As I started to type from an AirBnb room in Sao Paulo, I realized this will be a really, really long update. Lots of things to talk about  and some tech details I want to get into. I will try to point what I’m going to talk about on each section of this update, so feel free to read the points you would like.

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Where I was last month?

A month seems like a big measure of time, to the point I feel the need to read my last update and remember where I was back then

• Made happily(never)after for the Weekly Game Jam
• I took a break from some projects (I didn’t even remember that!)
• Made Cult Cultivation for another Weekly Game Jam – Said that I was coding an Idle Framework that I wanted to sell on the Unity Asset Store.
• Released an Update for Pizza Clicker (V3.7) and said I was going to get back to it in February.
• Said I was working on a new mobile game, temporarily named Mobile Dreamlands.
• Announced I started an Internship on a local game dev company
• Said I liked to work on Udemy courses

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Cult Cultivation, the Idle Game Framework and Pizza Clicker

Yup, I’m grouping all the idle ones in a single topic.

Being very straight to the point here, I’m at that point where someone gets a lot of things to do and can’t handle everything. My original plans was to finish the Idle Framework before the end of February, which I didn’t, so I had to put this on hold.

Also, it’s already February 15th and I haven’t even touched Pizza Clicker V4.

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About the Internship

Talking a little more about the Internship, it is on a company called Gilp Studios and I’m working on a game called Upside Down.

The project was originally on Unity 2017.1, we tried to upgrade for the 2018.3 version, everything was broken. Then we tried 2018.2. Everything was broken. Then we settled for 2017.4 LTS and it worked out well. Important Note: The game used to run on 30fps (not locked) and, just by upgrading the version, it runs on ~40fps, which is a good margin and should result in not having frame drops on the live version if we lock on 30fps, which is the default for Android Devices.

Me and the other intern made some things like developing a Colorblindness Mode, which was really well received since the game relies so much on colors. We had to also integrate that into the Localization Module, which was interesting because I had not ever seen how localization worked before. Another thing we made was some Interface Improvement, for example, changing some texts, recompile the Chinese Font to have the Colorblindness Mode in Chinese, adding some juicing on the UI buttons and fixing a transition on the music when you lost the game.

The music on the game was made using FMOD, I had never tried FMOD before, and boy, if you know how regret feels you know how I feel. It is so simple to work with and to integrate with the game to the point you have Dynamic Music very easily. I fell in love with FMOD and want to use it on every project now. In the end the transitions were just some minor transition timing thing, the lesson is that I love FMOD.

After all that I started working on the iOS Port, which is something I always wanted to try and, guess what, every dependency had broken while porting to iOS, I had to upgrade Google Play Games Services from 0.9.39 to 0.9.60, upgrade Firebase Version and Google AdMob version. After doing all that and refactoring some code (thanks #if macros) I finally got it to work on iOS.

After some more refactoring and code writing I managed to integrate Game Services on the game and add a Leaderboard, the remaining tasks would be doing the Achievements and IAP on iOS.

If you plan to release mobiles games, this paragraph is important. I’m currently stuck on the Achievements thing. The thing is that the way achievements works on Google Play and Apple Game Center are different. Google Play Games have three kind of achievements (Locked/Unlocked, Steps, Percentages) whereas Apple Game Center only deals with percentages, and when an achievement reaches 100% it is automatically completed and awarded (which does not happen on Google Play Games). So, how to effectively work with Achievements on Google Play and App Store? The answer is pretty simple! You build your own Achievement System and create interfaces to get percentages for ALL OF THEM, this way you can also display the achievements with your own UI, but that’s not the point. The point is to have your own small achievement system and have interfaces to send their data to Google Play and App Store. It’s really not that complex but needs to be planned ahead.

Anyway, back to what I was doing, Upside Down was originally only for Android, so there’s no underlying achievement system and all the code relies on Google Play. What I’ve done? Nothing. The story reached the present moment. I’m thinking on building an achievement system mirroring the Google Play Achievements and use them for the iOS Version.

These stories are not the most exciting, in fact, as someone who aims to be a Gameplay Programmer, they are pretty boring, but integrating with the stores, having achievements, leaderboards, having analytics with firebase, handling all dependencies and project version are very important tasks, it is that final 5% that gets the attention to your game. These are not really my cup of tea but doing them makes me value the ones who does them (I’m having flashbacks about my last job as a QA right now)

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This was not even the longest part of the update.

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Announcing Freshman’s Quest

Freshman’s Quest is a pixel platformer take that places on an university/fantasy mixed universe! Follow us on Twitter!

Some months ago I talked about a game development club I was a part of at the University, after a year messing with a lot of different things we started a real project, recently we decided to go public and start to gain some visibility to a project, the next goal is to have 2 polished levels and release a demo.

Here’s and old gameplay footage (the level design and level art are pretty much all different now);

It is a platformer, as simple as it can get. Our team currently consists of 1 Designer, 3 Programmers (which some of them sometimes dabble in art and design), 2 artists (which one of them also do Level Design) and a musician. The inspirations are, obviously, Celeste, Mario, Shovel Knight, Owlboy, Hollow Knight and all the recent games with some kind of platforming action.

The goal is to have a polished finished product and sell it on itch.io or Steam, if possible. The price would no more than $5. As we run to finish and polish the game, now we have to build a website, presskits, trailers, and all those things.

But it is a project that I’m proud of and teached me A LOT on working with groups, something that is really valuable. I’m thinking of setting its own Development Blog and creating a post explaining more about the project, if I don’t do that, I will post on Fourth Dimension Studio Devlog.

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Now here comes the long part

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MOBILE DREAMLANDS HYPE

Being direct to the point: Mobile Dreamlands first playable is ready! (CLICK TO PLAY!!!!) –  I made an early build to spread the word across and try to get some early feedback, keep in mind it’s not polished yet.

Mobile Dreamlands (temporary name) is some sort of mobile turn based roguelike game, the objective is to kill monsters, collect gold and go further down the dungeon. Your “success” is going to be measured by how far on Y axis you go and by how much monsters you kill. The amount of monsters you kill influences the amount of gold your earn.

I wanted to finish this game by the end of February and then work on a PC Roguelike game, which would be Dreamlands, but I ended up liking this project so much that I think I will stick with it until the end of April.

A basic core gameplay loop is done, I still have to polish and add content to it, but the 80% is done there. When I say I want to stick with it for a couple more months I’m saying I want to make it a REAL mobile game. I want to have it on Android and iOS, I want to have leaderboards, achievements, integration with Google Play Games and Apple’s Game Center, I want it to have monetization, but not in an intrusive way (which I hate about mobile games) and I’m even reasoning about searching for publishers, trying something with Gilp would be a good fit as I could make a more friendly contract.

I know that a roguelike mobile game seems a little bit weird but this project could really reflect some of my values on gameplay, how much fun it could give, how it could be a “real game” (i.e. not a casual money grab) on mobile, using ADS and IAP but not in a way that makes your experience worse if you don’t want to watch/spend. On a more personal level, I love turn based games and I’m thinking on having the aesthetics resembling Lord of the Rings, which is also something I love.

Talking about the art, I’m going to have a partnership for the art on Mobile Dreamlands! It is one of the artists from the game above (Freshman’s Quest), her name is Barbara Franco and she has an art studio in my city, called Hovel 102.

About the Monetization, what I’m thinking is pretty straightforward, about watching advertisement, it could give a second chance after watching, giving a temporary buff or maybe doubling the amount of gold in a run. Other than that, the gold is going to be persistent and you can maybe buy temporary buffs (i.e. having 2x gold for a run, 2x damage for a run, 2 turns for a run, more life, etc…), with that, having the option to buy gold with real money is also a thing.

Still on the Monetization topic, I’m thinking on having some sort of “DLCs” – For example, you can pay for $1 a new land with new enemies, new traps, new styles of design, different art, new music, etc…

Another idea is to have an In Game Shop, and my idea with this one (besides the buffs) is to have many different playable characters that can be unlocked with gold. I could make every character have a particular trait (more life, two movements per turn, more damage, etc…), but this is something I’m still thinking about, the real plan with the unlockable characters is to have aesthetically different playable characters, such as elves, dwarves, aliens (??) and maybe I can try the idea of having characters of different color, race and gender to add a little bit of representation on the game.

By working on this game for more time, I could also try to create some music for it, which is something I’ve been studying on the side and really enjoying.

I want to get technical about Mobile Dreamlands. It has basically two big systems: a level generation system and a turn based system. As I stated previously, one of my goals was to have an asset published in 2019, and the Level Generation System is a possible candidate, so I made some extra effort to have something good and reusable.

The Level Generation System

The Level Generation System is composed simply by three scripts: the Room, the RoomInstance and the LevelManager, besides that, there are three ScriptableObjects, the ColorToGameObject, RoomTypeToInstance and RoomGenerationMapping.

Room: It’s the abstract representation of a 9×17 grid, what is important is that it has a type, some examples of types is Start, Easy, Reward, Rest, Medium, Hard, …

RoomInstance: It’s the representation of a room on the Scene, it has a template and a ColorToGameObject[] – The way it works is that it receives a template, a template is a 9×17 image where each pixel represents a tile (I do them on Photoshop), then the RoomInstance iterates through this image and for each pixel, it gets its color, searches the color on the ColorToGameObject[] and instantiates the equivalent GameObject for that color, if there’s more than one GameObject, it chooses a random one.

Here’s an example of a template, the way it is configured, every black instantiates a random ground Prefab, the red points instantiates a random enemy and the yellow instantiates a “border”.

LevelManager: The LevelManager is the Big Boss. It has a RoomTypeToInstance[] and a RoomGenerationMapping[] – The RoomGenerationMapping is a ScriptableObject that maps a single room into an array of rooms.

When the level is initialized, it just adds a Start Room to the list, after that it searches on the RoomGenerationMapping[] for the mappings that starts on the Start Room, let’s pretend it adds an Easy Room and a Reward Room, the next step would be searching on the mappings for one that maps a Reward Room on something else.

I do this on the initialization until I have 5 rooms (totally arbitrary number), after that I do the same but on runtime while player progresses.

Having the Rooms List, the Level Manager has to create their Instances, it uses the RoomTypeToInstance[] to do that – which is a Scriptable Object that matches a room type to a prefab of a room Instance.

I liked the way this system turned out because I can add new rooms, new mappings, add more content simply by creating more ScriptableObjects, without having to hard code the logic. Even someone who doesn’t understand programming could use, although a Level Generation System would totally be aimed for programmers.

Smart pieces of code I couldn’t live without

As you could see, I’ve used a lot of Scriptable Objects lately, it happens that I learned how to use them better recently and I added them everywhere I could on this project. Scriptable Objects are really good for configurations.

Something I’ve been using a lot recently is Linq, a Query/Set Library which helps a lot, all these matches I talked about I’ve made using Linq, but the real smart boy I did this month, the month’s MVP is the RandomOrDefault():

I’ve had this idea when using Linq, the idea is simple, it returns a Random element from an array or a list, the beauty of this code is that it works for both data structures. If the list/array is empty, returns the default for that type.

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Anyway, I’ve been writing for more than 2 hours straight. I’ll finish this update here! It was a long long one because I had a lot to report and a lot I wanted to talk about, but hopefully some of the things are useful!

See You!

 

Bonjour! It’s me again with another update, in case you didn’t read and want to, I’ve written a mid-month update that is actually a yearly update called Happy 2019! (2018 Review #finishit)

Taking a break until somewhere around January 7th made me not have a lot of progress for this month, but let’s talk gamedev because a lot happened until today, lots of small things, but they happened.

happily(never)after

I’ve talked about happily(never)after on the last random update and said I would talk more about it here, but there isn’t anything to say. I don’t know what I was planning to say.

Anyway, it was my fourth platformer in a row, four was a decent number of platformers to code in order to have a certain skill with it. What is more interesting is that the progress can be seen from one to another, I’m even thinking on writing a blog post about it (improvement by iteration, or something like that).

So I decided to do this for the Weekly Game Jam 76, themed ‘Afterlife’. It’s the game I’m most proud of at the moment and I really liked the feel and controls. I liked it so much I was thinking on making a bigger release based on this game. Spoiler alert: It would be a metroidvania roguelike platformer called Midnight Journey.

cult cultivation

2019 Game Development Season is open! My first entry is Cult Cultivation, an idle game I made for the Weekly Game jam 78, theme was ‘Grow’.

I’m joining a lot of Game Jams lately, it’s just that I’m enjoying doing small/simple projects and effectively finishing little pieces.

Cult Cultivation is a really simple incremental game with just a few buildings to raise your currency per second.

The real reason for me to build it is that I’m coding an Idle Game Framework on top of Unity. I want to do that so I can easily create those kind of games, a genre I happen to like a lot, and to sell it on the asset store. Selling something on the Asset Store is one of my goals for 2019. To showcase this Idle Framework I’m planning to release two free games under Fourth Dimension Studio that would use it, the first would be a standard idle game (buildings and upgrades) and the second one would be more RPG based, monsters would be exponentially stronger and your “currency” would be your damage.

pizza clicker

For our Monthly Pizza News, Pizza Clicker V3.7 is now live on the Play Store – It is a simple update where I added one more upgrade for each building/worker (7 in total); added a new worker that gives you 2 pizzas per second; added some more random upgrades (2 or 3 of those); added 6 more news on the newspaper section and tuned the price of the first upgrades.

I will return to Pizza Clicker only in February (2 weeks from now), my backlog includes adding a better monetization plan, giving more rewards and being less invasive and adding Version 4, which includes 2 new workers, tons of upgrades and news. Hopefully, with V3.7 all code needed for V4 is done, so it is just a matter of designing and adding it into the game.

dreamlands vs mobile dreamlands

I already said I’ve cut the RPG elements from Dreamlands and I would do a mobile game using its Level Generation and Turn Based System. With that in mind, I got me asking myself, what is effectively the difference from Dreamlands and Mobile Dreamlands?

Mobile Dreamlands is, well, some kind of infinite turn based roguelike runner. Dreamlands is an action roguelike with a progression and a hub, aiming to be more of a traditional roguelike (including having random chances of critical/miss on combat) and it would have more content.

To differentiate them even more, I will change the thematic for the Mobile Version (Mobile Dreamlands is just a temporary name by the way) – I’m not sure what it will be but I want it to be more upbeat because I’m tired of doing dark/mysterious/depressing concepts. Dreamlands is Lovecraft inspired so it is going to have plenty of that.

And again, I don’t have nothing to show here yet (I’m VERY late on that), I’ve just adapted the systems to work on mobile.

le internship

In some rather unexpected news I’m on an internship now, what is even more unexpected is that it is in a game company, it’s unpaid but it is 4 hours a day and very flexible.

Adding to the positives is that I will be able to learn with more experienced developers (they have this company for 6 years now). Hopefully in no time I will have my name on the credits of a game with more than 100,000 downloads, which is great, another positive point is that this internship gave me the opportunity to go to GDC this year, just speculation, there’s a lot to talk/decide yet, but it would be awesome and I wouldn’t have this opportunity otherwise.

And hey, if I have the opportunity to do an internship, even if it is unpaid, on literally the only game studio in town (Brazil things!), I have to accept, right?

Bonus Paragraph: Sometimes I’m not in the mood of working on Unity or on Sheets/Documents for my game projects, it just happens sometimes. I found out that, for me, learning/practicing music composition (something I’m planning to focus on this year), learning vue.js (gotta learn a javascript framework to program those nice portfolios) or watching game development courses (why not? there’s always something to learn) on Udemy is a good way to start getting in the flow.

And again I’ve written way more that I should have. It’s just that this month lots of small things happened, for the next I want to have just two things to talk about here: idle framework and mobile dreamlands.

That’s it for this month, thanks for reading it!

Another year is nearing its end, for some reason I decided to review all my 2018 posts in this blog, trying to do a review of my year in gamedev and also talk about my plans in 2019.

I noticed some things.

2018 Posts Review

• 2017’s Last Monthly 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” – THIS DIDN’T CHANGE AT ALL.
• “2018” post: “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.” – Well.;
  
  • The Ace Programmer: Never talked about it again, wrote the first chapter and dropped it (it is something that returns to my head sometimes)
  • Midnight Journey: THIS IS ON MY MIND EVERYDAY! It was an Action RPG, I turned it into a Metroidvania and now I’m thinking on how to turn it into a Platformer (or Metroidvania without combat)
  • Pizza Clicker: Well, I released it, but on Mobile, not on web as originally intended.
• Still on 2018 post: “My Biggest Goal: The Biggest goal of 2018 is to set something free and feel how it is” About that… (Will be talking about that down below);
• A Dollar, Please: Stablished the goal of earning at least $1 with gamedev in 2018, well, it didn’t go so well;
• Moving Forward: Discovered the joy of cutting down features on games.
• Almost July: Got back to Unity after months into GameMaker Studio 2.

Gamedev Awards of 2018

Games I simply pretended didn’t exist anymore:

1. The Ace Programmer
2. Midnight Journey
3. Ghost Game

Games I started in 2018 and suddenly pretended they didn’t exist anymore:

1. Match 3 Roguelike

“Not sure if this was the right thing” Awards

1. Earned my Computer Science Bachelor’s Degree
2. Quit my Internship to develop games full time and to apply to Masters programs.
3. Spend a lot of my savings going abroad and buying a Nintendo Switch and actually 2018 was probably the year I played videogames the most since my childhood.

And the award everyone was waiting for!

#FinishIt Awards

1. Newton’s Laws of Roguelike
2. Zombies on the Basement
3. Tetris Clone
4. Space Journey
5. Pizza Clicker
6. Secludere
7. Journey to the Light
8. happily(never)AFTER

OBS: ordered by finished date, each one my games are like babies for me, I can’t establish a hierarchy implying one is better than another.

Today was the day I realized I finished 8 game projects this year, being worked on a lot more than that. If someone told me January 1st I would have done this, I wouldn’t believe. It was 5 Game Jams (Newton’s Laws of Roguelike, Zombies on the Basement, Secludere, Journey to the Light and happily(never)AFTER), one learning project (Tetris Clone) that had the purpose of helping me in a job interview but I got rejected before sending it to them! That’s Life! And, finally, two published games on Play Store (Space Journey and Pizza Clicker).

The interesting thing about Game Jams is that they show your progress in your face, my last three were platformers and the improvement from one to another is amazing. Also, game jam entries can be turned into full games, it is something that still goes through my mind for Journey to the Light and now, happily(never)AFTER.

That’s pretty much my 2018 summarized.

happily(never)AFTER

I’m opening this session here because happily(never)AFTER is a game I finished today, for the Weekly Game Jam 76 and I never talked about it on this blog before (obviously).

The theme was ‘Afterlife’ and my entry is a 1 bit platformer! !!! CLICK HERE TO PLAY IT !!! Probably it is the game I’m most proud of at the moment.

That’s about it because I will be talking more about it on the next update.

What about 2019?

For 2019 I will set some simple goals and I won’t really get much into detail right now because I will have another whole year to talk about everything that is happening and that I’m doing.

2019 Goals:

1. Release 1 Mobile Game
2. Release 1 Desktop Game
3. Release 1 Asset on Asset Store
4. Start my Master’s (I’m optimistic it will work out!)

Quick 2019 Roadmap: If everything works out according to what was planned (it never does) – this is what I plan to release in 2019:

1. Pizza Clicker New Year’s Upgrade (Update/Android) (January/2019)
2. Project Mobile Dreams (Mobile Game/Android) (January/2019)
3. Idle Game Framework (Asset/Unity Asset Store) (January/2019)
4. Freshman’s Quest (PC Game, Platformer) (March/2019) – This is the game I’m working with a group from University.
5. Roguelike Level Framework (Asset/Unity Asset Store) (March/2019)
6. Dreamlands (PC Game, Roguelike) (May/2019)

If everything works out perfectly, May 2019 is when I would start my Master’s, so that is why I only planned until this month.

So that’s it for my 2018 review and my goals for 2019 on game development! Hope you have a wonderful end of 2018 and an even better 2019!

Next update will be on January 15th, following the regular schedule.

Ayy, it’s that time of the month again, time for me to try to remember everything I did this last month!

The good news is, after complaining about procrastination last month, I’m having 60% of productive time while using the computer. That’s good since I spent most of my day and all of my tasks envolves using my notebook, this includes entertainment and communication.

So this month was pretty great, after working really hard I reached the mark of ten years old so my mom was ok with me going on an adventure with a friend and my pet in order to battle other people’s pets for prestige and money. I also managed to shut down a criminal faction and I’ve beaten the four best trainers in the world, cool right?

At least I wish my life was like this. Just a quick note on Pokemon Let’s Go, Eevee! (besides it being a great game, of course), these games always had those moves like Cut, Surf, Strength, etc. which would only make you waste a move set on your Pokémon, they removed these so called “HMs” for this game and now they work as some kind upgrades, just like in Metroidvanias, you reach a point on the game, earn an upgrade and after that you can reach new areas.

But CUT is not out of my move set!

Cutting Dreamlands

Y’all remember Dreamlands, right? That roguelike game inspired on Lovecraft, Crypt of the Necrodancer and Bloodborne with RPG elements that would take me 3 months to finish? Yeah… 3 months…

It finally kicked in that I have basically 3 enormous systems interacting in this game, the first one I call Roguelike Level Generator Framework, the second one is the Turn Based System and the last one is the RPG System. It happens that linking the Level Generator and the Turn Based System was not a hard task and it’s decent already. But doing the RPG System, designing the stats and balance is quite challenging. And that’s when I hit the wall.

The decision I took for the moment is to drop the RPG System for a while, of course that Dreamlands isn’t Dreamlands without the RPG, so I’m basically working on another game revolving around the Level Generator and the Turn Based System, but I still don’t have anything to show yet.

I’m thinking on a mobile game similar to an “Infinite Runner”, but turn based and “roguelike” – so there would be some enemies, hazards, traps, etc… The other option is to do a more simple version of Dreamlands for PC, I’m not totally out of this idea.

I’ve seen a certain lecture (I don’t remember which one, sorry) that talks about this approach, you kind of break your game in many different pieces and do a simple game using the first piece, and then another using the first and the second, until eventually you reach your desired game.

It is interesting because when you make a game with that system, you know it works, so if it breaks on the next game, you know it’s something new that was introduced, and (ideally) you won’t have to fix many things on older systems.

The State of the Pizza

Pizza Clicker is on Play Store for quite a while now (Download it here!) and here is a list of what I did on this month updates:

• Finally added Upgrades, now you can buy these upgrades that will make your workers or ovens even more efficient in pizza baking;
• Added some more pieces of news;
• A bunch of fixes (changing how much pizza is earned on down time, balancing some prices, raising some upgrades efficiency, added a visual feedback showing how much pizza you earn for a click and some visual fixes)

I did made a small announcement and sent the game to some people, I’m taking a look on the player behavior and I think I should do something to make the players engage more with the game (also, it was at this point I realized why those mobile games have lootboxes, free gifts every 4 hours, second chances, etc…).

Here’s a list of what I might do in the future:

1. Add a menu showing more information to the player (how much pizza per click, how much each worker or oven is contributing to your pizza per second);
2. Have a menu (change the pizzeria’s name, increase/decrease volume, restart game, etc…);
3. Introduce a new kind of upgrade that when bought, it adds a new worker or a new oven (this will be important for Version 4);
4. Add more news and more upgrades, of course, these are going to be added throughout the time;
5. Do some kind of “lootbox” – I want to do this to raise player engagement, but I don’t want to develop a solution that could be seen simply as “cash grab” or something that would force you to watch ADS.

And most importantly, I want to tackle some tasks like SEO Optimization, Play Store Optimization and try reaching a bigger audience with Pizza Clicker.

Now what

Something I’m thinking about, that I got by talking to some developers, is taking a break from my projects, so I would return to then in a couple weeks with more energy and a better perspective. Of course I would still work a little bit on Pizza Clicker and have updates, but I wouldn’t effectively create nothing new on this break.

Doing this also would be a good opportunity to study about SEO and Play Store Optimization and Marketing in general, I would also be able to tackle some old activities like making an Idle Game Engine from Pizza Clicker and fixing Journey Light (an old Game Jam game I made).

Now, after failing again at writing a short update and 1000 words later, here I go! Thank you for reading it until this point and I hope you have a good day!

 

As I write about me not having discipline, I feel like I’ve already written about that, probably because I have. But this month it kicked as hard as it could.

This month my brain just didn’t want to do any kind of work and I’m not sure why. It is normal to have bad days, unproductive days but having a whole unproductive month? Looks more like bad habits, speaking of habits, all my good habits were destroyed this month. It’s just something that happens to me from time to time, my brain simple goes like “Hm, let’s destroy all habits and create new ones!”.

On the good side I discovered a lot of good youtubers so I have this.

I can backtrack all these bad habits to 2 things: one night that I didn’t sleep while programming a game demo and starting a more aggressive diet plan (gotta lose some kg!).

I’m not sure the effects of not sleeping one single night can be, but I don’t think it can destroy a whole month, on the other hand, I’m sure it can help producing some pattern changing effects.

For the other reason, eating less calories than your body uses and going to the gym and doing cadio can be really stress inducing, making your body/brain try to spare the maximum amount of energy possible (for example, not wanting to do productive work because it is stressful and demands energy, etc…)

After talking about being undisciplined, lack of sleep and weight loss, let’s get back to regular schedule and talk gamedev. Yes! I actually managed to have a little bit of progress.

Please Click

The original plan on Pizza Clicker was to release and publish updates periodically, this is a very good trap that will lead you to just forget about the game. But one day I randomly looked at Play Store and it had 10+ install. How? The game wasn’t even finished for me!

I’m not sure how these people found out about Pizza Clicker, but you can see more on Pizza Clicker’s page.

I think this is a pretty good conversion rate for a game that I did nothing but hit the “Publish” button – It motivated me to keep working on the game and not leave it behind, I need to create gameplay to keep players more engaged.

So I launched two updates:

1. The first one just adds a simple feature where the mayor offers you an incrementer (a worker or an oven), in exchange you have to watch an advertisement. This is the less intrusive way I found to monetize this game, and while this updates adds ADS it also adds the Unity Analytics so I can get more numbers on the game.
2. The second one was just some bug fixes. There’s a feature that calculates how much time you spent away from the game and gives you a reward based on how much pizza per second you have and the time you spent away. The amount rewarded was 10% of all the pizza you would have produced that time, it was too much, now it is 1% (and I’m still thinking on making it even lower).

For the future, my plan is to add upgrades and add more News to the game, the Newspaper section is the way I’m going to tell the story of the game. Creating the news is not difficult, just a bit time consuming, as for the upgrades, I already started programming it and came up with an efficient way to do it.

The second plan for the future is to simplify Pizza Clicker into a generic Idle/Clicker game and sell it as an Idle Game Engine for Unity. Making these kind of games requires a lot of interconnected systems and a lot of persistency, that can be hard for people not very used to programming so this kind of asset would help some people.

How’s your Dreams?

Mine haven’t been so good actually, I had some nightmares this past month but that can be due to… Oh wait. I was supposed to talk about Dreamlands here.

You can play a very early version of Dreamlands on its itch.io page and leave any early feedback! Soon there will be a new build up!

My focus this month for Dreamlands was to work on aesthetics, so I played a lot with colors, did many different characters and tested a lot of things on art. After all that, I still have no idea of how it should look or what colors I should use!

I also created a simple “Sandbox” mode where you can choose your initial stats and the number of rooms generated, another minor change was that the character’s idle animation now changes according to the player base speed.

Random Numbers: I love random numbers. Really. I graduated doing research on algorithms that used random numbers at their core. Good Times.

That being said, I wrote some RNG based interactions for Dreamlands:

1. The damage is not constant anymore, it is now a random integer value between 0.75x and 1.25x, where x is the character’s attack.
2. There’s a random chance of a Critical Attack. A critical attack causes two times the damage and the chance increases with luck.
3. There’s a random chance of Miss. The standard Accuracy Rate is 80% and it increases with luck.

All these features can be easily tuned and easily activated/deactivated. I made it this way because I don’t know whether they are fun features or not, so they are definitely pieces I will be returning in the future.

Current Plans with Dreamlands: The idea was to make something in 3 or 4 months, that will not be possible. But I don’t want to work years on this neither keep adding more and more features. That being said, my current plan is to work on it until the end of the year and then come up with a release date. I would like to finish it in February or March, resulting in a 6 ~ 7 month project, which is a good amount of time.

Mobile Games on itch?

I hadn’t though before on putting mobile games on Fourth Dimension’s itch.io page, but I’ve seen people doing it so I also did.

Almost everyday someone visited Pizza Clicker’s page. Space Journey, my first and highly casual game also got some visits. I don’t have any control or number of how much of these visits resulted on downloads, so that’s pretty much it. I just thoughy it was an interesting result.

Space Journey was my very first game on Play Store but it is still fun to play! Take a look!

This post was longer than usual and I changed subjects some times, but I hope y’all like it! See you on the next one!

sidenote: I also tried to take a different approach on writing this month, an approach which I plan to stick to, trying to keep the post more engaging and not the “I did this, I want to do that” kind of post, which although very straight and informative, can be less appealing.

Dreamlands

Last update I was developing Pizza Clicker and I reached a point where I could publish it and did it. I wanted to work more on it and have some updates but I didn’t do it (still planning on doing it – just need to organize my schedules for it).

If you are interested in playing Pizza Clicker and managing your own Idle Pizzeria you can access the game’s page here to download it on Play Store or maybe download the press kit!

What I worked on was Dreamlands.

Dreamlands is a Roguelike RPG game inspired on Crypt of the Necrodancer and Bloodborne, the goal is to be a take on more traditional roguelikes but in a more “welcoming” and aesthetically pleasant way (as I find classical roguelikes kinda difficult to get into) – Aside of that, it will have a big influence of Lovecraftian Horror.

The aesthetic is still experimental as I have to decide color palette and art direction, I have the basic systems developed already (Level Generation and Turn Based Combat). The Combat System will still see a lot of tweaks during development.

There is nothing very interesting on it yet, just basic mechanics. The next steps are creating a sandbox mode and the art direction, after that I will add more content to the game and think about alpha and beta releases.

In fact, a first playable version is available online here (Fourth Dimenstion’s itch.io page).

My original plan was to make this game in 3 or 4 months, leading the release date to be in late December or early January. I think I can stick to this deadline because, by default, this game is supposed to be simple and kind of an introduction to roguelikes. My goal is to have it on itch.io and maybe on Steam for around $5.

If you want to know about Dreamlands in more detail, there are these posts on the Fourth Dimension’s Devlog:

• 2019/09/21 – What is Dreamlands?
• 2018/09/28 – First Milestone and Gameplay Update
• 2018/10/09 – Refactoring Game Systems
• 2018/10/15 – Quick Update

GameJams

This month I joined two Gamejams, which was something I haven’t done for a while, they are always nice to test and learn new things! These are the two games I’ve made:

 

They kinda look similar (well, it’s my pixel art style)

Secludere (Right) (Available online at itch.io)

Secludere is a simple platformer game. The jam was the “Become Better at Something Jam” which I kind of randomly picked at itch.io jams page, it was a small jam (7 participants I think) that I just happened to like the themes/goals. The idea was to practice with music and animation.

This jam was a week long so I really didn’t push a lot of desperate work on this (from 1 to 2 hours daily)

Journey to the Light (Left) (Available online at itch.io)

Journey to the Light is another platformer game, but this time with some combat mechanics. The jam was JimJam2 (143 entries) and theme was Ouroboros. I liked the concept I came up with for this game – which is Knights that needs to destroy each other in order to restore their own pieces/powers (a little bit dark, I know)

These are the results for Journey to the Light:

I’m actually happy with these results – I always end up with something out of scope for a gamejam and Journey to the Light wasn’t any different, so the game definitely lacks a lot of polish and bug fixing. That being said, I’m thinking on fixing some stuff and reuploading it and maybe in the future make this its own game with a story of maybe 1 hour and a “roguelike” mode.

Gamedev Club

Last update I posted some prototypes I worked on a gamedev club. They were useful on our process and we picked one to create a real game! The first playable version is still on the way so I might post it here on next update.

That’s it for this update! See you on the next one!

 

Pizza Clicker

Pizza Clicker is a game I’ve started working on a long time ago (there’s even a web playable version here) and I took this idea and made it mobile and the second game for Fourth Dimension Studios – On the Landing Page you can get the link on Play Store and get the press kit.

If you don’t have the time, here are some screenshots:

It’s still on some kind of early release and I have plans to update it to add Monetization (giving the player Ovens in exchange of watching ADS), Upgrades (as every Incremental game should have) and then more options of Hire, Ovens and Upgrades. The game’s lore will be told by the Newspaper section.

Next Project

Putting out Pizza Clicker now makes me able to work on another project, and I’m thinking on getting something more complex that should take 3 or 4 months to complete. It will either be the game I was previously working on which I called Match 3 Roguelike or it will be a new game which I’m calling Dreamlands.

What I will do is create a playable version of both of them in 1 week each, from there I will decide what to do.

Prototyping

It’s been a while since I’ve been working with some people at a local University to study and create our own games, until now we were just studying, getting to know each other and practice a little bit with internal game jams.

But now we are aiming to develop a real game and to decide what game we should make, we divided into groups and did some prototypes. I’ve worked on four prototypes on the last month, and it was a nice experience.

The first prototype is a metroidvania where your powers are related to university courses, and it also has some elements of Visual Novel. The second one is a casual racing game with a steampunk thematic, the goal is to play using accelerometer or gyroscope and it was actually pretty fun.

The two others (the ones below on the picture) were extremely experimental things, the first one was a puzzle where the room was dark and you needed to bark (you are a dog) in order to see on a bigger radius – You have to capture a thief and could do that by barking (the thief runs when you hear the bark) and locking doors.

The last one is the movement around a small planet, the idea was to have a management kind of game combined with simple combat and hazards.

I’m pretty happy with all these prototypes and I discovered that I really like prototyping, it’s all fun and games, maybe because prototyping is approached with more of a playful mindset and it is evaluated with the same playful attitude.

That was my update!

Until next month!

I quite don’t know where to start this update, which might be the first sign that have a lot of things to write here. As always, I will try to be brief.

Let’s take it easy and continue where I left at my last update on the game Match 3 Roguelike.

I’ve finished a prototype/playable version, which can be downloaded on itch.io – I tried to contact some people on the internet to play it but, generally, there wasn’t a lot of interest. I don’t know if the game seems boring, if I reached the wrong type of people (probably) or what happened, but it didn’t cause much of an impression.

Fortunately, I managed to sneak the game on Feedback Friday on Tim Ruswick’s Youtube Channel and he played it on live stream! yay! He didn’t understand a thing.

So I made what every sensible human being would do, GameMaker Studio does not do very well with these kind of games, so I decided to port it to Unity. Now the GMS2 version is publicly available on my GitHub.

Next update I will have something on this game probably.

The Fourth Dimension

Having graduated and parting ways with my Internship, suddenly I found myself with a lot of free time. So, naturally, I started trying to make my way into the games industry and while I search for opportunities to be paid to make games, I created my own “Game Company”: Fourth Dimension – Focusing on Gameplay and Game Feel. As mobile games are faster to develop, that was my starting point, and also my first game.

Space Journey is the first game I developed under the name “Fourth Dimension” – It’s even on Play Store! – It’s basically a Flappy Bird clone, but it happens on space, so the feel is a little bit different.

My goal for this “Company” is to develop games that are more comercial and can be somehow lucrative, that way I can build a portfolio with finished and polished games and might build a passive income (the dream). Even when I get a full time job (or get busy other way somehow) I still plan to work under Fourth Dimension and put more games out there.

I mentioned I have a lot more of free time so I got more into writing and finally set up my own blog (not this devlog) and a devlog for Fourth Dimension, here are some posts that might be interesting:

• Perosnal Blog: Simple Screenshake in Unity
• Personal Blog: AI Analysis on Pokemon Puzzle Challenge
• Fourth Dimension Devlog: GameMaker vs. Unity – My thoughts on both engines and why I decided to rewrite the puzzle on game in Unity.
• Fourth Dimension Devlog: Space Journey “Postmortem”

 

That’s it for this month!

Hopefully the next one will have more info!

Ayy, this month was a pretty conturbed one, it envolves doing some extra time on my internship, traveling, having to focus writing my final graduation project, presenting it, correcting it and writing some more, quiting my internship (so having to put on some extra time to finish my tasks and help others) and also has to do with getting a bit lost on where I am in game development.

Match 3 Roguelike

This is the last gameplay footage I recorded:

 

It has all the scene transitions and it is almost enough to start getting an impression of what the game really should be like.

After this footage I’ve written some code to reach the end of a floor and go to a subsequent one, the more you advance, more difficult the game is.

What still needs to be done for a playable version:

• Data Persistence between the dungeon part and the Match3 “Battle” part, it just restarts everything;
• Write the code to actually make the game gets difficult according to current level;
• The “Garbage System” – Difficult is represent by puzzles getting faster, but also by the enemy throwing “garbage” at your puzzle area, which occupies a certain area, turning it harder – But if you play well enough, the garbage turns into new pieces, so you can use it to your advantage.

I’ve already said that after doing this first playable version I will just need to tune and polish it, but damn it is being hard to get this minimum viable game.

Tetris

Tetris? What?

I applied for a job in a Mobile Game company in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

On the technical interview they asked “If you were to implement Tetris right now, how would you do it?” – My answer was pretty bad because I wasn’t expecting this and I got a bit nervous. After the interview I decided to check my answer and really implement a tetris.

It is playable right now, you can play it on my itch.io page.

If you are interested in more details, you can go to the devlog on the tetris page.

That will be it for this update!

Hope you all have a good month!

Another month has come and gone and it’s time for another update!

There’s not much to type here, there are two videos that pretty much sums up the progress during this month, but as I always do, I will divide in sections and end up talking a lot about the projects.

The Puzzle Roguelike

It’s been almost 2 months since I’m working on this project, yikes! I wanted to finish the “Minimum Viable Product” for this month’s update and then spend a week or two reaching people asking for feedback and honest opinions. Here is the video on the current “game”:

There are basically two parts: (i) The Roguelike Part, where you explore some sort of map and when you find an enemy you transition to the puzzle part. (ii) The Puzzle Part, it works as some kind of substitute of a regular combat, your matches remove enemy health, being rewarded for combos and bigger matches.

I’m planning to finish the minimum product in a week or two, I just have to add the transistions back and forth from battle and do a simple main menu which is already designed in my head (hey, that’s the hard part!). With the MVP I will start all the marketing stuff and see what people thinks of this game.

After that I will, well, finish the game. The interesting thing is that probably there won’t be much to add to the mvp, just polish it, tune difficulty, interest curves, make it more appealing, fix the camera, etc… Shouldn’t take more than two months (I hope so).

The Unity Thing

I realized months went by without me doing something in Unity, also I realized that it has change way too much and I tried to do something on it, also probably because I will be using Unity more than Gamemaker on the future.

I grabed a course on Udemy and did a metroidvania section, called “Tilevania”, the result is on the video below.

 

I recorded the whole Unity screen because I’ve just realized that the camera and the UI breaks on Full Screen, so I just recorded like this and I will lie by saying it was to also show the scene and hierarchy.

I honestly liked the end result and it was fun to try doing some metroidvania, it was a genre that I always had some kind of curiosity on trying to develop.

Adding some more things on top of this simple demo and doing my own art for it should result into a nice portfolio piece, so I might return to this game next month!

Weeell, that was it for this month, I hope to have some more interesting stuff on the next one!

See you!