot around clicking things with relative precision.

Now the question is whether or not the clustered outline issue will resurface when it comes time to animate this guy.

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And here’s the gargoyle enemy with a bunch of effects added! I don’t have a video with sound effects in it just yet, but even still, I’m digging that camera shake and particle system.

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Gargoyle Musings

Our team’s working on some new enemies for I Have Your Sword! At the moment, I’ve been getting to work on a gargoyle enemy that will be responsible for blasting shockwaves around the place by smashing the ground like some kind of rogue stone Hulk.

Originally, we were going to go for a bipedal look to a.) make the gargoyle look more animalistic and b.) allow us to go for a bulkier look than you typically see with gargoyles and their gangly thin bodies.

However, this side-on design didn’t quite end up working out because the gargoyle sends shockwaves in both directions, and we decided that we didn’t want the gargoyles to be able to move around to avoid the confusion of how a heavy stone creature can fly.

Having a stationary gargoyle solved both of those issues, and also made them feel more like a stage hazard than a living enemy (which works well for us because you can’t even kill the enemy in the first place). This front-on angle posed its own problems, however. Since the gargoyle is monochromatic and facing forward, there were a lot of same-colour body parts in front of each other that really made it tricky to get a good silhouette. Thankfully, this was solved by just putting outlines and shading in the torso, since the legs don’t require much attention.

Looking at this animation now, I’m tempted to add in some secondary animation with the tail and make some tweaks to the gargoyle’s hands, but ultimately I feel as if this design is much more reminiscent of a gargoyle than our earlier rendition. We won’t be having text to explain what this particular enemy is, so getting as much readability as possible is key.

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You can now officially pet the dog in our game.

That’s really all there is to say on the matter.

...Except not really because I got some things to say about how the system works.

As it stands right now, the two game objects animate separately as opposed to merging into a single animated game object. The idea behind this was making it easier to loop the animation if the both of them ended up not having an animation that matched the others’ length. But THEN the problem was making sure the player was facing the right direction when he was petting the dog so he wasn’t just petting the air.

I ended up using a raycast that hovered just barely in front of the player to make sure that the player could only pet something directly ahead! Once I worked out how to use raycasts, that is. And once I discovered that most of my problems stemmed from the fact that I’d accidentally made the dog’s hitbox too small.

It took me two hours to realise it.

We didn’t get up to much else this week, but I did also work out a system for making music fade in and out between scenes that you could expect to hear in the next playtestable build of the game!

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This week on Excuse Me Sir, I Have Your Sword, I put an alien dog in the game.

Look at him go.

He’s got two idle animations he can randomly swap between: tail wagging and barking (excuse the Undertale sample). In a perfect world, I’d force the animations to wait until the idle bob was finished before transitioning, but I had to get this finished quickly for the weekly show-off we’re having this week and couldn’t figure out how to do it in time. I’ll get on that soon, though!

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Incredibly minor update, but I spent the day making sure that we have the ability for hovering tooltips! I’m not gonna lie, I love me some time to play around with UI, especially when it comes to UI animations. The system’s still got a few kinks to work out (for example, editing a single tooltip between the two instead of spawning and tracking two completely separate game objects), but it’s definitely a good start. The UI tracks well with the positions of the game objects, and I’ve added in functionality for mouseover as well!

I should probably be a little less proud of this than I am.