Tales of the Old Earth

I've been taking a break from Bleaktide (my main project) because I was a bit burnt out on it. I needed some space to get a fresh perspective and focus.

Anyway, to keep myself busy I resurrected a Mario style platformer I was tinkering with last year to give myself something to work on while I recuperate.

It has been nice to work on something simple and creative just to give myself a break. I've made some decent progress and am pretty far in already. I have 4 scenario types (backgrounds and enemy sets), 9 levels and 2 boss fights.

I only have a video of the first level available right now, but will try to upload more soon. Here is level 1...

Skymorrowindblivion

I'm a fan of the Elder Scrolls series and wanted a project where I could just experiment freely (despite the scope obviously being way too vast). At the moment it's just a pet project where I can do what I feel like and have fun. Here are some screenshots (you can click on them to enlarge).

Silverglade Village South

Silverglade Village North. In the distance to the left you can see floating wizard towers above St Pork Knuckle Church. If you walk under the bridge to the right you arrive at a market place.

A grassy meadow in Silverglade Village.

Entrance to a small market place.

Animals grazing near a pond.

I've been toying with the idea of having an oil painting effect to give the game a more unique look. This is one variant.

A slightly more extreme variant of the experimental oil paint look.

Introductory text displayed at the start of the game inside the Adventurers Guild.

I've enjoyed working on the lore of the game. The game contains 21 books so far. Each book typically is about 4-10 pages long.

Chaos in the battle arena. You can choose which animals, monsters or characters to pit against one another. I chose to throw in cows, wild boars and some monsters ('void scuttlers' and 'rip friends'). It was a noisy and bloody affair.

I have a full Elder Scrolls style character creator in place. It is built on top of something called the UMA framework.

Another screenshot of the character creator.

Floating in the sky is the 'World Engine', which allows the player to do things like change time of day, weather conditions (rain, lightning storm, snow storm etc), wind strength, moon phase or even to enable the aurora / polar lights effect.

It's a book!

Battlescape

Back in 2014 I started work on a real-time strategy game called Zyrtuul. I knew that it was too much work for a single person, but often I just want to work on what I love rather than focusing on what is feasible, so I went ahead anyway.

I made a lot of progress over the year, but eventually (and inevitably) I ran out of steam. RTS games are complex and a lot of work, so I chose to rather change course and focus on games with smaller scope that I could actually release.

Since then I have released a few games on iOS. But although I had fun with them (despite the torture of the iOS deployment process) the problem with games that are small in scope is that, put simply, I'm not really passionate about them. Often I ask myself, would I play this myself? And usually the answer is no. I'm into games with more complexity and depth, and those are the kinds of projects I'd like to work on. Those are the kinds of projects that challenge and excite me.

With the games market so over-saturated the chances of getting your game recognized are pretty low anyway, so I thought "well fuck it, I'm going to work on whatever the hell I please, it's just a hobby in my spare time anyway."

And so I resurrected Zyrtuul. Except this time I decided that I'd go all out and make it multiplayer.

Back in 2014 when I first started work on Zyrtuul I was still fairly new to Unity and C#, and the idea of RTS networking admittedly scared me off a bit. Fast forward to 2018 and I have a fair bit of experience with Unity and C#, and my way of doing things has shifted significantly (coding conventions, design patterns that work well with Unity's world-view etc).

And so... I decided to start 'from scratch' (create a new project) and just drag in / re-factor the useful bits of code. I also decided to expand the scope and go all out. I wanted to challenge myself -- multiplayer and the full shebang.

The new project's work-in-progress name is Battlescape. It's a squad-based multiplayer game focusing on co-operative gameplay. I've always loved games like Starcraft and Warhammer: 40k, and back in the day LAN battles of Starcraft were inspirational for me. However, they've become very niche and overly competitive over the years (for example, the only way to be competitive in Starcraft 2 is practically devote your life to the game). I miss RTS games. I feel that they have become a niche genre; almost abandoned.

So I'm thinking, why should they be? I love them. Other people used to love them. I honestly feel that the mutliplayer RTS genre does not need to be inaccessible or intimidating to average players.

My idea with Battlescape was to focus on the co-operative aspect of it. It's multiplayer RTS, but you're all on the same team working together to overcome increasingly difficult challenges. Team-work, camaraderie, low pressure and a focus on allowing you to easily choose to play with your friends as if it was an old-school LAN.

I've made some really good progress so far. I'm quite proud of my squad formation logic. You can change formations on the fly and the units handle it intelligently (I was tipsy when I wrote the code and had to do some fair bit of math-wangling with a fuzzy brain). The core logic of the game is in place. However, as with most pet projects of large scope, I ended up burning myself out a bit.

I'm still in love with this project, but I've decided to take a break and come back to it later with fresh eyes. Also, I have unfinished older projects which (as with this one) I've abandoned due to burn-out. They need to be re-visited. Check out my posts on Araxxis Squadron and Lyntheria for more info.

Lyntheria

Back in about 2005 during my very early days of tinkering with game development I put together a puzzle game called Lyntheria. It was the first complete game I wrote, using DirectX 8 and knowledge acquired during my Computer Science undergrad degree.

It was very rough around the edges and unpolished. At the time I thought fixing the resolution to 800 x 600 was perfectly fine, and I hadn't yet encountered the concept of making the gameplay frame-rate independent. And so... the original game is pretty much completely unplayable now.

Often you'll have a grand idea for a game, but upon execution you find it's not as fun as you imagined. Lyntheria wasn't like that. With Lyntheria, when I shared it with my friends I found that it sucked them in.

Getting people to pay attention to a game you've made is often difficult, but with Lyntheria people seemed to take it as a personal challenge, even sharing it with wifes and girlfriends.

Looking back I decided to see what it would be like if I re-created it with my current level of knowledge and experience. This was during 2017.

I really loved the result. It's a simple game (though some of the puzzles are mind-boggling at times, even to me, the creator of them). It was pretty much complete as of late 2017, though I never ended up releasing it because I wasn't sure if there is even a market for these kinds of games nowadays.

Often when I work on a game I'll have a period of intense involvement and focus, but I'll burn myself out on it (especially since I'm doing it outside of normal work hours). I tend to jump onto other new projects and then forget about my previous projects.

In retrospect I decided it's wasteful to spend some much time on a game without at least attempting to make a go of it, so I've decided to resurrect the project and try release it on Steam.

It has a puzzle editor (the same editor I used to create the puzzles). I've tried to make it user-friendly so that players can create their own puzzles and even upload them for their friends or other players to try. The process is pretty simple (one-click really). The main difficulty I faced was preventing unsolvable puzzles from being uploaded. I solved this by requiring the player to play and solve their own puzzle before allowing them to upload it.

There is a single bug remaining where very occasionally reversing gravity in some puzzles doesn't allow the puzzle-matching logic to execute correctly. In addition to that I added an additional campaign at the end without creating new puzzles for it (feature creep!). But on the whole it's very polished and the closest I currently have to something ready for release.

I'm thinking I should probably put my more glamorous and overly ambitious current pet projects on hold and focus on releasing games again. Anyway, enough rambling. Here are the remaining screenshots.

The Bloody Glade Hits 80% Pre-Alpha Milestone.

What I'd ordinarily consider a reasonable bedtime (for a work night) came and went about an hour ago. However, I've been thoroughly absorbed in trying to complete a few tasks in my current pet project, The Bloody Glade.

Levelling up... you have to press the button at the top right to select new spells.

I still have 3 spells to polish off, various bugs to fix, a few extra enemies to finish off (need to make them more interesting), and a bunch of miscellaneous tidbits to deal with. But I looked at the plan I had laid out for myself and it seems to progressing well. According to my previous schedule it looks like I am 80% of the way to what I had planned for the initial "somewhat finished" alpha version.

The Earth Shatter spell spews rocks and dust from the ground around the player. This is the lowest level variant. As you level up the spell it becomes more potent and visually dramatic.

Scope creep has unfortunately kicked in, though I'm trying my best to resist it. I'm keeping to my "cool stuff can be added with updates, get the initial game out there" philosophy and trying to complete it as per my initial design. With that as the goal it looks as if I'm almost there. But, of course, when you think it's 90% complete, it tends to only be about 50% complete in reality, so don't judge me if I'm wrong here (and I probably am).

The glorious early stages were characterized by fresh ideas and cool new features rolling in hard and fast. The late stages tend involve dealing with an endless list of bug fixes and hours and hours and hours of work that doesn't yield obvious tangible results to a casual onlooker.

Anyway, I built the latest version and grabbed a few screenshots of each of the three current playable characters in action. I dumped a few screenshots above (because reading without pictures to break up the text is boring). From here on there are only screenshots...

The wizard's level 1 fireball spell. It also looks far progressively more impressive as you level it up. 

Hard to tell from the image, but there is a spike trap near the wizard with metal spikes that periodically thrust up and do damage to anybody foolish enough to be in close proximity. I want to add two more trap types, though doing so will add about two extra more nights of development (which, given that I only get a few nights a week to work on this, equates to about an extra week). Should be worth it though.

The wizard's fireball spell has been levelled up and now does explosive splash-damage.

 Various stats are displayed when you complete a level. I want a social aspect that allows you to compare how you did, what items you collected, which spells you used etc to other players (the 'other players' button accesses this functionality). I'm probably going to delay this for now though.

Selecting a new spell when you level up.

The abomination character is so bad-ass that skeletons pretend to be asleep as he approaches just so that he doesn't hurt them (not really though, I actually just insta-killed them with a debug cheat key).

The enchantress has an area-of-effect lightning storm spell.

If you look carefully you can see the purple-robed fella to the right dropping a ring. The inventory system is deliberately very simplistic (I want to provide non-casual aesthetics to a more casual audience).

An ice storm spell inspired by fond memories of Warcraft 2 (which happens to be one of the old-school soundtracks I've often listened to while developing this all).

The wasteland scenario -- I am very fond of the ground texture.

The little critter to the left just stole a health potion (he gives a hearty little giggle and taunts you as he does so). A friend who play-tested for me protested that it wasn't clear that you were about to be robbed -- that I should make it more obvious. "Bah! Nonsense!" was my response. I like it just the way it is. You'll know better next time.

No Crashy Spaceship

In late January this year I was close to having Doombot Arena ready for release. At the time I wanted to focus on mini-games where I could keep the scope really small so that I could focus on actually releasing them and get familiar with the deployment process on the Apple store. I decided to leverage a lot of the work I'd done on Doombot Arena and build a similarly small-in-scope game based on time challenges. I started working on a racing game, but found that the standard techniques suggested for car physics in Unity to provide an experience that was not quite as fun, frantic and simple as I was looking for. And so I decided to change course and go for a spline-following approach. The result was No Crashy Spaceship, a game which is essentially an infinite-runner (a genre in which you attempt to dodge obstacles to see how long you can survive).

Note before I proceed: I have interspersed this wall of text with a few screenshots to make viewing this blog post less of a chore to read.

I have subsequently started working on games that are somewhat larger in scope -- games that I am more passionate about. As a result, my enthusiasm started to wane on this project (my larger projects running concurrently just offered more of a challenge). However, I recently decided (after looking at the graveyard of unfinished and almost-finished projects I have lying around) that I need to stay the course and make more of an effort to finish and release.

The overall look of the game was inspired by Tron (having watched the animated series I became quite fond of the dark background contrasted with bright lights; it's a unique sci-fi look that I feel is very effective). The initial work-in-progress name was 'Lunatic Skyway', but after chatting to some work colleagues about it we concluded that the name was a bit bland and generic. After throwing around a few names I threw out the whacky 'No Crashy Spaceship' idea (as a joke). There were laughs all-round and unanimous approval, and so I decided to go with it.

Initially it was far more fast-paced and frenetic. I played it so much during testing that to me this felt like a suitable level of challenge. User-testing confirmed that I was utterly mad -- the game was completely intimidating to first time players. So I have toned it down a lot. When I watch friends play it on my iPad I'm always commenting about how I've made it too easy (the whole point in my mind was for it to be ridiculously difficult to simply not die almost immediately -- think Flappy Bird levels of frustration). However, not a single person who has tested it agrees and the consensus seems to be that having a slightly gentler difficulty curve makes it more fun. The speed does ramp up significantly with each lap though. I laughed when people were commenting how fast it gets a few laps in (my initial speed was WAY faster than that, even on the first lap). I think I have to acknowledge that I have an overly active brain though (and the attention span of a newt) -- a wiser course action is to accept that complete sensory overload isn't palatable to everyone.

As it stands it is pretty much ready for release, though my latest play-through did uncover one or two minor bugs which I'll have to fix first. Creating the promotional screenshots (which are the images you see here) has been a bit of a trial because the Apple store requires images of various vastly differing resolutions and aspect ratios -- trying to cater for all is a bit of a nightmare. This is one of the tasks that I have been avoiding. I could have released a few months back had I not been so reluctant to just whip myself on the back (like a Catholic monk fervently self-flagellating himself) to inspire enthusiasm and force me to go through the schlep of it all.