Player Graphics - A Game Jam Game - And a Completely New Game

I've been very busy since I came back from Denmark. When I came back there was a week until I was going to a game jam in Dublin, so I really wanted to put some nice work into the game that I could show off, so I mostly finished the player graphics and got them in the game.

After that it was onto the Game Jam where I worked on a small game on my own. The theme of the Game Jam was "Snow" and I ended up making a game where you are running around as a wood burning stove shooting coals at evil snowmen to defeat them.

It was a fun game to make and I'm pretty happy with how much I could manage to get done on my own in 8 hours, but I also think I made a bit of a mistake in making the game in 2D graphics using the same tools and packages I've been using for my current game, because even though I was very quick, it didn't really give me a change to try something new and crazy.

After the Game Jam, I felt empowered to try something crazy and decided to put my current project on hold for a week or two and see if I could make a tiny game and publish it no matter how broken it ended up being.

Enter Cretaceous Cravings! This was the rebirth of an old project I had worked on, though I started over from scratch with a clean project and new assets.

The idea was very simple. You are a dinosaur and to grow bigger you need to eat other dinosaurs that are smaller than you and avoid dinosaurs that are bigger than you.

I tried to go for a bit of a different art style. Using unlit shaders that displayed two different painted textures, based on the "light" direction you set on them. I think the effect was cool, but I'm not sure I really had the time to dial in the assets and textures for the look to shine. Part of the reason I went for this look was that I wanted the game to run really well, so I didn't want any real time lighting. This also gave me the chance to work with the Scriptable Render Pipeline and use the Shader Graph to make my custom materials which was a lot of fun.

In the end I just completely ran out of time. There are a million things I want to improve, but I forced myself to get it to a "complete" state where I could put it out and then I published it on Google Play.

The great thing is that now it's there and I feel like I could easily post small updates that would be big improvements.

I also made screen recordings of the entire process of making the game, so I'm hoping to make another "Making Of" doc video from that.

Well that's all from me now. I'll take some Christmas relaxation now and then decide what project to jump into when I've had a bit of time to calm down.

Quick Update - Rat in the game

So I've rewritten a lot of the enemy code, so I haven't gotten as far as I would like, but I am progressing, here is where the game is at currently. The enemy rat is in the game and there is now an Action Point Counter and cost to using a skill.

I'll be home in Denmark for a week, so I don't expect much to happen then. After that it's back to the player graphics, which I'm quite well into drawing at the moment.

Rat Enemy Almost Done

Another week of working on the game and I've had some good progress.

I started the week out working on an Action Point system for the skill casting. So you can no longer simply spam skills, you get an action point every 5 seconds and only if you have enough can you cast a skill. I have not yet decided exactly how you will get action points in the game. Possible you'll get an action point every time you do another action like an attack or a defend.

I then spent the rest of the week working on the graphics for the first enemy. This has taken way longer than I had hoped. It basically took two days to redraw it from scratch and then I've spent one day setting up the 2D rig for animating it. I had really hoped I would manage to get some animation done and have it ready in the game today, but I just ran out of time and energy. At least I'm very happy with how the design turned out.

Next up will be animating the rat and putting it in the game and then I think I need to get a version of the player character done as well. So lots of drawing and animating next week.

Catching Up

So it's been a while since my last update, I'm not going to try and summarise everything that's happened since. I've had a mix of busy, stressful and and frustrating weeks, but I'm finally settling down and doing much better with my projects, so lets see where we are at.

Project Flow RPG

My game is finally picking up some steam. I have had a really difficult time sitting down and putting in the work needed for it and the skill system has been very difficult to nail down. But in the last week or two it has really started moving the right way and become a tonne of fun to work on again.

I'm of course behind where I would be hoping to be, but it feels like I will progress now. The plan currently is to try and get a simple version of the game out before Christmas and then keep adding content afterwards.

Blending Away

I spent yesterday making a nice little scene in Blender for the October reddit Blender competition. I've been very inspired by all the info coming out from Blender Con this weekend and especially from Ian Hubert, who had a talk as well. His little 1 minute tutorials has really given me a different view on how you can quickly put something basic together and achieve a good look, rather than modeling, sculpting and texturing everything from scratch.

Coming Up

So the plan going forward is to spend as much time as possible working on the Flow RPG project and then when I tire of it, sprinkle in a few other things. 

Next month is National Novel Writing Month and I'd really like to participate and it seems if I won't do it now, I never will. I have a basic idea for a story I'd like to write, so I'll see if I can get into it starting on Friday.

Also I'd really like to spend another day doing another scene in Blender, so perhaps when next months theme gets announced I'll jump into that.

I'm also taking a week home in Denmark in November, so that will definitely set a limit to my productivity that week, but I'll bring my laptop and try to get some work done there as well.

I'm going to try and make a concerted effort to put up a little status update every Friday afternoon about how far I've gotten with the game.

Two Very Busy Weeks

These last two weeks have been pretty intense.

I got started on some proper development work. I went down to Cork city and spent three full days working on a game prototype at the Workbench open work space.

I really enjoyed sitting in there and working, it was very nice and quiet and there was a kitchenette to get free tea and coffee there.

I got quite far with my simplified idea for my sidescrolling RPG. What I'm trying to go for is a game where it is just fun to do a simple combat flow, similar to the Batman Arkham games or the first Witcher game, where you have to time your attacks to keep a combo going. If the prototype for that is fun when it's a bit further along I think it's a pretty safe project to make a small hack 'n slash mobile RPG where you just go through little quests defeating enemies and collecting loot. My plan would be for the game to take 2-3 months to finish, but I'll need to actually see the prototype completed first before I'm sure I want to proceed.

Last weekend I went up to Dublin to take part of a weekend long game jam. It was a really good jam experience. I worked with a few guys I've met before and had a great time, I almost only did 3D-modeling for this game jam. Here is a collection of what I manged to put together, as you can see, the quality went up and down a bit based on my stress level (everything is set up in an eevee render here).

The game itself was a VR game for the Oculus Quest and ended up working quite well, it took so long to get builds working on the Quest, that we didn't have as much time as we would have liked to flesh out the gameplay. but the basic idea worked.

Here is a video of me playing a bit of it.

Now unfortunately the beginning of next week has ended up a bit overbooked, so I'm not sure how much time I'll be able to put into the game, but Thursday and Friday are wide open, so I hope to spend those at the Workbench working on my prototype. My plan for this week is to finish the prototype and send it off to some friends to get feedback on the idea.

A Week of Powering Up

I still haven't jumped into a game project yet, but I do feel I've had a really productive week, despite a few distractions.

I've been spending some time playing around with Blender, as I planned, though not nearly as much as I would have liked.

Here are a few of the things I put together, as you can see I took some things further than others.

I also spent a bit of one day down in Cork city centre in the open work space for start-ups called Workbench. It turned out to be a really nice space and I got some really good brainstorming done for a game, even though I was just there for an hour or so. When I'm fully in production on a game, I think I will try to spend two or three days a week down there as it really was a nice space where you had no distractions and could use their facilities.

Next week I'll mostly be making ready for the big game jam next weekend. I might do a game on my Oculus Quest, so I'll ensure that I have my laptop set up for VR development for it.

A Week of Vacation

My girlfriend was off this week, so we spent this week relaxing together. We both needed some recharging I think, but especially my girlfriend.

So I have not been very productive this week, though I have done a bit. I've mostly been playing around with Blender and then I've been reading a lot. I've finished reading the second book of short stories in the Witcher series "The Sword of Destiny" and I got a good ways into reading "David Copperfield".

I've signed up for a weekend long game jam in Dublin in two weeks, so I'll be going up and staying in a hostel for the duration. Until then, I'm thinking about spending next week playing around with Blender and maybe coming up with a really good entry to the current Blender subreddit competition, since the winning price is an NVidia RTX 2080 Ti GPU. I don't think I would have much chance of winning with my rusty abilities, but it seems a shame not to enter when I have the time and it's good to get some more Blender experience anyway.

So plan for next week will be lots of Blender, lots of reading, some more practical projects around the house and then I'll try to get back to some exercises in "How to Become a Productivity Ninja" which I've also been reading.

A week of winding down

So it's been a week since my last day at Apple and I have been enjoying having some time to just relax and do a few practical things.

This week I've mostly been fixing up our house and getting my office set up to have a nice working space, but I did manage a few productive things during this week as well.

Firstly since I had some more time I got a lot of reading done and read The Forever War by Joe Halderman and whoa what a read that was. I have heard about this book many times before and been meaning to read it, but I was still impressed with it, it's incredible that this has never been turned into a Hollywood blockbuster. I'm not going to go into plot details as I don't want to spoil anything, but suffice it to say that absolutely everyone should read this book, even if you think science fiction is normally dumb or silly, just put that thought out of your mind and read this masterpiece.

Secondly I found some time to play around with Blender. Blender 2.80 is almost out and I've been getting back into it with the beta. I stumbled on some videos showing off Blender's motion tracker and compositor, I had never really realised how full featured these were. So I gave it a go myself with a little video I shot in my backyard and the result was really fun.

Thirdly I also did a bit of drawing one day, something I imaged could fit into the 2D RPG I've been thinking about making.

 So I've been feeling really relaxed and good in general and happy that I've also worked on a few creative projects, even if I haven't jumped fully into my game project yet.

All of next week, my girlfriend will be off work, so that will be our summer vacation, so I don't expect a lot to happen next week.

Going Fulltime

After trying to do game development in my free time for the last 7 years, I'm finally giving up and instead trying to do game developement full time. My last day working for Apple was Friday last week.

This has been something I've wanted to go for ever since I got started, but haven't had the financial stability or the courage to give it a go.

I'm not really sure I have that now either, but I'm giving it a go.

I have some money set aside and I'm hoping to get some tax credits and startup support later in the yest, so with those two things together, I should be ok to work on a game for around a year. Hopefully at that point I'll have something I can either sell or get an investment to keep working on it.

So what game am I going to make? Truth is, I don't really know. Over the last few months I've put quite a bit of work into an idea I had of a turn based 2D sidescroller with a Diablo like loot system. I liked the idea a lot, it was taking a lot of my favourite games and mixing them together, but I think I went too far into designing enemy, loot and ability systems without actually testing out whether the idea of a turnbased combat system where you are only controlling one character works well. As far as I can tell it doesn't, so it's back to the drawing board.
I've also been having a few ideas for VR games, so the first thing I'll do once I'm full time on game development will be a lot of brainstorming and prototyping to find out exactly what I'll be working on.

I've also started game development group and had two meetings with other people interested in game development in Cork. I figured it might simply be fun, but could also be a good way to stay motivated if you had someone to show your progress to.

Meanwhile I've let my webhosting of www.lonelygiantgames.com expire, though I still own the domain. I had way too expensive a hosting package considdering how little I used the homepage. I think for now I will leave it dormant, until I have something new I want to show off.

I'm also really hoping to spend the next few weeks getting a bit inspired. I've lived in Ireland for over eight years and I've seen very little of the country, so I hope to bring my sketchbook and a camera and go exporing the Irish countryside a bit and maybe find some time to read some good books.

This should also mean that this blog will become much more active. I think a weekly or fortnightly update about my game and working on my own, would be a great way for myself to take stock of how things are going.

Wish me luck...