Sorry it's been so quiet around here! I've been in a pretty heads down headphones on kinda zone lately which has been pretty awesome. I've been hammering away at Super Sky Sisters to get to ready to show to people at Game Developers Conference in just over a week! The latest thing I've been tackling is boss battles.

I'm using Otter's Skeleton and Bone components for the construction of big boss monsters to fight. They all abide by the classic video game trope of dying after all the eyes have been destroyed. Right now only one boss is functioning but I want to try to have three different bosses in the game by the time it's done.

There are some cool things I've been discovering along the development of this game that I do want to talk more about at some point soon (especially if I want to hit my blog post quota for the month.) I've been pretty focused on working on the game though and haven't really dedicated any brain power to writing up more detailed posts.

Also I'm still using toggl and I've made pretty good use of Trello for this project as well. As of right now things are going pretty well and I've been really focused these past few weeks!

Sorry about the silence on my blog lately but I've been pretty heads down getting a lot of stuff done on Super Sky Sisters, my two player action co-op game! I'm planning on having the game totally playable by the time the Game Developers Conference rolls around early next month, so I've been pretty focused on it.

Here's what it's been looking like lately:

I'm planning on going into a bit more detail on some things like how I'm rendering particles and the sky background for this game because I have some cool shader stuff going on. Also rendering those big red spiky blocks (or stamps as someone has called them) involves a neat shader trick as well. Back to work!

I'm back on Super Sky Sisters for the time being to try and make a finished game out of it as soon as possible. I'm supposed to be showing it at Indie Amigos on Thursday so hopefully I can get a new build ready! I'm also trying to get it ready for Game Developers Conference.

I'm working on some new assets:

And getting some of the new HUD working:

And of course spending a lot of time making sure the wings look exactly right:



Going to try to jam on it as much as possible today and tomorrow to see if I can have the new version playable for Thursday!

One of the things on my to do list for the past billion years has been a rearrange of my website! You may notice now that you're probably looking at kpulv.com/blog/ instead of plain old kpulv.com. Now when you go to kpulv.com you'll see a big list of all of my video game releases.

The number one reason I did this is because a lot of the traffic that comes to my site is coming from people who are looking for my games first and foremost. I think that it might be a little confusing if the first thing they see is a bunch of blog posts and some kinda odd navigation. Plus I think just putting my games in front of visitors first is just a better idea in general. If they're interested in anything beyond that then they can easily click on the link that goes right here.

All of my modifications should preserve any of the urls for my posts so there won't be any weird broken links. Also when I was coming through some of my old code I fixed a few bugs here and there that I'm sure only I noticed.

Of course this is something I've been putting off because I dreaded breaking everything on my site, but it turned out to be incredibly straight forward and I was able to crank it out in a day. Totally related to this I am still digging toggl quite a bit as it shows me pretty accurately how I'm spending my time on tasks, and sometimes it's crazy to see how little time I spend on things that I thought would take forever. More thoughts on this coming sometime soon. Back to work!

I've been working on a little prototype involving turn based combat. I'm not quite 100% ready to dive back into Stratoforce yet, and I had this idea gnawing at me and I just have to get it out of my system. What exactly is the idea? Well I can't say what it is yet, but if it works out then I'll talk more about it!

Since it is based around turn based combat I had to figure out how exactly that works. I'm so used to programming things that happen all in real time that suddenly going into a turn based game makes absolutely no sense to my brain. At first I had these huge state machines that were incredibly clunky, then I transformed it all into events that can be placed into a magical event queue.

Here's a simple class that can be dropped into Otter that is an event queue manager. It was whipped up very quickly so there might be some slight issues to debug. Check it out:

This is sort of similar to just a very simple behavior tree (see Kodo for more advanced stuff!) Basically what happens is there's a list of events that all need to be run. The current event is run during the Update, and if it's finished then it's removed and now the next one starts up. You can both Add and Push events into the Queue. Push will insert an event at index zero so it will be the next thing to run. To make events just make classes that extend EventQueueEvent!

So I have events like "Damage" "ActorDefeated" "ChooseTarget" "TakeActions" and more. It becomes very easy to manage when things are broken up into separate classes like this! This is actually also giving me ideas on how to run cutscenes in more real time action type games as well. Maybe it will be of some use to you!

When the new year came about I was determined to break my cycle of endless procrastination loops. I find that my productivity is tied to my mood, and my mood is tied to my productivity, so when things are going great in either one of those then it's awesome, but if one of those drops then it's kind of a self reinforcing downward spiral into the abyss. It's not impossible to break out of it, but it is really really difficult.

When I got back from my holiday season travels the very first thing I did on my main workstation computer was completely block reddit. I'm using a website blocking extension for Chrome that will just straight up block the site entirely. Reddit is a big problem for my procrastination. When facing a super hard problem I could either sit down spend a lot of time trying to solve it... or maybe open a browser and type "r" and suddenly an hour has gone by.

I've blocked reddit before, but not as hard. Usually my previous reddit blocks have just been totally mental. I would catch myself starting to type in reddit and then divert to something else, but this time I wanted to try a more all out approach. Also I can still browse it on my phone which I still do sometimes before bed, but having it blocked on my computer I should be doing work on feels different.

In similar fashion I've also limited my Twitter and Facebook time on my computer to one hour every 24 hours. Other sites are included in this time limit but it's mostly the big T and F. I actually don't think Twitter and Facebook are that much of a problem for me, but it is nice to have a hard limit on it per day, and even just having that limit does make me mindful of how much time I'm actually spending on those sites. For limiting time on sites I'm using the Chrome extension StayFocusd. I think I've only ever hit the hour limit once, but there are some times where working on various projects does involve Facebook and Twitter usage.

Blocking and restricting sites on my computer felt weird at first. I thought "well if I do this won't I just immediately find ways around my own restrictions?" As time goes on though the restrictions feel more like a part of my routine. Since I only have an hour of Twitter and Facebook I spend very little time on those sites now, and the time I do spend on there is very focused and brief. I haven't really felt a need to go to reddit lately, and I feel like I might just be better off without it. If I really really want to browse it I can use my phone which is a separate entity from my work computer.

The last thing for now is toggl which I've mentioned before. It's a simple time tracking application which can also be downloaded as a desktop program. I have a couple of different work categories such as game dev, drawing, blog, misc tasks, and I put exercise on there to track that as well. So far it's been working out pretty well and I am interested to see the results of it after a month or so. It is useful to see how much time was actually spent on certain things during the day.

I'm not holding myself to any sort of requirements through the day. Right now I just work on stuff as much as I feel like I can. Between drawing, game dev, and other stuff I'm logging about 4.5 to 5 hours of productivity a day which seems pretty decent.

As a continue to experiment with productivity I'll be sure to talk more about the results. Right now things are going pretty well with a weird prototype. It's getting me back into the groove of coding which I'm hoping will transfer back to my current projects like Super Sky Sisters and Stratoforce.