Hello again every one! I wanted to let you all know that we have just released our beta backer build on Steam! I know I have been a bit of a stranger thing but that's just because I am juggling many many different hats to try to make this game possible.
Ruin of the Reckless Backer Update #4 – BETA BACKER BUILD RELEASED! Posted on January 31, 2017 by fauxoperative
Hello friends!
As promised, all backers above the $25.00 level have now received an invite to The Beta backer Build (Beta Build 0.4)
So this is a formal announcement of the beta release, and some notes about what you can expect to find.
Here’s the best part, you already have it! The build has been pushed to Steam so if you downloaded it back during the Kickstarter then it is ready to update and play right now! Just close Steam, open it again, and your update will begin. Let us know what you think! If all goes according to plan, your old alpha build save file will be seamlessly deleted under the hood so you don’t have to do any thing but open Steam and launch the game.
However, please keep in mind that a release like this has a lot of moving pieces. There is a pretty decent chance that some horrible error or oversight will crop up. So… if something does go wrong, we really apologize, and we promise we will get it resolved ASAP!
If you backed at the appropriate level but still can’t access the game, or if you can’t find your serial number, please let us know and we will set you up!
Most of our previous updates focused on the things we have added so far, but there is a lot I never got the chance to cover. To discover all of the new items, orbs, enemies, strategies, and other additions we’ve added you’ll just need to jump in and play! (because that’s not what this post is about.)
What’s Left?
So much has changed since the last time you all had a chance to play, it is more appropriate to tell you what is missing from the game still, and what we plan to add before release.
Here are the major things we want to get added in moving forward.
‘Stella’ pixel art by the talented Rafael Francois (Twitter: @rathaelos)
Co-op Play – Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get the necessary assets finished in time to enable co-op play quite yet. However, it is now our number one priority. This is the next feature we want to add which is why it’s at the top of this list. Pretty soon, you will be able to adventure through the game with a friend!
Mid-Boss Tweaking – Right now there is a full boss battle which occurs halfway through the tower. Although we are pretty happy with the tone and pace of the fight, and many of the elements involved, we are still waiting on some art and sound design which should make the whole thing feel a lot better. We are eager to hear your feedback on what you think of of the current iteration of this fight (if you can even get there, MWAHAHAHA) and integrate it in to the experience by improving the elements you think are the most frustrating, or fun, or important. Of course, the balance of this fight is crucial so don’t be shy with the feedback. No screenshot yet because as far as I know nobody but me or Danny has even seen this sequence yet and we want to keep it a surprise for you guys (also the art isn’t fully done yet.)
Final Boss and ending sequence – We are in the process of designing/implementing the final boss fight against our mysterious antagonist. This includes designing the final boss itself (and his environment) and creating the fight as well as fashioning an intro that is capable of handling both Stargrove and Stella, or either one of them… as well as integrating an ending sequence for the game. This is another character we aren’t comfortable revealing the design for, since the final boss is connected to the lore of the tower and it would be a major spoiler.
Sound Design – Many of the sounds in the game still need iteration and polish. We spent a long time looking for the right person to handle our sound and eventually settled on Wes Devore because he really impressed us with his technical know-how and skill. We are still in the process of going through with him and updating/adding to many of the sounds in game, but if a specific asset jumps out to you as being needed or needing tweaking let us know!
Finished Chaos Card Art – You will notice that we have changed the Chaos Card art style to be much more detailed. We wanted collecting these to feel really cool. We are going to get every card in the game looking this good thanks to the help of the very talented Rolando Ortiz (twitter: @bnmotive) Currently, however, many of the cards in game have a little ‘grey backpack’ on them instead, which simply means the art for that card is not finished yet. Soon, they will all be in game and ready to go. Which of you will be the first to collect all 34? (and yes, there will be a few more added before release as well)
Polish to some elements – We have more polished/nicer art coming for the crates (which will soon be accompanied by barrels), and we want to add some really nice special effects so that thrashing your way through the tower feels as great as we know it can.) Really, besides that though, we will be adding polish to things that we think still need it (like, for example, gravity bomb…) , and also to things that YOU still think need it, so let us know your thoughts!
Optimization – Although there are MANY optimizations included in this build when compared to the alpha, we still expect that certain systems and configurations will end up having some performance issues. The beta is our chance to investigate the cause of such issues and resolve them, so if you are having performance issues PLEASE GET IN CONTACT WITH US! You are our front line of defense in the war against slowdown. We cannot possibly test the game on a wide enough range of systems to collect this data ourselves so please report any issues that you have.
One more enemy – One of our backers asked to see how the game/balance is stacking up in the beta backer build before they design their enemy, so we will be adding one more enemy to the game, which will likely be a lower level creature designed to make the earlier floors a bit more varied.
Bug Fixing – Although we tried our very best to eliminate as many bugs as we could, to find them all we will need your help! Please do not hesitate to contact us with any bugs you find. All of our backers will soon receive a link to our BACKER COMMUNITY TRELLO. Trello is a really amazing group workboard where we can share and collaborate with our backers… and where you can report bugs and leave feedback for us as well.
Pixel art by the talented Joe Rogers (twitter: @jrrogersart)
Ace Blade – There is one more backer NPC to add;Ace Blade. (Sai, the trader, is already in) Ace will be harder to find than Sai, and will offer the player direct combat assistance inside the tower once you can successfully get him on your side. In keeping with our general design philosophy though, his help is acquired DURING a run, not between runs , and if you should be defeated you will need to find him again to enlist his aid.
Pixel art by the talented Joe Rogers (twitter: @jrrogersart)
I also want to take this opportunity to extend a special thanks to Meg Ziegler and Marc Macgruder for backing us at the ‘Harbinger of the Reckless’ level and making the inclusion of these really flavorful NPCs possible! We *also* really want to thank Skye Clark, who backed us at the ‘Harbinger’ level but opted not to design a character for the game. (Skye just wanted an excuse to help the project out. Thanks Skye!)
Difficulty Tuning – A game like Ruin of the Reckless REQUIRES high difficulty to function, however, I want you all to know that this build is deliberately overtuned in that respect. What I mean to say that it is harder then the final game will be. This is because it is much easier for us to tone the difficulty down, then it is for us to tone the difficulty ‘up.’ So don’t be surprised if the tower feels very daunting right now, that is by design and part of the plan. However, just *how much* we tone it down is going to be in large part guided by YOU. That means we need your feedback to get the difficulty just right. This includes the balance of the various items, orbs, and abilities, so let us know if you find any thing to be ‘useless’ or ‘super overpowered.’ And… just a tip: Stomping Boots + Rapier feels pretty strong right now, and plenty of items that don’t seem that great at first glance are actually quite good if you build around them.
Credit sequence – We have had the opportunity to work with a lot of amazing people (including all of our wonderful backers), so this credit sequence will be our way of saying thanks to them! I’ll be honest, it probably isn’t going to be a super elaborate thing because we need to spend our time on actual game content for you to enjoy, but we will be making sure it looks polished and does due justice to all of our backers above the ‘special thanks’ tier as well as our collaborators on the project.
ALRIGHT! That’s every thing. As you can see, there is actually quite a bit of work to do in the time we have left, so we are going to be working around the clock. However, with the help of our backers and contractors, if we work full bore, we still think we can have the game finished and ready to go by the end of March.
Once again I want to thank all of you for helping us out and making this project possible. We look forward to working with you all to make Ruin of the Reckless the best game it can possibly be. To stay up to date on the very latest news about Ruin of the Reckless, please don’t forget to follow us on twitter @fauxoperative
Signing off for now, Charles Webb and Daniel Crockenberg
Ruin of the Reckless #8 – What it means to take a risk. Posted on July 13, 2016 by fauxoperative
Hello again friends! SpicyCrab from Faux-Operative games here again.
Today I wanted to talk a little bit about what ‘Ruin of the Reckless’ really stands for, the philosophy behind the mechanics, and how we stress those elements with the design.
What is the Ruin of the Reckless
The Ruin of the Reckless is a legendary nexus of the after life. It has existed since before any one can remember; attracting spirits like moths to the flame. But not just any spirits will be brought there. In fact, the vast majority of them will simply pass on through the conventional channels, sidestepping the Ruins entirely.
How does a spirit find its way here?
No one is quite sure why, but the only spirits that are called to the Ruins are those that died with true recklessness in their hearts. They may be heroic adventurers who threw caution to the wind, great heroes that fought in the name of valor, or (more likely) brave hearted fools that fell to their own foolishness. Whatever the case may be, one thing is certain… the more reckless a spirit was in life; the more powerful they will become once inside the Tower.
All in them in a place where the only true measure of someone’s strength is their willingness to throw caution to the wind and ignore the danger ahead they will show that their reckless power is enough to carry them through the day and to see their wish granted.
Why are these Ruins so Reckless
So now that you know the driving idea behind the design of Ruin of the Reckless, I want to talk for a minute about a few mechanics we’ve included to stress these ideas in game. Timid Players
One thing that we always found frustrating about many Rogue-like action games is the lack of pressure on the player to proceed. For instance, you might be looking in to a room full of enemies, a tough room that is going to require a lot of energy to crack. In this situation, without some type of time limit, players will often revert to un-fun strategies that clear the room very slowly in order to ensure they can progress without risk.
Here are a few examples; slowly picking off enemies from very long range with enemies that can’t defend themselves, slowly drawing out enemies one at a time in to a series of one versus one fights, hiding in a corner of the level and waiting for enemies to slowly come find you on their patrols.
Any one else have fond memories of getting this guy stuck on a wall and slowly killing him with soul arrows?
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With Ruin of the Reckless, we knew that we did not want this type of game play to be a major factor. Wee wanted to push players towards difficult decisions, epic moments, and intense fights. To keep things moving at the fast clip we have implemented some special mechanics.
Unstable Floors
Watch out! This floor is becoming unstable.
On each floor of the tower players will note a timer ticking down at the top of their screen. If you can clear the floor and leave before the timer is up, good on you. Collect your experience bonus and move on to the next floor.
If you haven’t left the floor by the time it runs out, the floor will begin to become unstable. Portals will begin opening up, but instead of bringing monsters as they normally would, they will send fireballs rocketing towards the player. Over time, they will appear more quickly, until they are materializing at a rate that will make it very difficult for the player to escape unscathed.
It’s true that some spirits, in desperate moments, have attempted to use these portals as weapons against their enemies. It’s also true that most of them regretted the decision.
Fast Fade-Times
So in many games in our genre, I have noticed that coins and items tend to land on the ground and stay forever. This gives players a nice comfortable feeling of being able to take their time, collect things at their leisure, and take out enemies in the optimal way without sacrificing resources. Basically, these are all the things we do not want to have in Ruin of the Reckless.
So with that in mind, we have a very fast tick down rate our coins. If you don’t pick them up when they drop, you will not get very many chances to try again. This means that to collect large amounts of money players will need to wade in to hordes of enemies while they are still fighting their friends. Of course, you could play it a bit safer and let those sweet coins disappear instead.
Better grab those coins fast, they won’t be there for long.
Reminder: The Ruin of the Reckless Kickstarter begins August 18th!
What could be more reckless than a Kickstarter? Join us August 18th as we throw caution to the window, put on our Icarus wings, and take to the roiling skies of the popular crowdfunding platform. If you dig what we’re doing, spread the word. Let people know that it’s coming, let people know that you are excited about it. If you can’t or won’t pledge, consider telling your friends about Ruin of the Reckless instead. Every thing helps, and once again I want to thank every one for your support so far. We never could have come this far without help from the indy gaming community!
Ruin of the Reckless #7 – What’s next? And a very important announcement about Ruin of the Reckless.
Hello again friends! SpicyCrab from Faux-Operative games here again. It has been a little while since our last blog post, and I wanted to update every one on what we are working on over here at Faux-Operative games, how our recent private beta went, and what is next on the horizon.
Here’s a concept for… something I can’t tell you much more about yet! – Rough sketch by Yunior Guerra
Feedback has been really positive so far. Testers really enjoyed our ‘juiciness’ elements; especially when hitting enemies. For any one not familiar with the term, ‘juiciness’ refers to the intangible (and usually quite subtle) effects that make your actions ‘pop.’ Things like hit stop, screen shake, knockback and just the general responses that a game gives you for your inputs. After putting so much time in to these elements it was great to see that people really enjoyed what we had done. Of course testers had plenty more to say, but I can’t get in to every thing here.
For those who are interested in learning more about this idea, I really recommend this talk by Jan Willem Nijman (one of the developers over at Vlambeer.)
We were also very curious to see how testers would respond to two of our new ‘experimental’ ideas. Luckily for us, they were a hit. Now that we know they work we can give you guys a peek.
Pets
An intimidating army of pets to be sure, but there’s no reason you can’t collect more.
No shape is more reckless than a dodecahedron (Just ask Carl Sagan,) and so reckless energy sometimes becomes trapped in just such a shape. A skilled practitioner can harness that power. We’ll talk more about the different types of pets later. For now, just know that by finding small totems hidden through the tower, or by collecting the appropriate ability orbs, players will be able to attract pets. You keep all of your pets when you leave a floor, so if you can protect them you can build an army!
Gust
Gust really shines around choke points and hallways, just be careful you don’t bounce your enemies back in to you!
This ‘offhand’ weapon causes no damage but pushes enemies back in a wide radius. Choosing Gust as your offhand weapon will make you a crowd control specialist. Upgrade your gust to emit extra tornadoes and also to increase its range, speed, and knockback.
Overall we were incredibly happy with the feedback that we got on this build. It seems we’re really on the right track and that’s very exciting. Of course it wasn’t all roses, and there were some things that players didn’t like – but most of these things related to elements we can’t quite include yet because they’re not done!
Tester Feedback
Testers were disappointed that the card system wasn’t implemented yet, for example. They also wanted to see a better overview of their progress between floors (we’re working on that right now!) They wanted a fully realized inventory screen, and they wanted a chance to fight an epic giant boss. Testers also asked for a more clear HUD. I really like the one we already have, but I can see how it might get a bit confusing, so we are looking in to ways that we can address that.
These are all things that we were on the way to implementing already though, so what this tells is to press on and get it all done! Full speed ahead! Which brings me to my announcement.
Just a neat shot of one of our spellbooks at work.
Ruin of the Reckless is running a kickstarter campaign starting August 18th! We are so close to where want to be, and we’ve stretched our resources so much further than we would have thought was possible. Unfortunately, as many of you are probably aware; art assets of the quality you see in Ruin of the Reckless don’t come cheap. And there’s still a lot of art that we need. We want to finish up our inventory screen, add animations to enemies, add doodads to the environment, commission designs for the new enemies that we want to include, and fill out basically the entire game with the lively animated pixel art goodness that you all expect to see. All of this is going to cost resources that we unfortunately just do not have.
For that reason, we are launching a Kickstarter on the 18th of August. If we reach our minimum we’ll be able to deliver the game with the level of polish we all want. If we beat it, we’d love to include some awesome extras like alternate player characters, a unique soundtrack, and expanded multiplayer functions. So if you have been following along, and you’re excited about what we’re doing; I really hope that you will take the time to spread the word and help bring this thing we’ve created to life the way we always envisioned!
We are working on some exciting stuff behind the scenes here at Faux-Operative games right now, and are looking for artists to help us out. This is, of course, a paid position, and we are interesting in inquiries from the community. If you dig Ruin of the Reckless and have been following along, that makes you an better candidate.
Are you a pixel or concept artist interested in working with Faux-Operative Games? Can you match the style of these assets?
Ruin of the Reckless #6 – What just happened on Steam Greenlight?
Hey again friends,
As I am sure most of you know (well I hope you noticed) we launched a Steam Greenlight campaign on May 12th. The campaign has been a big success so far, we broke in to the top 100 games on Steam Greenlight at around 24 hours. Since then, we have climbed higher. At the time of this writing… I’d say we’re doing pretty well for day 3.
Greenlight is notorious for stonewalling developers, so we’ll have to see what *actually* happens after this but I wanted to take some time to talk about the plan we had to make this work, what went right, what went wrong, and where it looks like things are going. The campaign is, of course, still going on, so please vote for us on Greenlight and tell your friends.
(Well the first thing we did was build the game, and then we made what I think is a really kickass trailer, but let’s skip that part.)
We always knew that we had to go to steam Greenlight eventually, but to do that you need at least some following. Steam Greenlight is about generating traffic in the first two or three days. From there, (where we are now), organic greenlight traffic drops significantly and it becomes very hard to drum up page views without press!
We knew we only had a set amount of attention we could devote to social media, and that we needed as many eyes on our project as possible in the lead up to the greenlight launch. We decided (A bit too late, perhaps) on pursuing the following communities.
Twitter -> We began posting tweets on our feed about the game. The most effective thing for garnering attention by FAR has been animated GIFs of cool moments in the game. GIFs that show off beautiful artwork or action packed ‘game feel’ moments seem to perform best.
reddit.com/r/gamemaker -> This one was easy to focus on because I was already an active member of the community (under my personal reddit account.) I transitioned to posts on r/gamemaker on my ‘corporate’ reddit account that focused mainly on Ruin of the Reckless. We made sure that every thing we posted was useful to gamemaker developers and we worked closely with the mods to make sure that we weren’t breaking any rules Our Blog/ruinofthereckless.com -> We started updates on this blog. I really tried my best to make the posts high quality and useful, and shared them wherever I could. Several people have told me that they were following along quite a while on this blog before they every commented on any thing, so don’t despair if you’re not getting comments. People may be watching in the wings!
This dev blog(Tigsource) -> We started a devblog on tigsource, which was easy because we crossposted our blog posts from our website to the tigsource thread here.
Fantasystrike.com -> I am a longtime member of fantasystrike.com, which is a smaller forum focused on game design. I already had a presence there, so it was natural to be posting updates to my friends on there.
Crap, that’s a lot of communities. Working on the game was already a full time job, but trying to be active on all of these channels in the lead up to the Greenlight (while we were still working on the trailer) was intense. Nobodys said this was supposed to be easy.
Our first blog post was on Marth 28th, so we had about 42 days of ‘social media preparation’ for the Greenlight. When we launched, we had about 130 twitter followers (now closer to 200) and an established presence in each of the listed sites, a mailing list, with 40 some-odd subscribers and a website. I wish we had started earlier and gotten more momentum first. but all things considered, it worked well.
We did not spend a dollar on advertising, we would have certainly been willing to, but we couldn’t find a deal/service that made sense to us… and we didn’t really know whether to believe the saying among indie devs that a small amount of advertising has little to no effect.
I also took some time to research other greenlight campaigns and thoughts from other developers, the most useful of which was a post-morrtem by Unfold Games for a successful Greenlight pitch called DARQ
As recommended by Unfold Games, we made a snappy animated GIF for our Greenlight header.
The Plan
Based on talking to other developers, we decided to launch on Thursday; supposedly that is the day where most people come home from work and want to relax at home. It was the best lead we had, so we went with it.
We would wait until Monday and send out press releases to every indie gaming news resource we could find, letting them know that our Greenlight was launching on Thursday and giving them the trailer. I have seen other indies say they sent out upwards of 400 e-mails. I don’t know where they’re finding all of these people, I was scarcely able to find 100 news sources that were willing to cover a Greenlight launch, but we would contact every single one. In retrospect, I wish I had started compiling a list of sources MUCH earlier.
Once the press releases were sent, it would be time to go to our mailing list subscribers, our twitter followers, the forums we were part of and reddit to let people know. Hopefully they would respond, because we knew we would need their help for it to work.
I also had a feeling a few of my more high profile indy-dev friends might lend our campaign a hand by retweeting us to their massive fanbases.
One of the GIFs we sent out on twitter to promote the launch.
What Went Right
— Launching on Thursday -> Launching on Thursday seems to have been a very smart decision. Only one title that launched on Wednesday is still above us, and several very high performing titles also launched on Thursday, leading me to believe that it probably gave us a natural advantage.
— Our Animated GIF came out really well, and our organic traffic numbers were high, I believe that our cool animated GIF brought extra views to the page.
— Our trailer killed it. We had worked very carefully to make our trailer as engaging as possible,we demoed it to dozens of industry insiders to get feedback before launch. I think it paid off. The trailer was quick, snappy, had only 5 seconds of title screen time (DO NOT PUT A 13 second intro in your Greenlight video people.) And the average user actually stayed to watch almost the whole thing (which is quite abnormal.)
— Developer support! Two of my favorite indy developers graciously decided to retweet our Greenlight campaign to their twitters. I won’t put their accounts here since I don’t want people to spam them, but you guys know who you are. Thanks to them, our Greenlight teaser was tweeted out to an extra 80,000 people! That kind of exposure is hard to come by.
— Reddit Response: Well, we actually were told we couldn’t post to certain places on reddit because more than 10% of our posts are about Ruin of the Reckless but in the communities where we were put up we did very well We were the top post on r/indiegames, r/gamemaker and a few other subreddits for almost the full first two days of launch. I think that really helped us.
— Greenlight Page Reception: The reception was good. Like… insanely good. We quickly shot up to rank 100 in only one day, the comments on our steam page were almost all extremely positive, check it out yourself. and we are oscillating between a 68% – 79% approval rating, starting to stabiliize just below 70% which is quite high. For reference, the 5th highest rated game on Greenlight has a 70% upvote rate.)
— Press: We got our first write up late on Day 1 by ind13.com. They featured us prominently on their front page and wrote a really neat article about the campaign. We also got a write up by oneangrygamer.com. We were also contacted by a few more press sources, but you can see those when they are released. Feels good to know at least some of those e-mails we sent out were read.
I like to imagine the slimes are the people that voted ‘no, thanks’
What Went Wrong
When I went down to to see my mom for mothers day, I told her our plan to launch on May 12th and she said “arent you worried about launching while mercury is in retrograde” (astrology people claim that the phenomena makes communication, planning, and clear thinking more difficult), I laughed and laughed and laughed…
Is it possible that the misalignment of this planet cursed us? Probably not. But we could have planned a bit better! (Love you mom!)
To be honest, the launch was riddled with huge mistakes. I really wish I had seen these issues coming, who knows how much momentum we lost due to these FUBAR moments.
— After sending out more than 100 press releases I had a painful realization. I had built, but not actually published the presskit page on to our website. By the time I realized I had forgotten to press ‘publish’, it was day 2 already. We got 120 hits to our website on day 1, who knows how many of those were journalists looking for our presskit. Almost all of the information was sent via e-mail any way, but this could not have helped us.
— Then… I had another painful realization. I had personalized every presskit e-mail to its receiver… but I had used the ‘forward’ button to send. Cue that horrible moment of realization… a good 50 of the e-mails I sent had a big fat “FORWARD:” at the front of their subject lines. I’m sure some promising leads went in to the trash bin.
— Then… I had another painful realization.. and this one was the worst of all. In an attempt to be responsible, I created our Steam Greenlight page over a month in advance. As we worked on the project, I updated the page with all of the information it would need, leaving it ‘published’ but still ‘hidden’ until it was ready. When the day came that we launched, I flipped it to ‘published’, went on over to the ‘recent submissions’ page and… nothing! We weren’t listed. It hit me like a ton of bricks, all the day 1 and 2 organic traffic that we had been preparing for was… not coming because our game wasn't technically a 'recent submission.' Worse yet, I had already given the link out to about 60 people who had started sharing it with their friends. OH NO!
It was awful, we had to take down the steam page and place it back up, quickly filling in the respective fields. The problem was solved in about 5 minutes, but the damage was already done. Dozens of people had clicked on those links and they were very unlikely to come back and check out the new fixed link. This also destroyed my google analytics links, which means we got no analytics data on day 1 of our campaign! What a missed opportunity. So, my takeaway from this is DO NOT PUBLISH YOUR GREENLIGHT UNTIL THE EXACT DAY THAT YOU LAUNCH!
— Remember when I mentioned that an indy dev friend of mine re-tweeted our Greenlight out? I remember the moment well. As I was sitting at my computer a little box flashed up in the corner ‘retweeted by REDACTED famous indy guy’ to SEVENTY ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE! Amazing. Within about ten seconds the retweet already had 16 likes, that’s REALLY fast! And then… about five seconds later… the comments asking what was wrong… why wasn’t the link working? OH CRAP! The first Tweet I sent had a broken link. I watched in horror as the likes and retweets climbed (indicating people were looking at it and sharing it), and the confused comments started flowing in. To my friends credit, he quickly took it down and offered to retweet a fixed version, which was really niceof him. The damage was done though. The second tweet only got 26 likes total. Who knows how much exposure we lost out on there. Maybe it was really no big deal, but it was a ‘feels bad, man’ moment for sure.
Greenlight is something like an orb... you can consume it to level up or use it as a weapon.
Other Stuff:
I learned some cool stuff about Greenlight during this process, and also some not so cool stuff.
Steam Greenlight Abuse: One thing I learned is that shovelware games give away thousands of beta keys to shady spammers who then turn around and give the beta keys back out in exchange for upvotes on Greenlight. Expect to see some preposterously highly rated shovelware games in the top #100 due to this extremely regrettable practice. If you’re on Greenlight, please don’t do this kind of thing… it is the reason Greenlight will probably be shut down sometime soon.
Upvote percentage: Since Greenlight games seem to be hurt by downvotes… it’s a priority to limit downvotes while maximizing upvotes. This is also just an efficiency thing, If you can drive the same number of eyes to your page, and get more upvotes out of them… why wouldn’t you? I noticed that some of the campaigns with very high upvote percentages had lazer targeted marketing. Say, a horror game where many of the comments on the page are like “I found you on horrorgamewatch.com! So cool!” For that reason, it’s a good idea to engage with communities that you know will have an interest in your game/genre. I wish I had thought about that more in the lead up to the campaign, I think our upvote percentage could have been even higher.
See… he’s learning too! Learning to kill…
What’s next
Well, it looks like Ruin of the Reckless will be Greenlit. Steam is very secretive about how exactly games are chosen, but we have an upvote percentage that is competitive with the top 10 games on Greenlight. Based on our research we expect that we will be Greenlit before the end of the month. Now, we have heard horror stories of developers getting caught in ‘Greenlight Limbo’, but all we can do is cross our fingers and hope that our performance in the coming days speaks for itself.
I want to thank every one for getting involved.
Twenty seven hundred people came to the Ruin of the Reckless Greenlight page in the last two days and if upvotes are to be believed, the Ruin of the Reckless community grew by 1200 people. Thanks to every one for helping us get this far.
And as always, please hashweb your twitter channel and facetag your instagrams! Please share our Greenlight with people and communities that you think will dig it.
We have a devblog up and are currently on Greenlight as well.
We are on our second day and have already made it well in to the top 100, last I checked, we were ranked #76 on Greenlight. Please come check out our Greenlight and add us to the list!
We had an amazing first day on Steam. We are (edit 72) on Greenlight and just a few hours in to day 2. I think our next blog article will be about what went right and what went wrong, and i'll write it up as soon as we get greenlit, which will hopefully be soon... but we have heard horror stories so I am crossing my fingers.
Thanks to every one who helped out.
Where do people find contacts for this sort of thing? I feel like I have plumbed the depths of the internet and have scarcely come up with 100 legitimate contacts in the press.
And yet some people say they sent 500+ emails on their greenlight launch. Who writes features on Greenlight?
Slime girls is soooo... great. When we heard Vacation Wasteland we knew that we had to have it, we knew it was perfect. I love that whole album.
We have hit a 78% upvote rate on Steam Greenlight right now, apparently that is really good! Please send attention to the page, the more eyes we can get right now the better, and thanks again to every one for all of your support.
Been meaning to comment on this for a bit; really liking the style and look of the gameplay so far! And rad stuff getting hold of Slime Girls for part of the music; been really liking their recent work so far, too. Just voted, good luck with the Greenlight campaign guys~
Hey again, we had to re-do the whole greenlight page so... if you are still interested, please consider re-upvoting us since yours got lost!
PSA Every one... don't build your greenlight page in advance. If you do, it will not appear under recent submissions and you'll lose some serious traffic. I wish someone had warned me about this!
Thank you for all of the kind words and support. I am glad every one likes the blog so much, I'll be posting articles again soon we have just been SWAMPED making the trailer and getting ready for greenlight + dealing with actual real life people sometimes...
The greenlight will be going up tomorrow, probably pretty early in the morning, i'll post a reminder when it launches.
I'll post the trailer up here as well, but I don't want to reveal it to non-press until the greenlight page is up on Steam.
Thanks io3, for the link. That is all helpful information.
The artist for most of what you see was John Sandoval, who is actually an editor here at tigsource if I am not mistaken. He is indeed very talented and was a pleasure to work with.
Thank you for the heads up about our website, i'll talk to our host about why that might be.
Ruin of the Reckless #5 – Silhouettes in Game Maker
Hello friends. Today we are going to be doing something a little bit different.
Quite a few people have contacted me asking about the silhouette system that I mentioned in our first blog post. This system allows players to see their character even when they are ‘behind’ a wall or other obstructing tile. Early on, we knew that this effect would be necessary for Ruin of the Reckless. We also knew that it was possible in Game Maker because we had already seen it accomplished by Hyper Light Drifter. For any one interested in reproducing this effect themselves, Julian Adams has graciously provided an example .gmz for you to investigate :
Hyper Light Drifter uses a similar silhouette system. Don’t ask me what their method is though! – Hyper Light Drifte.
We had found several methods to handle this but none of them did every thing we needed. Either they didn’t work in randomly generated environments, or they couldn’t handle different colored silhouettes, or they had some other deficiency that made them unsuitable.
Luckily, we found Julian Adams (also known as ‘Juju’) from the game maker community. This guy is an amazing programmer, and a great person, and his solution to this complicated problem is quite brilliant. Being the creator, we asked him to write a guest article about his implementation, and he obliged… so without further ado… Julian Adams on top down silhouettes. —-
There are a number of solutions to the silhouette problem that have been tried over the years. The most obvious is simply to prevent objects from ever going behind walls to a position where they are not visible. This is very effective – it’s cheap and requires no additional effort – but it compromises the authenticity of the environment. A Link To The Past uses this method an unusual way; employing a warped perspective to show the the front, the sides, and the back of obstacles in the world; this, unfortunately, locks the graphical style into a cartoony, surreal design.
RTS games pursue a more direct visual solution. Thanks to greater processing power available around the late 90s, they could now show units moving behind obstructing features without compromising the artistic expression of the environment.
Here’s a small example of our system in action. – Ruin of the Reckless
When the developers of Ruin of the Reckless contacted me, I was already interested in solving ‘the silhouette problem.’ We discussed different methods for displaying silhouettes in a orthographic/iosometric perspective.
1. The silhouette system needs to work in very large rooms, on the order of 5,000×5,000 pixels, lined with walls and obstacles.
2. The silhouette system needs to have minimal impact on the frame rate. They’ve spent a lot of time making their levels full of content.
3. The silhouette system should be pixel-perfect and support static tiles and animated objects. A wrought iron gate should only silhouette the specific parts of objects covered by the fence and not the holes.
4. The silhouette system should work with their object-based visual effects. The silhouette system should require as few parallel variables as possible.
5. The silhouette system should not mess with the depth and draw order system (using the ever-popular “depth = -y;” method). Silhouettes should obey this draw ordering.
6. The silhouette system should support different coloured silhouettes for different types of object (orange for enemies, blue for the player, green for items etc).
7. The silhouette system must be implemented in procedural, randomly generated environments.
—-
There are a number of pre-existing systems that have been described in GameMaker. Here is a relatively well known and popular solution:
This silhouetting approach work as follows: Every frame, “occluders” are drawn to a surface, but only if they are below the player. The player’s sprite (an “actor”) has its pixel data forced to a particular silhouette colour and is then drawn to this surface. This drawing operation is special – it doesn’t change the transparency of the surface data, only the colour data. This means wherever a player pixel and an occluder pixel cross over, a silhouette colour is drawn to the surface.
This has a number of deficiencies – firstly, it requires constantly drawing and redrawing tiles to the screen any time the view or player moves. This is hugely wasteful of resources. Secondly, it only supports one actor at a time – the player. Whilst the example provided with this method only includes support for tiles, adding objects to the mix isn’t hard.
Here is another solution, designed by HeartBeast:
This solution works somewhat differently and is, in some ways, much cruder. Every frame, a surface is cleared black. The player is then drawn to this surface in a pure white colour, maintaining transparency, but not colour information. Occluders are then drawn at alpha=0.5 and pure black to this surface. This means any pixels that share a player and occluder pixel have a colour of #7F7F7F or, to us mere morals, “grey”. The surface is drawn to the screen using a shader that only draws pixels that are grey.
This application is also flawed, though in a different manner. This method requires redrawing to the screen every frame, due to drawing the player to the masking surface. Whilst this creates a somewhat accurate end result, this method fudges a lot of the fine detail through the use of an approximate inequality in the shader. Edge cases can also break – if an occluder has a low alpha (highly transparent) or many occluders overlap in once place. Most of all, built explicitly for a 2D side-on perspective, it cannot express three-quarters/isometric perspective at all. Unlike the previous example, however, it can support multiple actors although only with one colour of silhouette. A peak at the occluder surface, and how it uses the red channel to resolve silhouette information. Note that each occluder is rgb 0,0, 0,at the bottom and the red channel creeps up to 255 pixel by pixel – Ruin of the Reckless
This red channel information represents the distance from any given pixel to the very bottom of that particular occluder. When we want to draw a silhouette, we sample from this masking surface and compare the y-position of the actor being drawn to the colour of the pixel on the masking surface. If the masking pixel is in front of the actor, we know that particular pixel (for the actor) is being occluded. Since we’re sampling the mask surface per actor rather than in one big lump, we can change what the silhouette colour is per actor. This is all done in a shader. Any object for any reason can be drawn as a silhouette with no more than a few extra lines of code.
The actual mechanics of how this is done uses GM’s native depth order and requires each actor to be drawn twice – once for the normal sprite, once for the silhouette. The shader is constantly being set and reset. If the specification is partially broken, a custom depth ordering can be used (using a priority queue or equivalent) to batch all the silhouetting significantly increasing the rendering speed. As it stands, however, the system used as per Ruin of the Reckless’ specification produces one silhouetted actor at the same cost as three non-silhouetted actors.
Introducing animated objects as occluders requires the masking surface to be redrawn every step when they’re on the screen. This is unavoidable but, thankfully, the vertex buffer submission is so fast that this has a minor impact on the frame rate. An occlusion object’s positional data can be drawn to the masking surface on the green or blue channel with an additive blend and treated similarly to static occluders.
There are some structural limitations, however. With the current system, occluders can only be a maximum of 256 pixels tall before we run out of room in the red channel to describe the necessary data. This limitation manifests itself mostly as a limit on the actor size (256px). This limit can be lifted through extra work in a shader to express height using additional channels to have heights of up to 2^24 (which is an absurdly high number). Using a single vertex buffer to store all the occluder geometry means that all sprites/tiles stored in that vertex buffer must be on the same texture page. For large games with a large number of tiles and sprites, this is unlikely to be the case; in these cases, you’ll need to use more than one vertex buffer.
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, it’s time to go read up a little bit. You’ll also want to learn some basic shader usage (the two topics are somewhat interlinked anyway).—-Conceptually speaking, we want to create a system where the occluder images are stored in video memory and are ready for very fast rendering to a masking surface. We then want to sample this masking surface only when and where we specifically need it; i.e. where we know that actor and occluders are going to overlap. We also want to be controlling each individual silhouette so we can customise what colour is displayed and what order the silhouettes are drawn in (following GM’s native depth ordering system).The fastest way to get geometry from VRAM onto the screen is by using a magical new feature introduced in GM:S called “vertex buffers”. They’re the equivalent of storing a list of triangles on the GPU; which are textured and coloured however you wish. We build a vertex buffer that contains all the static geometry for the level in one vertex buffer and, when it’s needed, this vertex buffer is submitted to the masking surface. Vertex buffers can send tens of thousands of triangles to a modern GPU at extreme speed, enabling the number of static occluders to reach the thousands before the framerate even begins to dip.What we draw to the masking surface is not actually the true occluder image. Instead, we draw the occluder with its diffuse colour information replaced with information encoded in the red channel of each pixel. Each occluder sprite (the same principle applies for tiles/backgrounds) is added to the vertex buffer as two triangle stitched together to make a rectangle. The bottom of this rectangle is coloured black, the top of this rectangle is coloured red. Each pixel-thick line going from the bottom of this rectangle to the top increases in redness by 1, this means a 200-pixel high wall starts off at #000000 at the bottom and has a red colour of #C80000 at the top.[img] http://i2.wp.com/ruinofthereckless.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/silhouette3.gif?resize=346%2C298)
