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Dev Log: Sounds n Stuff

Dev Log: Sounds n Stuff
Hey I'm being productive! Mostly. I'm still 'crastinatin' on the animations I have yet to do for Super Sky Sisters, but I am now getting some final stuff done on other aspects of it. I've been tackling some of the sounds lately and throwing in some temporary music so I can set up the music management system.

For sounds I'm turning to a new program I found on the internet called LabChirp. It's similar to the great and eternal BFXR, but it creates a different style of sound that's (to me) more akin to the old console sound chips.

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In other news I'm also working on the balance of the game. I've gone through and tweaked a lot of the game events in regards to how they grow more difficult over time, and I've also done some reworking of the difficulty levels that can be selected at the start of the game. My goal is to have a single play session last around 10 minutes, and during those 10 minutes I want the player(s) to be able to defeat all three of the game's bosses.

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Dev Log: What's Left?!

Dev Log: What's Left?!
Yes, the procrastination continues on the animations for Super Sky Sisters. I've been diving more into doing general drawing and art stuff lately and spending a lot of time with the ole Manga Studio... but this of course isn't really pushing the game closer to completion. I mean, this is pretty much all I have left:

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The enemy animations task will be expanded for each enemy, but aside from that everything is pretty much straight forward. I am working a little bit on getting music and sound in there but with just placeholder stuff for each. Balancing the game is also proving to be a little difficult as it's really hard to see the effects of each change without playing a bunch of full games.

I'm at the point of the project where I think I'm spending more time playing the game than working on it since a lot of what's left requires complete play session to test. Sometimes I toss around the idea of making a simple AI that will play the game but I feel like that's just going to be opening up a dark dimension of infinite iterations and procrastination.

I think I'm going to have to super buckle down and do some time boxing to finish this out.

Doodle Post

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Quick Explosion Stuff

Quick Explosion Stuff
Last night I had the opportunity to talk about explosions in front of a group of game developers. I ended up doing a live demo of making an explosion effect from scratch. Here's what I ended up with after about 45 minutes:

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Not my best work but not bad for having to come up with something on the fly in front of a bunch of people. I ended up using Photoshop for animations, ShoeBox to spit out sprite sheets, and Otter to implement the effects.

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One of the fun things of the presentation was adding suggestions from the audience which included spawning more explosions from the first explosion. This is why the whole screen briefly fills up with explosions and then calms down again. It uses a quick recursion to make the explosions chill out after a couple of booms.

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I had a lot of fun doing this and I want to turn it into some kind of screen cast or stream. I didn't end up recording it since I didn't want to really complicate the set up at the last minute. Running a live demo is already scary enough.

The full source code is available here. The assets needed are uploaded here. If I do a more full version of this talk I'll be sure to post it here!

Doodle Post

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