Thanks eyeliner!

To be honest, the nod is as much to desert strike as to UNDER DEFEAT, a great but not very famous dreamcast shooter by G-rev.

As a small update:
Right now, I'm still rewriting all the highscore, pause, score (...) screens, to allow more customization for the user: animated transitions, sounds, fonts etc.
It's time consuming, but I'm making progress

S.

Thanks darkhog  for your inputs.
Very interesting, and I'm thinking about it!

Selling different packages, with or without assets is a good idea.

Earning money as a "publisher" is more difficult: I looked at Wimi5, and their business model works because their game is based on html5, and it's easy for them to store everything on their server and keep everything under control.
I reckon it's not a trivial thing too to store unknown assets, which could be copyrighted, or porn, or....

I'm thinking about all that, because I would like in the future to build a community, even a small one, where people could swap games or assets, comment on people gameplay etc.
I must say it's far away on my to do list right now, but it's definitely something worth thinking on.
S.

How much does it/will it cost?

It's a really good question. The short answer is: I don't know.

We are not (almost!) alpha, and we don't know yet how much content we will provide with the SHMUP Creator.
The price will also depend of the state of the indie market at the time of the release, of the prices other people choose for their product etc.

It will be cheaper than AAA games, and the price will be more than 9.99$.
We have to find the sweet spot between that.

If you have any ideas or suggestions, don't hesitates!
S.

This is interesting work. I didn't realize this could be such big business, such as showcasing it within a conference booth, etc.

No, I'm sure this is not a big business at all: shoot em ups are a small niche, smaller every year. And,as everybody knows, the indie scene itself merged with the amateur scene, and so, is very crowded these days.
The Stunfest, with the conference booth, was a very cheap festival, so it was inexpensive marketing.

But anyway, I intend to work as seriously as possible on my project. I worked 20 years in the game industry, and I'll try do release a professionally made product, or nothing

S.

Looking good!

I'm impressed by your success in Japan and am curious:
Did you use any particular technique to market your game in Japan (like writing posts in Japanese or other)?
And is your game localized?
S.

[=.... NOVEMBER UPDATE ....=]

=.... NOVEMBER UPDATE ....=

November?
The last post was in August, and we are in November? Already???
Ok, here’s what happended: we had several contracts with a very big company. Very interesting work. The downside, of course, is that we had not a lot of time left to work on the SHMUP Creator.
The good side is, well, we have some money in the bank, which is always good news, and we resumed our work on the SHMUP Creator 3 weeks ago.
Yeah!

Right now, I’m mostly working on correcting bugs, cleaning the code, correcting bugs… This is a good time to consolidate the code in order to have a robust tool before attacking the polishing phase.

On top of that, there are a lot of new features and corrections, like:
. if the user modify a texture, a sprite or anything while using the SHMUP Creator, the game updates itself automatically
. we can customize a lot of new things, like the textures for the scores, the multipliers, the game overs etc.
. we can use a trigger “random”, to launch event randomly
. we can use a trigger “item”, to spawn items (for example, if the player kills certains enemies)
. the rotations, scale and translations of any entity can be modified numerically
. the background can now use lightmaps to light it, on top of the realtime lights
. there are a lot of code optimizations, especially for the bullets
. tons of small improvements for the GUI and the tool itself




What next?
We can’t predict how long this phase of development will carry on. After that, we will go back to the user interface and update it with the new features (mostly gameplay related) and the new tools.
We would like to add some kind of tutorials inside the SHMUP Creator too to help people start using it.
And the last big thing: we wil create an horizontal 2D level, using sprites. It will ship with the SHMUP Creator, and will help us polish the tool and correct the last bugs.

So, stay tuned!
S.

[=.... HOW CAN YOU FINANCE YOUR GAME? ....=]

=.... HOW CAN YOU FINANCE YOUR GAME? ....=

You can stop eating, or live in your parent’s attic, or use unemployment insurance, or have big savings of money from your family. You can do a Kickstarter, but nowadays, it’s harder and harder to generate some interest if you are not Yu Suzuki, IGA or Peter Molyneux, and the platform is more and more abused by big devs who want people and fans to pay for the market research they should do themselves.
You can also work every week-end on a very small game, and successfully release it one day. Unfortunately, the SHMUP Creator is a complex tool, and requires a lot more work than I thought.

We chose to do contracting works instead, in a controlled way.
We are only doing 1 to 2 months contracts, in order to spend the majority of our time on the SHMUP Creator development and other personal stuffs. We are not so picky, but we try do work on interesting projects: money is necessary, but learning new things is a must.
It’s another drawback of working solo or with a tiny team: you are less learning from others, ideas are less likely to cross-pollinate because less people are involved. And, I must confess, to be surprised by someone else work is something I like very much!
Until now, we were lucky enough to work on very interesting projects and to learn from them.

So, there it is: we are still working as hard as we can on the SHMUP Creator, but sometimes we must stop completely for a few weeks.
It’s quite frustrating, to be honest, but it’s the price to pay to be able to release soon a product we are proud of, and not a rushed one!

Stay tuned.
S.

[SHMUP CREATOR]

SHMUP CREATOR

Triggers in the water!
In the SHMUP Creator, you can use triggers to add complex events and create cut scenes and gameplay, without any scripting :

[=.... BACK FROM THE STUNFEST! ....=]

=.... BACK FROM THE STUNFEST! ....=

The stunfest is a unique event.
It's an entirely independent festival, organized by incredible volunteers, but with the size of a big event. 11,000 people during 3 days, a 150 meters queue outside, and all of this without any big names, without any PS4 or xbox One. Only passionate peoples.

In a nutshell : videogames purity.




It was also our first public showing of our tool, and our first event as an exhibitor, so we were a little bit nervous!
We were under contract with a big client at the time (Apple), so the pressure was high. We had to debug the tool and prepare a demo level to show what people can achieve with the SHMUP Creator.
We also made business cards, nice promotional buttons for happy visitors, and a 1m60 kakemono with the SHMUP Creator logo.
We put the 23kg PC inside our wheel suitcase, and the suitcase in the train, and of we go!



We stayed 3 days at our stand, presenting the SHMUP Creator, demoing the tool, answering lots of questions.
I've been interviewd by Game One (a french game TV channel), I talked with journalists, meet a lot of shmup lovers, and talked about the SHMUP Creator on the WTF scene. You can watch the video there, but only in french I'm afraid :





Our demo level used a quite basic scoring system, but it was quite interesting to see that if an occasional player could complete the level with 90.000 points, a superplayer could score 540.000.
The only wrong thing was that our demo looked so much like a real game level that people were a little bit confused, thinking that we were presenting "Blade of death" instead of SHMUP Creator :/

It was also a good time to meet some other indie developers and to share insights and experience. It's a shame I didn't have more time to try the other games and meet everyone, but we had to stay most of the time at our stand...

All in all it was really tough but also really good for us: it was the first time we were showing our work to people, and we received a lot of nice comments, excitement and a lot of interesting remarks.

And now, our motivation is on top !
Back to work!

Good work, and Congratulations!
S.

[=.... SEE YOU AT THE STUNFEST! ....=]

=.... SEE YOU AT THE STUNFEST! ....=

We are delighted to have been selected to participate at the STUNFEST!
The Stunfest is a great videogames festival, in Rennes, France. It will take place this week-end. … Conferences, indie games, superplay, concerts, E-sport, a lot of arcade games…

We are going to show the SHMUP Creator to everyone at the indie games floor. We worked on a nice demo to show what people can do with the tool, and I hope you'll enjoy it!

See you there, if you can!

Some screenshot of the demo level in the editor:

[SHMUP CREATOR]

SHMUP CREATOR

The demo level for the SHMUP Creator is complete!
We are going to participate at the stunfest this week-end, and show the game and the tool for the first time to people
S.

[=.... FIX YOUR TIMESTEP! ....=]

=.... FIX YOUR TIMESTEP! ....=

The framerate on my GTX 770 is more or less 400 fps, so I thought I was doing okay. But, when going fullscreen and using VSYNC, the framerate of the game was suddenly going choppy, and it made me crazy...
I tried a lot of things, optimizing the gameplay code, the graphics... Nothing.
Sometimes, the result was perfect, and I was happy. The next morning, I booted the game, and there: choppy framerate all over again....

So, one day, I read the post Fix your timestep! by Gaffer.
I bookmarked it ages ago, and I knew it was important, but in my head, measuring how long the previous frame took and using a variable delta time was enough. How wrong I was!
The thing is, too many frames per second and this method can produce errors, because of floating point rounding, and a non fixed-time step can (will) screw the physic.
So, I simply tried to use 1/60th for the deltatime with VSYNC on, and "voila", no more stuttering!

It's enough for my demo for now, as I know I'm not GPU bound with my machine. I'll implement a more sophisticated time step method in a few weeks, to allow slow machines to use the SHMUP Creator without problem.
So, fix your time step, it's worth it!

[=.... EXPLOSIONS!!! ....=]

=.... EXPLOSIONS!!! ....=

Explosions!!!
Shmups are about risks/rewards, about scoring systems, about bullets canceling and other subtleties...
No way! Shoot em ups are all about explosions!

I wasn't happy with the temp explosions I had, so I implemented a new particle engine in the SHMUP Creator which allow me to spawn several different particles emitters at once: particle universe
It's working well. It's a shame the particle editor is a little bit on the buggy side, but as it's now open source, I hope it will be more stable over time.

So, for the current demo level, I created several explosions :
Small ones:


Mediun ones:


And huge ones, for the bosses :


We are going to show for the first time the SHMUP Creator to a game festival in France, and so we need to polish our demo as fast as we can.
Stay tuned!
S.

Explosions, explosions!!!
New explosions system for the SHMUP Creator:

Small one:


Medium one:


And big one for the evil boss:


S.

Great post!
And of course, congrats.
S.

[=.... PICKING AND COLLISIONS ....=]

=.... PICKING AND COLLISIONS ....=

I was using a small collision library to test at polygon level what is under the mouse in the editor in order for the user to pick objects. It was working well, but not perfectly. It's sometimes OK to have something working well but not perfectly, but not for collisions. Picking object in the level editor should be pixel perfect to avoid users cursing me and my family. And sometimes, with some objects, it didn't work well, and was either not colliding with every polygons, or giving me false positives.

I couldn't find out why, so, today, I finally got rid of the routine and implemented Bullet Physics instead: everything is working well now.
Good bye bugs !

I'm really happy because it was something which has been bothering me for a long time, and I'm relieved

[=.... MEETING WITH RADIGO....=]

=.... MEETING WITH RADIGO....=

(Original post there : Meeting with Radigo)

There are so many things you can do in a shmup! Scoring techniques, power ups, scratching, bullet cancelling… The truth is, we can’t support everything, because in this case the interface would be cluttered and too hard to use for beginners and such.
And, to be honest, we don’t know everything!

This is why we are very happy that Radigo, a shmup expert who is contributing to the great french website shmup.com and was directing the Superplay TV show on the gaming TV channel Nolife, agreed to meet me and talk about the SHMUP Creator, what features should, in his opinion, be part of the tool, what is irrelevant, and about shoot’em up design in general.


(Radigo, on the right, explaining hitboxes using Japanese edamame at a shmup conference 3 weeks ago)


We meet at the Kawaii café in Paris and talked for 4 hours!
It was really interesting and I took a lot of notes
Radigo plays lots of shoot’em ups, is really knowledgeable and articulate, and, better than that, is a game coder himself. The conversation was precise and organized, and I’m really looking forward to starting implement the new gameplay features in the SHMUP Creator.

Actually, I already did: A thing Radigo likes a lot in shmups is secrets: doing things which sometimes spawn something, an item or a secret boss. So I added a “random trigger” to the game. An item can be spawned only sometimes, or some enemies can appears or not depending of the randomization of the conditions.

I really think the result of this discussion will permit people to create more complex and deep gameplay. And as always, the idea is to add some lego bricks of gameplay and to let people use them, and, maybe, be surprised because they will do things I even didn’t thought possible!

Meanwhile, we are hardworking on our demo level, and I’ll keep you posted very soon!
S.

[=.... My first computer....=]

=.... My first computer....=

I posted on our blog a post about my first computer, when I was a kid, a long time ago. It was a VG 5000, an unknown french computer, and it was crap. But, it was my first contact with video-games and programming, and it started it all!

http://bulostudio.com/2015/03/09/my-first-computer/


S.

SHMUP Creator

Working on assets for the demo level for the SHMUP Creator. Today: low poly trees.
Tomorrow : big explosions!