My goal for today was to make a new boss from scratch. Pretty happy with how this turned out. Even got some work done on new decorative background elements that drop loot a la Castlevania torches/sconces.





oh my wow, youtube links automatically turn into embedded videos now? how long has this been a thing? am i late to the party? 

I'm still on paternity leave (I guess, whatever that means when I'm self-employed) for the next few weeks, but I've made a couple blog posts in the meantime.

November 30: "Interim"



December 21: "Interim: Peppermint Mocha Edition"

I'm taking a short break from blogging (and possibly from development, depending on time and motivation) for paternity leave. I already recapped the first year of Gunmetal Arcadia development a few weeks ago, so now I'm taking a look at the first year of documentation:

10 Things I Learned In One Year Of Keeping A Devlog

SCREEN SHAKE! SHAKE IT OFF! SHAKE IT LIKE A POLAROID PICTURE!



DARTH ELEVADERS



SOME FLYING BADDIES



MORE THINGS I CAN STEAL FROM ZELDA 2

You Have to Win the Game is still one of my favourite games of the last few years so looking forward to seeing how this one progresses. Do the diamonds do anything at the moment once you've picked them up?

Thanks! The gems don't do anything right now, but my plan is to make them salable items. You'll be able to sell gems to various NPCs, and who you sell them to may have consequences. For instance, a black market dealer might pay more in the short term, but it may harm your reputation with other merchants who will then be less likely to offer top-tier gear in the futures. I'm thinking there will probably also be limited inventory space, so you'll have to make a decision between offloading gems to the first available merchant or waiting for the best deal at the risk of not having enough space to carry other, potentially betteritems.

Of course, none of that exists in the game yet, but that's where I'd like to go with it eventually.

This week's devlog is all about how user-defined control bindings work in my engine.

http://gunmetalarcadia.com/wordpress/control-binding/

Did a video today on the art direction in Gunmetal Arcadia and what "programmer art" means to me.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDPAsZokr8k&list=PL6Q317vV_kts3iFBgzx4mGjP9oIQpyLG8&index=1

Accountability is a big one for sure, but I'd say the hardest part is the obvious one: You are the bottleneck for all features making it into the game. You are the single point of failure in the production pipeline. Every last little thing falls on you.

If you don't have a producer mentality and aren't able to kill your darlings in the interest of maintaining a reasonable scope, it's easy to get overwhelmed.

I've been working on this game for a full year now! I updated my devlog with impressions from the first year, sales of Super Win the Game during that time, and this fun annotated graph of SVN commits over time:

This week, I revised the player character's animation set to remove the last few traces of the Zelda II Link sprite that I originally started with.

http://gunmetalarcadia.com/wordpress/swashbuckler/

Crawling enemies can now temporarily engage physics to fall and land on another platform in the event that they're crawling across a destructible tile when it breaks.

New enemy behaviors: aimed projectiles and surface crawling!

New devlog is up. I've been refactoring my entity hierarchy to facilitate better reuse of components and minimize copy/paste markup.

[Gunmetal Arcadia is now going to be two separate games!]

Big important update today! Gunmetal Arcadia is now going to be two separate games! The roguelike that I've been developing isn't changing at all, and its schedule shouldn't be radically affected by this decision. But as a stepping stone to help me make forward progress in the limited time I have right now, there will also be a prequel game landing first, one with a more straightforward action format in the vein of Castlevania or Contra.



I don't have a title for this prequel game yet, but you can vote on names here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1p8K60VzE_xPc7xlPF8J3H8vX7sFAugRnP0Rm3bM3-PQ/viewform

[How long have you been making games for?]

How long have you been making games for?
I've been making games professionally since 2007, but I started teaching myself to program to make games when I was about five or six years old, so...let's say 25 years.

How long before you sold a game you made?
If you count games I worked on in the AAA industry, my first shipped title was in 2008. But of the indie games I've designed and developed myself, Super Win the Game last October was my first commercial release.

Did it make any money? (as in did it cost less to make than you got back)
Not yet. It's possible it might eventually recoup its costs in the long run, depending on its performance in future sales or bundles, but it's still a long way off. I don't have exact figures, but I would estimate the cost was around $45,000 (cost of living plus expenses to showcase the game at regional events -- higher too if you consider time spent on unfinished prototypes that eventually led to that game), and I've pocketed somewhere around $15,000 so far, after fees and taxes and whatnot.

Short update this week as I'm dealing with the crunch of wearing too many hats at once:

http://gunmetalarcadia.com/wordpress/degauss/

In the interest of complete transparency, here’s what my schedule looks like right now. I’m doing contract work three days a week. It usually takes me a full day to record and edit “Let’s Make Gunmetal Arcadia” episodes and produce the weekend’s in-dev builds, so that’s a fourth day gone. Ignoring the handful of hours it takes to write these devlogs, that only leaves one work day for actual development. Of course, there are evenings and weekends, and I make up the difference working more of those than is probably healthy. It feels like I’m spending literally nearly every waking hour working on this game. So why is progress so slow?

Also a new teaser trailer!

I've just uploaded a new video log that covers the motivation and implementation behind palettized screen fades:

Let's Make Gunmetal Arcadia, Episode 4: "Quantization"

Full text at http://gunmetalarcadia.com/wordpress/trees-in-the-desert/

I’ve been thinking more consciously about how to develop a consistent aesthetic for this game that feels authentic to NES games. I feel like I might’ve talked about this a bit in the past, but examining Faxanadu has been hugely revelatory in understanding how to play to the strengths and weaknesses of the NES color palette. Take a look at this scene from early in the game:



Notice how each element is monochromatic: the walls are green, the background is orange, the enemies are blue, and the player character is a sort of pinkish hue. The NES color palette is notoriously lacking in dark or desaturated colors, but the bright, bold colors it offers don’t necessarily have to appear cartoony. Delineating each element by hue allows the scene to remain legible even when elements overlap in brightness. The background ranges from bright pumpkin orange to dark brown to almost total blackness, but it all reads as a background element because it’s united by a common hue, and although its luma is roughly equivalent to that of the walls, there’s no confusion as to which elements are solid and which can be walked past.

It’s also worth noting that the walls have a brighter, more distinct highlight than the background elements, so even in grayscale, even with very similar luma, there’s enough of a difference to distinguish between the two. This highlight is also a slightly different hue than the rest of the tile (pale yellow versus the forest green that comprises the majority), but it still reads as monochrome.

aw yiss palette fades

I've been busy wrapping up some new content on Super Win the Game over the last couple of months, but I'm back to working on Gunmetal Arcadia now, and I'm starting up a series of video logs to accompany the weekly devlog I've been keeping. I've written about this new development in the most recent blog and talked about it in the pilot episode.

http://gunmetalarcadia.com/wordpress/scry-to/

Let's Make Gunmetal Arcadia, Episode 0: "Pilot"




Let's Make Gunmetal Arcadia, Episode 1: "Envelopes"