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!

Time for another update! Not much progress overall but the important thing here is: (a) I’m moving forward a little bit everyday, working at least half an hour on something game dev related and (b) I feel like I finally have a game with a small scope and that could result in something that is fun and actually slightly different from the other games out there.

Progress

Last month I talked about my puzzle game prototype (based on Pokemon Puzzle Challenge), by that time all I had was this simple puzzle with moveable pieces.

Since then I have written the code to check matches and generate new rows from the bottom.

But testing this puzzle without any kind of visual feedback was hard, often I was randomly moving pieces and some pieces just disappeared, and I was like: “Is it a bug or a match I didn’t see?” – I have already heard of game genres that requires to be polished soon on development, I though that maybe this is one of them.

So I went on to write the functionality of having the pieces glowing for 1 second before they disappear, and, although it worked on the end, I had to change the structure where each piece was represented which led me to rewritting all of my game’s code. Oh well, things like this just happen. See the video below for the current state of the puzzle

Changes on the structure: Before, the structure was just the piece represented, now, each position where there is a piece, there is actually a vector, this vector has (i) a piece to be displayed; (ii) a value indicating whether the piece is set to be destroyed and (iii) a timer indicating how many frames has passed since the piece was marked to be destroyed.

When a match occurs, the piece to be destroyed is marked, and they are destroyed after a second on the Step function (or Update function) – The glow is achieved by a simple “is odd” function on the timer, if the time is odd, it is rendered a white sprite overlaying the piece.

Next on my To Do List:

1. Adaptaing the “fall” algorithm (the piece of code which runs after matches to check if any pieces above should fall) to make it seem like a smooth fall, not just changing piece positions.
2. Reinserting the new row generator.
3. Make the new rows appear slowly so the player can play around what pieces are coming.
4. Write the “Overworld”/Roguelike Part.

Talking in Roguelike Part…

Let’s talk Design

One of my intentions on this blog was to also talk about programming and design, I recently realized that I’m just writing what I’m doing, time to change that. I’ve written a little bit on programming above (on how I structured the pieces and how the glow was made), and now I am going to talk about some of my design process this month.

I tried to do a definitive simple game design document and it had 5 pages, the 2 most important pages are below, I’ve written about Game Identity, Design Pillars, Genre/Story/Mechanics Summary, Art, Music, Flow

The most important is the Flow, actually, all 5 pages could be just the flow (Please forgive my handwritings)

 

But these writings doesn’t matter anymore because…

Yeah! I’m proud of myself for cutting stuff from my games!

Last update and on the first two images it is possible to see that “Turn Based Like” gameplay was a feature of the game, the scope seemed too big and I asked myself “Why Turn Based Like Combat mixed with the Puzzle is important?” and it isn’t. So I removed it from the game, making the puzzle and the roguelike part much more simple. After all, the aim is for it to just be a puzzle game with some kind of a roguelike progression.

That’s enough for this months update. For some non gamedev related news, I’m embarking to the US tomorrow! Yay. I will be a week in Orlando. I just hope that I can move on with my life after buying a Nintendo Switch and Breath of the Wild there.

See you on next month!

GameMaker Jam Feedback

Last month I joined the GameMaker community Jam with the game Newton’s Laws of Roguelike – I knew it wasn’t that great, and the critics reflected that, well, what should I expect?

But having real people criticizing my game was actually an interesting experience, the main critique was that the game didn’t have a goal (it really doesn’t have) and it was more of a mechanic demonstration than a game (which is totally right).

But some people said that it had potential and it was fun, one user even said my game was the best use of the theme! (Newton’s Laws of Motion) – there was also some video reviews, here @ 6:07, here @ 0:44:15 and another I lost the link (damn.)

In the end, I got 19th place (out of 26) and I got really happy with this placing.

Heartjam

What? Another Gamejam?!

Well, yes. I liked joining one, so I joined another.

This time the theme was Scarcity, what came to mind was Resident Evil and how the bullets were scarce, so I did a shooter roguelike trying to get that feeling, the game is called Zombies on the Basement, you can go to its itch.io page for more information, download link, etc… There were also some feedback on the jam entry page – overall, the mechanic seemed to be fun but I think it doesn’t quite work as a Roguelike, maybe it would work as a 2D Survival Horror Shooter, who knows.

If you are interested visit the itch.io page, gameplay footage below:

This entry was almost a game, it doesn’t have menus or tutorial for time reasons.

Puzzles!

After working Newton’s Laws of Roguelike and Zombies on the Basement I decided to go back to my projects/ideas – I’ve written some ideas and I came up with an idea based on Pokemon Puzzle Challenge and an idea based on Final Fantasy Tactics.

The interesting thing is that both ideas use the same universe and same characters (one happens 4 years before the other) – So it is like a puzzle game which the sequel is a tactical turn based.

Don’t worry, the story is damn simple and these are games that shouldn’t take a lot of time to develop. The goal is to develop the puzzle one in about 2 months and release for $1 – And the other one the goal is to finish in 6 months and would be kind of a real game.

The Puzzle Game Prototype:

Example of how it might begin

Some reorganization (The Matching 3 Functionality is not developed yet)

How it works: 

• You have 4 pieces (heart, bow, sword and axe) and you have to align three or more of them horizontally or vertically.
• The cursor can be moved up, down, left and right and, as you might notice, the cursor is on 2 pieces, when an action button is pressed, the two pieces change position (the position are changed whether that was a match or not, different from some match 3 games where if there isn’t a match, the pieces goes back to their original place)
• The starting pieces are all random, and as time passes, an entire row of new pieces appear (from the bottom of the screen).
• Also as time passes, new pieces appears faster.
• If any piece reach de top of the screen, you lose.

The idea of this is either one of those two:

1. Be some kind of a Turn Based combat game where the attack is doing this puzzle. So you would have a team and would fight some enemies and to attack them you would have to align the pieces.
2. Be some kind of a 1v1 combat between two characters, where a match means that you are directly attacking the oponent and the heart means healing

For both of these ideas, the progression is similar, you defeat an enemy (or group of enemies), you gain some experience, level up (or not), evolve your character(s) and goes on to the next battle, you can do this until you lose (Roguelike Turn Based Puzzle Game, yay!)

Conclusion

• I Joined two gamejams and liked it (I will probably also join Ludum Dare in 4 days)
• I came up with some ideas I feel like I really can develop and that feel right for me (a lot of old projects of mine doesn’t really feel right for me anymore)
• The future is bright.
• Collecting Sticker Figures Album (FIFA 2018) is really expensive.

That’s it for this month’s update!

Hope to see you on the next one!

I also hope to have better games to show there.

 

This month I’ve tried something different: It’s not a secret that I always had difficulties finding time, fitting gamedev into my routine and these sort of things. This month I’ve chosen to work on game development only on weekends, this way I could turn off my gamedev self on weekdays and do what I had to do and on weekends I could turn off my regular-student-worker self and focus on game development.

Speaking about hours of work, it’s pretty much the same, but I’d rather work 3 hours straight on something than work 1 hour on three days.

This month I had an ok progress on practice/developing but I really liked what I got on the subjects on ideas, writing documents, creating a roadmap, etc… This won’t be shown right here, but I hope this can be reflected on next months updates.

Pizza Clicker

I actually wanted to have this game finished on 2 weekends but 4 weekends has gone by, in my defense, the last one I spent working on a Game Jam, so technically I’m only 1 weekend behind schedule.

This is my roadmap for the Pizza Clicker game, as you can see, I have pretty much everything for the first version, the only thing I’m missing is making it responsive/adaptable to all screens.

Not being responsive is pretty much of a big deal since is a game played on a web browser, so I decided not to “release” it yet. Probably next weekend I will be able to finish it.

Other point is “Better Aesthetics”, but I don’t really think that’s a key factor for this kind of game and shouldn’t forbidden me to declare the first version finished and release it.

Besides those two things, what is in my roadmap is to try to share the game with as many people as I can, get feedback, fix broken things and keep developing it (I have until v4 planned)

Currently it is on v0.9 (almost released!) and you can click here to play – but I should warn you, every save file will be wiped when the first version is release.

 

GameMaker Community Jam 7 (Newton’s Laws of Roguelike)

It’s been some time since I wanted to join a Game Jam, I decided I would take part on the GMC Jam 7, whatever the theme, whatever kind of game I thought on doing, whatever the result.

My intention on this jam was: a) Feel how a Game Jam is, b) develop something different and quickly, c) get more comfortable with GameMaker Studio 1.4 (which I will be using on the future) and d) work on something I wanted to work for a while, which in this case is Roguelike games.

The theme was Newton’s Laws of Movement which was kinda interesting at first but difficult to find something to work with, I got three ideas brainstorming:

• Doggo’s Laws of Movement, which is the same but dog version, something like: In an Inertial Frame of Reference, a doggo either remains at rest or continues to bork, unless acted upon a force. I don’t how this could become a game.
• Use the F, A Star Wars based Action 2D Puzzle Platformer, you don’t need to think a lot to know why I gave up of this idea – Basically it was going to be a 2D Platformer with Combat Elements and you could enter a “Use the Force” state, where you would be able to use the force (F) to manipulate objects around you and solve puzzles.
• Newton’s Laws of Roguelike, the idea I tried to go with, a simple roguelike where the enemies are based on newton’s laws.

First I went to watch some of HeartBeast’s Procedurally Generated Dungeons Tutorials, which creates a dungeon in a very simple, fast and effect way that works fine.

After that, I took some pieces of code of an old project of mine, which is the result from a course also from HeartBeast, and rewatched some of the lectures to get a good combat system going on, always adapting everything to what I wanted;

My original plan was to also do the art, I got this ones as a placeholder from ArMM1998 on OpenGameArt, lucky me, this art is great and had fit perfectly on what I wanted, I didn’t have the time to do my own art so the placeholders became the definitive art.

There are Four Enemies:

1. The Log: A log that is sleeping and only acts when you attack it (First Law)
2. The Light Log and The Heavy Log: Enemies that are strong either because they are heavy (high mass) or are super fast (high acceleration), and this is the Second Law.
3. The Bomb Log: If you try to kill it, it will explode and punish you! (Third Law – Action and Reaction) – gif of this one below

 

These four enemies looks the same, you have to differentiate them by their movements and how they react to you hitting them! Put that with a random dungeon and you have Newton’s Laws of Roguelike. There are many known issues and things I would like to have improved, but, that’s the feeling of joining a Game Jam I guess.

As a footnote: I used to think that doing something for a game jam would be like “OH MY GOD I ONLY HAVE 48 HOURS LEFT, I HAVE TO HURRY!!!!!!!!!!” – but it was more like “Hm, A day has passed and I have no ideas, meh, I can do a simple roguelike”.

This update was quite long, so I’m leaving!

See you, hopefully, next month!