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posts filed under: general

Exploring Explosions Talk

Exploring Explosions Talk
Last night I spent an hour or so talking about explosions! It was an internet talk that I gave from the comfort of my room to the fine folks at Warp Zone in Louisville Kentucky.



All the materials from the talk can be found here if you want to follow along with the animations and video footage.

It was a lot of fun to put together the talk, and get to share my excitement over particle effects to other game developers!
gamedev art programming design
Posted February 19th 2016 1:13 PM (General)
1 Comment

Game Development Streaming

Game Development Streaming
Sorry for the all the dust around here lately! I've been caught up in a bunch of stuff this month, and I've started doing some cool game development streams on Twitch!

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You can follow me on Twitch right here! Right now my schedule is every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday starting at noon pacific time. So far it's been a lot of fun and I've been streaming a lot of Super Sky Sisters stuff! With the help of the stream chat it's been pretty productive -- actually very surprisingly productive.

So I got a little bit swept up in getting my stream all put together so I forgot to write blog posts about my progress lately, but I'll be posting again this week with what's been going on with Sky Sisters. (You'll notice that I pivoted back to that from the dice rpg, but the dice RPG is still living on, I just am using streaming as a way to get back in the saddle of Sky Sisters so I can finally finish this dang game.)
good times gamedev sky sisters streaming
Posted February 15th 2016 4:04 PM (General)
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More Music Practice

More Music Practice
For whatever reason I'm having a lot of fun with my midi keyboard so here's a couple of more songs that I tried to write. Song6 is sounding more intentional and I'm actually kinda happy with how it turned out which is pretty rare for any music I write! Check it out!

Song5

Song6

I'm still just using OpenMPT to write these. I'm checking out the demo version of Renoise but I often run into the same issue every time with it: I have no instruments for it and I have no idea where to find instruments. I've found a handful on the forums but it's not really anything that feels useful to me. I'm actually just looking for a decent drum kit to use for chiptune sounding stuff and I can't seem to find anything! I don't know if I'm just not looking in the right spot though...
music openmpt
Posted January 30th 2016 11:13 PM (General)
6 Comments

Dev Log: Arranging Pixels

Dev Log: Arranging Pixels
I've been taking kind of a longer break from coding than I would like, but I suppose while I'm able to I can just roll with the punches and do whatever my weird brain wants to do. I've tried to refocus on my dice RPG like game by trying to figure out some art stuff for it.

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I've been drawing from some Zelda games as inspiration for this top downish kind of view. My idea is that there will be an overworld area and when you encounter an enemy it goes into the dice battle. The overworld will also have other neat interactions with the dice that I haven't totally figured out yet, but I have some rough ideas.

Image

One thing I'm stuggling with is just the overall screen size of the game and trying to do pixel art. I need a high-ish resolution for the dice, I feel, because I want them to have large icons and be very readable, and I also need room for a lot of UI stuff... but this big screen resolution means the overworld can look pretty zoomed out. Right now each movement tile size is 32 pixels, while each art tile is 16 pixels.

I'm trying to put the overworld "game" into a smaller portion on the screen of 640 x 480 because I actually like 4 x 3 way better for 2d games, and I'm trying to compensate for the "zoomed out" feeling. I could try increasing the tilesize, but 64 pixels is too large, and 48 pixels feels weird (it's not a power of 2, blasphemy!)

I think I'll roll with this idea for now, and put a bunch of hud and menu stuff over on the left. I kinda think back on how Desktop Dungeons did it with a square game view and the side of the screen being all HUD, and I think that works out nicely.

The size of your screen and how many "tiles" fit across horizontally and vertically can very heavily inform the feeling of your game! Limiting how "far" the player can see is a very important thing to consider, as it will then inform all of your level design and art choices. That's... probably a rant for another time though.
dev log art
Posted January 28th 2016 1:43 PM (General)
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Musical Doodles

Musical Doodles
So my ability to program is still pretty crappy, but for whatever reason right now I'm enjoying spending some time in openMPT trying to figure out how music works again. Every so often I get into a mood where I want to try to write music and this lasts roughly until I realize how insanely difficult it is to comprehend music.

Anyway, here are some music doodles. One of them is a little test to see if I could decipher a melody from a song I like.

* Song 0

* Song 1

* Song 2

* Song 3

* Song 4

Each one of these is between a half hour and an hour of placing notes and wondering what mysteries this universe still holds.
music audio openmpt
Posted January 27th 2016 12:12 PM (General)
2 Comments

Dev Log: Crap

Dev Log: Crap
Ugh I am pretty deep into whatever funk this is. I've tried starting up a few tasks today but to no avail really. I went through my list of stuff for some of my projects and tried grinding on a few of them with little to no actual progress to be found.

Today is one of those days where it feels like I get insanely frustrated at every little thing that doesn't turn out right. Everything feels like it's falling apart, nothing is working, and everything I try to create just turns out totally wrong, and I never know how to fix it.

I figure it would be healthier to share some of my thoughts rather than just keep them all to myself. Even right now I just feel so tired but I've accomplished a whole lot of nothing, so why am I so tired! Even that in itself is incredibly frustrating... I have no idea what I'm doing. I guess it's just another bad day.
dev log
Posted January 20th 2016 3:14 PM (General)
5 Comments
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