Doodle Post
No Comments
posts dated from: june 2016
Dev Log: Demo Night
Whoops I've kinda neglected posting on my blog this month but I think it's because I've been so busy working on stuff! Which is a good thing. Maybe.
This past Saturday night I was invited to demo Super Sky Sisters at a Denver Comic Con "afterparty" type thing. It was a bunch of local Colorado game developers all showing off their stuff and it was fun on a bun.
I set up Super Sky Sisters and this was the first time in awhile that I was having not game developers play it. A lot of my feedback comes from my other game developer friends playing it, and although I get good feedback from them, it's not really the same as having folks who play a lot of games give feedback.
I feel like Super Sky Sisters is actually not that well received among my peers! This usually fills me with doubt as I don't see anyone get hooked on the game when I have other game developers try it out, and I usually feel like I am very careful to notice things like someone saying the game is good and fun and not wanting to play it anymore (which happens a lot.) These doubts were pretty much erased by the demo I had on Saturday though! The second group of people to play the game tried the hardest difficulty right away, and when they got destroyed they went right back in for round 2, and even a round 3. I went up and talked to them and they were SUPER EXCITED about the game and I feel like it was the first time in awhile that this has happened with Sky Sisters.
So things went pretty well! There were a few more groups of players that played the game really well. I was actually pretty impressed with the level of skill I saw going on with the demo. A few teams even made it past the first boss which I've rarely seen in my play tests.
This past Saturday night I was invited to demo Super Sky Sisters at a Denver Comic Con "afterparty" type thing. It was a bunch of local Colorado game developers all showing off their stuff and it was fun on a bun.
I set up Super Sky Sisters and this was the first time in awhile that I was having not game developers play it. A lot of my feedback comes from my other game developer friends playing it, and although I get good feedback from them, it's not really the same as having folks who play a lot of games give feedback.
I feel like Super Sky Sisters is actually not that well received among my peers! This usually fills me with doubt as I don't see anyone get hooked on the game when I have other game developers try it out, and I usually feel like I am very careful to notice things like someone saying the game is good and fun and not wanting to play it anymore (which happens a lot.) These doubts were pretty much erased by the demo I had on Saturday though! The second group of people to play the game tried the hardest difficulty right away, and when they got destroyed they went right back in for round 2, and even a round 3. I went up and talked to them and they were SUPER EXCITED about the game and I feel like it was the first time in awhile that this has happened with Sky Sisters.
So things went pretty well! There were a few more groups of players that played the game really well. I was actually pretty impressed with the level of skill I saw going on with the demo. A few teams even made it past the first boss which I've rarely seen in my play tests.
Dev Log: FNA Primitive Progress
In between Super Sky Sisters tasks I'm chipping away at some basic stuff using FNA. One of the tough things to get out of the way early is drawing primitives so I've spent some time getting that up to par with how Otter does it currently.
Circles and rectangles are in and working with camera movement as well. I also went ahead and put in camera zooming and rotating as well so that it matches the functionality that Otter has currently. Primitive outlines for both rectangles and circles is working too! The tough stuff I have coming up is figuring out the best way to do Tilemaps and transformations of a bunch of sprites all at once... basically Otter allows you to do things like create massive graphics, such as Tilemaps, and then give them their own scale, rotation, origin, color, etc. This doesn't seem as straight forward in FNA as far as I can tell right now, but hopefully I'll stumble across something.
Other than that,I've started messing with some basic collision detection which I plan on reworking a little bit from Otter. I'm trying to make it a little bit more organized this time around now that I have a chance to rework things from almost scratch.
The plan going forward is to start up my next game using this framework, and keep Otter SFML online "as is" and probably clean up some stuff to mark it as version 1.0.
Circles and rectangles are in and working with camera movement as well. I also went ahead and put in camera zooming and rotating as well so that it matches the functionality that Otter has currently. Primitive outlines for both rectangles and circles is working too! The tough stuff I have coming up is figuring out the best way to do Tilemaps and transformations of a bunch of sprites all at once... basically Otter allows you to do things like create massive graphics, such as Tilemaps, and then give them their own scale, rotation, origin, color, etc. This doesn't seem as straight forward in FNA as far as I can tell right now, but hopefully I'll stumble across something.
Other than that,I've started messing with some basic collision detection which I plan on reworking a little bit from Otter. I'm trying to make it a little bit more organized this time around now that I have a chance to rework things from almost scratch.
The plan going forward is to start up my next game using this framework, and keep Otter SFML online "as is" and probably clean up some stuff to mark it as version 1.0.
Dev Log: Early FNA Experiments
While I'm taking a sort of break from Super Sky Sisters I've been messing around with something called FNA which is a recreation of XNA but in an open source style with maximum portability in mind. It differs in Monogame in that it tries to be as close to XNA as it can possibly be and doesn't branch off into its own thing.
Why FNA? I mean, I'm totally not sure. The only thing I can concretely say is that it's been recommended to be from developers that I highly respect. People often say that XNA is dead because it is no longer supported by Microsoft, but there is still a huge community of people making games with XNA and that is driving things like Monogame and FNA to exist. I feel a lot better about using something that seems to be more in the forefront of game development back ends.
One major point of FNA that I like is that it's only a csproj or a bunch of dll files. No need to install project templates or content pipelines or any of that stuff. One of my goals with Otter is to make it as easy as possible to get something up and running without having to install anything if possible, and I believe FNA is the best bet for something like that.
I've made it mostly through the first pass of text rendering, I've managed to get some basic shader stuff working, and now I'm working on getting primitives to show up. These are the three things that I'm most scared of so if I can get them out of the way it may be smooth sailing from there.
Basically when I do start getting serious about my next game I want to be working in something that has the possibility to be ported to other platforms. SFML does have that potential but it is not used very much in the game development community, so less people are familiar with it, and that means when it comes time to port I'm kinda up the creek without a boat.
More on this as it develops! You may even catch me working on this on one of my fancy game dev streams (warning: it's all programming and not super exciting.)
Why FNA? I mean, I'm totally not sure. The only thing I can concretely say is that it's been recommended to be from developers that I highly respect. People often say that XNA is dead because it is no longer supported by Microsoft, but there is still a huge community of people making games with XNA and that is driving things like Monogame and FNA to exist. I feel a lot better about using something that seems to be more in the forefront of game development back ends.
One major point of FNA that I like is that it's only a csproj or a bunch of dll files. No need to install project templates or content pipelines or any of that stuff. One of my goals with Otter is to make it as easy as possible to get something up and running without having to install anything if possible, and I believe FNA is the best bet for something like that.
I've made it mostly through the first pass of text rendering, I've managed to get some basic shader stuff working, and now I'm working on getting primitives to show up. These are the three things that I'm most scared of so if I can get them out of the way it may be smooth sailing from there.
Basically when I do start getting serious about my next game I want to be working in something that has the possibility to be ported to other platforms. SFML does have that potential but it is not used very much in the game development community, so less people are familiar with it, and that means when it comes time to port I'm kinda up the creek without a boat.
More on this as it develops! You may even catch me working on this on one of my fancy game dev streams (warning: it's all programming and not super exciting.)
