Greenlit and Further Progress

Yo!

So it's been quite awhile since I last posted here (YET AGAINNNN~), but things have been going rather well. Gearend was greenlit a couple of months ago! Here's an older devlog that I posted that shows a bit of what I worked on since then.

There's some more details and further videos after the break below.

Devlogs And Greenlight Preparation

Yo! Sorry for being so tardy on keeping this up to date - I've been really busy the past few months (as to be expected, I hope?). Here's a bit of news, and after that I'll dump the rest of the devlog videos I've yet to post here.

So, I'm GEARing up (haha) to put this sucker up on Steam Greenlight soon, so we'll see how that goes. I'm finishing up basically enough to get a trailer out (which means some boss mechanics and some NPC stuff, I think). I've been thinking about working on just the stuff I need to finish the game at this point, rather than being distracted by feature creep - I wanted to add one more zone, but maybe I won't have time??? I'll have to figure it out - I wanted to be done by the end of July, I think. Now I'd like to be done by end of August.

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I've also been doing stuff to work on my website, since that's something I proooooobably should do something about. The previous site I had was made using a program called OpenElement, and it's one I would advise you to use if you're doing some website work and wanna try it out on Windows. Since I moved to Linux, I looked around at the alternatives for website design and found that there aren't really any, for some reason. So, I decided to just go the manual route - I downloaded Atom, grabbed a couple of plug-ins to do some live HTML reloading, and started learning HTML and CSS. It's just a programming language, so it's pretty easy to learn - I think I like web design, haha. Kinda wish I had started writing sites in HTML earlier, I guess.

Shieldin' and Selectin' / Rusting Over

Hey, there!

I've been making new devlog videos for Gearend, my 2D Metroid-like in development, and forgot to post anything here! I actually have something interesting that I wanted to write-up, but before that, here's the new devlog videos.


In this one, I outline some of the changes I've made since the last devlog video. You can catch a quick changelog in the description of the video.



This one is a new song, Rusting Over. It's kind of a pensive, thoughtful, sad, driving track that I think fits in rather well with Gearend. But I've got a lot more good (hopefully) music I'll show, too! Please look forward to it, haha!

Gearend Devlog Video Dump

Yo, there!

I've been making a lot of progress on Gearend, but haven't actually shown any of it around here! So first up, a devlog video dump!

Here's a song that was in the old Gearend that I'm going to use for the new Gearend, after spiffying it up some.

And some more devlogs after the break!

Gearend Devlog Video #6 - AI Theory

Yo! Here's a quick devlog video showing how I'm approaching AI for Gearend.

The idea is to base everything around tracks that you can turn on or off, and that control which behaviors are being executed at any given time. It's basically lines of Finite State Machines strung together.

Each Track will have only one active Behavior at a time, though you can have as many Tracks as necessary. Each track also will have its own mode (Normal, Choice, etc) and its own controls (for reversing, toggling, clearing, copying, etc). The general idea is to make reusable behaviors simple and easy to use across the different games I make.

Anyway, that's it for this one. Thanks for reading!

Gearend Devlog Video #5 - Loadout and Location

Yo!

Here's another development log video post showing some of the stuff that I've changed / improved!

And here's a text dump in case you don't wanna watch!

Shoulders, Shots, and Shclouds

Yo! Here's a quick GIF update dump!

Gearend Revived

Yo! It's been awhile, hasn't it? Well, then. Lemme explain:

Airgrift is being paused for the moment, as I've decided to go back and start and finish Gearend.

As you might recall, Gearend was a 2D Metroid-like that I was working on a couple of years ago, and subsequently abandoned because I thought it was too big of a project for me. Since then, I've figured that the game's not gonna get done unless I started on it, and so I started planning out how I'm gonna start and finish the game. I believe I've grown leaps and bounds since then (or maybe I just know a bit more about how to get myself to get stuff done), and now I'm working on it again. Hurrah!

More info after the break!

Shops! Signs! Sssssmenu choices!

Yo! So development continues on Gearend. It's been awhile since I posted about it here, but it's been going on steadily and fairly continuously, which is nice. I've been streaming development of the game through Twitch and uploading the resulting streams on my YouTube channel, where you can watch them. Here's a link to a playlist of the devlog videos (including streams)! 

I've been working on new things that I know I'll need in the game, as well as thinking about what the game will be like for future areas, for example. It's shaping up well, I think! I hope to have a demo out for everyone to play around with soon.

Anyway, here's what the game has recently gotten:

Scrap boxes that you can shoot! When you shoot and explode a box of scrap, it will pop out a predetermined number of scrap, which is indicated by the old bolt scrap, as well as a new type of scrap, which is a golden Screw. Screws are worth 5 Scrap, while bolts are worth 1.

There are now Signs! ... Well, I guess it's not that impressive or interesting. They tell you stuff when you go to interact with them, as signs usually do. :|

You can now equip items through the menu system! This was necessary, as I needed to create a shop system, but had no way to equip things that you could purchase. The tabs represent the different slots that you will be able to equip things on - Body, Legs, Left Arm, and Right Arm.

Also pictured in this GIF is the shop system itself. The shopkeeper is at the far right and says some general niceties to you; you actually need to interact with the items on the pedestals themselves to purchase them. If you have enough Scrap, then you can buy 'em. I hope to have items available through the shop as well as through other means.

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Anyway, that's what I've got so far! Thanks for reading and following development of Gearend - I hope to have a demo soon, and finish it off quickly as well.

- SolarLune

Gearend Progress Continues

Yo! So I've been working on Gearend some more - in the time since my last post, I've implemented a new enemy and revamped how I make maps. I used to make them by hand, placing each tile of the background as well as the "foreground" ground and wall areas, but now I'm using "prefabs", or groups of blocks to create the areas. This allows me to be more efficient with how I make my maps and layouts.

I've also started trying to be more "Metroid-like" in my map creation so far, with areas that double-back on themselves, and that have multiple exit paths / doors. Hopefully, it'll be interesting to traverse.

I've fixed a couple of bugs that arose, fortunately. They had to do with going through doorways and running events. The doorway bug was interesting because it arose as a result of not testing doorways in the same direction more than once - I always used to go back through a doorway the way I came in. Now that I have a cyclical room layout (door A > B > C > D > A), I was able to find the bug. Guess it's a lesson to always test your game thoroughly and consistently, not just once or twice to ensure it works correctly.

The event bug arose because of spamming the advance key to skip through the dialog faster, haha. Guess I should test my game like players will play.

Also, I've begun implementing stats, like deaths and scrap collected. Eventually, there'll be a stat screen where you can see the amount of time you've played, how many times you've died, how many scrap you've collected, and so forth. Maybe there will even be different areas that are unlocked depending on how well you do with collecting and playing the game. If I do choose to implement such an area, though, I think I want the player to know that it's in there, and that those stats matter.

If I hide content behind an invisible barrier, so to speak, that the player doesn't even know exists, it can just frustrate players (i.e. after beating the entire game and looking through a walkthrough, they find out there's a better ending for playing in a special way).

I've also implemented some additional 2D filters, like a radial blur around the edge of the screen, and a slight vignette. I've also tweaked the bloom filter to be more accurate, using the built-in luminance texture instead of my custom formulae that weren't accurate.

No new devlog video or boss yet, but I hope to make significant progress soon. I'm gonna place some enemies, finish up some maps, and create the first boss before the village, and press on through!~

Thanks for reading.

A Nice Day Outside

I spent a few days recently looking into the Godot game engine recently to see how it's coming along - it's shaping up pretty nicely. It's a lot easier to use now than it used to be.

In any case, today I tweaked some of the shaders a bit to make the game more visually interesting (but hopefully not pointlessly so).

I also recently implemented a "key bot" that you destroy to unlock doors in a room. I think I need to add a "focus on the unlocked doors" cinematic, but I'm unsure on that; maybe just a simple "Zelda tone" will do. I don't know if I want to make the key robots things you need to destroy to move on; earlier ideas for this would be a robot you'd have to catch to unlock the door. I know I don't really want to bother with a whole "inventory" for this purpose, though (an additional key indicator, for example). I think I want it to be simple and easy to approach conceptually.

I plan on starting to create maps using prefabs (I suppose?) soon to help with map creation. I've tried this before in a tutorial video, and it worked out well, I think - hopefully it'll be useful and easy to work with for Gearend. I'm currently trying to decide if I want to go back and re-do the maps I've done so far with them, but I'm unsure. Here's the video, for reference.

Anyway, that's basically what I'm up to at the moment!

Gearend - Finding Focus

Today I spent a pretty fair amount of time in development, but unfortunately didn't get much done. I was trying to get a specific animation effect to work for an enemy, but it didn't work out, and I ended up changing what the enemy looked like to account for the lack of ability to sprite it. That enemy is this one, a self-destructing rolling canister.



I also started spriting a few more enemies, which turned out far creepier than anything else I've done so far, which can be interesting once I get into it. I'll see about animating them and putting them into the game. So far I've got four enemies, which is a nice number for the beginning of the game.

I changed a few of the colors I'd put down so far in an attempt to add some spice and pep to the different tiles, and while I'm not so much of a fan of the new colors, I do like the effect it brings, so it's fine the way it is.

I've gotta really become determined to work on this reliably and consistently if I want to be a dev for a living, so that's something I need to and am working on. It's easy to get distracted when you don't have any need to get up and focus on anything, haha!

So about the whole "re-making of the enemy because I couldn't get the animation to look right" thing - I think I wasted my time there, not because the enemy was so cool the way it was originally (it was just a cube), but rather because in the end, it doesn't really matter too much what individual elements or pieces of my project I might have to sacrifice or alter.

Circumstances change, and something that I might have planned for awhile may not pan out - that's just the way it can be sometimes. However, it's better to make the game and come back later to tweak, update, and fix, than to never release it because you get stuck trying to tweak elements to perfection. My motivation relies on making progress, I think - if I don't, then it's hard to make myself pick up the project. It's something to remember for myself, for sure.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Gearend - Upgrades

Hello there! So, work continues on my projects. For Gearend, I decided to make the first boss a bipedal robot like the player character, which should make it easier to design and work with. I'll introduce him a little bit when I get him into the game, but he's going to be kind of an interesting character, I think.

Today I implemented Energy and Health Upgrades - they're RAM chips and Hard Disks in-game. When you pick them up, they give you a little message about what was on them from a time when humans were prevalent, like "You can see a small puppy sniffing the video camera.", or "It's a video of a middle-aged man returning home to his wife and kids."

(Yeah, I know RAM chips can't store data when they're unplugged, but whatever, I'm trying to make them interesting.)

Just something to make it interesting to pick up the upgrades, kinda like Earthbound's flavor text after you go to the different points of interest or whatever.

Gonna keep chugging away on this!~

Animations of a Guardian

Starting to animate this big guy. I think he might be a bit difficult, so perhaps he'll be the second or third boss; the first one will probably be something a bit more your size, which should give me a good chance to test out a Bipedal enemy (an enemy that can equip two items, like you).

I got some really awesome feedback from ndee over at the BlenderArtists forums saying that I should vary my darkness levels on my sprite, which I pretty much whole-heartedly agree with; his edit shows some great improvement over my base sprite. Maybe I'll be able to work it in effectively.

Also, I've been listening to this song from the fighting game Under Night In-Birth because it's awesome and I need some rockin' boss music. Gotta step it up on my music, too!

I've implemented another enemy that just sits there and shoots and aims at you; nothing really impressive, so no GIF of that. Just some simple stuff here and there.

First Boss

So today I added some basic cruddy particles to the Railgun, and added a Shield. Both should be nice items to get in-game (especially the Shield). I also added the basic functionality that was missing to have different animations for the different use states of the item (i.e. the shield has an "idle" state and a "use" state). Using the shield will drain your energy, which obviously is a bad situation to be in. Now that I think about it, perhaps I should add a penalty for dropping to minimal energy - currently, it just serves as a kind of self-replenishing ammo for most offensive actions. Maybe I'll add a "fatigued" state or something.

As of currently, the shield doesn't block melee attacks, though I think that might be a good idea, though it might also be a bit over-powered as well. Need to mull it over a bit more, I think.

I also drew up this dude as the first boss (the new one's on the left):





Not sure how I'm gonna animate him, but I like him, I think.

Camelot-esque Choice System

It's smoother in-game.

Today I implemented a Camelot RPG-esque choice system into Gearend, as well as save stations. I say "Camelot RPG-esque" because Camelot is a game company that made different games (usually RPGs) for handheld consoles, and they usually expressed choices this way - via emoting heads. I liked the idea, so I thought I'd make a similar system for Gearend.

I felt the need for this because I had no way to allow the player to choose either to save or not when they approach and interact with a save station. Now, it gives you the option with these rather excitable heads.

I also worked on a new arm part, as well as the first boss's graphics. I hope to finish the game quickly. Thanks for reading this tiny update!~

What Am I Working On Now?

Hey, there! So, like I said, I wanted to post a bit talking about what I've been working on recently. After some thought, I decided to postpone my development of Valchion, and begin something new - something smaller. That new game is called Gearend, and has been in development for a few months now. It's not super huge, but at the same time, it's pretty far along.