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posts filed under: general

Travel Pillow Mock Up

Travel Pillow Mock Up
As I work on finishing up Sky Sisters I'm dreaming of what games I want to work on next. The first game that I've talked about here is my dice based RPG type game, but another one is a new platformer exploration kind of game.

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See the full version here.

After Sky Sisters is done I'm going to work on two projects at the same time if I can manage it. The main reason I want to do this is because I want to have some sort of platformer game spun up along side my weird dice RPG game. The dice RPG game is a cool idea, I think, but the design of it is largely a mystery. There's a lot of unanswered questions, and a lot of issues that need to be solved. I'm guessing this is going to be a little bit frustrating, so I want to also have a project that seems more straightforward. Usually when I'm making a platformer there's way less "mystery" in the design. Having something more grounded to work on when I'm not feeling the tougher design seems like a good idea, but only time will tell!
gamedev art
Posted July 20th 2016 9:07 AM (General)
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Dev Log: Background Stuff

Dev Log: Background Stuff
Going to be honest and say July has been kind of a crap month for game development. I think it's been a good month overall so far, but it's been full of crazy distractions. I'm on another break this weekend as I hang out with a bunch of people watching EVO, so I'm still not surrounded by a lot of time to work on stuff... and there's another slight distraction known as Pokemon Go which I've given into since it motivates me to walk around the city a lot more.

Anyhow here's some new stuff for Super Sky Sisters. I'm working on new backgrounds to change things up as players progress through the game.

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Hopefully I can get back on track pretty soon after EVO wraps up, and then I have a pretty long stretch of undisturbed time until PAX!
dev log gamedev sky sisters
Posted July 16th 2016 10:33 AM (General)
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Holiday Break Game Time

Holiday Break Game Time
Things got a little chaotic for me over the last two weeks and I've felt a little bit distracted and was kinda forced into taking a small break on game dev. There's also the fact that Summer Games Done Quick is going on and that is just a constant distraction for the entire week.

So I took a look at my Steam library and there were a couple of things there that I needed to still get through. One of them being Environmental Station Alpha! I've been meaning to play this game forever but I never got around to it until pretty recently. I was a few hours into it and so I started playing it again and took it all the way to ... almost completion? (Spoilers: It turns out this game has a billion hours of post game content, and I think I've done all the major things I can do, and found all the cool things I can find.) So I figure instead of talking about my own games for once I can throw down some thoughts about someone else's game.
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good times yay! games
Posted July 8th 2016 11:33 AM (General)
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Dev Log: Sky Sister Portals

Dev Log: Sky Sister Portals
As I gather more feedback and suggestions my task list for Sky Sisters unfortunately is exploding with tasks and bug fixes! I'm having a lot of fun working on the game but by now I'm getting itchy to finish it. Remember when like, last year, I was going to finish it and put it out there? Well, so much for that.

One of the pieces of feedback that has been lingering for awhile is addressing what happens after a boss fight. The original idea was that after a boss fight far enough into the game an exit portal would open up and you'd have the option to take it and end the game. By doing this you double your score and officially "survive" the game. If you waited long enough then the exit portal would disappear and your next chance to take one would be after the next boss fight.

The whole "waiting around until the exit portal disappears" wasn't really working out that well. It was tough for players to understand it, and a lot of times they would accidentally miss their chance to take the portal because they didn't know how to use it right away. So now I've taken out the single exit portal and I've replaced it with two portals.

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The portal with the skull on it takes you further into the game and you will face tougher challenges and more bosses, and the portal with the heart is the path to salvation. I've also made some overall changes to the game's timer system that lets the players wait as long as they want to make their choice. The game now only counts "survival time" which means the game timer only ticks when you're facing a threat. Otherwise it will wait around for you to move on.

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I've also made a change to the way that the sky backgrounds work. Before it would slowly fade through a number of color palettes, but now I change the palette of the sky after taking the skull portal. The sudden change in the sky color after taking a portal feels like some form of progress, I think. There is some demand for more background art, but we'll see if I can get that far.
sky sisters dev log gamedev
Posted June 29th 2016 8:41 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Tougher Foes

Dev Log: Tougher Foes
Part of adding more stuff to Sky Sisters was the addition of yet another difficulty level beyond "Impossible." It sounds crazy, but I do want to make sure that people that put a lot of time in the game have a lot to get out of it. This new difficulty mode doesn't have any effect on unlockables or achievements in the game, and is really there just for an insanely tough challenge.

I wanted to make this mode unique somehow so I spent some time making "elite" versions of all the enemies in the game.

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These enemies have more aggressive attack patterns and will ruin your day a lot faster if they're not dealt with immediately. You can actually run into these enemies in a normal playthrough as well but not until you've made it far into the game. The game does allow you to keep going as long as you can survive, so eventually you face harder versions of the bosses, and now you can face harder versions of the regular enemies.
sky sisters gamedev dev log
Posted June 25th 2016 11:33 AM (General)
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Dev Log: Demo Night

Dev Log: Demo Night
Whoops I've kinda neglected posting on my blog this month but I think it's because I've been so busy working on stuff! Which is a good thing. Maybe.

This past Saturday night I was invited to demo Super Sky Sisters at a Denver Comic Con "afterparty" type thing. It was a bunch of local Colorado game developers all showing off their stuff and it was fun on a bun.

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I set up Super Sky Sisters and this was the first time in awhile that I was having not game developers play it. A lot of my feedback comes from my other game developer friends playing it, and although I get good feedback from them, it's not really the same as having folks who play a lot of games give feedback.

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I feel like Super Sky Sisters is actually not that well received among my peers! This usually fills me with doubt as I don't see anyone get hooked on the game when I have other game developers try it out, and I usually feel like I am very careful to notice things like someone saying the game is good and fun and not wanting to play it anymore (which happens a lot.) These doubts were pretty much erased by the demo I had on Saturday though! The second group of people to play the game tried the hardest difficulty right away, and when they got destroyed they went right back in for round 2, and even a round 3. I went up and talked to them and they were SUPER EXCITED about the game and I feel like it was the first time in awhile that this has happened with Sky Sisters.

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So things went pretty well! There were a few more groups of players that played the game really well. I was actually pretty impressed with the level of skill I saw going on with the demo. A few teams even made it past the first boss which I've rarely seen in my play tests.
sky sisters dev log gamedev
Posted June 21st 2016 10:56 AM (General)
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