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[EnderLost Studios]

It’s been a while…

Well for the last week I’ve been working on this OP.

What do you think?

[EnderLost Studios]

365 days ago, An Aspie Life was released into the wild! So, on this first anniversary, I want to say thank you to all of you who followed that and the upcoming games development and of course played it. So, Thank you!

Well hey there again! For this weeks #screenshotsaturday i finished the school and its background! One thing I have learnt over this project so far, is that good art takes time. What I mean is my vision of the game is… VERY BIG! And as such the amount of backgrounds and detail I have to draw is far greater than the first time. So, it feels like it’s taking 3 times as long… and it because there is 3 times the amount of work with 3 times more detail. Regardless I’m picking away at it when I can between uni and slowly it’s starting to take form.

Now I’ve started work on the outside playground for the school and some of the characters that will populate it.

See ya next week!

[EnderLost Studios]

The Flamboyant tomboy makes her introduction

[EnderLost Studios]

An Aspie Life Beginnings #screenshotsaturday

Hey there guys, it’s been some time.

Uni has been getting in the way, but I have been working on it whenever I get the chance.  But I’ve almost completed the intro to the main part of the game. Only a little bit more to go until I release the first build. It’s really a great feeling seeing the characters that I’ve had in my head for so many years finally start to come alive inside the game.

Development will start up again through the upcoming holidays. The plan is to finish the battle system.

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on.

See ya guys soon.

[EnderLost Studios]

An Aspie Life Beginnings first RELEASE is now up for free! Thank you, everyone, who has supported this project over the last one and a bit years. Still, a long way to go!

https://gamejolt.com/games/AnAspieLifeBeginnings/347369

https://enderlost-studios.itch.io/an-aspie-life-beginnings

[EnderLost Studios]

Hey there again!

Well, today’s a special day! This #screenshotsaturday the first Build of the game has finally been released!

The current build takes you through the opening to the game. No JRPG battles just yet.

In celebration I’ve made a small trailer.

[EnderLost Studios]

Hey there people!
You know how last time I said, I wasn’t going to die?

Well, guess I did in the end lol!

Anyway, hello there again, I’m back now that Uni has settled down! And what’s even better, is with a game that’s almost HALF DONE!

Yes, core mechanics where complete awhile ago, and since then I have been working on working out the scale of the world and places you will visit. Unfortunately, I have had to scale back the story a bit because I want to get this project DONE!

Luckily most of the locations I have cut, I was having difficulty working into the setting and story.

But outside of that, as you can see. I have reworked the art style one last time and I think I’ve hit the bar for the pixel art I want to meet. Also, most of the JRPG attacks are now complete. Only 7 more to do out of 28 attacks! And from there is will just be some polish and getting the day and night-time graphics to work. AND WE ARE THERE!

Well see you guys soon… unless I die again!

[EnderLost Studios]

Hey there!
Well it’s been a bit of time, I mostly got out of the rhythm of posting updates as the games size and scale began to degrade my investment in the project.
Now I’m back! But not without some major changes to the core project. The first change is the turn-based JRPG mechanics have been cut from the game. Along with the size of the story. This is all down to decreasing the size of the game into something I can manage.
I’ll explain the rest of where I have been, and what’s happened to the project in an upcoming Devlog YouTube series.
Welcome back to yet another #ScreenShotSaturday! This week we take a look at the new battle system called meltdowns. In this, the player will have to defeat the ‘emotion monsters’ inside that room.  They can do this by running up to and attacking them. The monsters will try to attack back, but the player has a doge button that allows them to get away quickly. Once the monsters about to die, a slow-motion final action shot occurs just as the monster dies.

Been working on making this new battle system feel powerful and engaging to interact with. I think this week I finally nailed it. From here I’m going to keep working on this mechanic and the AI for the enemies.   
See you guys next time!

[EnderLost Studios]

Well it’s #screenshotsaturday time again!!

In this #screenshotsaturday I’m showing off the new and finalized ‘Meltdown Battles’. These battles took far less time to develop than the RPG battles. And I wish I did this from the get-go lol.

So, in these battles, you can choose between each of the 3 characters.  They all have their own move set and animations. Such as Hotaru and her larger hit radius or Thaules with his higher defense. The player must defeat all the enemies on the screen, by running up and hitting them until their health is depleted.

With each strike the player increases a POW meter, once it is full, they can unleash a MEGA attack on the enemies. 
 I wanted to give that battles a sort of comic book vibe. So, add the POW and block action pops to really enforce this sense of raw power with each strike.

The enemies Ai Is fully adaptive, and I can just change a few vars to give them a different Ai routine.  This is helped a lot to cut down on coding when adding more enemies. But yeah, it’s all come together and I’m really happy with it, there is a little work to still do. Mostly adding the MEGA attacks and fixing some collision bugs.

See ya people next time!

[EnderLost Studios]

It’s Saturday again boi!

AKA another #screenshotsaturday update!

Since last week my goal was to complete the Meltdown battles and polish them up! This week I managed to implement the MEGA attacks and did a lot of cleaning up to the Collison detection system. In one part of the video, you can see a tone of metros come flying down onto the enemy. That is one of the MEGA attacks. These attacks only can be spawned once the players ‘mega meter’ (needs a better name…) is full. 

Outside of battles, the player can set up each character with what mega attacks they will spawn within the battle. Through the game, players can get more attacks by finding locked chests. This mechanic will add some flexibility and player choice to the simple battles. As well as be how players get to have a heal ability. 

So, once I got that sorted, I went back and cleaned up my code, just to make it more usable and less buggy. And finally started the polishing process. Once again, I am in the process that is the less exciting to update you on.
Well, that’s all for now, see you, people, next week!

[EnderLost Studios]

And so we return for another week of #screenshotsaturday.

With the core mechanics all implemented, I’ve now turned my focus onto polishing up the code and fixing bugs. In order to do this, I have moved over to GameMaker Studio 2 and abandoned the old engine. This has led to a few capability issues between the project files. But that is why I am doing it right now while I am polishing the game.

The benefit of moving to the new engine is a better debugger. Along with better performance in the game. I hadn’t moved until now because I so use to the old engine.

When it comes to the game, these last 2 weeks I’ve been adding a lot of environmental effects to give the world life. Such as day-night cycles, dynamic plants, dynamic shadows, and the list goes on and on. This is all in an effort to help immerse the player into the game’s world. As that is the goal of any game, especially one with such a large and detailed environment.  

Finally, just this week I have released the first Devlog on An Aspie Life Beginnings. So you can check that out here. The plan is to release a new Devlog ever month.

On top of this we just have just opened a new discord server for An Aspie Life and other games we have made. discord.gg/h3vcqpH
See you all next time!

[EnderLost Studios]

Hello there and welcome back to another #screenshotsaturday. This week the focus has been on revamping the conversation battles Ui and input system. In preparation for the story and character text.

This new system is designed to add more flexibility and creativity for the player to experiment with all different types of inputs. These can be non-verbal, verbal and book. And these can combine together for the player to create their own messages.

The way that characters will respond to the messages will be based on what is includes inside that message. So, a contradiction will confuse a character if, for instance, the non-verbal body language is giving signs of stress and NO. While the verbal is positive and saying YES.

By next week I hope to have most of this new system completed but don’t hold me to it
See you all next week!

Come join the Discord to help the project grow!
 - Discord: https://discord.gg/GqZgf2w

[EnderLost Studios]

Come join the Discord to help the project grow!
 - Discord: https://discord.gg/GqZgf2w

Hey there guys, and welcome for another #screenshotsaturday for the end of February.

In this update, I’m showing off the completed conversation battle system and the new background animations. This is a major milestone, as now HAVE NO MORE THINGS TO FIX UP! I keep saying I am done, but I always find something new to improve. But now really, I have nothing else to work on. So, with that, it’s now on to developing the story and then FINISHING THE GAME!

The new mechanics really help add more flexibility to the gameplay experience. Therefore, helping keep players engaged throughout the run time.

But yeah with that we are onto the story, and I’ll try to not spoil to much during the development of this phase. 
Well see you guys next week!


For more  on An Aspie Life go here:
 - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheAspiegame

EnderLost Studios
 - Twitter: https://twitter.com/EnderLostStudio
 - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EnderLostStu...
 - Gamejolt: https://gamejolt.com/@EnderLostStudios
 - Discord: https://discord.gg/GqZgf2w
ALL THE BEST!

[EnderLost Studios]

As you can see, a new logo!






I wanted the new logo to really tell you what kind of game it is.

Therefore I decided to add clouds, to give it a sense of cold, high and light.

Then added the banner, to gives a sense of old, and rustic.


Finally added the mountain in the BG to show the main plot of the game. and the environment it is set in!

What do you think about it?   

[EnderLost Studios]

Ice and snow

Adding more details to bring the world alive. The water uses a system of 5 layers to add depth. Gamemakers Studios 2 new layer system helps tremendously


This new water uses a system of 5 layers to add depth to the water. Given An Aspie, Life Beginnings is set in an icy snowy land. The water needed to sell this.  Here is how I did it:
- Layer 0 -  https://imgur.com/djU21ev
 - Black void, to add darkness
- Layer 1 -   https://imgur.com/07kt88a
 - Seafloor, this is the base seafloor, titles texturing represents different water patterns
- Layer 2 - https://imgur.com/MIDU0df
 - Another seal floor, this adds more depth and layers, along with curved corners... this is not Minecraft
-  layer 3 - https://imgur.com/wbWT64R
 - Last seafloor, more curved concerns
- layer 4 - https://imgur.com/6XJcTZV
 - This adds walls for the island's cliffs, these being underwater
- layer 5 - https://imgur.com/RLXo2Ss
 - Water top 1, this is the waves. Have transparency
- layer 6 - https://imgur.com/vuhfr1A

 - Water top 2, this adds the waves that interact with the cliff walls. All Hand animated.

Finally, everything has a shader added to change the color pallet based on the time of day.

YEE so that's how I get the effect to work. If you want to know more check out the discord.

what do you think?

[EnderLost Studios]

Hey there again and welcome back to another #screenshotsaturday!

This week the world has started to become alive. The focus was to develop the overworld map, it’s locations, people and zones. I begin with developing the islands and water that would surround them. I wanted the water to have a very icy feeling to it. Therefore it needed a lot of animation to pull off an icy sea.

After that, I moved my attention to the mainland and began to develop the villages. I was in between using tiles or hand drawing everything. In the end, I did a mixture. Houses and locations were hand-drawn. Meanwhile, trees, rocks etc used tiles. Basically, things that could be repeated without the player noticing much. I think the end result of this is pretty effective.
From here it’s to developing the 5 levels inside the first town that the player can explore.

This week I tested a new system on my social media platforms, by posting at least every 2 days with whatever art or stuff I had down. I felt it was really helpful in sharing what my creative process was, and also a good motivation to get this art done. So, I’ll continue it next week. Let me know your thoughts?

Thanks for reading!

Helps a lot, see you next week!

[EnderLost Studios]

Hello there again!

Well here I am talking to you from my stockpiled storage room, I have yet another #screenshotsaturday to share with you!
This week I have the new docks to show off. Been spending all week on this, adding a lot of texture to the room. The mindset I used in making this room, was if the player feels like they're at the seaside… then I have achieved my goal.

Therefore adding a lot of snow, and cold colors the flow and clash with the water below gives that cold and chilling feeling. To let those colors flow and interact with the sea, that clashes and bangs against the rocks and beams emits that feeling.

I also added a bunch of birds, cause seagull are such a staple of the seaside... You just must have them. Not to mention they give the player something to play around with.

So, what do you think about the docks?
Well, that’s it for this week… Back to my bunker, I go!!

[EnderLost Studios]

Hello, it’s been a while.
I finished yet another semester of UNI, so I can finally divert my effort back into the game. I apologize for going dark for so long. But hey, let’s cut to the chase!
Been working on a lot of stuff behind the scenes. New shadow system, new levels, rooms, and characters. The focus right now is developing the story. I want to get the first chapter done by at least September. This would allow me to put the game into early access and begin to release builds regally. That’s the hope at least.
I will be getting back into the routine of publishing more on social media from now on. So, stay tuned for more! 

[EnderLost Studios]

Hello there again! Welcome back to another #screenshotsaturday! This week I was feeling a little burnt out. So, I decided to implement mini-games into the main game. These mini-games offer the player some downtime between events. They also help to flesh out the time period and atmosphere of the houses.

As you can see, I designed the games around the Atari 2600, given the game is set in the last 70’s, early 80’s. This was the most appropriate console to develop for. It was in fact hard to develop a game with a 2600 style. Simply down to emulating the limitations of the console. We are so use to the fact, that we can do anything. Having to think about the limitations and how that will translate into gameplay and graphics in order to make it look like an Atari game. It was a lot harder than I thought but was pretty fun to work out.

From here I am going to implement more of the story. As well as expand the mines with more levels and a boss. Turning it into the first dungeon.
But yeah, progress is happening.

See ya next time!

Bradley

Enderlost Studios

[EnderLost Studios]

Hey there once again!
For the last few weeks, I have been working on adding new environments to the game. The latest of these environments is the Forest. While not the most original location, it is important in helping glue the world together. It will mostly be used as a crossroads between locations, and to give the player areas they can perform battles.

To help give off the feeling of a large environment, I put over a week of development into the background. This was to ensure to give off that feeling of being deep in a forest, and that all the sprites blended correctly.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the outcome! What do you think?