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Offspring Fling 50% Off!

Offspring Fling 50% Off!
Before I head off to GDC, you should all know that Offspring Fling is currently available on Steam for 50% off! The sale only lasts for this week, so if you've been waiting to get your hands on Offspring Fling then now is your chance for the low low price of $3.99!

Now I'm about to get on a train that will take me across the desert and eventually to the Moscone center. See you at GDC!
yay! offspring fling steam
Posted March 21st 2013 4:26 PM (Games)
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Namiko Now Available

Namiko Now Available
Hot off the heels of just releasing Super Ninja Slash, I'm releasing another game into the public's hands. Originally available as a bonus game for the Indie Royale bundle back in December, Namiko is a relatively simple wave defense type game that can be played on OSX or Windows. (You can find the downloads on this page.)

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When it was originally created, Namiko scored me 1st place at a local game jam held here in Phoenix at the University of Advancing Technology. The goal of the game is to defend your palace against hordes of attacking humanoid enemies that have three different powers. As the protagonist Namiko, you can scan these enemies and absorb their powers to make them your own. The game is about figuring out each enemy's weakness, and maximizing your chances of successfully defending by choosing the right weapon at the right time. I think the theme of the game jam was "adaptation."

Since the jam version I put a few more days work into it and just tried to generally polish up the experience. On a side note, releasing this game into the public officially makes this my 5th release between GDC 2012 and GDC 2013! I'll post more about that later though.

Have fun!
namiko yay! game jam
Posted March 20th 2013 7:04 AM (Games)
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Super Ninja Slash

Super Ninja Slash
Over the summer I went to a local game jam. 48 hours to sit down and try and make a game. The theme of that game jam was "stealth" and Super Ninja Slash is the game that I ended up making.

The game is pretty short because I actually didn't add that much to it after the jam. The original version featured some pretty bad music by myself, but luckily DannyB was able to step in and make a way better track for the game.

Super Ninja Slash also features a couple of leaderboards based on time and enemy kills, so if you're fortunate enough to get through the game's 9 brutal levels you can submit your time and compete with other internet people.

This also marks my 5th and final game release before GDC2013! Thus fulfilling my promise to myself to release 5 games in the span of a year. I'll talk more about that later though. For now just swing on over to Super Ninja Slash and give it a whirl!
game jam ninja slash flash
Posted March 18th 2013 2:11 PM (Games)
7 Comments

Screenshot Saturday

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Some progress today on a fancy menu screen. Making a lot of use of my nine slice rendering class. I'll be posting an updated version of that soon!
gamedev
Posted March 9th 2013 9:19 PM (Games)
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Dev Log: Some More Camera Stuff

Dev Log: Some More Camera Stuff
I'm feeling pretty exhausted today so this post will probably be pretty short. Last week I posted about working on some camera stuff for platforming in Flashpunk. I made a few adjustments to the way my camera worked based on some more stuff I observed from Mario World and Yoshi's Island.

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I changed around how some of the horizontal camera stuff works. Now you have some wiggle room before the camera starts to move at all horizontally. The look ahead also works slightly better than before. If you're pushing up against the side of the wiggle-area, the camera will slowly look ahead in the direction you're pushing. If you're moving in that direction, the speed in which it looks ahead increases so that you'll hopefully always be able to see what's coming down the line if you're moving fast.

The vertical movement is more or less the same. The camera only catches up to you when you're on a platform, or if you're pushing the margin of the screen with jumping or falling. The falling margin of the screen is much higher, since usually if you're falling you want to see a little bit downward. One thing I did change was the camera's natural target point in the y direction. Now if the camera thinks you're moving upward a lot, it will look above the player somewhat. If you're moving down though, it will look directly at the player again. Looking somewhat above the player ends up looking nice in most platformers because locking on in the center usually means showing 50% of the screen as solid ground with the most basic camera behavior.

I have run into some snags along the way... right now I need to figure out how to handle camera blocking better. Camera blockers are necessary for a game like this to hide secret areas, and I don't want to reveal them until the player actually crosses into the secret area. At the point in which the player crosses the blocker, the camera will then be unlocked and catch up to its target position again. This worked fine up until the point in which I made the player camera more complicated... I might have to do some tinkering to get it working just the way I want, but also in a clean and reusable way.

Okay that's all for now! (PS The Flashpunk website is still down, but once it comes back up all my links to it will work again! Also if you're looking for just the code, check out the Git repository.)
dev log gamedev
Posted March 4th 2013 3:26 PM (Games)
5 Comments

Dev Log: Platforming Camera

Dev Log: Platforming Camera
Chipping away at things in my remake of my Global Game Jam game. Now that I have more than 48 hours to make the game, I've been taking some time to figure out some things that I've been neglecting for the past couple years of making short form game jam games.

In Offspring Fling, there is very little scrolling. I think only one level actually scrolls both horizontally, and vertically. On top of that there are still only a few levels that scroll at all. This means that I didn't really have to worry about a complex camera, I just have the camera follow the player with a little bit of a drag and it works out mostly fine.

For this new game I'm working on, there's a bit more platforming, and almost every level will have scrolling in it, and there will be some big and open rooms... so I want to have a better camera system in general to handle platforming.

What do I mean by this? Take a look at this breakdown of the camera system from Mario World.



This kind of camera system is pretty crazy. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make sure that the camera is showing the player exactly what they need to see. This is definitely one of those things where if you do it right, nobody will notice you're doing anything at all, but it is incredibly difficult to get this kind of stuff right.
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dev log flashpunk gamedev
Posted February 25th 2013 2:13 PM (Games)
5 Comments
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