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[SuperWes]

I've decided to challenge myself by pairing with a local game designer/artist to make a fun, polished game in under 8 weeks. I'll be chronicling my progress in these posts, which I'll cross post everywhere, including my own blog at http://www.superwes.com

One of more prolific and awesome game development shops in St. Louis is Butterscotch Shenanigans, which consists of two brothers, Sam and Seth Coster, who make really great Android and iOS games. A few weeks ago they made a post offering a mentorship course called 8-bit Dev Pipe to virtually anyone in St. Louis that was willing to take it seriously.

I was intrigued when it went up because I've been trying for many years to work up the motivation to actually get something to a releasable state. I often work on games until they've proven or disproven themselves and then move on to something else, afraid to get myself too invested in them. I have a folder with literally 30 unfinished games in it (I just counted) that I haven't seen through to the end and I saw this mentorship as an opportunity to be accountable for finishing something and humble myself by accepting that I have a lot to learn about certain areas of game development. I wanted to participate, but I didn't have a team.

Enter Stephen.

Stephen is a designer at local game development house Simutronics. He commented on the Coster's dev-pipe announcement saying that he would love to do pixel art on a team, but didn't have a project. I didn't say anything at the time, but we randomly bumped into each other at Buffalo Wild Wings and decided to pair up.

We reached out to the Costers to see if they were still accepting applicants and they offered to let us apply. After a short application we were in! But what game to make? Stephen and I tossed a few ideas back and forth, eventually settling on one that uses the core mechanics from something in my unfinished backlog. We're going to work on a Metroidvania that uses punching as the only interaction. Want to jump? Punch the ground! Want to open a door? Punch it! What to talk to someone? Punch them! It's a simple verb with a lot of clearly practical uses.

Our first meeting was Tuesday, April 1st, and after a few hours of high level discussion we forged a path forward. Our current goal is getting a character on the screen and making basic movements and interactions that work well and feel tight. Theoretically, if we can nail this goal the rest should be cake. Check back next week for videos of our progress! A tertiary goal is to make my bed every day. I guess I'll find out why in a few weeks!

If you can read the writing, you can see the milestone goals for each week below. I'll be trying to post progress updates every week so you can follow along if you're interested.



This is going to be fun. I'll post progress videos along the way, and in the end you'll hopefully be able to download and play the game yourself. Stephen will be posting design and art updates as well, so you should be able to follow this project from both angles. Please post your comments of encouragement or general suggestions below. The game isn't fully designed and we're listening, so this is a great opportunity to help make it into the kind of game you want to play! Let's do this together!

[SolarLune]

Huh, this sounds interesting. I wonder what exactly the mechanical differences will be in "punching" - I mean, what's the difference between punching someone and just talking to them? It sounds like just how old-school games used to do it (i.e. you'd attack, and the person would start talking). Looking forward to more explanations of how these mechanics work!

[Ephesos]

I figured I should post here too... I'm Stephen, the designer/artist!

*waves*

Not much to add currently, the time I was going to spend doing sprites tonight was eaten by an unsuccessful run at doing my taxes.

Huh, this sounds interesting. I wonder what exactly the mechanical differences will be in "punching" - I mean, what's the difference between punching someone and just talking to them? It sounds like just how old-school games used to do it (i.e. you'd attack, and the person would start talking). Looking forward to more explanations of how these mechanics work!

We're not sure there will be much talking at this point. Our primary goal is to get the mechanics of punching and basic movement feeling nice and smooth. So your primary verb is going to be punching things in different ways. If we get to talking, then we've done well.

EDIT: Also, I wrote a short blog post of my own about the start of this project. It's similar to Wes's, but it's located here.

[SuperWes]

This week I’ll talk about how we decided on a platform and technology to use to make the game, mostly because I spent all week experimenting with our options. Stephen and I set out knowing that we were making a game that is very heavily dependent on having a controller in hand. It could work on a touchscreen mobile device, but it would be awkward given how we want the game to control. This basically leaves us with very few options these days.

We could make a game for Playstation 4, Wii U, or Xbox One, but the requirements for even getting a dev kit involve setting up a business and going through a lot of overhead that might not be worth it for our small 8-week game. We could make it for XNA and publish it on Xbox 360, but Microsoft basically killed it off and I don’t get the impression that it has many players these days. We could publish on Ouya, but I feel like nobody takes it very seriously. That leaves us with the Playstation Vita as a last resort. Thankfully, the Vita is a really great system where our game won’t get totally lost in a flood of releases.

Unfortunately, because we don’t want to deal with any overhead it means we’ll likely be going the Playstation Mobile route rather than native Vita. This means we lose access to certain hardware features, can’t do cool things like trophies, and are put in this weird offshoot store that not many people visit, but there are some perks as well. I’ve gotten approved as a developer already, so I am ready to deploy on an actual Vita to test the game and publishing games should be relatively painless. We’re considering taking an episodic approach, where we release the game in separate parts and grow it over time. This might not be possible if we were in the Vita App Store, but it should be with the reduced oversight that comes from targeting the Playstation Mobile store.

With that in mind, I spent the week experimenting with the Playstation Mobile SDK. It has a few nice features, but overall it’s kind of a mess. The SDK itself seems relatively competent, but the documentation and example projects are poorly written and not very comprehensive. I tried for several days to get the Physics 2D Framework to work and ended up getting pretty close, but not being able to move at all once the character came to a complete standstill. I probably could have figured it out, but my gut reaction was that if I was having trouble so soon I would likely end up running into more roadblocks. It was time for a change.

I downloaded Unity and starting thinking really hard about going through a tutorial. I’ve heard from many people that Unity isn’t great for 2D games and I envisioned a future where I spent a week learning the basics and ending up feeling like it wasn’t going to work. It’s then that I remembered Monogame. Monogame is a cross-platform port of Microsoft’s indie game development framework XNA. I have a lot of experience in XNA, but haven’t yet attempted to convert any of my projects over. If it would work though, it would be perfect. I called my local developer friend Jesse Chounard from Third Party Ninjas for a second opinion and he affirmed my choice. So Monogame it is!

Unfortunately, since I spent all week picking out a development tool I’m a lot less far along than I planned to be. That’s what right now is for though! Time to write some code!

-Wes

[SolarLune]

^ Cool to hear. Any particular reason why you chose to forgo simply PC?

[SuperWes]

Yes! Thank you for asking. I should have included some talk about where PC fit into our decision making. It's always been the goal to leave PC open as an option, even if we went with PSM. The main concern with strictly PC is that the PC space is so crowded that to get any eyes on your game it needs to be on Steam, and that just isn't an option with a smaller, iteratively growing episodic game. My hunch is that if we posted the game to our website for free and lightly promoted it we wouldn't get many downloads, and I want to avoid that situation.

If the game ends up being something really special when it's completed we will likely port it to other platforms, and there's a good chance PC demos will start popping up in this thread, but the target for now is Vita.

Thank you for the question!

-Wes

[Ephesos]

Art update time!

Progress continues, and I’ve got some art to show off! Let’s just start with the most recent image, basically a test room compiled from what I’ve been working on.



Not much going on here yet, really. That’s the first draft of our robot protagonist, totally not animated yet, along with a simple hazard and a sweet blast door. We’ve got some walls, a background, and a few other little things lying around. The sprite sheet is still incredibly compact, and most of it is actually just repeated elements.

The hardest thing this week was the robot, which shouldn’t be surprising since it’s the main character. Unfortunately, it’s not like I went through a dozen drafts before settling on this one… no, I spent an entire day agonizing over this one draft. This first draft. And this is coming in with rather a lot of little concept doodles.



So it’s not like I had a lack of material… why’d I get stuck? Well, I have a little bit of a perfectionist streak in me, and it can be really paralyzing in the early stages of a project. It’s great later, when I’m applying polish and can afford to be making tweaks. But when the goal is to just get a bunch of stuff on the screen and see what works, it’s pretty much the worst thing possible. I get stuck, and then once I realize how much time I’ve spent on a sub-par concept, I double down from the fear that I’ve wasted my time.

This cycle is… well, dumb. It normally ends with me panicking and going off to play Minecraft for a few hours to shut off my brain. And that’s exactly what happened on Sunday. Thankfully, I managed to break the cycle this week by just walking away from the robot concepts. Besides, doors are simpler.



This time, I vowed to not get stuck on a single draft. I started and trashed a few door sprites, and nearly got hung up on the idea of a forcefield door (like this) before my first draft showed it was just looking wobbly and weird. I kept it simple, clean, and soon had something workable that I could even sort of animate, in my own half-assed prototype fashion.

Thankfully, that momentum carried me through the rest of the work I did this week. I was able to iterate a little on the wall tiles, and tried them at multiple resolutions. I found that pixel doubling was not going to be a very good solution, and basically just made the blocks look… well, blocky. But not in a good way, just sort of chunky and lame-looking. However, I found that mixing in single tiles with the 2×2 tiles made the wall look less… monolithic.

This goes back to a technique I loved to use back when I worked with Blades of Avernum, something we always just referred to as “frilling up the terrain.” It was really simple… hell, our editor had a button for it to minimize the tedium. Just take the empty expanses of grass you’ve got and randomly swap in some slight variations. And it made a world of difference:



Of course, as befits my perfectionist streak, I would usually try to curate the randomness and add another half-dozen tile types. I drew a lot of tiny rocks back in the day… anyway, I hadn’t had much cause to use this in any other projects for quite some time, so it was a relief to remember about it for Punchvania. Super-simple, but it can pull a lot of weight for not a lot of effort. Those 2×2 tiles? They use basically the same base tile with a crosspiece layer on top. In fact, I just have one Pixen file for that tile (oh, also I recommend Pixen for Mac users who want to do pixel art), with layers for the 2×2 version as well as the thicker black borders you can see on edge tiles. It’s a little dull to export out all the combinations individually, but hey it beats doing them all from scratch each time like a crazy person.

So I guess that’s about it. This weekend is the latest St. Louis Game Jam, so I won’t have much time to work on Punchvania (or sleep). But on the bright side, I should have something cool to talk about on Monday!

[SuperWes]

This week not a lot of progress on the Dev Pipe project was made, but I did make a different game! Last weekend, April 11th - 13th was the Spring St. Louis Game Jam at Webster University and I participated as part of an extremely talented team of 4. We created a platformer called Metempsychosis.



Download it at http://www.stlgamejam.com/game_jam_game/metempsychosis/ to play it now or continue reading to find out more about it.

The themes for this Game Jam were created using a Random game design generator. You can try it out at this link: http://orteil.dashnet.org/gamegen. Our team had a pretty difficult time with this challenge. The theme we got was "An adventure game where you go to war with manbeasts while balancing your karma." We spent a very long time deliberating on what this game could be. We went back and forth between making a point and click adventure game where you play as a female in the modern day dating scene or a story-heavy game in a fantasy universe. As the team kind of felt out what these ideas would become, over time it became apparent we would never come up with something we could agree on.

Eventually someone mentioned, "what about something like Limbo?" and we changed our focus to more of a platformer. Suddenly things clicked for everyone and we quickly threw together a high level design that involved playing through levels that end in a moral decision that gives you different powers that evolve over the course of the game based on your choices. And with that decision made we quickly got to work.

The game made slow progress over the first day, but suddenly came together on Saturday, allowing us Sunday to polish it up and try to fit in the missing pieces of the vision. We all walked away feeling incredibly proud of what we'd accomplished, and the rest of the team has continued working on it after the jam. Keep an eye on the download site above because I have a feeling what you download today will be just a shadow of what's there in a few weeks.

That said, this is supposed to be a development blog for Project Punchvania. As I mentioned before, with the Game Jam smack dab in the middle of my work week I didn't accomplish much, but I was able to build something that imports maps from Tiled (http://www.mapeditor.org/) so that level design can be done easily and can be quickly iterated on over time. Having good tools will be critical to our development process as we're hoping to quickly iterate on all aspects of the game until it's at a point where we can release something we're proud of. I'll talk more about level creation in next week's entry. See you then!