mattwillisgames

[mattwillisgames]

New Game Dropping on Halloween

Ay yo it’s been a while, probably too long to be be honest but I’ve been super busy and whatever. In the past year I’ve been learning to use Unity. I thought it’d be cool to start making 3D games but I also specifically had a cool idea for a small indie type game. So for the past 10 or so months I’ve been hard at work on this game. Working with Unity has been challenging as working with any new game engine is a challenge but Unity is particularly full of quirks and on top of all that I had to learn what a Quaternion was. Even Tumblr’s spell check thinks it’s made up. Anyways let’s talk about that Game Project.

The game is called Roost and as you play it you’ll discover why. The premise is that you, the player have recently got a brand spankin new job in the adjacent big city. Rent however is very high in the city so finding affordable housing is difficult. That is until you receive an surprisingly cheap offer for a pretty sizable upscale apartment located conveniently near your job. The lower rent is not without it’s requirements, luckily there is only one. You are not allowed to move the painting located in the bedroom. The landlord, Vanessa Smith says the apartment used to belong to her grandmother, who has since long passed, and the painting was of her. However the apartment has an odd vibe about it and you begin to have strange repeating dreams. Is this offer too good to be true? Or are you just being a bit paranoid?

Roost is a low-poly first person adventure game. It takes inspiration from weird ps1 era games like LSD: Dream Emulator, but attempts to put it’s own spin on it by adding an element outside of the dream. I wouldn’t call it a horror game but it’s definitely horror adjacent.

I originally did not plan on having the dream sequences but they sort of evolved out of necessity. The original idea was to have everything inside of the apartment. A whole game in a small space, but as I work shopped the idea it really felt like the game needed something else and the dreams fit perfectly while also technically keeping the whole game within the apartment. Overall I’m very satisfied with the final product. So if that sounds like your jam please check it out on steam:  https://store.steampowered.com/app/2161000/Roost/ . PS did I mention that the game is completely free?

#indiedev #steamgame #lowpoly #madewithunity

[mattwillisgames]

The Joy of Deving #2: Art Direction

How do you do fellow kids? Yes it is I, the Hip Master General, Dinosir. Here once again to tell you about games I am making. This time we'll be focusing on art direction of my newest upcoming smash hit game entitled, Super Sportsball. In the last Joy of Deving I talked about how there are multiple answers to the same problem when developing games. I also covered how there aren't necessarily right or wrong answers, just some work better for different people. It's definitely one of my favorite parts of the #devlyfe. If you missed the last entry check it out here.

This week we'll be focusing on a recent change in art direction and why I came to this decision. For reference please see the picture of the old art style down below. It wasn't near as detailed as it would've ended up looking like when finished but it's good to have a reference.

Originally there were several reasons for this initial art direction. Firstly, proceeding the development of Aftermath Y2K I really wanted to develop a title that would show of my talents as not only a pixel artist but an animator as well. This called for a larger sprite set so I could have more detail. However I didn't want to go too large. You see in my head this game looked like Super Mario land on the gameboy. I wanted very pixely art. So instead of doing 100x100px or 64x64px I went with 32x32px. In the end I couldn't really achieve anything I wanted with this sprite style. It just looks meh and generic. Really I should've known from the beginning because my original vision strongly contradicted what I was trying to accomplish. So I had a decision to make. Either follow my original vision, or pursue further detailed sprites of 64x64 or 100x100.

(a 64x64px sprite blown up to 256x256 for ease of viewing)

So why didn't I go larger? This looks pretty good right? Well the answer is time. To give you an idea this game was a temporary hold over until I decided which game I was going to pursue next. To which I now know. Thus I planned on developing this game for around 2-3 months. However this would not be possible for 64x64 or 100x100 sprites. It would've taken me far longer than that to properly develop art and animate a decent roster for this game. Not to mention how long it would take to properly make gorgeous background images to match. It would've been swell in my portfolio but I just want to move on.

(8x8px sprites on a 160px wide background)

So I chose smaller. It was faster, easier and it closely matched what was in my head. Now I say closely because if you remember I was talking about SML style.

The issue with that is that:

1) Gameboy palette is ugly. It just is. Those greens make me sad. Nostalgic but sad. I could've pursued black and white but because the reason listed in number 4, that didn't make sense either.

2) the gameboy palette is very limited.

3) I just made a game with a limited palette and I kinda wanted freedom from that.

4) Most importantly it would've been difficult in a 4 player game to tell the difference between characters with only 4 shades.

Thus, I changed my idea and found a true compromise. Between what was in my head and what would work. Overall I'm very satisfied with the current art direction. The art direction also fits the theme of micro-rounds. Each round is only 10 seconds long right now. Thus having micro sprites seems appropriate.

However I would be lying if I said that how the game looked was the only factor in this decision. In order to save time in development I decided to use GameMaker Studio 2's built in physics engine. Unbeknownst to me this engine has a huge flaw in it. The max speed of an object is directly tied to the framerate. I found out that an object could only move 20 px a frame. So the ball in the game was locked to a max speed of 20px/fr. Which seems fast, and it is; however when you screen is 480 px wide. The ball would take 24 frames or roughly 1/3rd of a second to cross the entirety of the screen.  This was fine, but I really wanted to make the max power give an extra speed bonus and make it near impossible to dodge. (This is because the throw speed uses a meter like the one in tecmo bowl where if you wait too long the meter starts over and thus you have ~1 frame to get a perfect throw, and if you miss that one frame you get a 0 throw speed and fumble the ball. On top of that there is a recovery time until you can try and pick the ball up again. So I wanted to reward those willing to risk it to get 100 power.) It wasn't too terribly easy to dodge/catch, but 1/3 is very doable especially with how forgiving the engine is with catches. Still at 32x 32 it wasn't bad, but if you recall I was thinking of moving the sprites at least 64x64 which meant that the backgrounds would've also increased to at least 960x wide. Then at 20px a frame, it would've taken the ball 48 frames to reach from or 2/3rds of a second. That's way too much time. Now of course I could've decided to just increase the framerate to 120 fps. While I don't for see that causing many issues, it may have. Who knows? I didn't do this, and this ball speed wasn't the main factor in my decision but it did play a large factor. To give you an idea the screen in now 160px wide and at 20px/frame; it takes 8 frames or a little over 1/10 of a second to travel the width of the screen. Which seems to be in a sweet spot for fairness to dodge and reward for the thrower to risk going for max speed.

Lastly I'd like to cover my decision for anthropomorphic animals. Why animals? Cause animals are super awesome, that's why! However, there's also a more practical reason. With an 8x8 based sprite having different animals allows for each character to have a different silhouette. Why is that important? I'm glad you asked Timmy! Well, in a fast paced game like this or even fighting games; having a different silhouette allows your brain to quickly recognize which character is you, and which is your opponent. Now normally this is done with outfits and having other factors come into play, like physic, hairstyles, and even moves or stances between characters being different. However with only 8x8 to work with you can't really make silhouettes of people different. Animals though, you can. The have different ears, tails, body, nose, etc. that you can work with. This helps the silhouette become far more prominent, and thus the choice, for me was obvious. Also did I mention how awesome animals are?! 

(see how different the silhouette looks)

(here we see two human sprites vs two animals. The human sprites are harder to tell the difference of when compared to that of the animals. )

Well that's all folks. I hope you enjoyed this little insight into my brain and the decisions I make. Also If you want more info, or have question or just want to contact me; HMU on the twitters: @ Megadinosir

#pixel art #pixelart #indie #indiedev #gamedev #game developers #game development #game dev blog #game dev stuff

[mattwillisgames]

Aftermath Y2K is live

Buy it before I chicken out and delete its existence of the interweb. I mean not really but...

Thanks to everyone who has supported and encouraged me through this process. I am finally here. After a year of long development (this was supposed to be a 3 month project :p) The game has finally been completed and released.

Pretty exciting and I’m pretty nervous too. Here’s to hoping the game does well :D

Oh here’s a link: http://store.steampowered.com/app/655360/Aftermath_Y2K

#indiedev #gamedev #steam games #steam

[mattwillisgames]

Aftermath is coming out tues 7/11 hopefully.

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up. Basically I was on schedule on the 6th to release, however I'm dumb and basically forgot to check some boxes, so the game was rejected. I then checked those boxes and resubmitted. So it should now be ready to go, however the process takes 2-3 buisness days to approve so it most likely won't be ready untill the 11th. This is both a good and bad thing. The game will be more polished now and therefore better, however it'll be releasing the same week as a big name platformer, The End is Nigh. Which is bad. Still, I just want to get the game out there at this point and I feel like the overall product is different and thus we'll still do fine. Also in features news there's now an easy mode if you're struggling with the normal mode. Easy mode is significantly easier than normal and I highly recommend you only play it if you can't beat normal. Also you will be unable to gain the level based achievements on easy. You can, however still obtain the secret achievements. Anyways that's it. Hope ya'll have a fantastic day. :D

[mattwillisgames]

Aftermath has a release date...kinda

What's up it's ya boi Dinosir with another tumblr update! Anyways... A couple of things on the status of Aftermath. 1) Aftermath will henceforth be renamed to Aftermath Y2K. There are some other games called Aftermath and to avoid confusion I decided to just rename it. It'll make the game infinitely more discoverable. 2) AMY2K has a tenative launch date of July 6th. I say tenative due to the hopefully large influx of players at TooManyGames. You never know what kind of bugs could show up, and I don't want the game to be a buggy mess. The linux version will probably launch after the 6th but not necessarily. I want to focus on making 1 version at a time so they work well. In theory it should be a simple matter of porting it but you never know with these things.

#Indie #indiedev #game #gamedev #aftermath #y2k

[mattwillisgames]

Aftermath is Greenlit!

Huzzah.

 Aftermath made the final greenlight cut. This is very exciting for me and a dream come true. While it's no longer a big deal to get your game on steam. At least with the prospect of Steam Direct coming... It does mean that I'm taking my first real step into the game development industry. There's a lot of work to do before my full dream of making games for a living is actualized. Especially now that steam's floodgates have been opened, essentially turning my project to a single voice in a large choir. PR is in by far my worst skill. At least in getting noticed. While I'm trying to do this on my own, I may have to turn to a publisher or PR firm to really get the word out on my game. The sad reality of this industry is a lot of good games don't make it because nobody heard of the game.

Anyways this still a huge step. I'm very excited for the future. Also an actual update. I had a first round of testing, well technically second but first round of the entire game being played. Fixed alot of little things, but a lot more to clean up. I'm also considering redoing the tiles and background of the last level to give the level the look of covering a larger scope of land. I wanted to have the game 100% done by TooManyGames, but at this point it's looking doubtful. Plus I also now have to integrate the Steam API. Which means achievements and other things which I'm not 100% knowledgable on. I'm gunning for an August release. Hopefully during a release lull but I'll take what I can get.

#indie #indiedev #pixelart #pixel art #8 bit aesthetic #8bit #gamedev #steam games #steam #greenlight #partylikeits1999 #aftermath

[mattwillisgames]

6-2-17 Update

So recently my PC decided that it didn’t want to not freeze after 10 minutes all the time. Meaning, I’ve been troubleshooting for the past week or so. This PC with my game project files. Thus I had to preform a search and rescue and transfer the project files to a computer I COULD work on. Luckily I’ve been saving up for a Surface recently as I’ve wanted something light that I could take with me anywhere, but would also be able to handle game development. At least in a 2D capacity. However I still had no usable PC for a week. So I was a bit behind, however I’ve been making progress ahead of schedule so... maybe it’ll balance out? Who knows. I thought this game would be a 3 month for fun project. So what do I know?

Anyways, I’ve added more music to the game composed by my homeboy Jesse. They’re some pretty good tracks and they fit in nicely with the game. Along with that I’ve fixed some collision issues and made a major design change. I’ve decided to remove player-enemy collision. I originally had some enemies that would collide with the player and others would not. In the end I feel that it’s really not fair to have had player essentially guess whether a new enemy would be passable or stop them in their tracks. So I either had to give all the enemies collision, or give none of the enemies collision, or make some way of signalling the player that an enemy had collision or not. In the end I felt no collision would be better for this game. 

A simple solution for a simple game.

Of coarse that left an issue of just letting players run through enemies without consequence. This is usually resolved by making the player take damage for touching the enemy, However I never really liked that in games, always seemed cheap to me. Furthermore, in Aftermath as a dog you need to lunge forward to attack and thus the player sprite will need to touch the enemy for the game to register a hit. I think it’d be confusing to basically tell players that in order to defeat enemies you have to touch them, but you take damage if you touch them, well except for if your attacking. Not to mention the technical side of figuring out i-frames and collision with enemies with more than 1 hp.

So instead of doing all that I instead just adjusted enemies attack timing so that if one were to attempt to just run through an enemy that enemy would be able to get a hit off. A positive is that the enemy encounters feel a lot more snappy. Overall I’m very satisfied with the results and new direction and I think ya’ll will be too. :D

#indiedev #indie #gamedev #game design #aftermath

[mattwillisgames]

This awesome injection of sweet 8-bit goodness is brought to you by my very talented friend Jesse Crespo who is kindly lending me a hand with the music in Aftermath. Expect more chiptuney goodness in the game! Also if you haven't please vote for Aftermath on Steam Greenlight at www.tinyurl.com/AftermathSGL

#8-bit #chiptune #NES #indiedev #gamedev #spoopyscaryskelemans #aftermath

[mattwillisgames]

Aftermath and Too Many Games

I decided to finally actually make a post about this. Mainly because I haven’t really been pushing any sort of webpage/blog/way to keep people up to date, and I really should. Mostly due to the fact that, I suck at PR.Though part of it may have been due to the fact that I never thought I’d get this far, but here I am. For those of you who are unaware I’ve been developing a little ditty of a game called Aftermath for the past year now. It’s a sudo-NES style action platformer game. Something akin to Ninja Gaiden or Castlevania. It’s finally finished... well sorta. All the major content is there and it’s completely playable, however I’m still farting around with it a bit so the game is polished and I can be satisfied with releasing it. Which basically means that it’s not actually done, but sssshy just let me have this one.

If that sounds like your deal; why not check out this greenlight page here and smash that yes button so I can get this game for sale so I can feed my non-existent wife and kids? Do you use a question mark for a rhetorical question? I dunno, who cares though!

Anyways there also some demos floating around one on itch.io and also there’s one included on the indieDB page as well. Links for days yo!

Also a bit of fun news, I’ll be headed to my very first game convention, TooManyGames but not as a mere peasant! Nay! I’m going to show off Aftermath there. It’s a pretty big step I feel towards maybe actually being a professional game developer. I’m bringing some swag and I honestly have no idea if I have enough. Uncharted territory here, but I’m excited to get some feedback and see what people actually think. :D

#gamedev #indiedev #pixelart #toomanygames #iprobablyshouldntpostwhenimreallytired

[mattwillisgames]

Crazy how a “little” shading can completely transform a piece.

#pixel art

[mattwillisgames]

Monkey dude monk warrior guy

[mattwillisgames]

Arin from Game Grumps. Sprites for a brawler type game :D

[mattwillisgames]

Owl Wizard... guy