So I started working on a small top down shooter game in unity a couple of weeks ago that I am calling Infinite Pew Pew Action. It is inspired by games like geometry wars and the binding of isaac, both of which I have played a lot recently. I decided that I wanted to build a world without limits and procedurally generate the lot of it because I have come to realise how time consuming level design is… so procedural generation to the rescu

Procedural generation worked. Currently there are three types of power ups in the game:

• Increased fire rate
• increased speed
• points multiplier

Orginially when I started designing this game in my head I was going for a more artistic idea of world generation being dependent on speed and direction with colour and player attributes being affected by input and it had a more painted aesthetic, it was a lot prettier and arty. This seemed a bit ambitious so now everything simply appears in a random position near the player and the game consists solely of Unity primitive game objects with a couple of textures I made. (I also made the horrible sound effects and music myself using sfxr and pxTone… I’m not a sound guy or musician so it is pretty bad)

To stop too many objects being in a single scene I have created a large trigger around the player that destroys any objects that become too distant. This is also part of another grand I dea I had which was to explore a world where things change behind your back without your control involvingprocedurally generated puzzles but that is an idea still in early stages in the little grey cells.

I plan on implementing more enemies as currently there is only one type, hopefully with different behaviour, the current enemies simply move towards the player at their max speed. Ideas would be faster, slower or more intelligent enemies. I’m not sure how far I am going to be able to take it, only time will tell.

Although I haven’t taken part in anything like ludum dare before I feel that this short development cycle of a couple of weeks was nice and refreshing, it allows me to get experience in each step of the process and brings me a little closer to getting more quality games completed and out the door rather than all these left over half projects I have.

Squelch is still being worked on quietly and I should have a nice update for that in the coming weeks.

Anyway, have a play of Infinite Pew Pew Action. I plan to keep on developing this and perhaps releasing a full version at some point down the road, depending on how happy I am with the final product. For now enjoy and feel free to send me feedback via email. I turned the comments off on the blog because of the ridiculous amount of spam I was getting.

Things are starting to take shape a bit more. My Game now has a HUD and you can toggle full screen at any time!

The level and editor framework are 99% done, I just need to fix a small problem with background images and we are set to go! I have some level design Ideas I am working on but I am yet to implement a lot of it because I want to get the editor stuff working first. The next big job is the menu system. I don’t like the current menus and I want to change the mood, because the graphics don’t really suit the actual game.

I also plan on randomising the colours of the collectible characters so they appear different. Another thing I wanted to do from way back but haven’t bothered to implement yet is get the other characters eyes to follow you around as you move.

This is a screenshot of the first level, not too much there yet. You will also notice the gentlemanly character, he is an animation test for a new idea, it is also my first go at pixel art and there may have been some tracing involved. My new idea involves top hats, monocles, guns and some interesting opponents, it should be come about a bit quicker than squelch, because I can just use the existing code base. I’m also hoping to do a lot of procedural generation with my next game so there won’t be any level editing involved

I’ve been busy! Really excited about how productive this last month has been. I feel like there is a pretty good chance I will have an early demo for the Freeplay Awards. The deadline is July 25th. Here is a quick screenshot.

Most of the game mechanics are in place, all i need is the animations for dieing and level completion and a couple for collectibles.

The scene transitions need a little work too. I would like to fade in and out. I have also just started on a menu system. If all goes to plan this should only take me about a week. then I will be looking for feedback in various places. Fingers crossed people will like it.

Parallax is in place, I currently have 4 layers, background, mid background, gameplay and foreground. The editor is working well too so I need to get working on level designs, I’ll be inserting some collectible objects to get your gold star of level completion. I also need to get to work on the art assets, it is going to be a huge job and I have barely touched the surface. Just need to get my basic items together before July 25th and a couple more animations.

Back to work!

Well it has been far too long and I have completed far too little. In my last post I promised some art stuff, so here are some of the things I’ve been working on in regards to my 2D platform game Squelch.

Here are a few frames out of the character sprite sheets I have been using. personally I think I prefer the hand drawn feel to the more calculated and precise look of the other sprite sheet.

The hand drawn sprites were created in GIMP and I used a sprite sheet script to arrange each layer into the correct layout.

The cleaner sprites were created in blender. Perhaps using blender is overkill but it is a pacakage I have been working with for a while and it was quite easy to use at this point. I created the shadeless shapes then rendered the frames as PNG images and imported them into GIMP as layers and used the same sprite sheet script as I used on the hand drawn sprites. The animation is a lot smoother with the output from blender as you would imagine and I think it feels more professional but a little lifeless. I am still thinking of ways I can improve it or include both examples in the game.

The idea for this platformer extends from my entry in the Good Game Game Competition a couple of years ago from well before I had ever heard the term “indie game”. This is the very first concept art I did back when entering the Good Game Game Competition.

I had many ideas for the different states the character could take on which as it turns out are very similar to Gish. A game I had not played at the time but perhaps I heard of it and forgot that I had heard it and the ideas came out here, but it is not unheard of for two people to separately come to the same conclusions. Regardless, I have decided to simplify the character down to just the sticky mechanic and try to find more interesting ways to use this feature in terms of puzzles within each level.

I have hit a bit of a wall with the sticky implementation because the way I want the character to move around corners is proving very difficult to implement. I’m looking into this problem very closely and I’m hoping to have a clean demo by July, hopefully in time for the Freeplay Awards this year.

Sadly I have found myself tied up in other work. I haven’t been able to put significant time into any game ideas recently. On top of that I also freshly installed windows 7 which is going quite well. Let’s hope it’s just a matter of time until I get back in the groove of things.

Even though I have been busy there has been time to play with Unity 3. When I found Unity I didn’t think they could make it much easier to work with but it appears they have. If you’re indie and you know it download Unity! It is a fantastic piece of software that simplifies the game development process better than anything I have seen.

Might put some concept art style stuff up here soon. I’ve been drawing again and I’m starting to do a lot more sketching digitally which is great fun. Undo makes life much easier.

A few weeks ago I worked on a little prototype in Unity. The aim of the project was to try and have a small complete game created using unity and it worked! I took a week off work and decided to try make a project in a few days. because I have such big problems when it comes to actually completing a project I thought a very short development time and a small project might help. Now I can say I successfully prototyped this idea. that’s my first complete project.

Unity is a great tool and being free for indies makes it even better.

I have still been working with SFML and Box2D. I finally got my game objects working and I can interact with the physics engine without messing up my pointers. This took me a while. The way in which I was adding physics bodies to the world and trying to maintain pointers was incorrect and my pointers were coming back with garbage but that is all fixed now after tracing my steps I found where I was going wrong.

I have started on a simple level editor and I also need to get my camera tracking a lot smoother in the levels. Still working with some very basic programmer art. I’ll upload some screens when things start to look nicer.

So, this is my first post. Welcome to the blog. Here I will be detailing my development progress and edification as I begin to develop games independently.

I am currently using SFML and Box2D to develop a 2D platformer. More info to come.