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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsConvicted Galaxy - prison break in Space [Demo] {Steam Early Access}
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« Reply #20 on: September 11, 2016, 06:28:40 PM »

Steam Greenlight seems to have stagnated for us over the weekend. Feels like we've been at about 30% to the top 100 for a few weeks (really it's been three days). We're trying to change that though.



Today, in between my day job, I was able to send out a few emails (172) to YouTuber's and streamers. Hopefully a few people will show off our game. In the mean time, the plan for tomorrow is to jump back on to 'real' game dev. We're going to look into making progress with the game UI and other player interactions. We have great things planned for the game, just need the time to devote to implementation. It should be a pretty windy and stormy weekend, so I should get lots of time.
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« Reply #21 on: September 13, 2016, 07:31:37 PM »

Greenlight... is... well being Greenlight, so it's time to move on and not worry.  Shrug

Now we are back on the game dev pony!  Evil

Got a new implementation of the radar working. The new implementation will allow for rescaling and much more precise control. I will likely do a few more tweaks to the radar system to allow it to function as our in game map as well.


Old on left, new on right (colors will be implemented tonight yet too)

After I get that working, I'd love to make a unity package and share it... but essentially it is a reversed engineered version of Area730's MiniMap that you can download for free on the asset store. I just wanted to utilize object pooling and a few other oddities of our project.
« Last Edit: September 14, 2016, 03:30:00 PM by Mind Grown » Logged

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« Reply #22 on: September 16, 2016, 10:44:52 AM »

I know that makes a big difference.

Yes it does but don't get boggled down on being on the front page. Just focus on making a good game that is worth attention, the attention will come. Same goes for other artistic fields
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« Reply #23 on: September 16, 2016, 08:52:27 PM »

Yes it does but don't get boggled down on being on the front page. Just focus on making a good game that is worth attention, the attention will come. Same goes for other artistic fields

Thanks for the kind words of encouragement. After a few days of minimal traffic, we decided that focusing on the game instead of attention was the right idea. It's good to hear that from someone else too!  Grin

We have gotten quite a bit done over he last two days. Kevin has been tweaking some of the PCG inputs to reduce the unpopulated space in the solar systems (making them smaller & increasing the amount of stuff in them), as well as other balancing tweaks. These changes have increased the pace of the game quite a bit, adding to the desired action. We have also been working on performance relating to UI components and my new radar implementation.

Looking forward, we hope to implement a new HUD and push out our next beta update Tuesday afternoon/evening.  Coffee
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« Reply #24 on: September 22, 2016, 11:08:21 AM »

We've pushed out v0.1.2 (Less HUD, More Action) update for our closed beta. HUD looks much better and because of our HUD and UI changes, performance has improved!

We've also had two different people do some sharing of our game. I guess all the emails and contacting press might pay off after all.  Cool




Space Game Junkie has posted a Let's Preview of Convicted Galaxy on his YouTube page. He was using a glitchy build of v0.1.1, and he still played for almost a half hour! I'm sure he will be back to check out future builds.

Convicted Galaxy, a procedurally generated space exploration game needs votes on Steam Greenlight
liamdawe from Gaming On Linux published an article about the status of Convicted galaxy as it relates to Linux. I seems the Linux community is really liking the idea of seeing Convicted Galaxy on their platform, as am I!

From a dev standpoint, the Let's Preview that Space Game Junkie did is great for us. It shows us, and the public, how a new player might react to our game. It's almost like a blind playtest over the internet, but better in some ways. It really forces you to just sit back and watch without interrupting, a very difficult thing to do while playtesting.  Coffee
« Last Edit: September 22, 2016, 11:13:38 AM by Mind Grown » Logged

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« Reply #25 on: November 01, 2016, 10:02:31 AM »

So it's been a little while and a lot has happened.

First, Convicted Galaxy got Steam Greenlit! So thanks to everyone who checked it out and voted. Smiley

Secondly, our beta testers got our second major update (v0.2.0) pushed out late last week. This includes a lot of new updates to the game mechanics and a re-haul on many of the existing components in the game. Most of what we attacked visually was the UI and menu systems. v0.1.2 had a lot of HUD improvements, while v0.2.0 has settings and in game menu changes. We also added ship specializations, implemented perma-death, and improved upgrading. You can check out more detailed release notes here.


A screenshot of our new upgrade window

I'm also working on a custom input manager for unity that will be have full controller support. I've tested it out in Convicted Galaxy, but it still has a few quirks I need to iron out. I've made my original version available on GIT hub, but I have a lot of changes to make to it before it is up to the standard that is in Convicted Galaxy right now. I also plan to make a tutorial video on how to use it once I update it.


A screenshot of remapping the Move Forward action in Convicted Galaxy

Moving forward, we plan to make concrete in our plans for crowdfunding within the next week (as we decided not to do that prior to getting Greenlit). I've also set reminders for me to update the devlog more often, even if we are busy. Sometimes it is very hard to rip yourself away from code to write a post about what you are up to, but I also feel it is very important.
« Last Edit: November 01, 2016, 10:14:34 AM by Mind Grown » Logged

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« Reply #26 on: November 11, 2016, 07:05:45 PM »

We now have a build of the game up on Steam for testers and us developers. It's pretty cool seeing someone "Playing ..." your game in Steam. Smiley

On Tuesday (election day) we did a podcast with Space Game Junkie. It went very well. You can check it out here if you'd like. Other than that, there has been a fair amount of planning and a lot of Blender movie making.

Blender movie making in progress...

Hope to have a trailer out soon and even more details about our upcoming crowdfunding. Thinking we are going to hold off until after the new year at this point. Darn indie devs always changing their minds! Evil Muahahahahahaha!
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« Reply #27 on: December 07, 2016, 06:26:46 PM »

Development has been slow, but we've shifted focused to all the PR and official matters that are just as important to launching a title. We have a brand new trailer that we have really taken our time on out on YouTube now, along with our announcement of our Kickstarter date: January 3rd, 2017! Give our trailer a watch, and we're going to get back to coding pretty soon here we hope!





Bonus: We were in a podcast with the good people that do SpaceGameJunkie, hosted by Brian Rubin. Also up on YouTube.



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« Reply #28 on: December 13, 2016, 07:04:49 PM »

Still haven't done much proper game dev lately, but I feel like we are getting close.

We just set our Steam Store page live today.  Cool ... Took a lot of time to get it set up, so it feels good to actually have it out in the wild. Still need to spend a lot of time looking through the "Community Hub", forums and all the other related areas that also go live at the same time.

Just 3 weeks until we start our Kickstarter, so most of our time has been just making sure that everything is all set to be turned on. Between Kickstarter and Steam, there are a lot of images to make! Unless you whip through making assets like a honey badger though honey, give yourself plenty of time for asset creation.
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« Reply #29 on: December 27, 2016, 06:07:04 PM »

Getting ready for the Kickstarter that will be launching January 3rd. We have made quite a few assets and had to do a lot of planning for our KS prep. During all the asset creation, we decided to go with a different font on the logo. A little bit more structured looking.




Here is a the link to our KS preview page if you want to have a gander and see what we've got set up so far. There will probably be a few more changes before we launch, but most if it is there.

That is all for now. Lots more planning and promoting to do throughout the interwebs in the short term.  Hand Any KeyCrazyHand Joystick
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« Reply #30 on: December 28, 2016, 04:34:04 PM »

We've also been working on some game dev streaming. We are just getting into the swing of things, but are planning from streaming 5-7pm CST on Thursdays, with extra sessions sprinkled in when it feels just right (like right now). You can find our live streams and recorded sessions on our YouTube channel or Twitch.

Today we are working on implementing an experience system. (Pretty much all of our stuff will be in Unity5 C#)
« Last Edit: January 03, 2017, 12:19:10 PM by Mind Grown » Logged

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« Reply #31 on: January 03, 2017, 12:26:53 PM »

After a lot of hard work, we have got our mission log system and associated parts working. A lot of other updates to balancing and the typical squashing of bugs.



All this done just in time for our Kickstarter launch. We are now live, so come check us out and share us with anyone you think might be interested. We're really excited about having a real chance and making Convicted Galaxy what we know it is capable of.


Kickstarter Page
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« Reply #32 on: January 05, 2017, 08:38:20 AM »

Our Kickstarter isn't doing so hot, but I'm not going to worry about it too much. We should get some cool YouTubers and streamers to put some gameplay videos out soon. Maybe that will bring in a crowd. We just haven't had a lot of traffic ( < 400 unique sessions), but we basically have $1 for each unique session (7+% conversion rate)... It is the same thing that seemed to happen during our Greenlight campaign. Low throughput, but fairly high conversion rate. Publicity is very hard. Concerned

I talked with another gamedev who ran a successful Kickstarter and his feedback for me was very raw and had very little sugar sprinkled on top (the best kind of feedback, sugar rots your brain). It was something that I really needed. He basically said that the game is garbage. He then played it and said it is surprisingly well put together and has potential, but it is missing almost everything it needs to trigger an immediate response from potential players (or press, which is really what is important for any campaign). This is exactly why he said it was garbage before he played. He felt no connection to the game before actually connecting to it. He said we need to work on game feel... basically this:




Jan Willem Nijman of Vambleer - On "Game Feel"

I love to watch any of the talks by the JW or Rami, but I'd never seen this one. It's good, as all of their talks are. Needless to say, we are going to start focusing on particular "things" in the game and making the "feel" right. I'm going to try real hard and and record a "before and after" video of each "thing" that we adjust, and then post them here. With what we changed and then you can judge the difference.

The more I think about it, as we get "things" right, maybe a single level demo would help us get feedback and also help players understand the game. Any thoughts? Stop by our discord channel and let us know.

Until next time,  Coffee
« Last Edit: January 05, 2017, 10:35:39 AM by Mind Grown » Logged

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« Reply #33 on: January 06, 2017, 04:29:49 PM »

Alright, we did some more promotion and a few game feel things.

Our first one is something I wanted to show off right way. Just an additional particle effect when hitting an asteroid.


vs.


It makes it feel so much more gooder! Going to keep working on updating more "stuff" with effects like this. One of the next big ones to attack is going to be making collectibles appear to actually be collected by the ship instead of just disappearing.

Until then,  Coffee
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« Reply #34 on: January 10, 2017, 01:06:35 PM »

So we've continued to work on "game feel" stuffs and have quite a few new bits. We will likely be pushing out an update soon.


Action feels more actiony with additional effects

However, I've been struggling with bullet (scorch) marks on asteroids and other objects. I've tried projectors, but they interact with too many objects projecting in the negative axis. I've tried the Simple Decals free asset from the unity store, but I can't seem to get the sprite to show up unless I click on it in the hierarchy. I know it is something in the editor portion of the script, but WTF? Why not let users spawn decals in code? Facepalm Anyway, if anyone has any other ideas or examples, I'd be glad to hear.


Stations now throw debris, smoke and even start on fire before exploding

Lastly today, I want to mention that I've posted about our Custom Input Manager here. It allows you to swap key bindings in code or through UI at runtime. Check it out and let us know what you think. It's basically what we are using for Convicted Galaxy atm.

Cheers!  Coffee
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« Reply #35 on: January 11, 2017, 09:46:44 AM »

Yet another update! We've removed some (about 1/3) of the physics asteroids but added rings or asteroid particles above and below the game play plane. We've seen increased performance and it looks and feels much more dangerous while going through an asteroid belt. We should be pushing an update to the beta soon with all the updates. Then I think we are going to target variation of skyboxes and the look/feel of solar systems.


View from near the outside of a solar system


Zooming through an asteroid belt toward the sun

Cheers!  Coffee
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« Reply #36 on: January 18, 2017, 09:48:23 AM »

Continuing to improve the feel of the game, we have introduced a few updated visuals.

1. A new, lighter, skybox. It's a bit of a pain to make skyboxes, but we will have a plethora of them for various solar systems. Kevin recently finished a lighter one than we had before. He also added nearby star spots in the direction of discoverable solar systems.


New skybox with distant stars glowing.

2. PCG planet visualization. Based on the composition of the planet, the materials are altered. Our end goal is to make it so no two planets are identical. That being said, there are limitations and we want there to be some consistency between similar planets. We've also added a handful of new planet types.


A desert and gas planet with visuals being driven by their composition.

3. Materials rework. A1, A2, A3, A4, B1, B2, ... are gone! We now have 4 tentative categories with 4 tentative elements. Each planet also has a defined probabilty of containing such materials.
Bases - Silicon, Carbon, Oxygen, Germanium
Metals - Iron, Aluminium, Tungsten, Nickel
Reactives - Calcium, Sulfur, Magnesium, Potassium
Inerts - Helium, Neon, Krypton, Nitrogen


The new orbiting planet UI and materials.

4. Orbiting planet UI. It is quite often important to know what the details of the planet you are currently at. We've added a overlay UI on to the planet that you are currently orbiting. It contains planet info and a contextual build menu for a station and satellites.


Another look at the planet UI and materials.

Oh, and Larry Chupacabra did a Let's Play. I think he is going to do another one once we have our next update pushed out, possibly with an interview style audio recording over the top. Smiley




Larry's Let's Play.

Cheers  Coffee
« Last Edit: January 19, 2017, 10:51:28 AM by Mind Grown » Logged

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« Reply #37 on: January 30, 2017, 02:45:01 PM »


Even the smartest missile can get itself stuck in a rut.

Alright, we are coming close to the end of our Kickstarter (only 3 days left). We are really hoping that a swarm of backers come to spread our broken wings, but it really isn't looking like we are going to get Kickstarted Sad

Either way, we have put up a pre-release demo version on our Steam Store page for everyone to try while we decide on what to do next. We really want to keep moving forward with the game, but bills need to get paid quickly...

Along with the demo, we have released version 0.2.4, and here are the release notes.

Cheers!  Coffee
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« Reply #38 on: February 09, 2017, 04:53:09 PM »

We are now officially on Steam Early Access. Initially we were not fond of taking this route, but a lot of support came in from people who enjoyed the game and follow a lot of Early Access titles. Quite a few people let us know that as long as we continue to be transparent and push out regular updates, they feel there is a good chance that Convicted Galaxy will pick up speed.

So, here we are. We will continue to update on a regular basis, and hopefully we will have more time to post dev logs. Our v0.3.0 (Early Access) build had a decent amount of new content. New audio, more mission logs and unlockables... We hope this initial version will allow a baseline to begin a lot more fixes and additions.
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« Reply #39 on: March 14, 2017, 09:56:09 AM »

Holy heck! It has been a long time since I wrote a devlog. Shrug

We have been super busy getting things ironed out so that we can continue to develop, and developing as we do that. Here are just a few things that are going on:
  • We have gone through a few iterations on the Early Access build and are now on v0.3.3.
  • Our next update should include some fairly large changes relating to stations and satellites. (How they build, how they upgrade, how they look, etc.)
  • We have been slacking on our streaming since the Kickstarter, but hopefully we can start doing that again soon (Darn DSL isn't helping us)  Cry
  • And a new found addiction to Arma3 isn't helping anything either  Roll Eyes

As we move forward, any feedback is much appreciated whether it be about our game or our public presence (website, steam, a site we are not on that we should be, etc.) I'll leave you with a new YT video from a small indie game streamer Peppage that was posted yesterday.





 Coffee
« Last Edit: March 14, 2017, 10:01:14 AM by Mind Grown » Logged

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