Nov 10 2011

LEFT CLICK

Man! Skyrim. It’s sitting on my desk, it unlocks shortly… it’s been taunting me all day with its un-installable-ness thanks to Steam, and I ended up reading the manual for want of anything better to do.

Here’s something I found. I love that this can make sense:

Anyway.

You know how sometimes you get super busy and it’s all a bit too much and you actually get less done, ’cause your brain rebels at all the doing-stuff and goes on strike?

No?

Well hey, I get that. Last week was a bit crazy, then I finally got my car back together over the weekend. With that done I drove to the London Indies monthly pub meet on Monday evening, then I drove to Cambridge Indies weekly meetup and monthly pub meet on Tuesday, then I got back here and I slept. Now HERE I AM, mobile and sane, and getting shit done on Cardinal Quest!

Until Skyrim unlocks in 15 minutes. But I digress.

We’re working on CQ Classic still. The buglist is pretty much clean now, especially since jday’s fixed a bunch of nasty inventory bugs with an epic system rewrite, and I’ve been doing some class, monster and weapon balancing (I think Fighter is much more fun now, and Thief is a little more complicated). Watch for an update soon. 🙂

Oct 22 2011

CARDINAL QUEST (MOAR)

Okay, this past week has just flown by. I’ve been working nearly every waking hour on Cardinal Quest, putting in bugfixes, coding new features, optimising the shit out of everything… and when I haven’t been doing that I’ve been hitting things with hammers to try and get my car back together and on the road. BUSY.

In Cardinal Quest news, Ido’s announced Cardinal Quest Deluxe, a total revamp of CQ that’s going to be bigger and better – with new classes, new monsters, new items and a whole ton of cool stuff. If you’ve paid for Cardinal Quest (or pay for it now) you’ll get an upgrade to Deluxe automatically once that’s done, and the full version of Cardinal Quest as it stands now has gone free!

If you haven’t played it yet, there’s now no excuse. It’s all there.

Oct 18 2011

CARDINAL QUEST

Yup! I’m working on this now. It’s a snappy, graphical Roguelike – explore dungeon, get treasure, down potions, cast spells, kill monsters – but without all of the fiddling and inventory management of classics like NetHack, so it’s almost exclusively focused on kicking ass.

Cardinal Quest developer Ido Yehieli‘s hired myself and a couple other awesome guys to work on making this game leaner, faster, stronger and bigger than ever! You can look forward to some nice improvements to it shortly – more spells, lots more items, balancing and so on just for starters – plus iOS and Android versions if that’s your thing.

It’s normally $4.45, but right now it’s on offer and you can get the PC version for anything from $1 up. There’s an online demo here if you’re curious. 🙂

Oct 13 2011

GROUND UP

I’ve got most of the essentials figured out with Fight Back now, so I’m finally getting to move whole new systems across. Stuff like ship physics, weapons and AI. This is my current sandbox:

The white ship’s a player ship, the black ship’s an AI. The pink squares, well, they’ll become bullets in good time. About when I sort the background out, in fact. 😀 As for why they’re pink – as a general principle when you’re doing something placeholder, the more obviously wrong it looks, the better! Hot pink usually serves that purpose perfectly, though maybe pink bullets in a shmup aren’t that strange?

Oct 03 2011

KEEPING WATCH

Having analytics is awesome! Here’s Vigilance’s play graph since it went out on Newgrounds:

It’s really nice to be able to keep track of something after it’s out in the wild. Play count is only half the story though! Here are a few other stats and things:

Average playtime is about 15 minutes
15% of players quit during day 1
18% of remaining players quit during night 1
30% of players completed the game and reached the ending
The most difficult level was night 1, with slightly more deaths per play than every other night. Guess my difficulty curve was off!
The ice rink got over half of all arcade mode plays, probably because of the achievement 😀
And: 20% of people who started the game finished it!

I have no idea if this is good or not but I feel SUPER PROUD. It’s pretty great seeing literally tens of thousands of people enjoying something I’ve made. Vigilance is now the most widely played game I’ve ever made by a factor of ten or so and it’s just going to keep getting new players now ’cause it’s up on the internet forever. That’s the power of Flash!

Oh, there’s a little side project I’ve been gradually adding to over the past few months – a simple Starcraft 2 mod for friendly 1v1s, practice and coaching. I did a little work on it over the weekend and now it’s collecting stats on things like how much time you’ve spent supply blocked in the game and how good you are at spending resources. The stat tracking’s really simple but already I’ve noticed holes in my game from it, so it’s a useful tool. 😀 I think it’ll have to get its own page soon!

Oct 01 2011

ADVENTURES OF BLUE SQUARE

Yup. Here’s my game right now:

All this under-the-hood stuff is hard work. Especially given I don’t really understand a few advanced HaXe features I want to use fully enough yet, like type parameters. Progress is slow but steady! So right now, all I have is Blue Square.

Of course all the old game logic and rendering is still in there, it’s just switched off. Right now I’m effectively building a new game engine inside my game. Everything should hook up OK once it’s done, but plugging it all in now would just get in the way.

I’ve got my memory management (such as it is) and component-based entity system set up now. The next major job is figuring out an event system for keyboard input and such. Hopefully I’ll be able to get on with that next week, though I have a few odd jobs that’ll intrude on the time.

Am I spending too much effort on tech that I might never end up needing? Probably! But it’s interesting and it’s good practice. More updates next week as things start to get pretty again 🙂

Sep 29 2011

REFACTOR (CONT’D)

I clearly don’t do enough of this low-level blank canvas stuff. It’s taking a bit longer than expected to get going, mostly because I can’t seem to get into a groove. Every few minutes I hit some weird new obstacle and have to go off reading about advanced HaXe features or start sketching class diagrams – and then I get bored and browse the INTERNET. That’s not helpful. 😀

I may have to do something drastic like get a laptop for Fun Times and keep my PC for Work Times. I’m really not very good at this “focusing on work” stuff, especially when I tend to keep browsers open and so on.

But anyway! Right now all I care about is just getting something on screen using the new entity system, advance loop and decoupled renderer. Porting all the game logic and everything over to the new setup is going to be a big job, but I can worry about that after I get something working. Onward!

Sep 26 2011

REFACTOR

I’ve released Vigilance, I’ve been sick all weekend, I’ve been repainting a subframe (more on that later)… it’s been pretty hectic!

Well.. mostly, I’ve been ill. But while I was ill Vigilance went up on Newgrounds, got reviewed on JIG (“a side-scrolling beat-em-up fighter with an artsy, ironical soul, where you kick unconscious people on the ground… to save them“) and is basically taking over the Internet. Top stuff.

So… work this week! It’s about half Fight Back and half… car maintenance.

Sep 23 2011

RELEASE

I met my goal for this week. Vigilance is now out in the wild, this time as a sponsored viral Flash game. Best of luck to it!

And, well, that’s all I’ve got. I’ve had a cold for the past few days. It hasn’t been so bad, but late in the evening I’m finding it hard to focus on a computer monitor! So good night for now, enjoy your weekend and I’ll be back on Monday trying to figure out what the heck I do next.

Sep 22 2011

PLAGUE

I’ve been working pretty slowly this week. Maybe I need to disable Internet access while I’m working? It’d probably help… but I’d fall behind on Twitter… o_O

I’m just hitting some minor snags with this Newgrounds build which I’ll hopefully get cleaned up shortly. I’m also coming down with a cold (a pretty minor one so far, at least!). Good thing I didn’t book Eurogamer Expo tickets, eh 😀 I think that means that finishing off Vigilance is about all I’ll achieve this week, work wise, but I reckon I can live with that.

Non-dev aside: I had a play of Sengoku’s demo last night. It’s possibly the least accessible game I’ve seen in years! What I think happened is that I waged war on a minor island clan, and the ensuing loss of honour meant most of my clan lost all respect for me and started voting in some jerk as my successor until I could recover enough honour and marry off my daughters to some of them as bribes.

I still have no idea if the game is incredibly simple or horrifically complex. Either way, it’s a good reminder of how far tutorials and general player education approaches have come and how much they bring to gaming.