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posts tagged with: gamedev

Dev Log: What's Left?!

Dev Log: What's Left?!
Yes, the procrastination continues on the animations for Super Sky Sisters. I've been diving more into doing general drawing and art stuff lately and spending a lot of time with the ole Manga Studio... but this of course isn't really pushing the game closer to completion. I mean, this is pretty much all I have left:

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The enemy animations task will be expanded for each enemy, but aside from that everything is pretty much straight forward. I am working a little bit on getting music and sound in there but with just placeholder stuff for each. Balancing the game is also proving to be a little difficult as it's really hard to see the effects of each change without playing a bunch of full games.

I'm at the point of the project where I think I'm spending more time playing the game than working on it since a lot of what's left requires complete play session to test. Sometimes I toss around the idea of making a simple AI that will play the game but I feel like that's just going to be opening up a dark dimension of infinite iterations and procrastination.

I think I'm going to have to super buckle down and do some time boxing to finish this out.
sky sisters dev log gamedev
Posted May 30th 2015 4:54 PM (General)
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Quick Explosion Stuff

Quick Explosion Stuff
Last night I had the opportunity to talk about explosions in front of a group of game developers. I ended up doing a live demo of making an explosion effect from scratch. Here's what I ended up with after about 45 minutes:

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Not my best work but not bad for having to come up with something on the fly in front of a bunch of people. I ended up using Photoshop for animations, ShoeBox to spit out sprite sheets, and Otter to implement the effects.

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One of the fun things of the presentation was adding suggestions from the audience which included spawning more explosions from the first explosion. This is why the whole screen briefly fills up with explosions and then calms down again. It uses a quick recursion to make the explosions chill out after a couple of booms.

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I had a lot of fun doing this and I want to turn it into some kind of screen cast or stream. I didn't end up recording it since I didn't want to really complicate the set up at the last minute. Running a live demo is already scary enough.

The full source code is available here. The assets needed are uploaded here. If I do a more full version of this talk I'll be sure to post it here!
gamedev art otter programming
Posted May 28th 2015 2:48 AM (General)
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Dev Log: Procrastination

Dev Log: Procrastination
Super Sky Sisters is almost done, but I'm having a lot of trouble actually bringing it across the finish line.

The very last thing to do on the game is animations and this is something that I struggle a lot with usually. Animation is probably my weakest skill amongst my game development related talents, and I usually save it for the very end of the project if I can help it. Offspring Fling had almost no animations until I was about 95% done with the game... I think the entire game was totally playable start to finish with all of the secret content and everything before I did a single animation on any of the enemies.

Since I'm not that good at animations I usually get very flustered when trying to work on them. I constantly do not produce results that are good enough for my own taste, which leads to me being very discouraged, which leads to me not liking to do animations, which leads to me procrastinating on doing animations even when it's the last thing to do in the project.

I should probably stop making excuses and just do it because that's the only way I'll be able to get this game done! But first.. I think I'll go work on sounds for a little while.
sky sisters dev log gamedev
Posted May 16th 2015 4:14 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Solo Mode Controls

Dev Log: Solo Mode Controls
Super Sky Sisters has a solo mode! But it's not for the faint of heart. It's going to be pretty tough controlling both of the sisters at the same time.

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Yeah, that looks pretty awful, but is probably the one of the easiest ways I can explain the controls before things get crazy. The game wasn't really designed for solo mode so I hope that most people play co-op, but I understand that not everyone has the opportunity to do so and probably wants to just blow up stuff on their own.

It is actually pretty playable in solo mode until you end up crossing player 2 with player 1. Then your brain melts because the sister on the left is controlled with the joystick on the right of your controller and vice versa, but if you can manage to overcome that madness then it should be a pretty fun way to play the game.
sky sisters dev log gamedev
Posted May 5th 2015 4:03 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Boss Stuff

Dev Log: Boss Stuff
Alright so it's been more than a week since I posted last on here due to a combination of many reasons. Around this time last week I got pretty sick and I think it was some kind of food poisoning thing, and I felt the effects of that for a couple of days. Also for a few days I just felt pretty out of it and I still feel like I can't draw anything lately so doodle posts have decreased rapidly. I also got caught up in organizing all my financial stuff from 2014 and that took a little while and I'm not exactly going to dev blog about that...

So I'm back in the saddle for now working on the third boss for Super Sky Sisters. This is actually the first boss you face in the game now since it feels like the easiest to fight against (at least to me!)

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The snake boss guy just cruises around the sky while casually trying to kill you. This boss at first doesn't directly aim at the players, so it's a little bit easier to dodge at first, however once the eyes open then you have to watch out as at that point it's actively trying to kill the orb.

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Of course there's also a crazy explosion for when this boss dies that can be viewed here. The animated gif for this was 22 megabytes soooo viewing it as a webm on imgur is a better bet than embedding it into this post.
sky sisters dev log gamedev
Posted April 8th 2015 1:11 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Stats Stuff

Dev Log: Stats Stuff
Why does it feel like making menus and interface stuff for a game takes three times the amount of work to actually make the game itself? I'm trying to churn through these menus and stuff as fast as I can, and I got some ideas for how to even make more work for myself... but for now here's the stats screen for Sky Sisters.

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Pretty simple compared to what I originally wanted, but I realized that not every single little thing needs to be tracked. For example there was a lot more stats per enemy, but then as I played the game I realized that you're only interacting with enemies only a small portion of the time, so I reduced it down to just how many times each player has killed an enemy.

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Some stats can be displayed for each player by holding down tab or a shoulder button on the controllers while on the stats screen. This may not actually matter, but I thought it would be a neat thing to have (and that's how things pile up on my to do list under neat things to have and I spend all my time trying to get all of them in.)

Okay only two more menu screens to go, one of them is pretty straight forward and the other is complicated as hell so we'll see where I end up with that next week!
dev log gamedev sky sisters
Posted March 31st 2015 12:42 PM (General)
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