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[stuffedwombat]

Hello!

I am making one game per Month in 2017 and am aiming towards updating this devlog every week.
 
This devlog will hopefully help me to reflect on what I am doing every week.
Feedback is always appreciated!

As we are currently in the 3rd Month of this year, I will now quickly summarise the first two games I made in 2017

January: Pampgun

In this little Game you reload by swiping your finger back and forth accross the keyboard (which creates the totally cool shotgun reloading sound in real life)!
Since you use the keyboard to reload, you move AND shoot using the mouse, which makes it pretty hard to control.

]What I did wrong with Pampgun:
Made Sprites before the game was anywhere close to being done.
Did not think about the difficiult controls when balancing the game.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/688192

February: Selectorium

I abandoned my original project in the last possible moment in february so I made selectorium in a few days.
Selectorium is a very small game, where you have to choose 3 abilities with which you have to beat the level.

]What I did wrong with Selectorium:
Some abilities require you to hold down a button to be used effectively and I never explained that.
The small screen size was really annoying when designing levels. A bigger screen size would have resulted in much more interestening levels.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/689530



And now to this months game:

March - Serf

This project is still in its babyshoes.

You play the mute servant of a crazy king and your only way to communicate is by grabbing and throwing speechbubbels. The King wants to take over the world and sends you out to do all the footwork for him.

The game will be a story driven 2d Platformer. I am making a demo version of it in March, will apply to Stugan with it and then make it into a full game in the Summer.

Here is a gif of the dialogue system (the visual style of the game has changed a lot, but more on that next week):



Oh you can also play all my pre-2017 games for free on newgrounds:
http://stuffedwombat.newgrounds.com/games/


Thanks for reading!

See you next week (when i will actually talk about the developement process of my current game ^^),
josh

[foofter]

I really like the picking up objects and creatures one at the bottom! That is super cute and nice.

[jamesprimate]

the style and creativity with mechanics is pretty impressive considering such a short and, id assume, frantic development schedule!

[chariospirale]

nice !

[Ryan Taylor]

Great mini games so far! Good luck with creating a game each month. Definitely not an easy task. But it looks like you do not lack creativity!

[stuffedwombat]

We are 12 days into March and I have run into some problems.

The "picking up and throwing mechanic" worked fine and I had a lots of fun changing the visual style of the game and adding various objects to interact with.





Sadly, i was stuck on everything but the core mechanic.
I rewrote the story three or four times, cut a lot of features, made 2 small Design Documents and nothing I planned really felt like a whole, coherent game.
The concept has promise and I will defenitely return to this Idea, but again, I felt it would be better to switch projects after 3 days without any results to my work.

Then I had a couple of 0% days, where absolutely nothing happended at all, which is something I will try my hardest from now on to avoid.


The project I am now working on is a turn based rougelike shooter, where Bullets are not affected by the turn based nature of the game.
It is still very early in developement, but I hope to finish the whole thing in the next 7 days, so I can prototype a more experimental game I also really want to make


I guess what I can take away from this week is that I should work on my endurance. I eventually want to make a longer and bigger game, but i will never learn the skills I need for that if I keep switching projects every week.


See you next week, hopefully with a link to the turnbased rougelike game

(also thanks for the kind words, it is much appreciated)

[gantt]

So far each games have its own unique characteristics, really looking forward on this!

[stuffedwombat]

Its the third Sunday of March!

The turn based rouge like (where the bullets you shoot are not affected by the turn based nature of the game) I talked about last week has proven to be an interestening concept, a horrible pitch and not fun at all.

This is how it looked when i realised that I would not be able to make this fun in a few weeks (as usual, i might come back to this later on):



So after another brief period of indecicieveness I just straight up stole an Idea from Daniel Linssen and made a game where your light source is also your ammo.

Below is a gif of the game in its current state:


(this gif is really laggy i am sorry for that)

This is (once more) not the game I will use to apply to stugan.
More on that next week!

[stuffedwombat]

another sunday, another devlog, another new project..

But today it is 100% complete!
 
Yes!

You can play this months game right now!
Woho!

 click here for game: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/690826



It was made in 2-3 days which was 1 day longer than i hoped.
But like it and did not want it to be bad, so I went the extra day.




This leaves me with only 4 days to finish my prototype for Stugan.

(internal screaming)


Follow me on twitter or you will miss all the important stuff i never say!
https://twitter.com/wombatstuff

[foofter]

That pizza animation and the whole game looks great. Impressive for just a few days. It actually feels fresh and new and makes me wanna play it (and I never play top down shooters).

Good luck with Stugan, too!

[Zorg]

What happened to the game with the hand?

[stuffedwombat]

What happened to the game with the hand?

it was almost done, I had about 20 levels and then I realised that it did not feel coherent or good.

So now it is in the "maybe later" drawer

[stuffedwombat]

Another sunday, another short update on my games stuff!

I have applied to Stugan with a very prototypy prototype of Shword Story:





I have started working on my first commercial game, which will be based on February`s Selectorium and currently looks like this:



And will hopefully soon look like this:

[stuffedwombat]

This sunday I do not really have anything to show you

I spend the week prototyping different control schemes for the game you can see above this post.
Yesterday I finally game up with one and this week is dedicated to creating a lot of abilities, enemies and polishing where polish is possible so far!

feel like I am making good progress

(Since the game I am working on right now is not for the one game/month thing, I think I will make a seperate devlog for it. Is that ok?)

(This month I will also FINALLY be able to participate in a ludum dare. I wanted to do that for pretty much exactly one year now, but there was never time. Until now!!)

[SolS]

Great ideas! Love seeing the creativity here

[stuffedwombat]

Ok, i was wrong

Implemented a sword and some dummy enemies to test physic stuff







Aw thanks!
I am not very good at coding or drawing, so I try to be as creative and innovative as possible in my games :

[stuffedwombat]

Another Sunday, another short update on games stuff  have been working on

This months game will actually be made during Ludum Dare, so i am currently focusing completely on my first commercial game (for which I will not make a second thread right now ^^).

Visually the game has gotten much closer to its final form!



After about 7 changes to the core mechanic and much despair when none of these changes felt good enough after a day of playtesting and tweaking, I just came up with a system that allows me to have both puzzle- and rougelike elements in the game, while also staying true to the original prototype and I am very excited to create that tomorrow

I have also started to draw 4 small pixel art mockups per day, here is a gif compilation of that:




See you next week, when I will hopefully have a solid prototype to share with you

[stuffedwombat]

Oh shit its sunday again!

I am currently working on a really cool game (i hope) for ludum Dare, no time to write my weekly update

You can follow the developement of my ludum dare game in this twitter thread though:

https://twitter.com/wombatstuff/status/855598395926491136


have a nice rest of the sunday!

[stuffedwombat]

Oh damm, I forgot to update this devlog last sunday!

Shame on me.


Ok, so my Ludum Dare Game "Therrain" can now be played online!
Maybe leave a vote if you also participated?



https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/therrain-1


Therrain - quick post mortem

I have wanted to make a tetris like game for ages now.
The theme small world was perfect for this.

the majority of developement time was spend reworking the block placement & block physics system.
On day two I completely reworked all the art (and am pretty hapy with how it turned out)

the greatest problem of this little game is that it has no real tutorial to explain that you can double jump.

The End


I also started working on a game about patience, where i will only work on one small thing everyday.
So yesterday I wrote its elevator pitch, tomorrow I wil choose a color palette, the next day i will make some test art, etc.

the game should come out in like 3 months i think

Oh and I am also going to make a gam about pleasuring the coountryside for an australian video game bar

[stuffedwombat]

Heyo!

I have not updated this devlog last month because I did nothing.

Last month I waited for motivation and inspiration to hit me instead of putting in a continous effort.

Wanting to create something really awesome, I discarded every prototype I made for one that I thought would be much better, effectively not getting anything done at all.

I did not learn anything new by failing to deliver, I was just reminded of the importance of constant work and sticking to projects.

Here is to a productive June.



(to avoid failing my "one game a month" thing, I made a shitty game on the 31st of may.
you can look at it here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/694326

I am not sure if I consider my one game a month project a failure now. i will continue to try to make on per month, but maybe I have to do it again in 2018 to really feel like i did it fair and proper.)