#.......... and i recently started to want to do gamedev again too

[ganondoodle]

been wanting to give demise and the gang a little bit of a rework but my day was spent speedrunning work, then helping my parents dig through a ton of earth in the garden trying to get plant roots out that explosively overtook everything last year .... and then spent whatever time i had left building a house in the sims (it crashed three times :)) )

(also the new tumblr update looks like ass,,,,,,,,,,,,)

[collapsedsquid]

Been following Star Citizen since the start, I picked up a ticket when it first announced, it was dirt cheap and promised a lifetime subscription, I figured they might regret that later and regardless of how it turned out I knew I wanted to watch the ride. I knew the developer, I had fun with Freelancer. I was in for the space-flight/trading sim of the future.

I also knew Chris Roberts was prone to never finish things, Freelancer was released but not finished. With him running the show and answering to nobody, I knew that could get even worse. I knew that that is part of the ride I was in for, I had to watch this crash. I keep on it on-and-off to watch how it goes.

Star Citizen has been playable for quite a while in some form, even if it has yet to reach "1.0." It's difficult to play though, I couldn't play it when it first released because I didn't have a computer good enough. When I got a new computer, I could play it for a bit but then after a point became unable to play it again because time progressed, it's graphics improved to more than my computer could handle. I haven't tried it on my most recent machine. One of the reasons for that is that I didn't ever find it fun. Flying felt awkward to me and the activities were kinda shit. Possibly because I didn't shell out more cash to Chris Roberts to upgrade from the starter ship to save me from terrible grind.

The real thing Star Citizen has become though is Content. Over the years they have churned out so much video, some of discussions of development, some of it sort of in-universe ads for the ships, some of just sort of in-universe tv shows, a little extended riff they did off of Top Gear that has gone on for a long time now. Can get the sense that people are funding a youtube channel rather than any actual gamedev.

Yeah one of the things that the game has become famous for is selling in-game ships for thousands of dollars. For a game that develops slow-as-hell, can't call it "vaporware" because it is playable, but yeah that is a lot of money. One of the weirdest things about it though is the fan community They have quite a large one that also puts out reams of content, the people who spent tons of money showing off their purchases. The ships look quite nice, quite detailed. Still though, seems a poor purchasing decision. Still wonder how close they were to making those ships NFTs.

So there's this thing that happens with Open-World games. People feel bitter about open-world games. People still buy them though. One of the things you notice in the fan communities before release though is that people read way too much into the developer's press releases. Developer says a few noncommittal words and fans will spin off this whole imaginary thing that they think they will be able to do, man it's gonna be so awesome, the best game ever. Except no, that idea would be infinitely expensive, that's not in the game. In Star Citizen people built massive stories about the ships and how they would fly and interact when they were merely a 2d image and a blurb. Man this is not just an open-world game, this is an MMO. You know that shit has to get balanced and tweaked to hell. The game systems are barely there. You have no reason for believing any of this.

They're pushing for the 1.0 release now. They did a big announcement that it would be "player-centric." When I first heard that I scoffed at that as meaningless buzzwords. It does have a meaning though, it basically means "we're going to have as few NPCs as possible" Yeah this does seem like an attempt to try cut back on the content to get the thing out the door.

As another part of that they had "Squadron 42" the single-player campaign they promised from the get-go. They had a whole extended trailer that showed off the first mission recently. The whole thing was weird. So Star Citizen, the multiplayer game I played, the Chris Roberts game, was a space-sim, another in a classic if out-of-trend genre. As development progressed they started adding guns and FPS elements. What they showed off for that trailer though I think I can describe as "uncharted-a-like." Hoppin into turrets of a big ship for space combat, then running around hiding in the ship to avoid boarders, jumping from space-debris to space-debris. This is a whole other game they are building here man. It's sort of a prologue, I get that, but man what a weird way to start the thing. I guess I'll see how it is when they release it in 5 more years.

[kodev]

I don't mean to be a bother but I was wondering how you got into game development (like coding and stuff). It's something I've always wanted to do, but I have no idea where to start ^_^' (feel free to ignore this ask of course)

AHH Of course I would love to help... err I'm actually very bad at playing video games which is sort of hilarious in context but I love rpgs of all kinds with my whole heart and I grew up around software development so I also got exposed to that side fairly early on. Um.. TBH I also kick my feet a lot about gamedevelopment but for where to start I have a few suggestions in no particular order:

Join a gamejam These will usually have themes (easy inspiration) or challenges, a deadline (gets your ass moving to actaully do something), and discord communities full of people willing to help you with anything pretty much! A lot of them are hosted in itch.

If you already have an idea For me I like to draw up a list of things that I personally like in video games I've played, and then try to see where I can expand on them. From there, I see which game engine would support me the best. It is possible to make an entire game without actually coding anything (RPGMAKER is pretty good for this, and I know some other ones support block coding), but I really recommend picking up some knowledge of coding if youre able! From there, I usually come up with characters, diagram interactions, and try to come up with a timeline of events.. If you're having trouble with this, I usually bounce my ideas off of a friend and get feed back and have a fun little ideajam which helps me to get moving again.

Some helpful links/things I like: Aseprite is good for pixel art/animation Not too experienced on the music side, but I know there are a lot of free music places out there! My rpgmaker masterpost has some included :) And u can always commission music artists! For writing... I've tried out Bibisco, Scrivener, Google Docs, etc... But I think as of the moment I like Fortelling the best :) For learning how to code: I will never stop recommending Codecademy if you're able to pay, but there are a lot of videos on youtube on practically every game engine-y thing you may desire! This is a good masterpost for unity-related stuff, but i recently found out that Unity also like donated a crapton of money to the US Military so I've been trying to adjust to unreal instead lol.. This is a good rpgmaker post! And this is a good general gamedev post if you haven't seen it already

And my final piece of advice is to play a lot of indie games! I spend a lot of time just browsing on itch and then playing different games I come across. Not all of them are amazing, but all of them do inform my direction on indie gamedev in some way or another

There's a lot of free resources on the net I can link you to if you need help with music or coding or game engine advice... but best of luck! And i hope this was helpful :)

feel free to ask me anything else!

[thefirsttree]

A personal update + my next game

OK, time to do this. I’ve been meaning to do a big DAVID WEHLE™ update for a while now and explain why I haven’t released a new game yet, but you know how life gets in the way. Especially when life is a quarantine hellscape, you have three beautiful, amazing, exhausting kids to raise, a spouse’s job you support, a viral YouTube channel that turns your brain to mush, a thousand emails waiting in your inbox since your game is free on the Epic Games Store (with an impressive number of redemptions too! … meaning lots of emails and customer support issues), etc., etc. What also contributes to my lack of updates is because… I just don’t really like posting online. Fascinating correlation, I know!

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a venting/ranting blog post (well, maybe a bit), because my life is seriously AMAZING and INSANELY BLESSED and LUCKY. I can’t believe how many dreams keep coming true, so much so that I feel I don’t deserve it and I really pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes… but I did want to at least be honest, because I owe that to myself.

Wow, where do I even begin? Well, how about we start with the reason I’m even a full-time indie game dev now: The First Tree. This small hobby project I worked on at night morphed into this gargantuan beast (or fox) that took over my life the past 5 years. Which is great! I’m living the dream! And yet, I really didn’t expect it to do as well as it did. At its core, my game is a slow-paced, sad walking simulator (ahem, I prefer the term “exploration game,” but you know what I mean) that somehow seemed to launch at the right time to the right audience. It resonated deeply with some of you, and for that I’m eternally grateful. I still get emails almost daily how my game changed their lives in some formative way. I’m beyond honored.

However, with that spotlight came criticism and demands from the ever-present, insatiable internet. I would randomly be surfing the gamedev subreddit trying to decompress, and I would see a comment by some rando saying how much I didn’t deserve my success, and how it was all one huge lucky fluke. And I believed them!

And to add to it, some devs considered me an indie marketing “guru”, which I was uncomfortable with. I worked hard to market my game every week, and after my GDC talk, people assumed marketing was my passion; the reason I got up every morning. Just to clarify… NO, I don’t like marketing, and I hate being the center of attention. I don’t like asking people for money and wishlists. But I did what was necessary because I was passionate about telling stories, and I wanted to give my story a fighting chance to be seen on the crowded pages of Steam.

So now, you’re probably wondering “well then David, why did you make fancy YouTube videos showing off your success? Not very modest if you ask me.” This honestly could be a long blog post all on its own, because my experience of putting myself in the spotlight and becoming a “content creator” is… complicated. It was an unusual step for me, especially since I never even showed my face online (as a game developer) until my GDC talk.

First off, I always wanted to teach and start a YouTube channel. I love video editing, especially since I’ve been doing it longer than making games! It’s a huge passion of mine. And teaching people who didn’t know they could make and finish games was a huge motivator (and it’s been so rewarding already). But the second reason is, I was scared. I was self-employed, and I was riding the success of a “huge lucky fluke” that would probably not happen again. I wanted to make sure I could provide for my amazing family, and give them food and health insurance and security in these tumultuous times. I was turning my lifelong passions and hobbies into a business, and it wasn’t as simple of a mental transition as I thought.

So, I went all in on YouTube and the accompanying online course called Game Dev Unlocked. I spent years editing the scripts and videos, and polishing them to a shine. At first, no one watched my videos, no one was buying… and in the blink of an eye, the YouTube algorithm picked up my main autobiographical video (“How Making Indie Games Changed My Life”), and I started getting 5,000 subscribers a day. Right now, I’m at 150,000 subs, which is still hard for me to believe. I always had a dream of earning 100k subs on YouTube, so I was pretty happy with the whole thing. Sales were OK, but mostly people didn’t want to buy the course. Then the emails came in…

Something you should know about me: I am a textbook “people pleaser,” and if someone asks for my help, I take it very seriously. If someone is mad at me, even if I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s all I can think about, and it ruins my day. So, taking an onslaught of people begging for help and multiplying that by an impossible amount of people for my brain to truly comprehend thanks to the internet… and let’s just say it wasn’t a healthy mix.

I received thousands of emails from people who were begging me for some kind of reassurance that everything would be OK. That their dreams would come true too. And I wanted to help every single one of them. I went from a nobody working on a game for fun to becoming a spokesperson for the indie game dream. I couldn’t even get a shake from the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru without someone recognizing me and asking for game dev advice. And it didn’t stop there… I would get emails from suicidal kids asking for help, teenagers from Afghanistan asking me to get them out of their country, and on one occasion I received an email from a hopeful game developer in a war-torn country who had just experienced a bomb blowing up their neighboring village. His friends were dead, and he was hoping he could finish a game before he died too, and he needed my help. How do you say no to something like that? Didn’t I owe it to everyone because I was lucky with my hit game and I needed to “pay it forward��? (Something people constantly reminded me of)

And then to top it off, after you’ve given everything you’ve got to other people in need… you get hate mail in your inbox. You spend the whole day serving your children and strangers on the internet, then when the kids are finally asleep, you hit the bed to relax and take a look at your phone to decompress, and you randomly come across an angry gamer in your Twitter mentions telling you your game they got for free sucks, and that you took away a potentially great game from them and that your apology isn’t good enough.

Long story short, I went to a mental therapist for the first time in my life. I was broken trying to care for two toddlers and a new baby in a pandemic (which is very, very hard), taking care of my course students who gave me their hard-earned money and demanded results, and the countless people begging for help on the internet. I was this introverted, internet-lurker trying to take on the weight of the world. I was so tired and hurt that no one cared about me and my needs… only what I could do for them.

Quitting my day job and making this hobby my full-time job has stirred up… mixed emotions. This statement may disturb some of you, but I was definitely 100% happier when I had a full-time job and I was working on my game at night. I missed working with the amazing team at The VOID, working on Star Wars… back when the success of my game was this abstract thing I could only daydream about. Mostly, I was making my game for me with no outside expectations to pay the bills or satisfy the ever-demanding internet, and that brought me a lot of joy.

It’s not all doom and gloom though! I’m actually very happy now and in the best shape I’ve been since the pandemic started. I’ve had to confront my weaknesses and personality quirks, but I’m a better person for it (and I’m sure these issues would’ve come out eventually). I hired an awesome community manager for Game Dev Unlocked who is helping SO MUCH with the emails, I can’t even tell you the mental burden it alleviates. I even leased a co-working office to help separate work from my home, and that’s been a huge help too. I’ve decided to work with my old friends from The VOID on a cool, new VR experience. It will take me away from my projects a bit, but I’m ecstatic to work with a great team again (and not manage anything, whew).

These are all things I would’ve never guessed I needed, because I thought I knew myself pretty well… turns out I didn’t.

The reality is: running a business is HARD. Running it solo is even harder. You have to remember, I was burnt out on The First Tree well into the Steam release in 2017, but I kept working on it for 4 more years due to my fears of failing again and not earning enough money for my family.

So, I was wrestling with the age-old concept of commercialism and art. There was this dichotomy of doing whatever I wanted and being true to my vision (what most people assume the indie dev dream is like), and doing only what customers wanted to buy. This is something that has killed me with YouTube… in one specific instance, I was super excited to make the exact video I wanted to make. I loved every part of its creation, and I thought it had a message that would inspire everyone. I lovingly edited it over several weeks, posted it, and excitedly waited for the stats… and it was by far my worst performing video.

This is not a new problem. Even the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo was a commission forced upon him by the very violent Pope Julius II. My wife and I regularly talk about the fine balance between artistic integrity and commercialism, a problem she is very familiar with as an artist who constantly needs to balance what she wants to make with what the customer wants to hang up in their home.

For The First Tree, I was lucky. It was pretty much what I wanted to make (I had to compromise a lot of things of course), and it turned out millions of people wanted it too. Recently, I thought the safe business decision would be to do it all over again, so I started work on a spiritual successor to The First Tree (an idea that I may revisit one day since I do love the story idea). But that isn’t happening anytime soon. Trust me when I say I am now currently burnt out on animal exploration games.

So that realization left me with a question: what do I do next?

I’ve decided I need to make a game that I want to make, for me. It will be a bit different and I’m almost certain most fans of The First Tree will not love it… but it’s an idea that gets me super excited. It’s an idea that could help me fall in love with game development again.

A few more details: this game will be story-driven, first-person, and will use the Unreal Engine. That means development is gonna be slow going, because I have to learn a whole new tool. The “smart business” decision would be to make something quickly in Unity which I’m already familiar with… but I want to do this for me, and UE5 looks like a lot of fun. I’m also shooting for an early-ish release date so I avoid burn out and I keep the game short: I want to release it in Fall 2022, but knowing game development, it will probably take longer.

With the help of my therapist, I’ve also concluded that I’ve been too accessible on the internet and that my self-worth isn’t determined by the amount of people I try to help online. Of course, I love helping people and seeing them succeed, but I need to step back and focus on my family and myself. I will delete my social media apps on my phone (I will still post big updates occasionally) and stop responding to most emails, tweets, DMs, etc. It’s not that I’m ungrateful… in fact, if I don’t say thank you or at least acknowledge the incredibly nice people who share a sweet message about my game or want to tell me how I inspire them (still hard for me to believe, lol), I feel a ton of guilt… but I need to let that go. Please know I’m extremely grateful to all the fans who follow my work, so even if I don’t thank you directly, I truly mean it: thank you.

I will still post and stream occasionally on YouTube when I want to (and I still do live Q&A’s for my GDU students). The online course sales will help support my family as I work on a potentially risky game idea (and my new job will help alleviate the risk too). I’m gonna try one more marketing experiment and sell a mini-course soon (and add an Unreal section), and after that I’m done working on it. A gigantic thank you to the people who bought my course and are part of the amazing community, it has helped me and my family tremendously, and it’s inspiring seeing the games you make!

I’m a bit worried about the whole thing since this new game idea could flop, which could definitely affect my family. But a sappy, high-school yearbook quote is coming to mind… ��I think it applies here: “A ship in harbor is safe—but that is not what ships are built for.”

Thanks for reading,

David

[fayesemblemring]

18, 20, and 22 for the ask game! :)

18) What are your hobbies?

The main one is playing videogames, but I also like reading books and comics, watching the occasional TV series/animated media when on the train and taking a walk!

It sound more than it actually is, because in truth, since I'm stuck at home because at home and videogames are one if not the only thing that stimulates me enough, gaming is the main thing I do in my free time.

...not gonna lie, my life feels pretty empty at the moment.

Ever since I started working and am away from all my friends, my life feels more hollow than ever.

Other hobbies I technically have but almost never end up doing are creating art, mainly writing and gamedev!

But I can barely do them due to lack of time, energy and executive dysfunction, and it's one of the most frustrating things ever.

I can barely write, I haven't worked on any games after the one I made on the first months of Covid and while I do want to draw or paint for the heck of it, most of the fun I have doing it is being in company while creating, so doing it alone feels a bit pointless.

...sorry for turning this into venting

20) Favorite book?

May be kinda cheating, but I loved reading the Metal Gear Solid 4 and Halo Reach novelizations! Especially the MGS4 one, I consider it to be better than the actual game.

As for books that aren't adaptations, hmm.

I'll admit I don't remember much of the book I read after a while passes (then again I don't remember much of anything), but honestly I haven't felt hooked into a book for a long time.

Granted, while I am reading more now that I live near a library I'm not reading as much as I want or should, so...

I'll accept any reccomendations if there's a book you'd like to share!

21) Favorite show?

Again, I'm not one who tends to rewatch/replay stuff, but some of my favorite shows are Phineas & Ferb, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Ducktales 2017 and the She-Ra reboot!

Yeah, most of the stuff I watch is animated.

I started watching Heartstopper after hearing about it though. I'm in only a few episodes in, but it's pretty cute!

22) Favorite movie?

Movies are probably the type of media I watch the least due to their length requiring too much attention on my part, but some of my fave movies are Revenge of the Sith due to it being like a insanely fun rollercoaster ride if the rollercoaster was poorly made in CGI and on fire, Emperor's New Groove since it's the funniest thing Disney has ever made, and Spaceballs because it's an hilarious parody and Star Wars if it was actually good

Besides non-comedy movies, A Silent Voice really hooked me for a few months back in the day.

Recently I also watched the first Sonic Movie since it came on Netflix and it was way better than I expected!

Too bad I missed the sequel at the movies..

[selfmadesuperhero]

i’m very much not okay 

and i’ll probably take very long for me to explain why

i don’t know how to write this. i don’t know where to even start. i’m here because i just don’t have anywhere else to go. i can’t afford therapy. i no longer have any close friends other than Mabu (gf).

it’s getting pretty bad inside my head

i know most people’s lives are hell this year and i’m not special. i know that. to me, this year is feeling like the last nail in my coffin because 2019 had already chewed me up and spit me out. 

i kept my last job for eight years. after my first year there, another developer came in, and we became friends. we worked side by side less than 4 feet apart for six years. our hours were flexible but we always agreed upon our schedule just so work would be more bearable, because we both hated it and often had to team up against our boss’ downright abuse. it was a very small company (at its biggest we were only 7 employees). we were also going to graduate at the same time from the same school (different majors), so we had a bit of a pact to leave our shitty boss once we’d graduated and start developing our own, way less shitty games.

at the start of 2019, he got an excellent job offer. i was thrilled for him and told him to of course get out of that hellhole we hated so much, we were only there because the pay was decent and the hours were flexible so we could get our degree, you know? it stung, but i was happy for him. on the last day i gave him a ride home (which is also something i did almost daily), he surprised me by hugging me and telling me i was like a brother to him and our plans weren’t going to change. 

i believed him, and went back to work. he was soon replaced, obviously, by a junior developer because that’s how capitalism works. but suddenly, i no longer had someone to take a stand with me against my boss - there was no one left that i knew, everyone had resigned or been fired and i was the oldest employee. you’d think that’d earn me something, after eight years being dedicated to the same company, right? 

(shortly after, my grandma passed, after years and years of agonizing in a wheelchair. we lived together)

fuck that

the first months were fine. i was being the senior developer and teaching the junior constantly, so my boss stayed out of my way. but see, this is where he started to get ansty. the more the junior stopped being a junior and was actually useful for something, the more that piece of gigantic ass just started thinking only about our salaries. i started in that company in 2012 making little more than 3 bucks/hour (remember i live in a third world country, but it was still specialized work), but by 2019, my salary was pretty much double of what the junior was making, and every penny extra i got during those years was a CONQUEST. i also worked six hours while he worked eight, so.

my boss basically started treating me even more like shit. he wasn’t nice to be around before, but he was bearable in small amounts. suddenly it was obvious to everyone that he was really fixating on me and my performance, and to me it was obvious he just wanted me to walk away too so he could replace me with TWO junior developers instead of just one measly charlie. 

then, the nationals elections began. oh boy.

this probably wouldn’t read as news to anyone, but i’m a huge leftie, obviously. if you’re at all interested in politics, read about what socialist policies have done for uruguay during the past 15 years and how they turned us into AT LEAST a developing country, but i digress. 

the people that sat in my office even shared my political views or whatever, but my boss is actually part of the conservative party and started actively campaigning. every time something involving politics happened, he made a point to come barging in the office and telling me and specifically me about it like i was personally running against his party. i actually recorded him once to have proof of him at least screaming at me, so i could check if i was crazy for thinking he had something against me. he frequently called me communist and just mocked my views. if you’re wondering, yes, this is illegal, but nothing happened. 

then, two big things happened at once: we lost the election, and my recently adopted puppy was diagnosed with distemper. yes, it happened on the same that and it’s a day i’ll never forget. 

my girlfriend and i had talked about getting a puppy once we moved in together. we’d named him like two years before it actually happened. we moved in together on may 2019 and on september i found the most precious boy for adoption on facebook and i was innocently all like “oh i’ve had to put rescue dogs for adoption before, let’s give back!”. 

on october 27th, he had a seizure and the vet told us it was likely we’d have to put him down because only 20% of dogs survived, and it was even less for puppies. 

when i went to work, i had to put up with my boss laughing and mocking me for winning the election “against me”. i guess i missed my running for anything?

this post is already too long for me to get into details about my dog’s disease. for months, every day we looked after him constantly. i read everything there was to BE READ about distemper online, spent thousands of pesos on medicine and treatments just in case he had a chance. good news is he did! this is the only positive note in this post. 

it still wasn’t easy. he made us cry at least three times a day. we really thought he was dying, and we’d made the mistake of naming him 2 years before he was even born. we’d taken PERFECT care of him while he was unvaccinated, but the vet told us it was most likely he was already infected before he came home to us. i’d never seen such a small puppy so sick. he hallucinated constantly. if you don’t know, distemper is a neuro/digestive/skin/bone/HELL disease that’s really nasty. he’d have seizures almost daily and poop and pee himself. he stopped being able to control his body other than his two front legs, which he didn’t even have full control of. when he stopped being able to walk, he started crying constantly, it really tore the heart out of my chest

we called another vet, a dog physical therapist, so she’d tell us how we could help him. she told us to make him stand as long as possible, so every time he had a meal, i’d bend down with him and hold his hips - so he’d be able to stand, and slowly gain back some muscle mobility. every day we massaged his legs and flexed his joints, even his tiny toes, so he’d avoid atrophy. and we did it!! as i’m writing this, he’s one year old now, he’s no longer sick even if he’ll carry with him plenty of lifelong sequels, and he walks and runs and barks like the best of them ♥ i wasn’t going to plug anything but if you wanna see his progress, it’s on instagram @hamiltonthefighter

okay, i guess i ended up talking at length about his disease in the end, sorry. his walking again had a price to pay for me: my own back. for two or three months i was bent over this dog, you know? i still can’t get out of bed without help sometimes lol around december it got really bad but i just kept popping pills because joy oh joy, i was doing my thesis and i didn’t really have time or money for anything else. my job was basically paying for our rent, my university classes including the thesis course which was ridiculously expensive, and our dog had given me credit card debt out of desperation (we even had to buy those rubber things used for yoga to place on our floors so he’d have something to use his nails against instead of constantly slipping on the floor, we tried every medication that might help, we gave him CBD oils, all kinds of vitamins, constant vet visits where during the first two weeks he got like three different shots every day, etc)

i’m rambling, and i’m sorry, but i don’t really think anyone will read this. i started this post crying my eyes out and writing about my dog at least has been calming, because even if he’s a drooling mess now, he’s still the same he ever was and i love him very much and he’s sleeping soundly next to me and he’s finally close to fine. 

remember the friend i talked about like half an hour ago? the one that worked with me for six years? nothing changed between us during the first months. for my thesis, i was going to develop a videogame with Mabu, but we were allowed to have external coding help because it was about GameDev, not the actual coding. i knew how to code, obviously, but Nico (the friend, guess we’ll give him a name) was also part of our project so he was gonna help us code so i had more time to focus on art and 3D modelling. the idea was kill two birds with one stone, make something we all liked, mabu and I were going to graduate with it and then we’d keep working on it during 2020 as we’d always always talked about.

by december, even if nico and i still talked regularly, i could tell he had just moved on with his life. he’d said he’d help us, but he was doing his own thesis, so i told him not to worry at that time, our final due date was in february. he asked us to forgive him during december and promised us he’d come back in january to DEVOTE himself to the project. i started coding the project besides working on the art and i was thankfully able to meet all the deadlines, so it was really fine, of course i understood where he was coming from. 

then, on january 7th, Mabu’s grandma passed away. she was scheduled for a heart surgery that supposedly only had 1% risk, and she passed on the table because of a doctor’s mistake. the surgery was here in the capital, but Mabu’s family lives five hours away. she comes from a very big, very loving family, and her grandma (being the mother of five children) was very much the center of it. i also loved her. she’d replaced my grandma the second she passed and every time i saw her she hugged me like i was a lost grandson. 

when my girlfriend called me during her surgery, i immediately left work because i just knew she would be crying if things were okay. this was a nightmare come alive for a family of 20+ people, and most of them were 5 hours away from their own house. my mother in law was (and still is) devastated by the lost of her mother because she was the one to encourage the surgery and she still thinks she killed her. i drove my her, my girlfriend, her sister and her sister’s boyfriend on my mother’s in law van for five hours while they all cried or slept and i had to really, really pinch myself because i was EXHAUSTED but what else could i do? 

logically i missed work the next day. LOGICALLY. i had the service to attend and i was 5 hours away from the office and i didn’t even have my own car with me. i told my boss to discount the day, since i wasn’t entitled to the mourning day by law because it wasn’t my grandma. he didn’t even reply - he almost never talked to me by this point unless it was to berate me for something. i went back to work the day after the service.

now, remember we were doing our thesis and it was due in february? it really wasn’t great timing for anyone to die, but i was trusting Nico’s promise that he’d have more free time and he’d make up for not helping us code sooner. i told him the news about Mabu’s grandma, and then basically had to tell him to say something to her for her loss because he was supposed to be her friend, what the fuck, why aren’t you at least sending her a text.

let’s just say, january wasn’t a great month for Mabu and myself. two weeks after the passing, we still hadn’t had news from Nico. Mabu didn’t even have time to properly mourn because we had to turn our thesis in like, little over a month. i wrote to nico just downright ASKING if he was gonna be able to help us or WHAT, to which he said to me...

he’d never promised anything because he was really busy with his own stuff and he didn’t want to bring it up sooner because he knew Mabu was mourning and things were hard for us at the moment? 

like that’s great pal, thanks for telling me at the last POSSIBLE second you were just dropping out altogether, what the actual fuck? it still baffles me that someone can be so thick headed, but he kept saying he had made no promises and both Mabu and I knew that was a lie and i honestly just couldn’t deal with someone so selfish he couldn’t at least give a heads up sooner

the icing on the cake during the beginning of this year is someone i haven’t even mentined: MY PIECE OF SHIT BROTHER. talking about him may deserve another post, because this is already so long and convoluted and i haven’t even talked about his involvement in my misery during 2019-2020. i’ll try to make the story short if anyone’s still reading this far: 

a lot of years ago, our maternal grandmother moved to uruguay from russia and bought a tiny shitty house here next to my mother’s. my mother still hasn’t talked to me since 2013 because i’m trans, but that’s neither here nor there. i tried to keep in touch with my brother (we don’t share dads so he was no relation with my side of the family), and around 2017 i finally succeeded in making friends with him. or so i thought, clearly. 

that grandmother passed... sometime. i don’t really know because they cut me off. she didn’t speak to me either, she was literally a crazy old nasty woman and i didn’t even care when i heard she’d died, to be honest. she was such a nasty woman, she’d put her tiny shitty house to my and my brother’s name just to keep her own daughter out of the inheritance when she bought it. 

that also meant i was inheriting something for the first time ever, even if it was shitty. BUT my brother had his own fake grandma (the woman who looked after him his whole life instead of our mother) who was very old and frail and asked me if he could house her there. i said yes because again, i didn’t give a shit about the inheritance or the house or anything regarding my mother’s side of the family (other than him obviously), so for years this woman occupied the house. my brother basically took all existing furniture and appliances because he was moving in with a girlfriend and i even loaded up my shitty car with his stuff. all i wanted to inherit was the couch set, which had come all the way from russia and everyone had promised me since i was a wee lad, but he started whining about his fake-grandma not having a living room set and nowhere to sit and i didn’t even live by myself yet so i let them have the fucking couches, too. 

oh boy this is already too long but now i’m too lazy to make a separate post

anyway, sometime during 2019, the woman moved out to an old folks home because she could no longer take care of herself. i immediately asked about the couch set with hope in my heart that it could finally be mine, but my brother told me our mother didn’t want me to have it. 

he wanted to rent the house to make a profit, which sounded good to me because of that dog related credit card debt i talked about. and here’s where you might think i’m not that there in the head, but all my life i didn’t want anything to do with that house until my mother was in the ground - not out of hate but because i thought it was a shitty thing her own mother had done to her, and the inheritance should have been hers. she doesn’t have a degree or a stable job because she’s a russian translator so hey, whatever, they needed it more than i did. but then my brother starting getting ideas about improving the house so we’d make more money, and how we should do it together, and... i think i might have mentioned already why i didn’t exactly have time to redo a house? i was doing my thesis? about to graduate? my boss was constantly on my case? my dog was about to die? 

i helped as much as i could at first, but then december came, and then january, and my brother just kept nagging me about the house like i was purposefuly sitting on my ass doing nothing, because oh every day it’s not rented it’s money lost. no amount of explaining how stretched thin i was seemed to suffice, not even when mabu’s grandma died and nico left us hanging with the thesis and i had less than a month left to code the whole project by myself while ALSO taking care of the art. 

by the end of january, i was so stressed, i called a doctor after a panic attack. he gave me a weeks rest because of my back, because i wasn’t even able to get up without help at that time. it wasn’t much of a rest because i still used that time to sit at the computer and code 15 hours a day at LEAST, but hey. 

it was the first time in 8 years i’d taken medical leave of ANY kind. i didn’t even get medical leave when i got my chest surgery. it happened on a friday and i was back to work the next monday. i’d never skipped more than 2 days of work at best when i had a bad case of the flu or something, but that was it. 

when i went back to work, my boss immediatelly called me to his office. he started berating me about my performance again, bringing graphs comparing the amount of lines of code i’d written next to my coworkers. i didn’t mention this, but the graphic designer had also quit during 2019, so i was also covering that workload and no, that didn’t exactly translate to lines of code. i also had to spend HOURS every day tutoring the junior because he was too much of a cheap shit (didn’t use those words) to hire an experienced developer. i’d even WORKED AS A GRAPHIC DESIGNER FOR MEDIA CONTENT FOR HIS POLITICAL CAREER, EVEN IF IT WAS AGAINST MY BELIEFS AND NOT AT ALL RELATED TO MY JOB. he denied everything. EVERYTHING. he stuck to the narrative that i was just lazy and the proof was i’d just taken AN ENTIRE WEEK because “my back just hurt a little” and i had the audacity to skip work for someone else’s grandmother dying

i’m not exaggerating, i swear to anyone who might be reading this. that day was brutal and i’m still not over it half a year later, i don’t care if that makes me sound like a wuss. i worked eight years of my life in this fucking place. 

this argument lasted for hours, but i kept my head down because i couldn’t afford to lose the job, specially not then. i even apologized for any loss in performance and tried to explain my point of view and what i was going through (which i’d already done to another superior weeks ago anyway). but just when i thought i’d MAYBE be able to keep my head above water, he told me he was denying my the request i’d made to take two weeks of holiday days before the thesis final due date. 

i had already explained everything to him. everything, even nico dropping the team and my having to do everything by myself. i broke down and i told him he was forcing me to leave my job, i’d just have been certified by a doctor and i was asking for leave for SCHOOL (all things that are protected by law here), but he just kept repeating i could either walk away from my job or show up during those two weeks. he just wanted me gone, but he couldn’t fire me right away without having to pay me THOUSANDS because of my seniority (by law). he knew what he was doing to me and he didn’t care about it. he didn’t even let me TOUCH MY COMPUTER, he told me he wasn’t the one pushing me away, that i was doing this to myself, and he’d ask for a lawyer to check my computer for any “inconsistencies in my activity”, even. i really have a hard time just thinking about that day and how utterly humilliating it was. i lost a lot of personal files, because i sat at that desk for eight years and of course i had personal files because sometimes i stayed after hours before going to class. 

imagine for a second a sixty year old man, rich as shit, political candidate, standing in front of a computer, disconnecting the mouse and keyboard so i couldn’t touch it, yelling at me i was doing this to myself and i was losing my job because i had the audacity to ask for two weeks leave to finish my fucking school thesis. 

and yeah, i lawyered up. i didn’t have actual money to AFFORD a lawyer, but mabu’s cousin’s girlfriend was a lawyer and lived one block away and i immediatelly told her everything there was to tell. she brought me to the firm she worked in and they guaranteed me i had a pretty strong case and i was at least gonna be able to walk away with something.

that put things in hold for a while because the “trial” or whatever wasn’t gonna be held until after the thesis, so i tried to forget about it. my boss even owed me my untaken paid vacation days, which i told the lawyers because i was pretty sure he’d just forgot, but i wanted to know if it made a better case against him. they agreed, and i left it at that. 

but you know who was still making my life miserable even when february began and i had less than three weeks to finish our project right? MY SWEET BABY BRO. he was constantly nagging me about having to do all the work himself, like I’D ASKED ANYTHING FROM THAT HOUSE TO BEGIN WITH. but see, the nastier he started getting, the more apparent his lies began to appear. he got nasty to the level where ON THE DAY I WAS TURNING THE PROJECT IN he kept calling me demanding MONEY for stuff he’d paid for the house without checking in with me. i was honestly baffled by his level of selfishness, i was already sleeping three hours a day tops and he expected me to what, paint walls? he was FIERCELY against having to wait for my project to be done even if it was two weeks away and he was asking and asking for money when i’d just told him i’d lost my job without a penny to show for it. nice guy, really. 

suddenly, the following lies became clear: 

 my mother didn’t care if i took the couch set, he told me that because he was moving again and he was planning on taking the couches himself. (he ended up doing just so, too). he lied to me with the thing that hurts me most in the world: my mother hating me. he had even made a joke about it, because my mother had bought a new couch not long ago, and he didn’t “get” why she “didn’t want me to have anything”

 years ago he’d told me he had refinanced a tax debt the house had, and i gave him money for it. now that the house was about to be put up for rent, he pretended that had never happened and suddenly started talking about how we needed to take care of that

 he wasn’t planning on splitting the rent three ways between him, our mother and i. he was gonna keep two thirds, and i later even found out my own mother had given him the idea. 

 then poor mabu confessed to me once, two years ago, she’d wore a skirt one time visiting my brother and his then girlfriend, and he had told her nasty stuff to her year upon saying goodbye and she had never said anything because didn’t want to hurt our sibling relationship 

talk about final nail huh? 

i confronted him and he denied everything, obviously, he instantly played the victim card, how dare i think that way about him, how dare i break his dreams of reuniting the family again. he said things to me i’ll also never forget like, apparently, it shows that i’m a shit person because i have no friends and no one wants me around, unlike him that has so many. he told me i thought the world owed me when i was shit and i believed anything anyone told me before believing him. no one told me any of his lies, i caught them all by myself, but whatever. he cursed me and told me he never wanted anything to do with me because i was rotten and i only cared about money and i was so so selfish. this must have been around march and i still don’t know anything from him, or care.

what do i have to do for that side of the family to leave me alone, i wonder? all i ever wanted to do was be his friend

the “trial” against my boss came and suddenly every lawyer that worked at that firm was taking a fucking holiday except for the one that was supposedly leading my case - except suddenly, i didn’t have much of a case at all. i walked away with less than 2 thousand dollars and that was WITH the vacation days i hadn’t taken. the agreement was the lawyers were gonna keep 25% of however much i made but THAT vacation money wasn’t supposed to count because it didn’t come out of the “trial” thing, you know? 

well, it did. the lawyer screwed me over too. but hey, at least he’d gotten me unemployment for a couple of months (you only apply for unemployment if you’re fired, not if you walk away from a job, and my having been fired or not was what was being contested), i still tried to be optimistic, i had a few months to figure things out while i looked for another job, and at least i was able to finish paying for school with that money.

yeah, this was late february, beginning of march. joke’s on me for being optimistic at all

my own brother plotting with my own mother against me has done a number for my mental health. i already had baggage aplenty, like every trans dude or girl whose parents would rather see them dead than be a dyke/fag (my mother’s own words, ladies and gents)

my boss of eight years kicking me to the curve at the worst moment in my life in the most humilliating of ways while blaming me for it has left me feeling so worthless to people in general. i’m getting better with time, i think, but i’m still all not there. i have a really hard time thinking my work is worth anything at all.

i keep thinking my brother was right, and i’m a shitty friend, and i don’t deserve anyone around. my only real friend at the moment is my girlfriend, which makes it really hard to have any arguments because i start feeling like my life is ending because she’s pretty much all i have left and she’s the most important thing in the world to me because i wouldn’t have survived all this shit i’m writing without her by my side. i would walk to hell and back for her. but nico also left me behind without a second thought, after telling me i was like a brother to him, no matter how many times i invited him to hang out or anything to keep in touch. i’ve been a shitty friend to a lot of people, but not him, and he still didn’t care about me at all, so i just stopped trying. 

but now social distancing has got me all fucked up. i can’t trust people. i can’t go outside. everything is scary to me, i have at least two or three panic attacks per WEEK and they get nastier and longer every time. i know i need help, but i can’t even afford rent, let alone therapy. Uruguay has the worst unemployment rates since 2006 now thanks to our baby-Trump right now. i look for jobs daily even if the notion of having a job even SIMILAR to the one i had before gives me the shakes. programming isn’t as hard as some people may think, but the workplaces are usually VERY toxic because you’re valued by the amount of lines of code you write, and i’m so so tired. i’m still looking because I NEED. TO. PAY. RENT. but not because it’s something i want in life, at all. i’d much rather be poor and just do freelance work instead, but i’m failing.

i thank the people that have helped me or commissioned me these past few months from the bottom of my heart. i’m sorry i’m not more active, i’m sorry i’m still rusty and can’t draw faster, i’m sorry i sometimes spend half a day crying my eyes out because i just don’t know how to move forward. i have a week left, i still haven’t made enough for rent, let alone the bills or food. mabu used to get plenty of art commissions on etsy, but she hasn’t sold anything since march either and she’s younger than me so our financial struggles have an even deeper impact on her

i’m just so, so tired. i’m lucky to have mabu, and that is about it. i honestly don’t think i could have survived this year without her. for months the future has looked like a black screen to me. i can’t even trust the vegetable market in front of my fucking house because some piece of shit spread the rumor that i’m trans and now i can’t even open the door to my front house without getting stares sometimes, it’s ridiculous. i wish i could trust more than one person in the world so that everything wasn’t on her shoulders.

i’m not okay. we’re not okay.

that’s about it. i’m sorry i can’t end this on a more positive note. at least we graduated with an excellent score. not that we had a graduation, obviously. thanks corona.

thank you for reading if you read this far ♥

[lizziebobizzie]

Psst. Hey. Friend. Wanna stare at some amateur art?

Oh. Hey. I didn’t see you there. because this is a text post and I have no idea if anyone’s actually reading it  I said I’d post more art “Tomorrow” in my last post, but I think I technically posted at like 4 or something, so this might still qualify as “Tomorrow”? I dunno. I’ve still got some art though, and after this and maybe one more art dump straight from my hard drive, I can start posting art as I make it. That would be kinda cool! Anyway, Art below. Click “Keep reading” to stare at it.

This beautiful space belongs to Delbrot Baggins.

I play a decent amount of DnD, so it was inevitable that I’d draw some of it. This shack belongs to a Halfling I’d play. Crotchety old man that wanted to kill Poseidon. Good times. My lord was he fun to play.

Another DnD Character. Her name is Diana.

I don’t think I ever have, or ever will finish this one. Diana never got a lot of time in the limelight, so at least I have this to remember the game by. Could have drawn the hand better, though. I might be interested in redoing this piece later, too!

I just redrew this old picture of mine today!

This beautiful prick’s name is Lenny Smiles. I played him in another DnD sort of game called “Fate”. He’s the kind of jerk that smokes, drinks, and can’t stop himself from speaking his mind. He’s genuinely a horrible person, but he’s somehow so lovable. He’s a chronic liar that always makes good on a promise. 

...I miss him.

This is one of the oldest pictures I’ve drawn.

Another character, Vahn Sicrihel. A retired lawyer turned law professor, stern and skeptical. Official, buisiness-y type of person.This was my first real attempt at digital art, and I put a special focus on all the wrinkles of the cloth. If I could do it again, I’d finally fix that face, as well as the hands and general perspective here. It looks wrong enough that the character looks flat.

I consider this piece to be my best landscape drawn in photoshop.

I made it a while ago and if I could, I’d completely redraw the clouds and clean up the linework. I’d also focus on color a bit more to clean up the reflections. I love the palette though, and I feel like the subdued colors really make this piece feel like water coloring. It’s pretty, but it could use a loving touch.

Do you watch ProJared? I do! He’s one of my favorite youtubers!

He was playing a lot of “GameDev Tycoon” a little while ago, and I kinda sorta latched on to “Circuit Break”, which is the name of one of his first releases in the game. Boy that’s confusing to type. I really wanted to draw a cyberpunk dystopia for cover art, and I considered trying to share it with Jared himself, but I feel that that’s a bit naive... I never really put it anywhere because I never really liked the result and I had a really hard time cleaning it up properly, but looking back I think it’s a little pretty for what it is. If I did it now, I’d focus on a strong sketch before carefully planning color. I’d also want a few reference pictures for this one, so that maybe I could put it on reddit. That would be nice.

I don’t even know what this hot mess is.

I think I just wanted to make something spooky one day. I don’t really have a story behind this one, to be honest. Part of me wants to redo this so I can carefully plan the color and do proper shading. This could have been so great if it wasn’t so, so unfinished. It looks so visibly amateur. I can gladly say I’ve grown a lot since then, both as an artist and as a person.

That’s all for now!

I don’t have much more art to dump, so I have a feeling the next thing I post will be recent art. I hope so, I think that would be pretty neat.whoever you are, wherever you are, I hope you enjoyed this retrospective on my art as much as I loved sharing it. It’s very comforting to see this art somewhere other than my hard drive, and I like finally being able to talk about it. I’ve come a long way, and I still have a very, very long way to go. The best thing I can do is keep pushing forward and hoping for the best. 

I hope you have an absolutely splendid, fantastic, enchanting, wonderful day. Even if it means crying a bit.

[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

[horiiis]

hello friends uwu it’s been some time!

Been filling up the queue every once in awhile and I’ve updated the blog’s theme! Please feel free to take a look at it! I am using a glenthemes theme.

I am still in the process of updating everything (such as adding announcements, properly making a change log, etc)

It’s quite an unceremonious return, but I can’t wait to share stuff with you all again!! 

I might be asking for feedback on this blog (specifically in regards to tagging) if that’s okay. If you have any suggestions for me, I’d love to hear them! The interface hasn’t seemed to change TOO much since I left, but with the new characters, I’m wondering if I should change the tags again...

If you’re interested, keep reading to get details on what I have done so far and what I’ve been up to during my hiatus!

On the desktop theme, I’m planning on keeping a similar format! With links on the side to where you can read GSNK, the taglist, and my fanfics. I intend on updating the announcements page for important dates (when gsnk ch are released on GanGan, when the most recent CMC chapter was released, character birthdays, etc). The News container will later be updated to contain blog changes (so, a change log) at some point.

I removed the submissions feature on this blog, since it was never used!

I’ve already updated the About page and was surprised to be reminded of the original intent of this blog! It won’t be happening anytime soon, but if we can host more events in the future, I think it would be very fun.

When I read the old About, I was reminded the original purpose of horisexual was actually to host fanfic competitions! Your love and engagement with my old fics made me really nostalgic, and a few on the GSNK discord convinced me to jump back into tumblr. I am glad that everyone is still so friendly and nice!

Re: the submissions feature (mentioned above), if we ever get to a point where we host a fanfic contest, I will likely be using the submissions as the way to submit.

(Speaking of events, will you be participating in GSNK Week? I’ve planned out what I want to draw already and I’m super excited~~)

I have also updated my Fanfics page using code from namjooneh but will continue to work on it so it fits horisexual better. I might have implemented this new format, but the filters don’t seem to work, so I’ve already found a backup that I just need to enter the fic information into.

You may also note that none of the long chapter fics are in there (except for one) because I’ve only decided to rewrite one of them (for now! We’ll see where that motivation goes, haha)

That being said, are there any ways you would like the fics to be filtered? I don’t believe the new format has a filter system, but it would be nice to know what information you would like me to add to the blurbs and previews!

As for an explanation for my hiatus:

I was receiving a lot of hate on my personal blog around mid-2016. A lot of the attacks were about information I overshared, which as a minor, I should have been more mindful of. I am ashamed of how I acted back then (refusing to simply ignore/block and instead kept responding && the information that I was freely giving out), but I’d like to think I’ve healed a lot since then. I have since went in, deleted all my posts on my personal blog from 2016, deleted the few remaining hate messages still in my inbox from that time, and am ready to start again.

What I’ve been up to:

In the past 4 years, I’ve been attending university within my state! Our GameDev program is apparently one of the best programs nationally, but no one seems to know that outside of our university (we were told to put it on our resume and bring it up in cover letters haha) so it’s a bit weird to talk about. I have made some games! This is a link to my portfolio if you want to know a little about them.

I’ve also started a ko-fi page! I used to be a dual major until recently, so I am taking an extra semester (plus this summer semester) to finish up my credits as I graduate. Graduating later than 4 years isn’t a big deal, but it’s very hard financially. Student loans are no longer willing to help support me, I will be a part-time student in the fall (little to no financial aid), and I’ve been barely been able to support myself as of late since my job assigned me on a project with a $2 pay cut from my regular rate.

I also got accepted into an internship program in Japan! As mentioned before, financing the rest of my tuition is hard enough, and now I need to be able to afford my plane ticket, the program fees and living expenses. I am currently studying Japanese for the N3 certification, but we’ll see how that goes (I’m going to stay hopeful!! I still have time!!)

If you want to know more about Ko-fi and the program I’m doing, I made a YT video a month ago. It also briefly explains why I find this internship so important to my professional development. If you have the time, resources, and would like to support me, I would greatly appreciate it! I even have a sticker club reward for monthly supporters, and a portion of those sales goes to Project COVID-19, a fundraising project by a few of my colleagues who are raising money to purchase PPE for health facilities nationwide (US). 

I would like to explain more, but covering the past 4 years is a long time (haha)... and you’re here for the GSNK content! I am sure there will be loads of more opportunities to talk about myself (apologies if I do so...) so I will end it here. 

Thank you for being a follower of horisexual for so long. And if you’re new here, welcome!

I am currently taking summer courses and working (remotely), so I do not know how active I will be, but I will definitely return to fill up the queue a few times a week- if not every day. I have a few asks from before I left/received during hiatus. You can still submit prompts to me via ask and I will try to get to them!

If you want to talk I am also on discord ( JamKats#9424) and twitter @/jamkataclysms (note my twitter is mostly art & games). I also have a ko-fi account where I post GSNK fanart sometimes! https://ko-fi.com/jamkats

I hope you have a great day! As a reward for reaching the end of this long post, here’s a recent redraw of one of the gsnk omakes! (from vol 10)

If you’re in the GSNK server, you’ve probably seen it already, so I guess it’s not that good of an award...The other (the first) redraw I did has been queued so it will go up sometime this week!

I spent all night studying, so I’ll probably go to sleep now <3 thank you again :)

[yourwolves]

How to plan a game, stay motivated and get it finished.

x-post from this post 2 years ago by V4nKw15h  

Introduction

The question of how to motivate oneself or finish a huge project is a very common question here. I wanted to share my personal methods.

This guide was originally posted here on /r/gamedev 8 months ago. I'm reposting it for those that missed it and to update it with new lessons learned.

NB: This primarily applies to very small indie teams or solo developers such as myself, but some of the methods could be applied to specific tasks within a larger team.

Who am I? Where is the proof that my methods work? I'm a solo developer with more than 5000 hours of work into my current game, taking it from prototype to a 100+ hour playable game. The game is arriving on Steam in less than two weeks. You can see it here.

_

Getting Started

Most games revolve around a 10-30 second gameplay experience that is repeated endlessly. I first heard this concept described as a core foundation behind the design of Halo. This is the core of your game and if this isn't fun, it's unlikely the final game will be fun either.

Decide on the key concepts and gameplay elements that are at the core of your game.

Don't waste weeks or months planning out every last detail for your game. (I first read this tip from Minecraft's Notch)

Start work on it now. Don't procrastinate. (Also advised by Notch) Start as you mean to go on. As Nike says 'Just Do It'.

_

Passion and Dedication

Choose a game genre you fully understand and are passionate about.

Without passion you will never get it finished.

Without dedication you will never get it finished. If you struggle with this then practice it in any avenue of life. Learn how to finish things before embarking on bigger things.

You will have more success making a game for an audience you fully understand that is small, than for a bigger audience that you don't understand. You need to know what your audience wants if you want to have a chance of pleasing them.

Make a game that you passionately want to play.

_

The Prototype

The goal of the prototype is to create that core 10-30 second experience to ensure that it's as fun in reality as it was in your imagination.

If it's not fun, tweak it until it is.

Don't waste time on fancy graphics at this stage

If you can't make it fun now don't assume that adding more crap around it will make it fun later. That's highly unlikely.

Once it's fun, continue to add the core features (in a very rough but functional way) that you believe are essential to your game concept. It's better to make sure the whole concept works now before you waste too much time on a dud.

The prototype can take anything from an hour to a month depending on the complexity of your final game.

If it's not enjoyable now it's unlikely that it ever will be. Don't build a game on broken foundations.

_

The Master Plan

Now that you have a decent prototype it's time to plan out in a very rough way your schedule for the project. If you don't have a schedule you will fumble around endlessly wasting time and never get the thing done.

List all the core features that your game will need.

Don't detail how you will achieve them. You may not even know how you will achieve them at this stage. Just list them. Also, list all the essentials that every game needs eventually - things like save game functionality, a website, rebindable keys possibly.

Do this in broad strokes. We are not looking to list every minute detail here, just an overview of the big picture - each big job.

Once you have your list, estimate how long each job in the list will take and write it next to it.

Total up the time for everything. Now double it! Seriously. Even if you are very conservative in your estimates, almost everything is going to take longer than you expect, and you are going to run into endless jobs that you never predicted.

If the final total is not something that you think you can achieve reduce the scale of your project and repeat the above process until you arrive at something manageable.

_

Breakdown the Master Plan - Chunks

Split all the jobs in the master plan into 'Chunks'.

If your planned game will take two years you may want to break the list down into 'Chunks' that will each take three months each.

If your planned game will take 3 months in total, break it down into 2 week 'Chunks'

List your 'Chunks' in the order that they should be completed.

_

Take the first 'Chunk' and break it down - 'Pieces'

Even if your game is only planned to take 3 months to complete, you are still going to have a lot of work in each 'Chunk'.

Break the first 'Chunk' down into a new list of 'Pieces'. Again, don't get into details here. A 'Piece' might be something like - 'Create a basic GUI Interface' or 'Create assets for game feature X'.

Be sure that you have enough time to complete your 'Pieces' for that 'Chunk' in the timescale you have allocated. If not, you may need to move back up the plan and reduce the scale of your project.

_

Breakdown this first 'Piece' of the first 'Chunk' - Immediate Job List

Each 'Piece' might be still quite complex, and you may not know how to achieve it yet. As an example, our first 'Piece' might be something as broad as 'Implement the user interface' that could take two weeks to achieve. Now break that down into another wide brush stroke list, for example:

Implement the start screen

Implement the menu system

Implement the HUD system

Etc

Once again don't detail each job yet. Just list the jobs.

_

Breakdown the first Job in your Immediate Job List

By now you get the idea. Hopefully each job in our 'Immediate Job List' will take no more than a day or two. For smaller projects you will probably be already down to jobs that should only take a couple of hours and you can skip this stage.

So for example we might break down 'Implement Start Screen' into this new list:

Create the background

Create the main menu (New Game, Start Game, Options, Quit)

Implement the code to make the main menu function.

Add some juicy special effects to make it look nice.

_

Pick a job and break it down

So let's imagine we have chosen the job 'Implement the code to make the main menu function'.

Finally we are at the micro scale. We now plan in detail how to achieve this single job. Break it down again. List each little piece of the job that needs to be done.

It's a good idea to also now have a rough idea how you will achieve each little piece before getting started. This will help you predict problems that may occur with your chosen method.

This shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes. Maybe longer if it's a complex problem that you need to do some research on first.

Now do it!

Rince and repeat stepping backwards through the processes. Do all the little jobs to complete a job on your 'Immediate Job List' Then pick a new 'Piece' of a 'Chunk' and create a new 'Immediate Job List'

Then do it!

_

The advantages of this method

It's structured with timescales in place to get it all done.

The plan is all broad strokes that shouldn't take long to list initially.

It breaks down massively complex systems into tiny, easy, bite-sized pieces.

You only get down to details just before actually implementing something that will be finished in a few hours.

No sooner have you planned the details than you are implementing them while the problem is still fresh in your mind. This keeps motivation levels high and saves time. You aren't trying to remember something you planned six months ago.

You get to strike jobs off your list quickly. Don't underestimate how motivating this is. You see progression happening in a visual way constantly. There is nothing better than seeing a job list disappear.

_

Staying Motivated

Don't procrastinate

If you ever allow yourself to think 'I can't be bothered right now', push it out of your mind and get working immediately. Don't give it any time to fester and gain traction.

We are stupid creatures. We live by habit. If we allow ourselves to not work because 'we can't be bothered' this becomes a habit and it will happen more and more. Don't let it start. Do the opposite - get in the habit of just doing it and then it becomes easy to just do it.

However, if you are in the habit of just doing it, and you get a strong feeling of 'I can't be bothered' you are likely genuinely tired and need more sleep, or you're overworked. See below.

_

Don't Overwork - a recommended work schedule.

Applies only to full-time development

There is a reason the average working week is 40 hours. This has been proven over time to achieve efficient results. This is especially true in a concentration intensive job like game development.

Do 8 hour days, 5 days a week

Take a 5 minute break to get up and walk around once every 45 mins. Give your brain a break.

Take the weekend off to relax, recharge, and motivate yourself for the following week.

Get enough sleep. Don't underestimate this tip.

Take a week off once every 3 months. This is essential or you will burn out. You need time away from thinking about something or you fry your brain so it's of no use to you.

You will be more efficient and get more done by not overworking. Overwork makes our brain go around in circles while problem solving. If we are fresh, problems get solved very easily.

By not overworking, and getting enough sleep, your motivation levels will always stay high. - Well at least until mid way through Friday :)

The only times I feel like 'I can't be bothered today' is when I'm genuinely physically tired from lack of sleep or because I've overworked recently.

_

Get it out there

As soon as you have a playable alpha get it into the hands of your target audience.

Player feedback is essential to making a great game.

Listen to all feedback. You may not act on it, but you need a solid reason why you aren't acting on it.

As your game expands, get more people playing it.

You might have an ultimate goal of getting it on to Steam, but put it out there on a smaller platform once you have a stable product. Price it so that it offers value for money at that early stage. You are doing this not to make money but for experience and to get motivated from player feedback. You will also find out if you are wasting your time.

_

Conclusion

I hope this is useful info for some of you. It's not going to work for everyone but it's worked for me and I'm still motivated after nearly three years of development.

[topicprinter]

Retention rate is one of the fundamental metrics in product management. We all use it regularly, yet few of us know that there are many different ways to calculate retention rate. And it is very important to know which one to use when you’re making decisions based on retention data.Let me start with a story. When I worked at Zeptolab (popular game development company, creator of Cut the Rope, King of Thieves, CATS) once we got an email from a gamedev studio that wanted us to publish their game. We were getting many similar emails, but that one got our attention. We were impressed by the metrics of the game, which had just recently soft launched. According to the developers, Day 1 retention rate of the game was over 55%, and Day 7 retention rate was over 25%.However, when we started playing and testing the game, something felt wrong. The gameplay was not engaging enough to justify >55% Day 1 retention rate. And the meta game design was not good enough to users in the longer term.Further investigation revealed that what this game development company called retention was actually “rolling retention.” Classic Day N retention of the game happened to be unimpressive.This is just one example of how retention metrics can misguide you. There are many nuances in how you can calculate it.Classic Day N retention vs rolling retentionDefinition of classic Day N retention and rolling retentionDay N retention shows the percent of users who return to the app on a specified day after their first launch.Rolling retention shows the percentage of users who return to the app on a specified day or any day after that.If Day 2 retention is 50%, it means that 50% of new users launched the app on day 2.If Day 2 rolling retention is 50%, it means that 50% of new users returned to the app on day 2 or later.Calculating classic Day N retention and rolling retention for a real appOn the graph below you can see classic Day N retention and rolling retention calculated for the same app.The difference between these two metrics is huge. And it gets bigger as we go from day 1 to day 14. Imagine you asked a product analyst to calculate retention, and for some reason, he calculated rolling retention instead of retention. There is a chance you will make a wrong decision about the product’s future development direction.Let’s take a closer look at the difference between Day 1 classic and rolling retention.Day 1 classic retention is 43%, which means that 43% of new users launched the app on day 1 after they started using it.At the same time, Day 1 rolling retention is 59%, which means that 59% of new users launched the app on day 1 or later.That means that there were 43% of users who launched the app on day 1.The main disadvantage of rolling retentionRolling retention has one significant drawback, which is why it is recommended to use it only in cases when it is absolutely necessary.The problem with this metric is that it can change any time. If a user suddenly returns to the app for the first time in 90 days, rolling retention for all of the previous days in the report will see an increase.With classic retention, you know the exact percent of users who returned to the app by the time N days have passed since the first launch. Day N classic retention has no connection to data from other days and won’t change once you put Day N behind. In contrast, with rolling retention, the value for Day N retention might change 90 or even 250 days later.When to use rolling retentionFor the vast majority of tasks, classic Day N retention is much more useful than rolling retention. Therefore, it makes more sense to use the former.There are rare cases where rolling retention is convenient. Usually, it is employed in products that aren’t used much. For example, if you want to analyze the long-term retention of a flight-booking app, then rolling retention can help. You will get an answer to questions such as “How many users returned to the app after 30 days?” But even in this case, standard monthly retention will provide valuable insights and you probably won’t need rolling retention.Sometimes, companies want to look better in the eyes of investors or customers, and they use rolling retention in their reports and presentations. As you saw earlier – this can make your product look much better, especially if the people listening do not understand all the nuances of retention rate metrics.Now you know what rolling retention is, and how it differs from the more commonly used classic Day N retention. If you suddenly come across it somewhere in your work, you will understand what it’s all about.Where does the confusion between classic retention and rolling retention come from?You might ask why do some people refer to rolling retention simply as “retention.”In the beginning of the mobile analytics era, Flurry, a popular mobile analytics system, showed its retention metrics using “rolling retention” instead of “Day N retention,” confusing mobile app developers.Later on, Flurry also introduced the classic Day N retention report. But it was too late, and it had already established a culture of using rolling retention as the default.Calculating retention by 24-hour windows and strict calendar datesDefinition of retention calculated by 24-hour windows and strict calendar datesWe have discussed the difference between classic Day N retention and rolling retention, but there are more nuances to calculating retention metrics. Let’s discuss another one.Day N retention can be calculated by 24-hour windows or strict calendar days. The difference seems to be insignificant, but as you will later see, the values of the retention metric can vary significantly depending on the method you use to calculate it.When retention is calculated by 24-hour windows, retention charts will measure each user on their own rolling 24-hour windows, where Day 0 runs from the exact time of the First Event (usually the first time the user launches the app) through the next 24 hours, Day 1 runs from hour 24-48, and so on.Let’s say we calculate retention by 24-hour window and Day 1 retention is 10%. What this means is, say out of 1,000 users, 100 came back and triggered some event between the 24th and 48th hour after their respective Start Action (e.g. User X launched the app for the first time on Tuesday at 4:00 pm, and then reopened the app sometime between Wednesday 4:00 pm and Thursday 4:00 pm).When retention is calculated by strict calendar dates, retention charts will measure each user based on actual calendar dates. This means that if a user launched the app for the first time on October 1, at 11 pm, his day 1 will be the day of October 2, even though his day zero lasted no more than an hour (from 11 pm to 12 am).You can read more about this in the documentation of the Amplitude analytics platform: https://help.amplitude.com/hc/en-us/articles/230543327#24-hour-window-vs-strict-calendar-datesCalculating classic Day N retention by 24-hour windows and strict calendar datesOn the graph below, you can see the 24-hour window and strict calendar date retention for the same app that we examined above, when we were comparing classic and rolling retention.In this case, the maximum difference between two ways of calculating retention is visible in the first days. Day 1 retention by calendar dates is 43%, while Day 1 retention by 24-hour window is only 32%. As we move further, the difference becomes less significant. Further down the timeline, the two lines almost merge, which is not unexpected.Here’s why there’s a big difference in the Day 1 retention: Imagine a user launches the app for the first time at 11:50 pm on October 1. The user then launches the app again 20 minutes later, on October 2, 12:10 am. The user never returns to the app afterwards.In this case, if you’re calculating retention based on calendar dates, then the user will be considered as “returned” on Day 1. But if you’re using the 24-hour format, then the user will not be taken into account in the Day 1 retention report. For that, she would have had to open the app between October 2, 11:50 pm, and October 3, 11:50 pm, the 24-48 hour time window following her first event.Cases like this, where users launch an app for the first time before midnight and launch it again the next day before their first 24 hours expire, explain the difference you can see between the two ways of calculating the metric.Why it is important to know if the retention is calculated by 24-hour window or by calendar dates?We often use retention metrics to compare products between each other or to compare our product against benchmarks. That is how we make sense of the numbers we see, and that is how we know if the app’s retention is good or not.Let’s say you are working on a casual mobile game. You soft launch an early version of the game. After a few days, you calculate Day 1 retention. It happens to be 32%. You don’t know if it is good or not. That is why you go and search for benchmarks on Google and find a report by Appsflyer.The report says that to be in the top 10%, Day 1 retention for a casual game should be above 50.7%. Your app is a far shot. The median Day 1 retention is 38.8%. Again, with a 32% Day 1 retention rate, your app is not even close. Based on this information, you decide to close the project.However, that’s a mistake. By default, Appsflyer calculates retention based on strict calendar dates. Meanwhile, Amplitude, your analytics platform, uses the 24-hour window by default to calculate retention. If you calculate your app’s retention based on strict calendar dates, then Day 1 retention will be 43%. This puts you above average casual mobile games and not far behind the top 10%. This would probably change your decision.Which method of retention calculation is better?It depends. I would say that calculating retention based on 24-hour window will give you a more accurate answer to the question: What percentage of users return on Day N? However, it takes longer to get this data when you calculate retention by 24-hour window. For users who launched the app for the first time on a specific day, you will get the Day 1 retention only in two days (48 hours). In contrast, when you calculate retention by calendar dates, it will only take 24 hours to get Day 1 retention.Considering this, I would use retention calculated by calendar dates when I need the data quicker. For example, for marketing analytics, where every day incurs extra ad costs, using the calendar date format will help you avoid spending extra money on a poorly performing campaign. When you can afford waiting for another day, retention by 24-hour window should be your choice.But generally you can choose what you prefer. As long as you know what is exactly calculated, you will be able to draw accurate conclusions based on the data.SummaryThere are many different ways to calculate retention. And it is important to be very clear about what exactly you mean by retention and how is it calculated when you make decisions based on this metric.

[waynekelton]

Upcoming iOS & Android Games 2019

The mobile gamer can look back at 2018 with an affectionate and misty eye, secure in the knowledge that gaming on mobile devices gets more diverse, sophisticated and polished with each year. In this respect, 2019 has also proven to be a banner year on this front and it shows no signs of stopping now.

Roughly speaking, the most exciting upcoming games can be split into three groups: the name-brand megahits-in-waiting, boardgame adaptations, and indie projects. Read on to see what the who’s who of mobile gaming are cooking up for this year’s treats.

Quick Mentions

Eve Echoes had a Closed Alpha at the end of August, although we're not sure if the game is looking at a general 2019 release. Probably not. We suspect this new mobile game will replace the previous project we've been expecting, War of Ascension, mentioned below.

League of Legends Mobile - Riot are another company trying to port their heavy-hitter game to mobile. We've only had vague reports so far, and we're not even sure it's coming out this year, so it gets a quick mention for now pending further information.

We've removed Scythe from the list because Asmodee seem to be less involved in mobile this year then they were the year before, and Terraforming Mars hasn't even made it onto mobile yet. 

Upcoming Mobile Games 2020

Commandos 2, which was originally in the main list below, has slipped to 2020 on mobile. It's still due out on PC this year but speaking to the devs at GamesCom, they're probably not going to even start testing on mobile until the New Year so we've still got some time to wait yet.

Homeworld Mobile was announced at the same time as Homeworld 3. We're only guessing at a 2020 release here, but it's within the realms of possibility.

Company of Heroes (WW2 Tactical RTS)

We don't deserve Feral Interactive, quite frankly. In a sea of games fighting and struggling against the whims of mobile gamers and business models, here's a company that decided to just get really good at porting things to iOS, and at the same time decided to get really chummy with companies like SEGA. This is the company that's brought us Rome: Total War and Tropico to tablets and phones... and now they're bringing us that most sacred of strategy games, Company of Heroes.

The gold standard of squad-based real-time tactical strategy gaming, and they're just casually bringing it to your handheld device likes it's no big deal. We don't know much about it, at this point, other than it's due in the 'Fall'. It's only coming to iPad to start with, as is their tradition with most of their ports. It will also be premium, with no IAPs, and just include the base game content for starters.

Call of Duty Mobile (Shooter/Battle Royale)

Announced at GDC 2019, this new Call of Duty-on-mobile spin-off is the latest in a long series of mobile adaptations of the hugely popular FPS franchise. Activision's next attempt appears to be following in the vein of games like Fortnite & ARK - offering a fully 3D, fully-developed version of the main franchise that can run on phones and tablets.

From what we know so far, it's going to be a kind of 'greatest hits' compilation of modes, maps, characters etc... and may even feature a Battle Royale mode (putting it in direct competition with Fortnite, which is popular on mobile as well as desktop). This is the next game on the list to release, and you'll be able to get your hands on it come October 1st, 2019.

GWENT: The Witcher Card Game (Card Game)

One can never have too many card games in their lives, or at least, that's what the makers of all of the Hearthstone wannabes like to tell themselves every night before going to sleep. GWENT started life a a mini-game within The Witcher 3, but it proved so popular CDPR decided to spin it to create their own take on a digital card game. It's been out on PC for a little while already, although we're not sure how well it's performing vs. the other giants in this space.

The mobile version has been expected for a while, and now we finally have a release date of October 29th, 2019. It'll definitely be interesting to see what happens - Hearthstone's reign is fading, but there's yet to be a real successor that can confidently claim the crown... maybe it'll be this one, maybe not.

Football Manager 2020 Touch & Mobile (Sport Management/Sim)

Another year, another round of Football Manager games. The FM 2020 series is going to be launching on PC and Mobile all at the same time, with the mobile offerings once again being split into Football Manager 2020 Mobile, which is a stripped down version of the game that works on phones, and Football Manager 2020 Touch which is the PC version ported to tablets. Not much more to say on this one, other than the release is planned for November, currently. 

Minecraft Earth (AR)

It seems 2019 is the year people finally try and jump on to the Pokemon GO craze. It's only been three year! Minecraft Earth is Microsoft & Mojang's answer to the likes of Ingress Prime and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Different from the existing Minecraft experience on mobile, this AR-fuelled game comes with a number of key concepts. First and foremost, people can explore the world in real-life, checking into locations on their phone much like how Pokestops work. These locations net them resources which can be used in the building mode, which is reported to be just as free-form as the original game. Finally, those constructions can then be placed in the real-world, so anyone with their phone can explore and interact with them.

This seems like a pretty decent marriage of Pokemon GO-style AR and a popular IP. Say what you want about Microsoft, none of their various Minecraft versions have felt like cynical cash-ins, so it'll be interesting to see how this one turns out. It's currently running a closed beta test that is rolling out to more and more people over time, but we're not sure when a full release is planned yet.

Xenowerk Tactics (RTS)

From the people who brought you Space Marshal comes a new RTS called Xenowerk Tactics. We don't know a hell of a lot about it at this point. It's due to be coming "this year", it will be a premium game and it will be releasing on iOS and Android, but that's about it. It's described as a "pre-apocalyptic RTS-like, mutant blasting game with exploration and strategy elements." Such a vague release window could still mean we don't see this until next year, but there's still plenty of time for pixelbite to get this out the door, so who knows.

Phantom Doctrine (Turn-based Strategy)

Phantom Doctrine ... mobile version, are you ready for the change.#indiegame #gamedev #mobile #PhantomDoctrine pic.twitter.com/fKM4RAVqkN

— CreativeForge Games (@CFGmain) June 7, 2019

 Another one a few of us here are really looking forward to. Phantom Doctrine was an attempt to make an XCOM-like game set during the Cold War. You run an international spy agency and you must train up your agents, develop their cover and embed them in locations, as well as engaging in other acts of espionage and intrigue. There's a 'base/strategic' part, and then a turn-based tactical part. What stops this from just being a token nod towards Bond-style espionage is that most turn-based tactical battles can start off peacefully, and even end without a shot being fired provided you do your job well enough.

It's pretty good, although it was a bit glitchy when it first launched, but provided how well XCOM fits on tablet and mobile, I have no doubt the mobile version of Phantom Doctrine is going to be right up our alley. Considering there was no word of an actual release window, perhaps a 2019 release is a bit ambitious but what the heck, we're excited!

Tom Clancy's Elite Squad (Collectable RPG/Battler Thing)

Not sure if this is turn-based or real-time thing - there's not much information beyond the E3 2019 trailer. Ubisoft will be offering players the chance to assemble a 5-person squad with characters from across their franchises, where you need to collect and upgrade characters and fight in 5v5 battles against either the AI or other players. There's going to be a single-player story + guild vs. guild warfare.

No release date, but pre-registration is already live so I'm expecting at least a beta or something this year, with perhaps the full release early next year if not by Christmas. I stand by what I said when we originally reported on this though - I think Ubisoft are missing a trick by not making this an Auto Chess game.

Game of Thrones: Beyond the Wall (As Above)

Behavoir Interactive (them what made Fallout Shelter) had their own announcement as this year's E3. In the same vein as Ubisoft's Elite Squad, BE are working with HBO on Beyond the Wall, another RPG/Strategy/Squad Battler thing. Usually, separate new games sharing the same basic DNA signifies an emerging trend but, again, I think the guys have completely missed the fact that Auto Chess is happening.

Still, all the parts are there to make this a potentially compelling experience - you've got to recruit people into the Night's Watch, go on rangings beyond the Wall and defend said Wall from wildlings. This trying to cash-in on the recently finished television show, there will be some magical based mumbo-jumbo reason to recruit, or collect, famous people from the TV series as well (this game is officially set half a decade before Book 1, so you can imagine there'll be a bit creative license going on here). Pre-registration is live on both iOS & Android, so hopefully we'll learn more about this soon.

Final Fantasy (Tactical RPG)

We're lumping two Final Fantasy games into one entry because there's not much to say on them at the moment. At E3 it was announced that Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicle's Remaster will also be hitting tablets and smartphones. We're expecting that to drop in the Winter. Here's the trailer:

Meanwhile, Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius is getting a tactical RPG spin-off, War of the Visions. We're not 100% on details or release window yet, but it's also got a trailer:

Out of the Park GO! (Sports/Management)

While not the all-father of sports sims that is Football Manager, the OOTP Baseball series holds just a firm a place in baseball fans hearts. The mobile incarnation of OOTP has been a series of games called MLB Manager, the most recent of which we reviewed last year. It seems the developer is starting from scratch for the next iteration, even re-branding it to become OOTP GO! Here's what they have to say about it:

OOTP Go! will be free to play, which includes full access to Perfect Team and the ability to create and play fictional solo leagues. The current MLB rosters are a $4.99 in-app purchase, international leagues will be $1.99 each and historical MLB seasons will be (as usual) $0.99 (plus there will be bundles available for a reduced price).

Last thing we heard a public beta for it was due to start soon, so we'll be amazed if it still manages to release this year. Coming to both iOS & Android.

Dire Wolf Digital (Board Game)

This isn't the name of a game, but the name of a company that announced this year they're making a bucket-load of digital board game adaptations. Because we only have the announcement text to go on, we've decided to keep the new games all in one place until we know more. The company recently released their first offering from the list, Raiders of the North Sea, at the end of July. We're not sure if they'll be able to release many more before the year is out, but here's the remaining ports they have on their slate:

Mage Knights – It's worth noting this is the first step in a bigger agreement with WizKids, so it's likely we'll be seeing more announcements this year.

Wings of Glory – A popular table-top aerial skirmish game.

Yellow & Yangtze – a Reiner Knizia tile placement game of civilization building.

Sagrada – A dice drafting game about creating works of art.

Root – the recent Kickstarter sensation about asymmetrical warfare in the woods.

We'll update as we learn more.

Diablo Immortal (Action RPG)

Diablo Immortal will draw some side-eye and mockery, having been already made notorious because of its horribly mistimed announcement. (Yes, we have phones, but read the room, Activision-Blizzard). Even more puzzlingly, the game is being created in partnership with NetEase, a Chinese developer whose resume already includes ‘Eternal Realm’ (无尽神域) itself essentially a Diablo clone. Weird stuff: the official license merging with a pretender to the throne to make a hybrid project together. Concerns about endless grind or re-skinning of Eternal Realm are well-founded, but while most of us will be as judge-y as possible we’ll also probably still give the final product a try. Good action RPGs live or die by loot, character progression and above all, delicate-yet-accurate controls, so it will be interesting to see if Diablo Immortal will be a good game as well as the inevitable cash cow.

We thought we'd have heard something about this game by now following its announcement last year. The silence doesn't mean the project is cancelled, of course, but it could mean this will slip to the 2020 list.

Terraforming Mars (Boardgame)

Terraforming Mars sounds like a noble goal for all of humanity. In reality, the game is a push-and-pull competition for corporations to garner by prestige by...terraforming Mars. Three categories: oxygen, temperature and ocean coverage dictate the endgame, but to get there, players will reshape the red planet into a bright blue hope. It’s a Euro though-and-though: precisely balanced, intricately co-dependent and inevitably point-based. But the close match between theme and mechanic makes this game deeply satisfying and intuitive to learn and explain, and the action selection mechanic is uniquely innovative and inspired. Just when I think boardgame design is tapped out, something truly exceptional rises to the top.

A limited beta was in progress on mobile, but then the developer went bankrupt. Last we heard Asmodee Digital have retained the rights and assets to the mobile version so hopefully they'll be able to get a new developer on board sharpish. Whether we see this by the end of the year though is anyone's guess.

Impossible Bottles (Rhythm/Action)

Various robots move about in their bottles and raging about like a bull in a china shop. Each level presents one of these Impossible Bottles for the player to fix by manipulating the environment and repairing the situation, or at the very least soothing its sole occupant. A scientist built these robots as part of a perpetual motion machine for unlimited energy, but they don’t quite work as is. The secret to fixing everything is music, or in gameplay terms: rhythm.

One-touch gameplay and lush, fantastic art: it was slated with a mid-year release which obviously hasn't happened yet, and we've yet to hear anything else about it.

Heaven’s Vault (Interactive Fiction)

We're not sure what's going on with Inkle's of 80 Days interactive fiction fame) newest game Heaven’s Vault. It's currently available on Steam and Playstation, and a Switch version is planned for 2020. As for mobile? Who knows. I've been worrying that the Switch is stealing some mobile ports, although you never know - Apple Arcade might change that now.

An archaeologist-slash-xenolinguist explores the dusty remains of an alien civilization on an unknown planet, with a vivid backdrop of sienna sand and celestial blue. There’s some pretty nifty procedural tricks behind the code-breaking and translation, and while its approach to storytelling is a little less handcrafted, it has the potential to have even more surprises and replayability than the globe-trotting 80 Days.

Other Missing Games From 2018

As a reminder, here is a quick list of some other games we were expecting last year, but never turned up on mobile:

Bad North (RTS) (Out now on PC & Switch)

Exodus: Proxima Centauri (Boardgame)

Epic Card Game (Card Game)

Lord of the Rings Living Card Game (Card Game) (Out now on PC)

Monster Slayers (Card Game) 

EVE: War of Ascension (MMO) (Possibly replaced by EVE: Echoes?)

Best iOS & Android Games of 2019 (So Far)

There's already been some excellent releases this year, and not all of them were expected/on this list. If you haven't already, check these games out:

Raiders of the North Sea (Board Game)

Santorini (Board Game)

Astrologaster (??)

Tharsis (Turn-Based Strategy)

Shards of Infinity (Card Game)

Fort Sumter (Boardgame)

Dungeon Warfare 2 (RTS)

Cultist Simulator (Card Game/Sim)

Necrodancer AMPLIFIED (Roguelike)

The Castles of Burgundy (Boardgame)

Star Traders: Frontiers (RPG)

Legends of Andor (Boardgame)

Evolution: The Video Game (Boardgame)

The Escapists 2: Pocket Breakout (Simulation)

Seen any other games coming out this year you're excited about? Let us know in the comments.

Upcoming iOS & Android Games 2019 published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[impurelight]

Dumb Arguments

There has been something bugging me lately. Commenters on the internet do not know how to argue. And it is really… weird.

So the big issue on the internet is net neutrality. I think the FCC voted on it but whatever. The more I think about it the more I don’t care about it but I’ll tell you why I was so against it.

At the time there were so many people saying things like, ‘net neutrality helps competition’ and ‘I don’t want ISP’s to mess around with my internet’ and ‘it’s like forcing everyone to use the internet slow lane’.

These are all dumb arguments. Because refuting these is trivial. How does net neutrality help competition? That’s not a bad thing, stop saying it so negatively. That’s an oversimplification. And people repeat them over and over again.

It’s like how I am for government spying and then someone has to be like, ‘oh, you are for everyone knowing everything about you.’ as if those things are logically equivalent. It’s an overused argument. So overused I made up my own fallacy to refute it.

I was recently arguing why having a coordinate system in a grid based strategy game wasn’t as useful as simply having a pointer to every tile’s neighbour. And it was so sad. Everyone just spammed the same points I had already shot down. I had to even make up arguments to argue against.

In fact there was a DoS attack on the FCC. Basically net neutrality advocates spammed them with the same comment with just the from line changed. Turns out it may have been net neutrality refuters- rebels- oh, whatever. Basically they wanted to make net neutrality supporters look bad.

And I totally bought it. Hook, line, and sinker. That is just what I would expect net neutrality advocates to say. The same generic tired argument over and over no matter how much it has been said and when anyone says anything otherwise they’d just cover their ears and shout really loudly.

The thing is when someone makes a stupid argument like this I don’t care what they’re saying. I just don’t want to be on their side.

Now if there were some actual facts I wouldn’t have been so fast to take that side. I saw a video that said, ‘in the past ISP’s have done x, y, and z. If net neutrality were enforced those would not be possible.’ Now that’s a strong argument. Not perfect, it’s still one sided, but a lot better. And it would make me think twice before jumping sides.

I actually thought this weird personality trait may be related to me being a computer scientist. But no, because truth be told this started a long time ago. I first noticed it when I thought about global warming.

I was on this forum and people were arguing about global warming and I took the against side. Mostly because the for side were idiots spewing the same thing over and over.

Well I changed my view but no one changed my mind. I had to change it myself. Informative media like this reporting on facts I did not know about changed my view.

So is this anecdotal information? Yes, but I recently read this slashdot article and knew I had to post this.

I also remember hearing on a YANSS podcast episode that smarter people are more likely to fall for sketchy new age mumbo jumbo like this.

I think there are two sides to every person. The neocortex highly developed logical side and the animalistic side. And unfortunately, the animalistic side wins out most of the time.

I'm starting to think education has made this even worse by teaching the neocortex side to develop these stupid arguments that just strengthen the animalistic side.

Because the smarter you are the easier it is to fool yourself into thinking the side your friend is on is really the right side, even if it isn't. Like in that famous study where, turns out, the phrase ‘I need to make photocopies because I need to make photocopies’ beats out ‘I need to make photocopies’.. Maybe the reason why Donald Trump and Brexit keep happening is precisely because we are getting too smart for our own good.

Well, whatever it is I hope it reverses soon. It sure is lonely having no intelligent life to argue with.

[tinyworldsbackup]

Picoworld: How I saved time animating & Why I switched to Krita

This is an automated backup of www.tinyworlds.org

Hello everyone! I'm currently experimenting with finding a fresh art style for my game about terrariums. This post is meant to share my learnings with fellow artists and game developers - I hope you find this useful! Here is a looping video of my art experiment in-game.

In this post I will cover:

making your own tiny world/terrarium

why I recorded a video instead of using photos

why I switched to Krita from GIMP

how I saved time making the animation for the character

1. Building a tiny, self-sustaining world

I started by building a terrarium - that's a tiny world in a glass jar. I collected rocks, plants, water and snails from a nearby river and pond and put them all in jar to bring it back home. A natural circle established - due the sunlight new algae grew, which the snails then ate. Without the snails the terrarium soon would have been covered in algae! The waterplants where also really important, as they converted CO2 into breathable O2 for the snails. With those systems in place, the little "ecosystem" was mostly self-sustaining. I didn't really need to do anything for 1 month, just observe if the balance is still ok (enough O2, not too many algae, etc.). A couple of days go I put the snails back in the river so they can dig themselves in for the winter.

#element-74e00fa2-d668-4b80-8e7c-5a351611b98c .colored-box-content { clear: both; float: left; width: 100%; -moz-box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; -ms-box-sizing: border-box; box-sizing: border-box; background-color: #c9f8a9; padding-top: 20px; padding-bottom: 20px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 20px; -webkit-border-top-left-radius: 0px; -moz-border-top-left-radius: 0px; border-top-left-radius: 0px; -webkit-border-top-right-radius: 0px; -moz-border-top-right-radius: 0px; border-top-right-radius: 0px; -webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 0px; -moz-border-bottom-left-radius: 0px; border-bottom-left-radius: 0px; -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 0px; -moz-border-bottom-right-radius: 0px; border-bottom-right-radius: 0px;}

TIP: If you want to make your own tiny indoor pond/ "jarrarium", this tutorial is really good. And if you don't want to make it underwater and without animals, I've made a video tutorial for moss terrariums some time ago, which is really easy to follow. Enjoy!

2. Why I Recorded video instead of using a photo 

But before putting them in their habitat again, I recorded some video of the terrarium, which you did see at the beginning of this post. I recorded a video as it is important to have motion for things to feel alive - a photo simply didn't work in my previous experiments. I then turned my recording into a seamless 5 seconds loop using this tool and imported it into Unity (what my game runs on). Please note that both video and character are more and less place-holders to use only for this art test. I probably will rebuilt things again!

3. Why I switched to Krita from GIMP

My little character itself was drawn in the free Krita (after lots of character development on paper and digitally). I just recently switched from the (very limited) GIMP to Krita and I really like it. GIMP was always missing a good brush system to me and Krita has that and so much more! Their color selection and overall tools are really well designed (plus it is 100% free). My only complaint so far is that the function to add text to images is still really basic. Other than that, I can really recommend it!

4. How I saved time & work making the animation in Spriter

I then created a really simple animation in Spriter (free tool, 60$ for Pro version), which is a bone-based animation tool. That means I don't need to redraw every frame of the animation, but instead move parts of the model to make things come alive. Which is a great timesaver! The placeholder character animation took about 3 minutes to make as it's one of the simplest animations you can do (simple "squash and stretch"). It also has a community-made Unity integration, which works, but is sometimes a bit buggy judging from the experience I had in a recent project. There is also the more expensive tool Spine (70$ for Essential, 300$ for Pro version), which basically does the same job, but gives you some more advanced tools and better Unity integration. But for now Spriter is the best "bang for the bucks" and works really nicely for me.

addendum

Thank you for reading! Please let me know if this was useful to you :) I want to post more posts from now on that are useful to other artists & developers! If you're interested in that, subscribe to my newsletter:

#element-4c6734ed-8078-4336-ad60-dd3bde005399 .colored-box-content { clear: both; float: left; width: 100%; -moz-box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-box-sizing: border-box; -ms-box-sizing: border-box; box-sizing: border-box; background-color: #c9f8a9; padding-top: 20px; padding-bottom: 20px; padding-left: 20px; padding-right: 20px; -webkit-border-top-left-radius: 0px; -moz-border-top-left-radius: 0px; border-top-left-radius: 0px; -webkit-border-top-right-radius: 0px; -moz-border-top-right-radius: 0px; border-top-right-radius: 0px; -webkit-border-bottom-left-radius: 0px; -moz-border-bottom-left-radius: 0px; border-bottom-left-radius: 0px; -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius: 0px; -moz-border-bottom-right-radius: 0px; border-bottom-right-radius: 0px;}

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[rhinctus4]

02//48HOURS

Yeah, so much for weekly updates! Based off previous attempts to do weekly content on youtube and tumblr, it’s not at all easy to keep up with. Also, i haven’t touched on gamedev much at all, everything to do with school changed within probably two weeks after posting that so nothing to say in that regard. Something which did happen recently (on August 25th) was the 48HOURS Furious Filmmaking Challenge, which is probably one of the biggest events of the year. It’s always a huge buildup to the event and it turned out to be heaps of fun this year, so I want to put my experience on here. 

So every year around May we check on 48hours.co.nz to check if any new updates are posted. As of last year that hasn’t so much been the case as the dates got moved towards the end of the year due to sponsorship issues. After checking multiple times the registration finally opened near the arse end of term two, sometime after I posted the first post just below this one. For a while we had been desperately trying to figure out what on earth the team name should be, as we didn’t like the old one and no one was coming up with a good one to replace it. After holding a proper set of polls we nailed down the new team name. Mach One. Which we thought could possibly be mispronounced as mack one, but we decided it didn’t matter. We were making films at the speed of sound.

Our first meeting was with a small group of people, the writers and directors, which helped us boil down what we wanted to do over the weekend. The big white table was set out at the bottom bock of Max’s house, an area which became known as “The Pit”. As lunch approached we continued the discussions over lunch at the international food court

Ruby, Max in the distance, Felix, and Donald with some hearty meals. We can all agree that Wave is still the best chocolate milk in nz.

The man in the distance

That pretty much concluded our meeting for the day, not too much else happened other than writing up a timeline for the weekend. The next meeting was scheduled for the Friday before 48HOURS, on the 18th. 

This year was our first year inviting Eamonn onto the team, which rounded off the team member number from 9 to 10. It was a huge meeting, held again in The Pit, we discussed ideas, roles, and went through the entire timeline which had been written previously. People were falling asleep towards the end of the night, which was a bit of a worry in light of the upcoming weekend! Despite this, the meeting was a success and put us in good step for the weekend. 

Welcome to the pit! In this shot, going clockwise from the bottom left, is Oscar P, Ruby (face obscured by fatt hed), Joe, James, Eamonn, Max, Sharn, Donald, and Felix

Max holding the talking stick

Sunglasses for everyone!

Here we see Doggie tapping away at organisational documents

Things get silly with the now broken talking stick

Making a point

Oscar appears

Impromptu drum jam sessions are in order, and are tradition for us with 48HOURS at this point. 

Sleepy boi Sharn

Grandpa Max reading out his genius 15 minute ideas

Sleepy Oscar towards the end of the meeting

Oh no

Max evaluating his choices

Quick escape!

James and Donald are not impressed

So that wraps up our meeting. Everyone headed home on their own merry way. The next event was on the Thursday before 48HOURS, the 24th of August.

I actually didn’t hear this was happening while I was at the meeting, just a bit of oversight on my part. The gear test was a small thing held with only a handful of people, even less than the initial meeting. We set up computers, talked gear and equipment, and were out of there in no time at all. We were so close to starting!

Macbook for writing, Duck computer for doing any audio, editing, or VFX

The table is moved out of the pit

Co-director doggie at his last supper. Wait...who is that on the poster above him?

And with that, I left. I left my duck laptop there and had to wait just one more day. 

The big night arrives. There’s always the usual excitement of getting all the gear out of various cars and into the house. There was also something about Ned’s Declassified? 

Ned! NED!

In the background there you can see all the gear which Donald brought in, and off camera is Oscar’s electronic drum kit which he brought in as well, which turned into the drum kit of choice for the weekend. It was a total blast to use.

There’s heaps!

After everyone piled in, we sat down at the big table, sending Joe and Sharn off to pick up the genre from Hollywood cinema in Avondale. We all waited in anticipation, with the livestream of the event up on the big TV. While we waited Max and I finished off the team intro clip which goes at the beginning of a 48HOURS submission, we had actually been working on it for some time and only on the night had we actually gotten the time to finish it off. We had that done and exported pretty quickly and we got back to the big table. Ant Timpson, big boss of 48, had been teasing about changes to the required elements of the film. They were pretty different from last year. No required line, no required prop. This year there was a selection of 20 different narrative themes which you had to pick one of. Our details for the weekend were:

GENRE: Action

THEME: Transformation (which we eventually came to pick)

CHARACTER: A female

PHYSICAL ELEMENT: A collision

TECHNICAL ELEMENT: A smash cut

SOUND EFFECT: The Wilhelm scream

The required sound effect was new too, and we all groaned when we found out it was the fucken Wilhelm scream. Once we had all the required elements we set off for 10 minutes to think of as many ideas as possible. When we came back we all sat around the big table and in a circle went around everyone’s ideas. After hearing many ideas we came down to two main ideas. The 18 Dollar Man and Reaction Woman. The 18 dollar man is about a powerful android being created my a master engineer, only to have the powerful android best the engineer. With only 18 dollars left in pocket, the engineer creates the 18 dollar man, who must train his arse off to beat the powerful android. Reaction Woman was about a world where everyone is fighting, except for this one person. We eventually went on with the latter. We had meter long pizzas for dinner, then while Max, Felix, and I went into Max’s room to write the film in separation from the noise, Ruby, Donald and Sharn figured out cinematography, and everyone else figured out choreography for fight scenes in the film, as it was going to have a bunch of hand to hand combat. They figured out an awesome looking fight, choreographed entirely in The Pit, and the camera people figured out some brilliant shots despite only having random snippets of the script and story to go off of. Us three writers actually managed to produce a full script by our deadline of 3am on Saturday. It looked pretty solid, and had everything we were required to have. Shortly after we all found places to sleep and got ready to wake up by 6am.

Figuring out story beats

These shots are only from 11pm on Friday, we had a long night ahead of us. 

6AM came fast, and we got up feeling peppy and ready for shooting. Donald and Sharn had completed the shot list, and the choreography was nailed down. After a classic breakfast of eggs, bacon, hash browns, and bread pretty much everyone got ready to go out and shoot. This included the two directors, Sharn the camera man, Max as the on set editor advisor dude, Zarina as our main character, Joe the supporting role, and the parent which took them, which I remember to be either James G. or Ruth. That was the longest shoot of the day, and the whole time Felix, James, Oscar, Harry, and I were back at the house. Hereafter Felix and I are the “Resident Editors”, and to prepare for the first batch of footage to come in we made our master premiere project with the team intro we had completed on Friday evening, our team’s title card, a blank video with a length of 5 minutes to show the maximum time allowed, and then 5 seconds of black. It was up to the competition’s standards in no time at all, so the rest of the time was just milling around for us. 

James on the other hand had been tasked with making music composition ideas despite not having any idea of what he was meant to be scoring for at that point. It more so provided the opportunity for his gear to come out, my bagful of gear to come out, and also to dig out some of Max’s instruments which he had hiding in his closet so that people wouldn’t get audibly abused by everyone during the weekend. We didn’t clearing off any of the writing guff from the previous night, we just set laptops, keyboards, synths, audio interfaces, and a bunch of cables onto the big table alongside pens and refill pads. It was chaotic but it worked! We also moved Oscar’s drum kit over from beside a couch in The Pit to beside the big table. It was a musical banquet! It also proved to be an opportunity to test out the gear which I hadn’t gotten around to using. Us playing music continued until around 12:50PM when everyone got back from filming the office scene.

A text from the Big Cheese, with a bunch of strange hieroglyphics littered between mangled text

Harry at the Casio, Oscar in the back at the drums. James on the Microkorg, which was plugged into the Scarlett, which was plugged into the macbook through logic 9, out to a tinny burger speaker which turned out to be useful for making loud noises. 

The full music table, taken shortly after everyone left to film the next scene. 

When the office crew got back, everyone started rushing around getting ready to go shoot the big opening scene up the road. James, Oscar, and Harry gapped it too so it was just the resident editors at home. While we imported footage I took a bit of time to rearrange the desk, then Felix and I got going. There were three scenes shot at the office, a short fight scene between Sharn and Max, which was part of a montage, a dialogue scene between Joe and Zarina, and a short scene of Zarina and Sharn. We reviewed the footage, and were super happy with the amount of footage and coverage which had been taken. It didn’t take us long to cut together a rough edit for the three scenes. After a bit more milling around, people began to make their way back to the house. Felix and I started importing the footage once it arrived, and we got to work. This scene was fun, and because it was only roughly 6 shots it didn’t need that much editing out. The coverage was fantastic, and only a small reshoot for a shot of a phone was needed. It was more a case of what we wanted to put where. 

By this point the crew had gone off to another shoot, this time down by Wynyard quarter. Problem being that it was starting to get dark. By now James had some pretty solid ideas about what to do music wise, so we locked the edit on the opening scene and made a low quality video export of the scene. James got to work making music along to the beats of the opening, while I dug into sound effects. In the opening scene alone there were a fucken tonne of sound effects. Most of them I found on the spot from freesound.org, which is a fantastic website. The crew got back with the Wynyard Quarter footage and Felix mostly dug into that after importing it, I kept going with SFX, and James kept going with music. By this time it was around 7PM. Things started mellowing down, some people had gone to sleep. James had pretty much done the composition for the first scene, we bounced that in 3 separate parts to use in the opening and eventually in the outro. At what was probably 10pm a small collection of non-sleepers had gathered in Max’s room, and I was looking to record some actual sound with a microphone. Felix had gone up the road to his house to get his mic and audio interface, the latter of which turned out not to work with the duck computer. So, we grabbed the M-audio from the back room and for the first time I got to press the phantom power button, which was just super exciting. It glows orange! I was fucking stoked, and a blue light turned on upon Felix’s mic too. We got multiple hilarious recordings of people making grunting noises, a bunch of which got used in the final piece. We then started finding objects to use for foley, one of which was a nerf sword. Oscar tried swinging it but we weren’t quite getting the noise we wanted. A bunch of people tried, inching it carefully closer and closer to the mic. Then, Donald volunteered, and with one fell swoop he topped the microphone off onto the floor. He was thenceforth banned from swinging near anything significant. I don’t have any photos of this, but Oscar did have the brilliant foresight to take a fast one of us in the room:

In this photo of Oscar’s is myself, Max behind James, James, Felix, and Sharn. This was when we were bouncing James’ tracks, before we got into audio recording

As the night went on past 12AM on Sunday, more people began to fall asleep, and eventually Max went to sleep and requested I vacate his room, so I quietly took all of my shit into the back room to find the big table had been filled with extra cables and game controllers from people playing smash to pass the time. It felt like some kind of stealth mission trying to move loose game cube controllers off the table. One of them fell of at one point, that caused me to freeze up. At this point it is probably around 2:00AM on Sunday, i’m the one person awake as I was determined to make it until 3:00AM without sleeping. We were out of V at this point as well, as we had somehow managed to drink it all by Saturday at sunset. 

In previous years we always had a surplus of V, but not this year. As a matter of fact, there came a point I think on Saturday where we were running out of drinks. We had slammed down all of the Lift, both cans and bottles, most of the cola bottles were gone, especially the vanilla stuff. There was also the odd drink out, like a single bottle of iced tea or bottles of juice, but even they got drunk at some point. Donald, Ruby, and possibly Max had to go on a quick drink run at the local countdown to refresh the supplies. Everyone was doing something at all times, and it really showed in the quota of drinks consumed over the weekend. 

So I actually made it past 3AM doing the audio, but by that point the smallest delay in doing literally anything caused me to lower my head and close my eyes, and I was lucky the ridiculous grunting recordings got so loud at parts, because I would quickly scuttle though the 50 or so different sounds we had to find a certain one, often to be awakened by one of Donald’s fucking loud noises. Hootin’ and Hollerin’. The opening was mostly done, and the need to sleep was gnawing at me without the caffeine, so I mindlessly climbed onto the nearest unoccupied couch, which was a single leather sofa was Donald has taken up post on the double, and fell asleep for 4 hours. 

By the time I woke up Eamonn had come back from being at home, and had just snuck inside at 6am when everyone was failing to wake up on time. He mentioned just how uncomfortable my sleeping position looked, which was completely true. Nonetheless, we all got going pretty quickly. William arrived not long after we had woken up, and we couldn’t afford to wait around for long at all to people just scoffed down some bread pull aparts and were off to Wynyard Quarter to shoot the next major scene. I got back into audio work in Max’s room after transferring most of the equipment back there from the big table. Joe and I to record radio announcements, and not long after that the crew got back from Wynyard Quarter dripping with rain.

Joe recording his radio announcement, also this is the best view of the VO and recording setup. I didn’t get a good look at the phantom power light which is a bummer. Duck computer really pulled through during this 48HOURS

Felix once again imported the footage, I was somewhat distant from editing at this point as I was completely immersed in sound editing. After Felix got that scene together, we had a segment without any good sound to use, so he sent over the edited scene and a copy of the room tone. That was a pretty quick job and I got back to fine tuning the first scene’s audio. By now the crew had gone off to record the final piece of the montage over at Browns Reserve.

Photo credit to Donald, a shot of smooth operator Sharn holding both camera and boom whilst donning the HD-201′s and slick shades. Meanwhile, Zarina is psyching herself up for the next shot of hooligans launching kicks at thin air.

We got Joe to figure out some music for the montage earlier, and now that James was back he was able to refine it. We kept on making small edits to what we had and added in music and sound where we could. The crew got back from Browns and we imported the footage again. This meant we had all the footage for the montage and we were able to refine that further. The only footage left to do was the ending and the pickup shot of the phone. We completed the montage fairly quickly while the crew left to do those last shots. 

Turns out that Donald had been putting in our name for the text-in sweepstakes which had been going for the entire weekend, and we finally managed to score a prize of a chicken lunch from Bird on a Wire, thing being that they didn’t get back to us about it until after Donald had already made an arse of himself in the cafe. Then we ended up having lunch from the house which consisted of chicken. Then an HP rep got back to us saying that we could go and pick up our lunch from the place under his name, so that was just ridiculous. We had it for dinner in the end. 

It was around now that this beautiful image arose, credit to Oscar for the photo

After we had the last scene completely filmed it was approaching crunch time. Things were tending to become a little bit more tense, stakes were rising. We quickly got the final scene cut together so I could do some fast audio done on it. Then we all went through it to make some changes to the sound, and adjust things we needed to do. We placed all of our sub sequences into the master sequence, made more changes, then people began to be kicked out of the room. I was one of the last to go before Max and Felix got down to the knitty gritty and did the final checks on the cut. Max was the last person to come out and say that it was all done. So, we quickly got onto exporting it which didn’t take too long. Despite things going so smoothly, it was still slightly stressful if literally anything messed up. People stopped playing smash out the back when we were done, and we quickly transferred the film to two different USBs. One which we bought and the one HP gave to us in our goodie bag. With the films on the USBs, we jetted off from the house over to Hollywood cinema for the hand in. We left shortly after 6PM. 

A view of the pit just before we left to Hollywood Cinema. Looks like a battle happened in here

The chip packets had returned to the music table once more

My last photo from the weekend, standing outside the house as we’re about to leave

We raced off the Avondale, and despite our car leaving second we actually made it to Hollywood Cinema first. Got there at around 6:30, only a small crowd had gathered there at that point. Got the usual applause as we walked up and handed in our film. Hooray! Always such a rewarding feeling being able to walk up to the tables and have your name ticked off. Mach One had done it. Once the others got there we set up shop on the second floor and amongst giving people signature seal pup congratulations, we were screaming, shouting, clapping, and overall just having a great time. When the countdown to 7:00PM was done, we headed off back to the house to watch the film and have dinner. We ate our bird on a wire lunch, watched the film a couple of times, then the frantic rush to pack up and charge out the door began. We all said our farewells to each other, many sweaty bro hugs were in order. I was one of the last to leave as I had brought so much shit in my bag. And just like that, it was done! I had lost my voice from screaming, and I could see that I had a long sleep ahead of me. However, this year’s 48HOURS had been absolutely heaps of fun.

So that’s it. We came third in our heat and didn’t win any significant prizes. We were proud of the film though, as it had been our most solid 48HOURS production to date. In retrospect we thought that the world we had to set up in less than 5 minutes may have been a bit far fetched, but the story was clear and everything else about it was fabulous. The acting from Zarina and Joe was super solid, all the supporting roles were funny and really added to the film. Sharn’s camera work, with the help of both Donald and Ruby, was absolutely fantastic. All the work done in post was heaps of fun to do. As always I loved the musical efforts from James, and even though Oscar didn’t have as much involvement in the actual compositions this year, I really valued his input too, as with Joe’s help on drums for the montage. I think the one thing I regretted the most from the weekend was not taking enough photos and videos. I absolutely love looking at them, and there are large parts of this write up which are lacking photos entirely as I didn’t get around to thinking about them. If Ruby uploads her photos from her 35mm I wouldn’t mind crediting her on those in this post.

Finally, looking back upon the weekend, I never realised how much fun 18 dollar man would be to make. I wouldn’t say I regret not going with it, as both of the ideas were fantastic. Eamonn was the genius behind 18 dollar man, so sometime these summer holidays him and I are going to write it, and from writing this post I realised that I would really like to nab Sharn to do cinematography again. The idea has absolutely HUGE potential and i’m slowly going to get things in order for that to happen during the summer summer holidays. I have to hold myself back from getting too excited about it! 

Oh and just a last thing, there is now a site for any compositions I’ve made:

rhinctustunes.tumblr.com

I’ll be posting there again soon.

[jorgegamedev]

The Great Status Report – Part 1

These past five months have been full of non-stop action including, of course, the creation and development of several new games. During these months, I have worked on more games than I had ever previously worked on before, improving not only my programming and game design skills but as well as increasing my overall list of projects.

Last time I published a new status report I wrote about how my focus on university and its projects, combined with the ever-growing list of tasks and events, were consuming most of my time to dedicate to other tasks. My time-management, however, took an even bigger spin on the months afterwards. That was, until now, where there are multiple highlights from these I wanted to share with you, now that I finally got the availability to publish a new status report again!

Let’s begin by closing off the star of the show from last post – Colossorama. A few weeks after the updated version of the game was released, mid-November, we applied it to be showcased at Lisboa Games Week, the flagship games fair here in Portugal. We were selected and able to feature it for a few hours during the weekend where we had the opportunity to show the game to a considerable number of players during that limited, yet worthwhile time-frame.

Apologies for the low-quality of the pictures but the camera which they were taken with doesn’t like certain types of environment lightning. Oops.

Despite not having the opportunity to showcase the game during the full event, we still had a great learning experience from showing it, an opportunity to which we have to thank Indiedome – the folk which organized the showcase and also did the choice of the games – for. There’s also the well-deserved shout-out to Robin Couwenberg (RobinhoodPT) which contributed with his great skills and composed some original music tracks for the game! You should revisit the game and give them a listen to.

Colossorama has since become a dormant project for the time being, with a few extra bug-fixes and updates being published after the event’s release. The reasoning being that we needed to shift our focus to other various projects – presented next – being developed shortly after.

One of the things we added was the option for the player to toggle a display listing their highscore at all times while in-game. A friend of ours recently got 17K heads in a single game.

Following what we believe was a remarkable success and entry for a first Ludum Dare participation, Jose Sanchez (The Moski) and I decided to join collaborations once again for the December edition of the 72-hour game jam for yet another gamedev marathon.

The resulting game was Hyper Holomayhem 37, properly named after the synthwave 80’s aesthetic we designed the game around off, a theme boosted by Zak Blystone’s (ZakBlystone) amazing soundtrack which he composed while joining us during the event, and too which the game pairs amazingly well with.

If it wasn’t for the detail of the game you could almost say it could run on a VGA Graphics Card.

Hyper Holomayhem 37 is a side-scroller platformer shooter where, as a jetpack trainee, you must stay for as long as possible in the Hyperdeck, a room that’s constantly changing layouts as you power it up with gears. Gameplay is based around collecting gears spread throughout the level which you must bring back to the room’s core under a time limit. Enemies chase you around, and you will have break blocks to get to some gears you wish to collect. Once the time is over, your training is complete.

Akin to Colossorama, the game was developed with the Unity engine, and is available for free and playable online at itch.io. Although the game’s development did not go as smoothly as it did in the previous edition of the event we still had a fun time developing, releasing and getting feedback on the project. You can read more about this development experience over at the game’s post-mortem, once again available at the Ludum Dare site.

Given the circumstances, we honestly feel honored that we obtained the #51st Place in Overall and #43rd Place in Fun in the Jam category during the judging period!

A little trivia about the game is that the jetpack inclusion was actually a bug that happened during development which we decided to keep in as it increased the platforming possibilities of the concept.

We were not able to develop a full post-jam update for the game as we did with Colossorama, hence why it still features the Ludum Dare edition number in the tittle (which has since become a tradition to separate the Jam version from the full-featured one). We look forward to being able to revisit the game in the future, but for the time being, the project’s development is also considered to be on hold.

The cause for all these developments holds is because these weren’t the only games being developed during this time period, and prior to the game jam (by the beginnings of November), we had already began working on a much-larger scale project being double-developed as my personal university project for this semester and which also featured Moski’s help. His help was allowed given that, since our course is mostly focused on the game’s programming, we are allowed to have outside contributions for the projects art. The project was also designed and developed together with one of my course-mates, Alexandre Cristo (AlexandrePC112).

Remember this? Amazingly, everything but the grass ended up staying the same from beginning to end.

Remember the screenshot that was posted as the teaser by the end of the last blogpost? That project – which is now named Blueprint Apocalypse - has since grown and been iterated upon as we developed it through the four months we had to produce the project. Compared to the earlier screenshot, it almost looks like an almost different game compared to the current version, but you can still find many similarities between both versions.

The grass was probably the hardest element of the game to implement and get right. No joke.

Blueprint Apocalypse has been our most ambitious project until now, and one we really took much broader risks when it came to the game’s design. The game is what we call a free-roaming tower defense game where, as the town’s untrustworthy engineer, you must build defense mechanisms from a diverse arsenal of towers in order to protect your hometown from being attacked.

However, right before the town started being attacked, they confiscated all of your engineering blueprints, meaning you will have to buy them back! Multiple hordes of enemies will attack the town from multiple directions, some stronger than others. The placement of every tower needs to be carefully planned in order to construct the best defense.

One of the greatest challenges of the game’s development was getting the different mechanics of a tower defense game to feel great and justified when combined with the free roaming aspect we decided to include in the game. We needed multiple play-testing sessions (which we suggest to always do whenever possible) and several design discussions before we got a set of mechanics and game flow that we were satisfied with.

Although the game has been in development for some months now, and the university semester where the game was being developed in is over, we would like to further polish the game and experiment a bit more with the concept before making the game public. As usual, once the project’s development is complete, the game will be available and playable on itch.io.

We tried to add as much fun-elements as we could to Blueprint Apocalypse, including the most extensive and varied combination of Towers and Hats you will see together in a single game.

Phew. This was quite the long status report, wasn’t it? At this point in time, it’s even the most extensive post I have ever posted here! But amusingly, this is only half of this long status report. However, there’s only so much a person can read about a guy and his games in a single-day.

As such, I decided it would be for the best to divide these past five months and their projects into two separate blogposts, not only for the sake of making it easier to read and digest, but also to separate the conditions under which these games were made. The previous games have all been developed for Ludum Dares and always with the help from the same artist.

The next half of the blogpost will focus on games developed in physical game jams here in Lisbon, giving some insight on the conviviality in these types of events, as well as focus on plans for the close future, including what’s coming up next, and how I plan to break posts on this blog going forward.

Guess going five-months without writing a blogpost causes a situation where there’s a lot to write about, huh?