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2016: I Guess Part II

2016: I Guess Part II

April


Looking back at this I'm actually pretty impressed with the pace of my work on Super Sky Sisters. The game went from having just a little bit of content to having a boatload more in just a few short months. I spent some time coming up with a whole new secret quest in the game involving unlocking seven mysterious runes that appear under different conditions.

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And of course unlocking all of these runes brings you to a super cool and tough boss fight.

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Of course my Pathfinder campaign kept rolling forward and we made it to the second season of our story. A lot of stuff happened that I'm trying to keep track of in a journal but it's actually pretty dang difficult. Ryn continued to evolve, and one of his past lives came into the story more.

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On top of all that the Super Meat Boy site ended up dying in a horrible server catastrophe, so I was tasked with coming up with a new one for the modern age. Team Meat decided to forego the blog style of their old site and just opt for a more promotional page for Super Meat Boy.

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Back in the world of Super Sky Sisters another thing I added was an idea of an item that appears in the game that boosts your sister's power. I wanted to add things that made it so both players can be actively contributing in some way especially when both players just can't shoot things.

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I also dipped into making some cool shader effects for bigger enemy attacks.

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And as always I kept up with my doodles.

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May


At this point in the year I was pretty solidly into working on Super Sky Sisters and maintaining my development stream on Twitch. Next up on my list of new features was damage numbers from enemies and other objects in the game.

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This month I also took my first look into pivoting to XNA or probably FNA for my future game projects. I'd been using and maintaining Otter, my game making framework, which is based on SFML for the past few years, and some frustrations were piling up from using it. Of course there's always the possibility that I'm suffering from the grass is always greener syndrome. I didn't end up getting that serious about XNA yet since I didn't want to get totally side tracked.

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In the wild world of Pathfinder I ended up making some new art for Ryn for the third season of the campaign. I ended up using this artwork for a makeshift pawn for our battle grid.

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It's actually really tough to find a figurine for a Samsaran Oracle… who would've thought? Samsarans basically make up 0.001% of the population in our campaign, so Ryn's a pretty rare sight.

I finished out the month by publishing Otter on Nuget, although I'm not sure if I like this option in retrospect. I much prefer people have the source code in front of them and are able to compile it themselves in debug or release mode when necessary as the nuget version only gives you the release built dll file.

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June


Summer was in full swing in Denver and I was actually spending a lot of time outside believe it or not. I was trying to experience the first summer in years where I wasn't living in a desert that gets to be 120F.

I ducked back into some FNA experiments for the first part of this month. I knew going into FNA that the two most difficult things are going to be text rendering, and primitive rendering. I dove right into those first.

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It's pretty basic, but it was working!

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This month Comicon was in town, and the local game development community of Denver held a special event showing off local games. I got to show Sky Sisters for the first time in forever to a crowd of real people that could play co-op.

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The game showed a lot better than it previously had. I think a lot of the updates I gave it over the past few months really made a big difference. Two brothers played the game and did really well, and they were talking about strategies and how to get the highest score, and listening to them talk about it so excitedly almost made me cry.

Speaking of Sky Sisters, I worked on more of the polish stuff involved with the secret hidden quest you can do.

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I also addressed one major piece of feedback which was dividing the game up into more defined "chunks" where after a boss you can choose to continue playing or to end your session doubling your score. The game is primarily a score attack so it's a way of making a bet after each boss.

Of course there were some more doodles.

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