Game Development

There are 76 posts filed in Game Development (this is page 1 of 8).

Game Dev and Activism Updates

It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update so I figured it’s about time to do just that.

Firstly, let’s talk about Cave of Atman DX. Towards the end of last year I continued to build out the game and responded to some of the feedback from a round of play testing. Unfortunately I hit a bit of wall with some HaxeFlixel bugs that don’t look like they’ll be resolved anytime soon. As such I decided the game would need be rewritten in another framework (thinking was MonoGame or Godot). Beyond the framework issues I was also struggling with some design challenges with later puzzles.

Despite these issues I think the game is in quite a good state. There’s a good amount of content (4+ hours) and a solid design base. There’s just a lot of polishing and refinement that needs to take place.

Around this time I came up with a compelling new game idea. Since releasing Expand in 2015 I’ve found it difficult to find new ideas that are worth pursuing. Expand was a huge time investment and so I’ve been weary when it comes to jumping on larger projects. This game idea was quite small, focused and compelling.

So from November last year till mid June I chipped away at some of foundational code and tooling for this new project. It too is in a good state but has some design issues to work through so has been put on ice for time being.

This is where things diverge….

Towards the end of last year I got quite involved in political activism. I’ve been politically engaged for a long time but beyond the odd online petition or regular donations I hadn’t done any real activism. I tried joining a political party but couldn’t handle the banal branch meetings.

In late November 2018, I received a call from a youth climate group who I was donating money to. They were running some training and asked if I’d be interested in coming along. I completed the training and was invited to help at their booth and at their protests around the national Labour conference. I spent three days talking to Labour members about the climate crisis and participating in several protests. It’s was pretty insightful and I really enjoyed myself.

Given I’m now in my early 30’s I figured I was a bit too old for this group. Plus I had a bunch of concerns around how effective the work we did was. I’ve always been skeptical of shouty protests. I like the idea of direct action but nothing was happening in this side of the country.

At one of the protests I spoke to someone from GetUp!. They suggested I come along to their local Action Group and do some calling. They had a great pitch and GetUp!’s data driven focus was very appealing. I volunteered with them for about four months in the lead up to the Australian election in May. I did weekly calling, door knocking and a tiny bit of training for new callers. It was a good experience but after the election I felt like I needed to move on.

While doing GetUp! I was also involved with Extinction Rebellion (XR). Despite being politically engaged for a long time it was their UK bridge action in November 2018 that pushed me to get more involved. I’d never seen anything like it. It was festive, respectful and compelling.

In February, Extinction Rebellion ran their first major public event in South Australia. It was a talk followed by the formation of several working groups. I came along to this and got pretty involved from the get go. After the terrible election result XR felt like the place to be. I’ve been helping them out ever since.

It’s been tricky trying to manage game development and activism. Since July I’ve been just doing activism. I’m hoping with the summer break I can rebalance things. We’ll see how it goes.

Cave of Atman DX – Development Update September 2018

It’s been roughly two months since AVCon and so I figure it’s time for an update regarding progress with Cave of Atman DX.

Firstly I’ve just finished with a new build that I’ll be distributing to testers later this week. I’m looking to send this build to testers one by one, responding to their feedback before contacting the next one. Puzzle games require thorough play testing and so I’m trying to leverage the feedback from testers as much as I can.

The following are the major changes for this build.

  • Steam Integration for replays
  • Improved replay playback with duration, pause/resume controls and level names
  • Setup scripts to perform screen capture from replay data
  • Improved tooling for world map. Game now generates level thumbnails and simplifies stitching rooms together
  • Non-rectangular levels
  • Resolved AVCon Bugs
  • New introductory levels and branching levels

Unfortunately I didn’t get to prototype a shield holding enemy or build up art references. Instead I opted to focus more on adding to and adjusting the existing level set as it feels more critical at this stage of development. There are now more introductory levels which unlike the original game aren’t just instructional but also contain smaller hooks. The introduction area now branches earlier and each branch is more interconnected.

There are now 69 levels in the game. The AVCon build had a bug where you could attack over small gates making many levels easier. This means I don’t have a good reference on expected play time. My current estimate is around 4 hours, it took me 1 hour to play through the build.

With this next round of testing I’m looking to:

  • Gage impressions of overall quality and strength of puzzles
  • Use feedback to narrow down the overall scope of game regarding production quality

My focus for the next few months will vary based on the feedback received. I’ll definitely be responding to feedback and exploring several items on this list.

  • Keyboard Controls
  • Building art references
  • Creating end game puzzles

I’ve been in preliminary talks with several people regarding art. At this stage I need a better sense of what I’m after and so building a collection of references is critical. I haven’t done a great deal of work with artists so am feeling both excited and nervous in this area.

That’s all for now. I’ll try and post another one of these in the next few months.

Chris

Cave of Atman DX – AVCon 2018

Last weekend The Cave of Atman DX made its first public appearance within the Indie Games Room at Adelaide’s AVCon. I’ve been working on updating the original game from the start of the year. It was great to finally be back showing a game at AVCon, the last game I exhibited there was Expand back in 2014.

As mentioned The Cave of Atman DX is an updated version of the 2014 flash game. The game has been ported across from FlashPunk to HaxeFlixel. It now includes four new mechanics, an over world map, 32 new levels and the much requested ability to undo your moves. I’ve also added the ability to record user replays and crashes and send them to our web server.

I pulled out the following stats from our replay data.

Number of Sessions: 76
Average Session Length: 19.5 minutes
Median Session Length: 15.5 minutes
Longest Sessions:

  • 2 hours 20 minutes
  • 1 hour 43 minutes
  • 1 hour 17 minutes

Overall we were really happy with exhibiting and the response to the game. Thanks to everyone who checked it out.

The next few months will be quite busy for me so progress might be slow. However this is what I’m looking to work on next.

  • Steam Integration – Namely linking replay data to users
  • Improved Replay Tooling – Setup playback markers for level start and improved playback controls
  • Fix Bugs – Several minor bugs related to mechanics appeared at AVCon
  • Level Fixes – Improve tutorial levels and smooth out difficulty
  • Shield Mechanic – Create Prototype
  • Art References – Build up setup of references for artist

Current world map.

Adelaide itch.io Bundle and Exhibiting Games Talk

Just a short post today to let you know about somethings I’ve been involved with recently.

Firstly I’d to let you know about the Adelaide itch.io Bundle. The bundle is $20 USD and will be available throughout the itch.io Summer Sale. It contains 10 titles from artists based in Adelaide, South Australia. All proceeds from this bundle will be donated to Hutt St Centre to help those experiencing homelessness.

Our focus with the bundle was to highlight the existing and emerging talent within our community and to provide those who purchase the bundle a broad range of experiences. This bundle includes several digital and analog games along with a zine.

Secondly last night I presented a talk about exhibiting games. The talk was streamed online and is available to watch here.

Update 1: The bundle is no longer available. We raised $470 USD which is $637.75 AUD for Hutt St Centre. Thanks to everyone for supporting us.

itch.io also featured the bundle on their front page which was really lovely.

Update 2: The organiser of the game dev talks has uploaded a cleaner version of the talk which can be watched below.

New Game: Zero Out

Back in late 2015 I prototyped a programming game called Loop Game. The prototype was shown at the local Adelaide games gathering called ARGGGH and raptured a small crowd of programmers who spent roughly an hour working through the problems.

The goal of the game is to write a computer program that will shift all the numbers in the grid to zero. However you’re limited in the number of if statements, loops and ReduceCell function calls you’re allowed to make.

Recently I discovered Google’s Blockly library which allows users to create Scratch-like programming editor. Their examples even included code that translated the users blocks into Javascript code. So given this and my day job experience as a web developer I figured it would be cool to remake this game using Blockly for the web.

So that’s what I’ve done in this new game called Zero Out. You can write your program using the Scratch-like interface or directly in Javascript. The game has 10 levels (two more than the prototype) and should take between 1-2 hours to play through.

Play Zero Out

Hope you enjoy the game.

Gem Thief Demake

Over the last week I’ve been working on a PuzzleScript demake of a now defunct iOS game called Gem Thief. The original game was released back in 2011 by Evil Genius. There are some really neat levels in this game which is why I felt compelled to demake it. I also hadn’t actually finished all 50 levels until I starting work on the project so this was a good excuse to do that.

You can play the game here on my website or over at itch.io.

Beyond this I’ve been working on an updated version of Cave of Atman. Since January I’ve prototyped out several new mechanics and blocked out 32 new levels. I’m now starting to rewrite the game in HaxeFlixel (was originally in FlashPunk). So expect to hear more about that in the future.

Adelaide Game Playtesting Session – December 2017

Sorry for the late posting on this one. We’re having another playtesting event tomorrow.

Date: Thursday 7th December 6:00pm – 8:30pm
Location: AIE Adelaide Campus, 32 Grenfell St. Adelaide, SA 5000
Facebook Event for additional details

I’ve made some progress on the line game I posted about previously but it’s currently not in a playable state. Instead I’ll be working on a small PuzzleScript game I started doodling on last night.

Adelaide Game Playtesting Session – September 2017

Next week there is going to be another games playtesting event at AIE. This one is going to start half an hour earlier than our previous events.

Date: Thursday 28th September 6:00pm – 8:30pm
Location: AIE Adelaide Campus, 32 Grenfell St. Adelaide, SA 5000
Facebook Event for additional details

I’ve been busy with prepping Expand for PS4 lately and so I may not have a new thing to show. After a conversation at the most recent ARGGGH gathering I decided that I will finish a thing I started about a year ago. Here’s a screenshot.

Expand is coming to PS4 on October 3rd

Surprise! We’ve been working with Ukiyo Publishing and BlitWorks (porting) to bring Expand to the PS4.

Expand on PlayStation 4 will support extras with:

  • PlayStation Trophies
  • A bundle package with the game’s soundtrack
  • New language support in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese (Simplified and Traditional).

The game plays really well with the PlayStation 4 controller and BiltWorks have done an amazing job with the port. We’re really keen to expose the game to a new audience of players.