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[Squize]

Hey everyone, I guess I should start with a bit of background to the game.

I wrote a game called "Rot" in HTML5 using PixiJS ( Which is so great ) as Flash is basically dead and I wanted to learn new skills / tech for that all important client work that pays the bills. I spent 5 months on it, and it turned into a bit of a monster in terms of scope. I realised, far too late, that I was never going to earn my money back through licensing it so I started pulling it in a little.

Obviously that's frustrating, hamstringing your baby like that, so I thought doing a full blown version with Unity would let me realise everything I wanted, and so here we are.
Rather than calling it Rot again which would just be confusing, and because I don't think it's really a sequel, rather a directors cut / mega mix, I went with Rot Purge ( R:P ).

To add some much needed context here's Rot on Miniclip http://www.miniclip.com/games/rot/en/


Quick summary:

It's basically SmashTV with voxel zombies. I'm not going to try and flower it up with some rich backstory, it's a shooter pure and simple. There are unlockable weapons with upgrades, because that's the law, and you can unlock various outfits, some of which directly affect the visuals. It's never going to take itself too seriously.


State of Play:

So where are we with R:P two months or so in ? Obviously going from pre-rendered sprites to actual real voxels has been a massive luxury, not just in terms of workflow but what we can do now, which basically means destruction.

If anything I think I spent a little too long on that aspect, I added it before the baddies so that's all there was at the time, but I think it was worth it. As a gamer if I see a bottle in a game I want to be able to shoot it and watch it smash, as a coder I should provide the same.

The game is actually playable, with the first two levels in and working quite nicely. There's still a silly amount to do, like the original Rot I've avoided the UI for now, as UI coding is the worst, it's the anti-Batman.
Also I need to drop the weapons / outfits in there ( Writing this is making me realise how much there is left ), and I'm aiming to add a lot more to this one.

I'm in two minds about how to do the weapons, it would be easier to stick with my COD type approach, buy a weapon, buy upgrades for it, or just have random drops or even blue prints / crafting.


Spent for now:

I think that's probably enough as an intro to the game.

I'd like to give a shout out to @mikelovesrobots https://twitter.com/mikelovesrobots for being brilliant enough to open source his voxel art that I abuse so heavily.

If you want to read a constant barrage of swearing in a 140 chars or less, @gamingyourway https://twitter.com/GamingYourWay which will in all honesty be updated more that this devlog.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on it ( Only the good ones. Obviously ).

Squize.

[Squize]

I thought I'd quickly go over how the collapsing works, as in the above gif of the street light, as when I started this and looked around there was very little out there about how to do this.

We're using Picavoxel from the Unity app store to handle all the voxel stuff ( It let's you import vox files from MagicaVoxel really easily, and creates a mesh out of them ), and it stores all the voxels in nice easy 3D arrays for us.

To handle the collapsing, it's pretty convoluted so stick with me. We have generic shootable objects in the game,

When one of those is shot, we run a quick test on the 3D array to see if there's a whole empty row where the bullet impacted the object, if there is then it's meant to collapse under it's own weight.

From there we call our VoxelCubeHolder which handles "Clusters". There are 10 pooled clusters so we can only ever have 10 collapsing objects at once, which should be fine. Each of these clusters has 255 cubes with rigid bodies pooled in it.

Every frame we work up the array vertically from the collapse point ( i.e. the hole we've just shot through the object ) a row at a time and request our rigid body cubes. Luckily Unity physics just handles these for us, we just give them a colour and position and the engine does the tricky job of making them fall into a pile.

We do this every frame until we've reached the top of the voxel array and we're done, we can kill the static object off. There is also scope for optional particle effects, so in the case of the street light we trigger some dust and some sparks, as well as firing off sound effects.

After a short delay the cluster kills off the collisions in all the active cubes for a short while, allowing them to fall through the floor and then returns all those cubes and itself back to the pool.

Doing it this drawn out way may seem slightly insane, but we're only ever triggering a small number of cubes per frame ( Plotting this is cheap, they get batched for us, but the number of rigid bodies has a high cost until they all sleep ) and with pooling we know we're not going to fall foul of the garbage collector and cause stutters at heavy times.

[Moth]

Looks sweet!! "Smash TV with voxels" is a great concept.

Is the game going to take place in one area with waves of enemies, or are there different areas like Smash TV?

[Squize]

Cheers mate.

Different areas, as many as I can face doing for launch. There are currently two levels, the town square and the bridge ( I just posted a new dev video the other day which is a 3 min play through of the first two levels,

)

Also there will be different game modes, so it's not just a constant horde / wave based thing, like "King" where you can only shoot in designated areas which shrink as soon as you go in them.

Thanks for taking the time to check out the thread and reply

[Squize]

Just a quick update today, but it does come with some gif action.

Added in the ammo crates which fall onto the level periodically, next up a compass to help you find them and then they're off the ToDo list.

[Squize]

I've just been snowed under with putting a site / press-kit together, so there's not been a great deal of progress. Did get the shotgun in though, and here it is in super slowmo not enough colours gif form.

I can't wait to finish off the drudgery that is everything but the game and get back to it properly.

[Squize]

Progress has slowed down a little, the whole Greenlight thing sucks up a ton of time, and then adding gamepad controls.

Twin stick shooter controls seem to be a dirty secret no one speaks about, they're Zelda in the attic, and it takes a ton of time and effort to balance them ( Something I naively wasn't expecting ).
For a brilliant article about how it's done in Relic Hunters Zero check this link: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/MarkVenturelli/20150817/251387/Everything_I_Learned_About_DualStick_Shooter_Controls.php

i've found it tricky because when you're working on your own game you have a blind spot for issues, so you subconsciously avoid doing things that you know are less than great when playing, and when it comes to controls you adapt to them really quickly, even if they're not great.

Enough woes, after struggling on that I've treated myself to adding in the grenades ( There will be other throwable weapons too, so it was worth taking some time to get the feel of this right )

And I think that's it. I set up a site for the game, http://rotpurge.com just a simple thing, but it needed doing. Also we're on Greenlight ( I'm not going to flood the thread with comments about that as it's boring for me, never mind you guys. If you'd like to check it out it's here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=507887546. We're 78% of the way to the top 100 so that's going well, I couldn't be any more grateful for everyone whose supported the game ).

[Squize]

Something a little bit different for this long overdue update, I thought I'd talk a little about the Greenlight experience as I guess it's going to be relevant to a ton of you guys who haven't done it yet.

Now you'll have read up on it before diving in, there are lot's of great articles out there, and they pretty much go along these lines,

"When we launched on Greenlight we had a nice boost from our 1000 Facebook fans, and then we got featured by RPS and then Jesus returned to earth and mentioned the game, hey presto, we passed through in a week. Oh, and make sure you have a good icon and trailer."

Now I'm going to sound a little butt hurt here, it's unavoidable I think, but I'm not ( Really ). This isn't going to be a "Why don't people like my game ?" post, as those are just a waste of time, it's more a "It's fucking hard to get people to even look at your game" post.

I launched early on Greenlight, with hindsight maybe too early, so I didn't have a lot of strong gameplay videos to show never mind something playable I could get played on YouTube. What I did have was a working HTML5 "version" of the game, so I could say "If you like this, imagine it a lot lot better". I hoped that would be enough.

Rob at Miniclip was excellent, when he heard we were on Greenlight he posted a link to it on the games page,

To have one of the largest gaming portals actually link out of their site is so rare.

That generated around 50 views, not votes, just views.

We recently posted Rot to newgrounds, we always do well there, the NG crowd dig our games, and we got front paged...

Ah, turns out we don't always do well there. In fact this is our lowest rated game on there ever. Oh.

From the near 8k views at the time of writing, we've got another 5 Yes votes or so ( On the positive side, no new No votes, so hurray for us ).


Now you can argue that it's different demographics ( I think especially in regards gamers on Miniclip ), that I'm targeting the wrong people, and with a game that wasn't exactly sprayed with love by all who played it. I'm really not hear to argue, there's no argument from my side.
The point of this post isn't all about woe is me, it's to try and add an alternative side to the Greenlight process. You know when you read a postmortem about mobile games, how they got featured on the appStore and really took off, you don't often read about the games that did nothing at all. And that's the vast majority of them.

So my advice, for what it's worth from someone whose game is currently at a 171

If I concentrate really really hard, maybe it'll climb up the charts.

• Don't launch too early. I thought I could plough on with the game whilst it was waiting to pass through GL, but it means you just pressure yourself into always needing something new and shiny to show to keep up the momentum.
• Exposure is good, but it needs to be good exposure. Twitter gives you around a 1:100 click through rate, think of your most popular tweet views then divide that by a 100, that's how much help Twitter is going to be to getting your game out there
• When you first launch you get all those sexy front page views, once they go you need a plan B to bring fresh eyes to it all the time.

And that's it, here's a gif of an exploding barrel to finish off with.