I moved to a new URL! Check it out!

posts tagged with: gamedev

Dev Log: Star Pads

Dev Log: Star Pads
One of the issues I'm trying to solve in Super Sky Sisters right now is keeping both players engaged. After some playtesting and feedback some players end up in scenarios where one player becomes the "dominant" player and the other just follows that player's lead. This can be somewhat effective for playing the game, but the non-dominant player ends up just kinda tailing along and isn't really having that great of a time.

One of the things I'm playing around with is the idea of having these "star pad" type things that appear on the map every 30 seconds. When one angel is in the star pad, the other angel will get a big boost of power. This has two effects that I'm hoping will shine through.

Image


The first one is that in the situation where one player can't get a good shot on an enemy or a boss, that player can now try to position themselves on a star pad to give the other player a big boost in weapon power. I'm hoping this will give the non-shooting player an option to not feel like they're doing nothing.

The second is that it gives the players another reason to move and to end up in positions they wouldn't otherwise approach. I believe the game plays really well when the players are actually going for points, but a lot of players wont do that their first few times playing. Most players are just interested in survival for the first few times they play.

Probably more thoughts and changes regarding this soon!
dev log gamedev sky sisters
Posted April 27th 2016 10:57 AM (General)
No Comments

Dev Log: Shield Effects

Dev Log: Shield Effects
Chipping away at some of the new work I've created for myself with Super Sky Sisters. So far it's been going pretty well! I'm trying to get the new boss's look and feel to a certain level of quality before pushing into the actual fight too much. Here's some of the effects for their shield!

Image


And regaining the shield

Image


The basic idea is that you'll have to use both sisters to take down their shield and then you can go crazy on their orb. After dealing a set amount of damage their shield will turn back on and the fight will most likely be separated into different phases based on how many times their shield was brought down.
sky sisters dev log gamedev art
Posted April 19th 2016 11:20 AM (General)
5 Comments

Dev Log: Runes n More

Dev Log: Runes n More
Warning! This is now mega spoilers for Super Sky Sisters if you ever want to play it without knowing the most secret of secrets.

The latest developments on Sky Sisters have been working on the super secrets that will be in the game! The basic idea of it is that the players can activate these secret rune things that trigger based on different game play events. The events are things like taking no damage for a certain amount of time, beating all the bosses, getting all the power ups, and all that kinda stuff. Whenever one of these events is triggered a game event appears that is unlocking one of the runes.

This is all still pretty work in progress stuff!

Image


When the players complete the unlock sequence they add the rune to their collection.

Image


What happens when they get all of them?! Well it's going to be a big secret boss fight. I'll be working on that next week, and then cleaning up all the effects and art for all of this nonsense... and then I think the game will actually be content complete except for audio. Yeah!
dev log gamedev sky sisters
Posted April 7th 2016 7:04 PM (General)
No Comments

Asset Class Generator Updates

Asset Class Generator Updates
Over the last couple of weeks I've been thinking a lot about the idea of packing game assets into a single file for my Otter projects. Back when I was using Flash, and Game Maker, a compiled game ended up only being one main file. I always liked how simple the game would appear to be to a player. Just a zip file with an exe! There's no way you could mess that up.

In the wild world of programming with C# usually all of my assets end up being in a folder alongside the exe. This allows players to go through and view any asset the game could possibly load, and even modify those assets if they so choose. While this can be pretty cool, it also makes it tough to keep secrets.

Now I know the whole idea of "no matter how much effort you put into trying to hide stuff in your game people can still decompile it and hack it and see everything." Yeah, that is totally true, but I feel like that is only usually about 1% of all players of a game, and if I can put in just a little effort to hide secrets from most players I think it's worth it.

So with all of this in mind I made some updates to both my Asset Class Generator, and Otter. The Asset Class Generator can now pack assets together as bytes, and Otter has a static Files class that can load in assets that were packed by the generator. None of the files are encrypted or anything, but if you wanted to do something like that yourself it wouldn't be too difficult.

You can download the latest build of the Asset Class Generator from my open repository kpulvtools. Check out the details on how to use it here.

So far with tests in Super Sky Sisters this method works pretty well, and instead of a sprawling mess of folders and assets I can now just include a simple "data.pak" file along with the exe and dll files and off it goes. Now if only I could get rid of these pesky dll files somehow!
tools gamedev
Posted April 5th 2016 2:16 PM (General)
No Comments

Dev Log: Super Sky Sisters Secrets

Dev Log: Super Sky Sisters Secrets
This post probably contains spoilers of Super Sky Sisters...! But if you're following my updates or my dev stream then you probably know everything already by now anyway.

Last week on the dev stream a discussion started of having a boss fight that is made up of multiple, individual pieces. As the game plays right now there are three bosses that are all big creatures made up of multiple parts. The idea proposed was a boss where the parts are separate and can move and attack on their own.

This started to mix with an idea I heard while at GDC which was some sort of 4 player versus mode where there are two teams of two. Each team has an orb and has to take down the other team's orb. Eventually this boss idea ended up on a boss battle with some sort of rival characters for the angels.

Image


So now there's sort of this secret boss fight with two demon sisters and an orb of their own. This idea right now to me feels like the thing that has been missing in Super Sky Sisters. I think once I get this boss fight working, and I tie it into the game, the game will finally feel "whole" to me. Also it gave me some ideas for a basic story of the game as well, which I now think I'm going to approach with some simple illustration cut scenes with some brief text.

Now I think this is the official last thing I'm going to be adding to the game. I've pushed the game pretty far in the past two months and I'm pretty happy with my progress. I think this final secret mission type thing is what the game needs to feel complete. Thanks to everyone in the twitch chat for the brainstorming help!
dev log sky sisters gamedev
Posted March 28th 2016 5:40 PM (General)
No Comments

GDC Aftermath

GDC Aftermath
Another Game Developers Conference has come and gone. I guess this was my 9th GDC I've attended, so I guess next year will be kind of a big deal... I should do a quick recap of the week while it's still fresh in my mind. I'll spare you the big details and just try to do a broad sweep over the week, and maybe if there's anything specific I want to unravel I can do that in another blog post.

Also all the pictures in this post are from Matthew Wegner and the GDC Photo Stream!

Things started off a little crappy because of the weather. Saturday and Sunday were pretty rainy and cloudy days respectively. Walking through San Francisco during a giant mess of a St. Patricks day parade while it's raining is not super fun, and it's even worse when you're carrying all your stuff trying to find where you're staying.

The weekend was spent hanging out with all sorts of cool people from around the world. Sunday night we busted out some Magic booster packs and did a quick draft tournament. My Red White Allies deck managed to scrape out two victories in my pod which was pretty neat. We also ate a lot of sushi right off the bat which is one of the main reasons I go to GDC I think.
Read More
good times gamedev gdc
Posted March 22nd 2016 5:04 PM (General)
3 Comments
« newer posts
older posts »