28/04/2016, 03:53
(Teleport: not pictured)
Today’s development stream led us quite a bit further in regards of a certain very important feature! I had been avoiding implementing the teleporting system for a long time, but after getting a bit lost with the design of a new room I decided to instead implement this long-awaited aspect of the game’s structure. Along with this came a smooth-ish transition effect, which might bear a bit too much resemblance to Cave Story(?) Sweet stuff! Next week I’ll concentrate on adding more content to the new area as well as refining the “on-line” minigame.
23/04/2016, 18:27
I finally got around to doing it! The main website is as simplistic as ever and possible even more cluttered than before, but the flash applet is out and replaced with a simple viewer. This has the benefit of there being more space for stuff on the game-specific pages on top of the obvious lack of need to support flash, but I think I’ll have to add categories of some sort, as the actual main page is pretty full of text now.
Doing this reminded in a sad way about how times have changed; it’s cool and all to have a personal website with my own games listed neatly, but the indie gaming culture has definitely moved on from people downloading games from developer’s websites, what with the prevalence of Steam and other such services. I kinda miss those days but totally understand why people prefer the ease and security of Steam over downloading various zip files from some site/forum somewhere.
An interesting side-effect, though, is that these days games that you pay money for probably get more players than freeware games, just by the power of being on a site that specializes in marketing the game and making it easy to obtain it! This is great in the sense that it makes supporting the developers the assumed option, but I really hope something like itch.io becomes also favoured by players of games as a kind of bohemian haven for less standard games.
Whatever. I hope someone checks out my older games using this new site to justify its existence, but it’s fine even if not!!
22/04/2016, 23:09
Happy first birthday of Environmental Station Alpha! To celebrate, the game’s 50% off on Steam & Humble Store for this weekend, and the OST has a 33% discount too!
21/04/2016, 02:57
A lot of time in today’s stream was spent reminiscing the early days of the Klik Skene, but progress was nice nonetheless. The laser traps are now in along with buttons that come in hidden, timed and one-off variations. I also added a new enemy, although I’m a bit afraid that it’s too much like a certain existing enemy. :( Oh well! I’ve been playing Ludum Dare entries on-stream every day when not otherwise busy and will continue to do so later this week as well. Many high-quality entries there this time around!
18/04/2016, 20:04
I really got interested in weird dynamic animation stuff during the Nordic Game Jam last week, so Ludum Dare this weekend was a great excuse to play more with that stuff (although the theme, shapeshift, wasn’t really fitting for what I had in mind). Anyway, here we are again! My entry is called Cavern of Flight and while it barely incorporates the actual theme, I’m very happy with the result because I got to do what I wanted to and the game feels pretty solid despite some hiccups. The coolest thing was that this time around I recorded some random sounds with my Zoom recorder and actually made the soundscape on my own! Lots of fun, that.
After this I feel like it’d be cool to also have rats crawling on the walls, some bats & snails and the spiders rolling other creatures into cocoons. Maybe also little archers hopelessly overwhelmed by the wildlife?
14/04/2016, 03:46
So yeah, Nordic Game Jam was last weekend and because of it I forgot to add a weekly update last week! I was initially slightly afraid that I’d be too busy with things to really enjoy the event, but in the end everything turned out great! It was a lot of fun to hang out with those indie dev friends that I only meet at these kinds of events, and the atmosphere was very relaxed. I even got to have a sauna twice!
The theme of the jam was “Leak”. I almost completely disregarded the theme, and made a tiny game called Sausagebear and Mr. Duck. I had a very strong inspiration of a game with ducks that can be herded and followed that; in the end I didn’t have time to polish things quite as much as I’d have liked, but that’s understandable seeing that I started working on this some 12 hours before the deadline.
GET THE GAME HERE!
My favourite games this year were
1. Jukio’s Stress-reliever.exe. We had a lot of fun during the jam and this was one of the results. Jukio does great stuff. LINK HERE!
2. Doki Doki Densha Sekai. A very dreamlike experience, resembles Yume Nikki although with more meditation and less creepy. At first I wasn’t impressed but the metro mechanic made this really really inspiring! LINK HERE!
Tonight I worked a bit on the new area in ESA 2, as well as implemented some tiny fixes to Snake Game. With the latter I ran pretty quickly to some aesthetical issues that will need to be solved so I didn’t work on it on-stream that much. I’m starting to appreciate the artstyle of ESA 2 more, and these new enemies (+ one not visible in the gif) have a very nice sense of weight to them.
I kind of want to stream again on the weekend, we’ll see if that happens, though.
