Progress on the game is still super slow, mostly because I'm in the middle of preparing a boardgame for a local convention (come to Playthrough in NC y'all!) and we're about to ship a game through my day job.

Still, there's some stuff to show off! Artist prepared some neat concept art for two of the main characters.



There are also some animations and new environment work in the game, but I'm in the middle of cleaning those up in code, so they're not *quite* ready to show.

Artist created an attack animation, which I think is super nice - has a lot of energy and umph. I still want to play with the timing a bit (she starts to put away the bat while jumping away).

Also on display: started polishing up the UI a bit and adding little UI animations to making everything feel less static.

Lots of little backend improvements. Trying to get a web build working, but Unity's WebGL option is being a bit finicky.

TIG hasn't been e-mailing me about replies to this, otherwise I would've been in here earlier thanking everyone for the positive responses. Thanks guys!



Working on integrating new characters. This stuff takes time when every developer on the team also has a full time job. ^^ But we're pushing forward slowly.

The middle character (Chloe) still needs some love. Her animations look a'ight in motion, but still frames of her highlight some of her flaws. The aliens are in a decent place, though the markings on their breastplate I think don't quite fit the space very well. Artist is currently working on a pretty fantastic attack animation... we struggled over appropriate weapons for college kids, and we settled on Sally carrying a big baseball bat while Chloe has a high-tech glove she built herself.

Our goal right now is to work toward a vertical slice - the completed first dungeon, with representative art and gameplay features and writing. Obviously this is still far off (all the environment art and UI is still todo, though the core of the gameplay features are actually in a pretty good shape).

Edit: Do you still do dev streams? I tried to in the beginning of my project, and stopped for a few reasons. But I still appreciate the concept (and might try and tune in).

I haven't done any for a while, but that's largely a product of what I've been working on and not because I've lost interest. I try to keep the dev streams to when I'm doing level design or content authoring, because I think watching me code might be the worst experience a person could undertake. Most of my personal work has been backend stuff, which hasn't been very streamable, but if there's interest in that sortta think I can do some streaming again.

At the risk of reviving a dev log that's over a year old, I thought I'd provide a look at some highlights over the last year of being in both the Apple & Google app stores:

1. Getting in a featured list has lasting benefits
Alien Star Menace was put in the "Aliens Attack" feature on the iTunes App Store. It provided a modest boost, and I thought that was it. Until X-Files came out, and they revived that feature. And then Independence Day came out, and they revived it again. And then they brought it back a few more times. Each time I'd see a spike - again, nothing huge, but the download spike was nice to see.

2. The long tail isn't so bad
ASM still gets a healthy number of downloads on iOS - anywhere from 600 - 1000 a month without promotion. From a money-making perspective, this is negligible (I make *maybe* $30 - $40 per month on a good month). But as an indie dev that developed this game purely part time, having this kind of user acquisition really feels good to me. The game doesn't seem to want to die despite how old it is.

3. Game reviews are a funny business
I found over the course of time that game reviews did literally nothing to my downloads. I was featured by several big Android sites (300K Twitter followers), and not only did I never see any download benefits from that, the Android version of the game drastically limped behind iOS, which received relatively little press outside App Store promotions.

4. Speaking of Android...
I've released several games on Android now, and they have all underperformed like crazy in comparison to iOS. We're talking a 20X - 50X difference in many cases. I'm getting close to dropping the platform entirely.

5. Downloads spike seemingly out of nowhere long after release
Right now I'm in the middle of an Android download spike (which is what inspired looking back at the game and writing this post). It's been hovering around 5K downloads over the last year and then jumped to 6K in the course of a week. Again, small numbers by mobile standards, but it's a big relative spike. I've tried to hunt down a reason, but I'm not finding one. Similar things happen on iOS out of nowhere. This game is over a year old, it's hard to imagine people are organically finding it and spreading it around, but *something* is happening.

6. Communities don't necessarily translate over
ASM built up a decent community on Tumblr and Twitter and Everyplay and TIG and such. I attributed ASM's initial success largely to that. Since then, I've released another game which flopped horribly. A completely different game, but I had been hoping some of the ASM fanbase would migrate over, which just didn't happen. ASM was known, but that didn't necessarily translate to fans following my other works.

7. It's cool to have a "successful" game
ASM has over 150K downloads on iOS and 6K on Android. It received almost exclusively positive feedback. It didn't make a lot of money - a few months rent at best - but I'm happy with how it performed, especially given it was a part time, solo project. It was by far my best performing personal project, and it's done better than a few games I've made in professional settings with actual teams. This has had a huge boost on my morale even when other projects tanked, and it's personally rewarding to be able to say "Yea, I made a game that did a'ight."

Appreciate the feedback Valar!

A few people are on the team now, so I felt it pretty necessary to start writing up a design document to communicate everything. Not being one to be secretive about my work, I've made it publicly viewable: Once More With Feeling GDD

It's very much an evolving document and is not intended to be all-inclusive (there are various aspects of the game that are being developed on-the-fly as they become necessary).

Feedback is welcome. Or not. I can't tell you what to do, man.

Not dead! Progress is just slow due to a day-job promotion and teaching kicking into gear.

I decided to move away from an Active Time Battle system. Combined with mini-games, it lead to a very "hurry up and wait" feeling, and all the menu navigation lead to a jarring play flow. Now things are not real-time, but there's a speed system that controls the order units act in.

I also tossed menu navigation entirely. Now everything is mapped to single button presses - you just your action by pressing an arrow key, and each target is mapped to an arrow key. This reduces things that were normally 6-7 button presses away into 2. It's not represented very well in my (hideous) UI, but it's there.

I also found a collaborator. He's an artist, and he's gradually shifting away from the pixel art aesthetic. He's redesigned the main character Sally, which you can see in the screenshot. Looking more like The World Ends With You than an older 16-bit RPG. I'm happy with this - this game's clearly a throwback, but I'd prefer it look more modern if possible.

I'm at least a little in love with your main character and the pause screen.

So you said more universes open up - is there a limit to how many universes there will be per level, or is it a fixed set of universes based on the level, or does the universe set just grow and grow? It'd be really neat if you unlocked a new universe and could go back to previous levels to find new things, but obviously that'd be a lot of extra work.

This looks super cute. Will I be able to battle with the monsters I raise, or is it all about giving them a happy home?

You're creating your own server back-end for this? That's pretty cool (and a lot of work!). Are you going to support asynchronous multiplayer? If you're unfamiliar, that's multiplayer that doesn't require a constant connection, and players can take hours or days between turns. Lends itself pretty well to strategy games.

Some small updates in case anyone is interested in this:

I've been updating the dev log for this game on the regular, so you can see it's making forward progress. Not quite in the playable demo state, but the first dungeon is near-complete and the main story arc is outlined.
Once More With Feeling DevLog

Teamed up with someone briefly, but he vanished after making a handful of tiles. Ideally looking to partner with someone more reliable than that. ^^

Working on the first boss encounter. This guy's more alien-like than the previous enemies, because the primary antagonist is an alien invasion. After he's finished, I'll clean up some of the encounters in the first dungeon and then move on to the next set piece.

Dev is more slow-going now, as I'm teaching this semester and I'm about to take a lead engineering role. But it's still pushing along.

That name is not final.

Thanks for the positive feedback guys!

Here's a minor update:


Still working on the first dungeon. I underestimated how much extra work is involved with non-random, fully authored, in-map battles similar to Chrono Trigger. With a purely random battle generator, I could just specify the types of enemies that get generated in a map and let the RNG take care of it.

With this system, I have to specify a ton of extra stuff:
- Positions where the various characters jump to when the battle starts
- How enemies enter (sometimes they come from off-screen areas as a surprise, sometimes they're already placed)
- A good camera position
- A safe position to jump to after the battle is over (in the screenshot above, you can see the characters jump onto the table when the fight starts, but they can't just stay there when it ends)
- What starts the battle (whether it's a map trigger or touching an on-screen entity or something else)

Not really a fast way to do this, and there isn't a lot by way of tools I can write to streamline it. Just requires me to roll up my sleeves and work things out.

Oooo. I tried my hand at a procedural racetrack generator about 7 months ago, and I'm interested in how you're doing yours? I managed to get pretty good results largely based off an article floating around on Gamasutra...

So, I honestly have trouble reading what's going on in the screenshots & video. Your color scheme or art style seems to make everything fuse together to the point where I have legitimate trouble finding the player avatar and following the action.

That's not intended to be harsh. The game idea sounds solid. I just don't know what I'm looking at. :-/

Working on the college post-disaster. Not everyone makes it, and the people who do are clearly quite shaken.

When this arc was just an idea in my head, I didn't appreciate its gravity. It was actually a bit distressing to author these scenes. Brutal events happen in older JRPGs (Kefka poisoning Doma's water supply and wiping it out), but it's something else to actually create it.

The game is intended to have a more serious story when you dig into it, but the first dungeon brings that home early (earlier than I expected - older designs had the college as a throw-away scene). From there it'll lighten up a little bit before going downhill again.

It looks like your avatar is sporting a gun? Does that mean sometimes your mecha can get boarded, requiring you to blow some people up while managing outside threats?

'cause I think that'd be pretty rad.

I'm always a little jealous of people who can make good 2-color art. It seems so easy on the surface, but every time I try it ends up looking... just as bad as all the other art I make. So good job. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Why WASD to move, if I may ask? This game seems like it'd be perfectly suited to an asteroids-style "rotate and thrust" system.

Art style is great. Though I worry that grasshopper feels a little... flat.

Have you checked out Plight of the Zombie? Similar idea. Might be something you can get some ideas from.

It looks really cool, and these games seem to do well on mobile, so I wish you luck.

I wouldn't mind being part of the iOS test. I have an iPhone 5.