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posts dated from: october 2015

Change Places!

Change Places!
Well for the past week I've been working on getting Super Sky Sisters to a more finished state, but I've also been trying to figure out all the details of packing up all my stuff and moving to Denver, Colorado.

My time in the sunny desert of Tempe, Arizona is coming to an end. It's gonna be super tough to say goodbye to everything and everyone in the place I've called home for the past 6 years of my life. I originally moved out to the desert to join my teammates to work on Snapshot (a one year project that quickly became a three year project, whoops.) The other team members moved away, but I ended up staying in Phoenix since I loved it so much. Phoenix has a small, but active game developer scene that I enjoyed being a part of during my time here, and I even took up helping lead the local IGDA chapter here. I'm gonna miss this place a lot!

I'm officially making the move to Colorado on November 1st, so unfortunately that means that working on stuff this week, next week, and probably still after that is going to be a gigantic pain in the butt. I actually haven't had a proper home or place to work in about 2 months since it was almost nonstop traveling during the summer, and over the past month I've been waiting on figuring out if I was in fact moving to a new city or not. I'm currently writing this blog post from outside a coffee shop in Tempe as I haven't even set up my desktop computer in weeks. Surprisingly I've been doing okay without my desktop set up, but I am missing having a multi-monitor set up.

What's this all mean?! Well I don't know, I'm going to still be trying to make games, work on Otter, and update my blog a few times a week, but I am expecting that to slow down while I'm on the move... we'll see how this goes!

Doodle Post

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Dev Log: Online Ranking

Dev Log: Online Ranking
Whoops I dozed off on my blog for a few days there. I've been working away at Super Sky Sisters trying to add enough stuff to call it a finished, proper game. The next step with that is adding a simple online ranking system!

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Right now the way it works is your computer will have a unique id associated with it and you will see how you match up against other high scores from all the other players. Right now in the screenshot above the online scores are all completely random so the graph looks a little nonsensical, but I imagine when the game is actually released and played over time what you'll end up seeing is more of a bell curve instead.

I opted to do this kind of ranking system to try to just tell players generally how they're doing. If you're not in the top 100 scores in the world you'll end up seeing a percentage value instead of a rank. That percentage value is the number of players you're currently ahead of. You also need to reach a certain minimum score (yet to be determined) to post to the ranking system at all.

The computer id thing does mean that if you switch what computer you're playing on you will not keep your ranking. If the game ends up on a system like Steam then I can probably use the steam id of the player, but honestly using a unique id related to the computer is the easiest solution for the player. The player doesn't have to do anything in order to start submitting their time, and everything just happens magically. I still might make a way to transfer your id to another computer though, maybe!

Things are going well even in the midst of life chaos! I had some more ideas to add to boss battles so I might tackle that next.

Doodle Post

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Dev Log: Sky Sisters Progression

Dev Log: Sky Sisters Progression
Okay so I'm taking a moment to step out of crazy box physics land to go back to polish some things up on Super Sky Sisters. It's been awhile since I've posted about it but it's that weird two player co-op game that I made at a game jam a billion years ago and decided to finish it which took way longer than I thought it would because I'm dumb.

I'm adding some kind of progression system onto it (which I refuse to call a metagame because it's not a metagame stop calling it a metagame already.) I want to make it clear that I'm being a total sell out because I hate progression systems in most games, but it seems like a lot of people want it and a lot of feedback I've received suggests it might be a good idea to add. So here it is.

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These are sort of like achievements in the game and represent different challenges. Some include clearing a certain game difficulty or defeating a boss enemy, or scoring a certain amount of points in a single session. These will be used to unlock the special abilities in the game, and the harder difficulty levels.

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This is probably just another elaborate way to procrastinate on finishing the player animations which I should've finished like 6 months ago but hey what are you gonna do! I should probably release this game soon ha haaaa.

Doodle Post

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