Time for another (late) monthly update! Yay!

What has been going on: As I like to do, I wrote two posts after my monthly update trying to set up some intentions and goals to the new month and the new year, as well as an evaluation of the year that has gone. To keep it simple, I will just talk a bit about my goals in 2018 (see the previous post for full information, if you want to, of course).

2018 is the year I will start calling myself “hobbyist gamedev” and focusing on getting things done instead of desiring to learn this or that, it is also the year I decided to focus on art/design stuff.

That being said, my biggest and only goal for the year is to set something free and feel how it is.

I have basically three game projects that I didn’t give up: Pizza Clicker, The Ace Programmer and Midnight Journey – What is in my mind right now is to release Pizza Clicker (shouldn’t take more than a couple months) and then focus on Midnight Journey, so the Ace Programmer would be on an hiatus (or I could work on it when I have blocks on other projects).

A side idea from now on is to also get more into Game AI, because it is something I study and like a lot, also there isn’t too much content about it. I have two projects of mine that, if I have the time, I would like to develop and release it as open source projects – The first project is the Game AI Prototyper – An “engine” that abstract game logic so you can just write your AI algorithms for a game without having to code a game – The second one is the Evolutive Hearthstone Decks, an AI that generates decks for Hearthstone and constantly improves it (using Evolutive Algorithms)

I think these AI projects would be interesting to design, code and make it available on GitHub – Let’s see what the future holds for them.

ANYWAY, The Monthly Update

The Goal: The original plan was to have a playable version of Pizza Clicker and an usable version of the Game AI Prototyper Project.

The Reality: Click Here to play Pizza Clicker – As I had to travel my projects were delayed and I spent more time than I expected on Pizza Clicker, so I couldn’t reach a releasable version of the Game AI Prototyper.

Below you can see an Image of the Backlog of the Game AI Prototyper, as you can see I was pretty much halfway through, which is very far. So next month I will get back to it.

About Pizza Clicker – It’s been some time since I’m thinking on this game, since I’ve been playing a lot of Clicker/Idle games lately (Cookie Clicker, Adventure Capitalist, Communism Simulator, Crank, and a lot of others…) because they are very addictive to me.

As it is right now, it is just a very raw clicker/idle game with basic functionalities – The idea is to have it mixed with management and storytelling features, I have pretty much everything planned, see the backlog for the Version 1 below:

How Pizza Clicker will work? The idea is that you can get “Cursors” and hire employees (Gennaros) and they make pizza for you. You can also buy ovens so that they can do even more pizza, you can also make your own pizzas by clicking. As you progress through the game, you start getting famous and the story will be told through the newspaper as you make to the news, from local to worldwide.

Pizza Clicker Overview: The game progression is simple; At the beggining (V1.0) you have a pizzeria, and then you start hiring more Gennaros, buying Ovens and you will have to open more pizzerias. On V2.0 there will be upgrades available, you can train your Gennaros in Italy, buy Japanese Oven Technology, make more pizzas and be the best Pizzeria in the World. On V3.0 you will have to create your own research and market center to study oven technology and study where to open the next pizzeria. On V4.0 You will be selling your pizzas to other galaxies and eventually other time periods, until you discover the Automatic Oven. The Automatic Oven doesn’t need Gennaros, so you start firing them, this will lead to millions of unemployed Gennaros, and bad things will happen.

The idea of having multiple version is that I would officially release it on V1.0 and keep the development going, but only if at least a few people play and like the game, otherwise I would spare my time and start working on another project.

Aaaanyway, That was a long update I guess. See you on the next one and hope you like Pizzas!

You can always follow me on twitter: @guilhermepo2

2017

Although 2017 wasn’t the year I earned my first dollar with game development or either the year I released my first game, it was a year with a lot of experiences and learning (i.e. failures).

The year of 2017 made me realise some things:

• I have all the programming skill I need to develop any game I want to.
• I can do Pixel Art.
• I can do Music, even if they are just simple music.

These topics were the ones I tried the most in 2017 while developing some prototypes, Midnight Journey and Ghost Game. But 2017 also teached me a lot of things related to game development.

• Game Development is way more than programming/art/sound, it is about reaching people when you have the finished game, about PR, selling your game, talking to others.
• Game Development as a hobbyist is more of a discipline exercise than anything else, also a motivation exercise.

2018

With all that said, what I should expect for 2018? Better, what should I aim for in 2018? My bio in this blog is “Gamedev Blog. Programmer trying to learn pixel art and game music composition” – Well, this were my goals in 2017, but now I want to change it because I know I can do those things, I just need to practice with them and for me to practice with them I need a game, I need to develop something because my main thing is not being an artist or a music composer (sidenote: maybe thinking I need a game idea to practice pixel art or music composition isn’t the right mindset)

I just want it to be “Life of a Hobbyist Gamedev” – I won’t play the role of the “I’m a Gamedev in this cold world” guy, but that doesn’t mean I won’t have goals or anything like that, this bio means that I’m not aiming to turn into something, I already am. So I can just focus on working harder and improving.

Two Sides of “my” Game Development

Game Design

I love Design and Games, so, Game Design is a natural extension. Programming, the wish to do the art and the music is just a way for me to be totally in control of the design of my game, to be totally in control of the outcome.

This year I want to focus (focus should be the biggest priority, given my historic lack of it) on three projects: Pizza Clicker, The Ace Programmer and Midnight Journey.

Artificial Intelligence for Games

I’m not sure if I talk about it a lot or if I ever talked about it, but I’m a computer science undergraduate studying AI for Games, my final graduation project is related to AI in Games (using machine learning and evolutive algorithms) and I want to apply for graduate studies also on AI in Games. I’m realizing that AI in Games is not something a lot of people talk about, and I asked myself: “Why?” – Well, I don’t know but I will search for the answer. This field is growing on universities and pretty much any game nowadays use some form of AI, so most of the companies should have Game AI Programmers, where is all this people? /r/gamedev has more than 200,000 subscribers and /r/gameai has a bit more than 4,000, why? That’s just some thoughts.

What I wanted to say here is that I will start doing some AI Projects that I had saved for later, currently I have two and they should take all the time I’m willing to give to them and some more. These projects are going to be open source and my plan is to have people using and contributing with them,

These projects are:

• Game AI Prototyper (needs a better name): A Simple framework that tries to replicate the mechanics from action/rpg games like The Legend of Zelda from SNES, that is actually the same core mechanics from roguelike, dungeon crawlers, etc… – It will replicate the mechanics and have an API to control the character and observe the environment, the purpose is to abstract game logic so it is easier to develop, test and learn artificial intelligence algorithms applied in games. It is in progress and I hope I have a beta release until the next monthly update.
• Hearthstone Deck Builder: YES! AI FOR CARDGAMES! This is an idea I had more than one year ago and I wanted to use for some graduation related project, I still couldn’t find a way to do it so I’m just going to do it by myself. The name explains itself, it is an AI that will build decks for Hearthstone.

Conclusion

The conclusion is that on 2018 I want to change my bio from “learning something” to “hobbyist gamedev” – For that I will focus on game projects (pizza clicker, the ace programmer and midnight journey) but also on game ai projects (prototyper, hearthstone deck building) – not all of them on the same time, and I’m not saying I will finish and do all of it, what I’m saying is…

My Biggest Goal: The Biggest goal of 2018 is to set something free and feel how it is – I like Pizza Clicker and these AI Projects because they are fairly easy to build a releaseable version (shouldn’t take more than a month each). After releasing something I want to ask for feedback everywhere possible: friends, groups, reddit, youtube, whatever, and then I can build upon it and improve it.

I never had the feeling of what comes after releasing a game, releasing a piece of software, so this is what I’m aiming for this year.

Finally, Why AI Projects?

1. Because I want to.
2. Because it is something different.
3. Because I hope it can help when applying for postgraduate education on AI in Games.
4. Because I want to release something and I want to release something open source (games are harder to release as open source).
5. Because I want to practice more with C++ and Development in General.

These were just some thoughts I had in mind and I needed to organize them and put it on words, I hope now I can do a better work and achieve my goals.

You can follow me on twitter: @guilhermepo2 – Using more twitter for game development purposes is one of my minor goals for this year.

I will have more free time these next days, So I should spend more time on game development and try to build something cool for the next update, which will be on Januray 18th. In general, I’m working on three projects: Midnight Journey, The Ace Programmer and Pizza Clicker.

I will stabilish some goals and what I want to do on each one of them.

Midnight Journey

Main Goal: Very simple, I just want to draw the main character animations and put them on GameMaker until January 18th.

The Animations are:

• Idle Animation (Optional)
• Walking Animation (Optional)
• Running Animation
• Attacking Animation
• Dashing/Rolling Animation

Secondary Goal: Decide on the story and start writing it.

The Ace Programmer

Main Goal: Have a prototype using a visual novel engine (unity or gamemaker) and Phoenix Wright sprites.

Secondary Goal: Have custom images for the game, I should try drawing it or hiring a freelancer.

Pizza Clicker

Main Goal: Have a playable version in PixiJS or Phaser IO, not sure which one I will use.

Secondary Goal: Estabilish a differential for Pizza Clicker, there are tons of clicker and idle games, why pizza clicker should be special?

It’s been almost a year since I started this monthly update thing, although I didn’t do exactly what I wanted, I worked on so many different things and learned a lot, I might write some kind of yearly review or something like that.

I’m pretty happy with my progress this month, unfortunately, there’s not much to show here, but if everything goes according to what I planned, I will have 2 prototypes to show on the next update. I can’t help but to work on 2 or 3 projects at the same time and for some reason I like doing it.

Anyway, here’s what I have to show

This month I decided to focus on pixel art, I wanted to have simple animations for a character and have them on GameMaker. Unfortunately, I couldn’t effectively predict how much time the character design would take, so I ended up with just the character. I will talk a little bit about the process.

That’s the “feeling” I would like to achieve with the character, not that easy, specially with a 32×32 pixel art canvas. Below is my main character for the Midnight Journey Alpha.

So… It doesn’t fit. I heard about the game “Hyper Light Drifter” and I liked it aesthetics and the character proportions, so I decided to follow a similar style.

I ended up searching some references, trying some drawings and ended up with a lot of sketches.

 

The image above shows the one I liked the most and decided that I would use it (even with better feedback on other drawings). As you can see, I even tried an animation, that would be the dashing animation (It didn’t quite look good). But still, something was off for me, it didn’t look iconic or anything like that, so I decided to play more with colors and the colors I would use in the game.

After aaaall of this, this is the winner, this is the main character for Midnight Journey.

So, that’s pretty much what I have to show on this update, took me like 2 or 3 weeks of sketching to decide how my character would look like

I will take a small break of a week or two to focus on finals and projects at University, and then I will be on Holidays! After that I will set some goals for the next update. I will try to use the extra time to put those prototypes together to post on the next update.

I want to start using more twitter for gamedev purposes, so follow me. I’m not sure how to do the transition from portuguese tweeting to english tweeting, I might just post random pictures and screenshots.

That’s it. See you next year!

I wrote my Monthly Update on November 8th and I’m planning my next one to be on Sunday, December 10th. Some days ago it ocurred to me that I should have more specific and better planned goals, so I decided to think better over my goals and to write another post talking about them. I will start setting better goals on the end of each monthly update.

Overall Goal: I have two goals for this month.

1. Working on Midnight Journey, working with GameMaker and trying to practice more with Pixel Art and drawing assets to the game.
2. I wrote about the “Ace Programmer” game some updates ago, I want to finish 100% the tutorial script and puzzle design.

1st Week: November 8 – 15: I did a small improvement I think wasn’t on the update, now the game shows your stamina. I also tried some things with Pixel Art.

2nd Week: November 15 – 22: This week I wanted to work on Midnight Journey’s main character, I got a small idea but I will still work 1 or 2 more days on it.

3rd Week: November 22 – 29: 

1. Midnight Journey: Liking or not what I have for the character, I want to start drawing animations such as running, basic attack and dashing and try to integrate them on GameMaker.
2. Ace Programmer: Improve the current script for the tutorial level.

4th Week: November 29 – December 6: 

1. Midnight Journey: Finish integrating the animations on GameMaker, evaluate how they look and decide if I should keep doing it or change the character or the animations.
2. Ace Programmer: Link the script and the gameplay, introduce a character that will explain to you the puzzle system.

This month wasn’t one of my best ones in therms of working on games, but let’s go straight to the point.

The Present

For the first and almost only point of my monthly update, I bought GameMaker, yeah, it hurts. And then I was able to finish the course I bought on Udemy and get some more insights on how to work on GameMaker.

As for how the game currently looks like, here is a video:

I’m pretty happy with the result and with how making it on GameMaker wasn’t much of a trouble as it was to do something similar on Unity. This made me want to get back to my older project: Midnight Journey.

ps: the sound is very poor because what you are hearing is actually the microphone, for some reason OBS can’t get sound from my macbook.

Briefly, the second point is that I wanted to try something with Pixel Art, some kind of a glitchy effect/animation, and here is what I got:

It isn’t the most complex animation, but it looks okay and doesn’t require a lot of effort to do it, so I’m actually happy with it, I want to explore more on this on the future.

The Future

As the title says, I want to set some things that I want to do and write where my thoughts are heading to, for this month I will probably be working around these ideas:

• GameMaker RPG Course – The course is over but I can try expanding it, adding enemies, messing with things, changing the UI to something that I like more, trying to use shaders, …
• Pixel Art – I want to try more on the Glitch Art thing (because I have some ideas on how to use it on my games) and I want to come up with some sketches for Midnight Journey’s main character.
• Visual Novels – I talk about this a lot but never show anything here, anyway, I hope to have something to show someday. I’ve been into playing things such as Ghost Trick, Ace Attorney and 999 lately, and I had 2 ideas of games on the genre. I’m trying to write some scripts/design documents for them and I pretend to keep working on it.

That’t about it for this month!

See you on the next one!

I had a lot to do this last month, I started my Internship (finally) and I’m still getting used to my new schedules and adapting to it.

I will divide my update this month in 2 parts: GameMaker and my Ghost Game. Easier ones first.

GameMaker

If I remember correctly, I said in one or two updates before this one that I wanted to try GameMaker, well, this day finally happened.

I started browsing some youtube channels, searching for references and I found about HeartBeast and his awesome tutorials. A couple weeks ago I found out about his new course on GameMaker: The Action RPG Course.

It was almost exactly what I wanted to learn on GameMaker, the course was something around $10 so I bought and started following it. Here is what I’ve done:

If you remember my older updates, this is almost exactly what I wanted for Midnight Journey, just some minor tweaks and doing the art and the game would be good to go.

BUT. I got pretty disappointed when I found out I could only create 10 scripts on the trial version and 20 sprites, so I can’t finish the course because of those limitations. I don’t agree with this approach, just not being able to export the game is a good enough limitation in my opinion. But hey, maybe this way works for them because I’m really thinking on buying the desktop license ($99). I’m enjoying GameMaker more than Unity for working with 2D.

PS: Unity finally has Tilemaps on Beta Testing, maybe I can stick with Unity because of that.

Ghost Game

This is actually the first time I thought about giving up on a game idea (and not just saying I will put them aside for I don’t know how much time). Designing Levels is way difficult for someone who isn’t a designer. I have no clue about what to do and how to do it.

But hey, I might not be a good designer, I might not be able to design good levels, but I’m pretty sure I can design something. So I will change my approach on this. Anyway, I worked on the Intro Scene, the Main Menu Scene, World Map and started the Second Level. You can see it on the video below:

It is all just a prototype yet, but it can say what I want for it.

I also did a Smooth Follow script for the camera, which you can see on the Second Level. This gave me idea to also use the camera as a Gameplay Mechanic, the player could be able to manipulate it using the Human or the Ghost to see the environment to think more about their actions.

My approach for this game right now is to do just 2 levels, the Tutorial Level and the other one shown on the video. After that I will start putting together the art, music and sound effects. Maybe after that I will ask for feedback over the internet.

Plus: I’m getting into Adventure Games with Visual Novels elements lately (like Ace Attorney, Ghost Trick and 999), I even made a prototype for one (Ace Programmer). And I wrote a bit on ideas and scripts on this subject, so maybe next updates I will talk about them.

What I’m going to do this month

• GameMaker: Not really sure, maybe evaluate my finances to see if I’m able to buy the Desktop License, finish the Course and see what I can do with it.
• Ghost Game:
  •  I want to finish designing the second level and transform the Tutorial Level in a Tutorial actually.
  • This month I also want to start doing the art, basic musics and search for sound effects.
• Visual Novels: I still have to think more on the ideas and keep writing the scripts

It’s time for another update and this time I haven’t managed to work as much as I wanted, actually, I worked way way less than I wish I had.

What I have done:

Being short: The tutorial level for the Ghost Game is now playable, you can see it on the video below.

It is indeed really simple, it is the tutorial level anyways, the only purpose is to make the player learn that they lose if they are on enemy’s sight and also that they can/have to use the ghost projection mechanic.

The next step is working on its aesthetic and actually have some intro and some text explaining the player what to do.

Besides that, I started working on how the aesthetics and level design should be, I’m fairly new and unexperienced in designing levels and aesthetics so I didn’t exactly know what to do and I didn’t know well how to do what I think I should do. This is the perfect recipe for procrastination.

I do have some thoughts and rough levels on paper, but I was just too insecure if they were really good.

What I learned here is that if I overthink like I did, the game will never move forward, so the best thing is to just draw the art and create the levels with my current ideas and then improve them over time, hopefully with some feedback to guide me to the correct path.

As a final thought, I realized that this game resembles Super Mario but with the ghost mechanic thing, and maybe simpler. When I realized this I thought of doing the level transition similar to Super Mario or Donkey Kong Country where you have that World Map and move through it to go to each level. See the pictures below.

What I want to do:

As I haven’t had a lot of progress, I will keep the same goals as previous month:

• Focusing on Working on this game whenever possible, try to work on it everyday.
• Finish the tutorial level and have two more playable levels.
• Draw the Art for at least the Tutorial Level.

As I said, for the levels, I will briefly think about them, create them on Unity and improve them over time. The same for the art.

And that’s it for this month! I will work harder on September to have more progress to show here!

Time for another update! Last month was the last one on University Semester so I had to focus more on studying, doing essays, those kind of things… Now I want to use the recess to learn some new things and keep working on my games.

What I’ve Done

Fortunately, an essay I had was to do something on Unity using 3D, so I decided to tackle an old project and see how it would be like to do a 2D Platformer with 3D Graphics (something like Limbo and Inside), try some Inverse Kinematics and mess a little bit with shaders.

My mind before trying it: I just have to model a very simple character, use Mixamo for Rigging and Animation and things will work out, right?

My mind after trying it: Yeah, right…

The character could perform just 4 simple actions: running, pushing an object, pulling an object and climbing

Working with 3D wasn’t my favourite thing in the world, now I know it will never be. I simply couldn’t time the animations and actions, I think I would need a lot more time to get everything correctly, so I had to get away with a workaround on pretty much all of the actions. For the climbing action, I got away with just teleporting the character when the animation finished, so this is what looks the weirdest.

On the positive side, Inverse Kinematics is way easier than I thought it would be on Unity, I just used it to point the character hands on something that was interactable or making it look where I wanted.

As for the shaders, I still don’t have much idea on how it works, but I made a strange looking one using a tutorial. All in all, it was a good learning experience, if you want to see it, watch the video below.

 

About my projects:

I haven’t touched them actually, just had some thoughts.

Ghost Game: This was the game I talked about on the last update, now I decided the Human Body will be able to push/pull objects and interact with buttons/levers, the Ghost Body will be able to interact with buttons (not levers as they are heavier), won’t be affected by gravity and it will be able to posess the enemies NPCs.

Midnight Journey: Seriously thinking on studying Game Maker to do this one, I think it will be better, anyway, I want to use the extra time I will have to work on this one, but for the time my focus is on the Ghost Game.

Also, I started messing up with Phaser, it looks like a good framework for developing games for HTML5.

For the next Month:

Well, for the next month I will try to set a simple goal: I want to work everyday on my Ghost Game.

I want to have the first level finished (a tutorial level) and two more levels so the player can use that they learned on the tutorial, this is actually almost half of the whole game.

If I have an extra time besides that, I shall work on learning or practicing something (pixel art, music, Phaser, Game Maker, …) or writing stories/scripts/documents for my projects.

Well, that’s it! I tried to keep it short! See you next month!

At my last update I said I was going to start writing a Game Design Document for Midnight Journey and I would also work on simple mobile games. I changed my mind a little bit on that. I change my mind all the time actually.

I did write on Midnight Journey and got some good insights on what to do next, but instead of thinking on mobile games to develop, I decided to prototype two old ideas and a new one. I didn’t have enough time for prototyping both old ideas so for this month I just have one of them.

Time spent on Game Development

I said I wouldn’t have a lot of time for doing this on my free time this month, so I started to log on a pomodoro app how much time I worked on game development.

That’s 33 Pomodoro Intervals, so it is something around 14 to 16 hours of work, it’s not much but I will try to improve and work more on it.

Ace Programmer

Background: So… I decided that I had to play more games, come on, a game developer/game designer should play games, right? Playing Games wasn’t something that I would do regularly in my daily life, so I’m trying to fit it in.

I decided to give a shot on Ace Attorney, I have been looking at this game for more than a year since I played Ghost Trick, both written by Shu Takumi. So I played the first one already and while I was playing it I came up with the idea of doing this Visual Novel/Adventure Puzzle Game related to programming.

The Game: Well, I already said it. It is a mix of a Visual Novel and a Puzzle Game, I spent a whole day doing a simple prototype, and you can play it here:

http://gueepo.itch.io/ace-programmer-0001

Just ignore the thumbnail.

I’m actually satisfied with this prototype and what the game could be, I’m just not sure if it would be fun for those who are not interested in programming. But that is something to think later on, my focus on the moment is on the next idea.

Ghost Game

Background: This idea is in my mind since 2015, actually both ideas. I merged the mechanics from a game into de story/purpose of other game. It is a game where near-death experience is the main topic, so I will try to show it on the mechanics and on the levels.

The Game: It is a puzzle game where you have 2 bodies, a human body and a ghost body. The human body can do some things and can’t do other things, the ghost body can do some things and can’t do other things. The idea is that you will need both of them to solve the puzzles while avoiding the enemies on the level!

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the screenshots above, you can see the main character and an enemy. The second screenshot shows the ghost body and the human body on the floor.

What to do: I want to focus on this game for the next month and maybe even finish it on August or September. I want to have just an introductory level (a tutorial) and 5 levels to play, that will be the game. For the next month: First of all, I want to have a real name for this game. I also want to figure out what exactly each body can and can’t do, so I can code it and start designing levels. Then I have to put together the art and simple background music to finish it.

Midnight Journey

… And finally! Midnight Journey, the reason why I created this blog afterall and the game I almost gave up for having a big scope.

It happens that all those things I was adding to the game, multiple enemies, level up system, npc’s, backstory, etc… They didn’t add anything to the game.

Going back to some old pieces of writing I found out my original intended experience for this game, and they were: 1. Creating a game that is hard, punish you for your mistakes and reward you for learning with them. 2. A game with a dark mood/ambient 3. I wanted the player the think that there is a story behind everything (maybe there is, maybe there isn’t). On top of these, I added a fourth one: 4. Have a minimalist feeling, the feeling that everything is meaningful.

With this is consideration, I removed every random enemy because they were going to be just something to keep the player busy for 5 more minutes, I removed every weapon variety, the starter weapon should be meaningful, it should be your one and only weapon, so I don’t have to program a weapon/armor change system and I don’t have to draw sprites for them. Every death is important, death will be the way to level up and it will be done automatically, so no stats, no level up interface for the player, maybe he won’t even know death works like a level up mechanism.

What do I have then? That’s still something to think, I have the main character and bosses, maybe the game will be just it, I actually think it would be interesting.

For the next month: Just think more and write more on it, I’m getting into something and I want to have a really good game design document for Midnight Journey, while I’m doing it my focus will be on the Ghost Game.

That’s it for this update! The next one is going to be somewhere between August 5 and August 12.