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[SolarLune]

It's greenlit. Whoa.

 

I guess you can still follow it and favorite it and stuff, though. That'd be helpful!

[KaiTheSpy]

Congrats! I've been following Gearend since almost the beginning and I can't wait to play it. Are you going to also have it on itch.io  or just Steam? If it is on itch will you get a Steam key?

[SolarLune]

Thanks! I plan to pop it over on Itch and on Steam, so people can get it either way. And yeah, I'll try to have it so anyone who gets it on Itch also can get it on Steam. I believe it's just like, Valve allows you to create new keys for free, and Itch just asks you to pop some of those keys into a box for claiming. Not quite sure exactly how it works, but as I recall, that's how it works.

_________

Development rolls onwards, and here's another devlog video.





I've been working on the water zone some more, polishing it up, as well as getting gameplay just feeling better in general. I also finished and added a crepescular ray shader that makes outdoor areas look a lot better, in my opinion.

[digitallava]

This looks fantastic! Congrats on the greenlight!

I love the art but find that the lighting, while cool, is a little distracting and takes away from the rest of the art. Personally I think it would be better if the dynamic lighting was less prominent and we got hints of it every now and then.

[DragonDePlatino]

Very interesting devlog! I watched the whole thing and it was an cool window into your development.

I agree with digitallava. The dynamic lighting is well-done but it would be better if it were rarely used for dramatic effect.

[SolarLune]

Hey, thanks guys! You might be right that the lighting's a bit strong (it's not as strong in the daytime areas - it feels really strong in the darker areas). I think I'll leave it the way it is for now (it's not super prominent in the nighttime areas - not every "room" has the lighting visible).

So it's been awhile since my last update! I've been slowly cranking away on making this, mainly focusing on finishing areas that I require before adding new ones - trying to finish everything up rather than keep on adding more stuff.

It's going pretty well, I think - I'm actually approaching finishing the game (WOAH).

Anyway, here's another music devlog about a song for a zone that might not make it into the game, haha.

[SolS]

The game looks great! Congrats on being greenlit!

[xix]

Congrats on greenlighting, dude! I've always liked your stuff

[Jalapenosbud]

a late gz on greenlight, and good to see you're still at it! i sometimes check for your game youtube devlogs, so was abit worried you hadnt made any for a while but finishing a game up can ofcourse take alot away from doing devlogs, so keep at it! :D

[SolarLune]

Hey, thanks again, you guys!

Like before, I'm chugging away at getting everything done and getting the game page up on Steam before release. After it's done, I have to consider just when to release it - it's currently approaching the time around where Steam usually has major sales (the Winter / New Year's sale), so unless I can get the game done and out in the next couple of days (which I probably won't), it probably would be wise to wait until later, possibly in January, to put the game out.

I think I heard that it's good to have 1k people that have reserved the game on their wishlist before release to build up hype. Not sure if I'll be able to hit that (or if it's a particularly important target to hit), but I'll see how it goes from now 'til release.

As for the game, I'm waffling between adding another zone, or calling it done and just finishing up what I have. I don't have time to add another zone, really, but I don't really feel like the amount of areas I have is "good enough". I guess it's OK, though - it's a small game. Maybe I can just add some smaller intermediate special areas and bosses / events to help make the zones feel less "standalone" and less monotonous.

Anyway, I made this intro for when you first boot the game up. I think it turned out pretty cool:





That's about it.

Oh, and this isn't new if you've seen my Twitter or the pixel art page here, but here's an animation of one of the bosses, the Purifier, doing a slashing attack. The edge of the slash could use some work, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, I think.



Thanks for reading!

[SolarLune]

Yo! Here's a couple of things I did recently.

Working On the OST

So I recently acquired over 800 followers on my SoundCloud (hurrah!), and I wanted to do something a bit special.

I decided to put out another song from Gearend's soundtrack, and to give that song out for free. You can also grab the source .sunvox file, if you're interested, on the Bandcamp page.

Now, I wanted to make an OST cover, but I lack the skills in drawing vector art with Inkscape (which seems like a really nice program, if a little unstable) to properly make a cover. So, I decided to do it the roundabout way - I drew it in Aseprite, in pixel art, and then loaded it into Inkscape and used the Trace Bitmap feature to vectorize the image. I think it turned out pretty great, actually! I'll have to keep this in mind when I want to do more high-def drawings.





The song itself is a remix of a song I made for a previous game of mine, Pockette Rox. I updated it to sound more, well, good, haha. I like it a lot. Very high-energy.

Distribution

I've been squaring away getting distribution up and running on my system, and LibGDX makes this rather simple. It uses gradle, so I just call

Code:

gradlew desktop:dist

to get a .jar of my game generated. This can be run by anyone who has Java Runtime Environment 8 or above.

Now, for Steam, I'd rather not have to ask the user to download Java. I would also not know for sure that their installed version of Java (which many people have because of Minecraft) is new enough to run Gearend. So, I'll need to package a JRE along with my game, so that Steam can run it simply and easily, without having to install anything extra. LibGDX references a project, packr, which does just that. It packs a JRE in with your project and creates an executable that you can use to run the game .jar with your selected JRE, along with any custom parameters (like allocating a certain amount of memory; for Gearend it should probably be around 2GB, I believe).

Now, the down-side is that I still need to actually have JREs to package - one for each OS type and each bit architecture (32-bit or 64-bit). The company Azul provides up-to-date builds of OpenJDK, known as Zulu, which is awesome and what I'm going to use, but they're only 64-bit.

That means that I'll either have to find other 32-bit JRE builds for Windows and Linux, build them myself, ask players who have 32-bit systems to install Java 8 (where I should be able to detect it from there and just call "java -jar Gearend.jar" from Steam), or just make 64-bit the official requirement and say that it's possible to run on 32-bit systems using an existing install of JRE8.

On the other hand, according to Steam's hardware survey, around 9% of Windows machines are 32-bit, and 0% of Linux machines are 32-bit. Also, I don't believe pre-built, store-bought machines use 32-bit OSes anymore, so it's probably not a huge deal, either way.

[SolarLune]

Yo!

So the game is done, finally, after a couple of years of work, haha.





You can grab it on itch, and Steam. People who buy it on itch have access to a free Steam key. Here's the links:

https://solarlune.itch.io/gearend
http://store.steampowered.com/app/574500/Gearend/

The OST is also available on Bandcamp:

https://solarlune.bandcamp.com/album/gearend-official-ost

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Thanks a ton for your help and feedback over the years, everybody.