I decided to actually take a break from some Sky Sisters stuff this week just like I told myself I would! I spent some time messing around with a web project that I've been meaning to try out. I'm working on building a Pathfinder character sheet that just runs off HTML and Javascript (and some other stuff to save and load the data.)

I dug into a framework called Milligram which has been super handy in regards to getting a decent looking UI up and running quickly. Web development still feels super weird to me as it's combining like 6 different technologies into a single thing. Combining HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL feels like a giant mess but somehow it all comes together.

With PAX coming up I finally got around to throwing together a quick website for Sky Sisters. It is nothing close to anything fancy, but it will have to do for now!

Along with the website you can see that I've finally made some sort of logo for the game. I tried a bunch of different designs with halos and wings and the angels themselves but after all of those attempts I settled on just having a simple text logo with a bubbly cloud looking style. Also I think the font I used for "Super" is the only font in the universe that can be used for writing "Super."

Okay now for real I am finishing getting ready for PAX...

Recently the Super Meat Boy website servers totally crashed and took everything down. Basically everything was lost except for any local back up copies of anything, and I wasn't exactly keeping a local copy of the site's mysql database on my local machine. With the old site gone there was an opportunity to make a new site, so here it is!

I made use of all the fancy new CSS tricks that all the kids are using these days. The website adjusts itself when it's scaled up and down in the window. Different stuff happens on mobile. It uses the Upheaval font (the font used in the game) with fancy weird CSS tricks instead of images made of text. There's animations on stuff that also just uses weird CSS tricks. There's even a video background for the main header, whoa!! I can't get over how much stuff CSS can actually do now and mostly all browsers support it! (Well I don't care about internet explorer or safari so hopefully they're cool.)

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!

The recap train keeps movin'!

July

July was a pretty busy month for me outside of the world of game development. It started with the annual trip to EVO to watch the world championships of fighting games (although a lot of tournaments seem to be popping up lately calling themselves the world championship of fighting games.)

Spending some time in Las Vegas is usually a terrible idea, but EVO makes it somewhat tolerable, and seeing a bunch of cool indie game developer friends makes it very tolerable. I think I played a solid 5 hours of Street Fighter IV with my training partner Adam in our suite.

I did manage to get some work done as I tried to tackle an overworld map for Stratoforce.

And I worked on getting an enemy HUD up and running.

This is also the month when I broke my relatively brand new Xbox 360 controller with the fancy d-pad. I ended up using that as an excuse to take the controller and customize it with a bunch of cool parts from the internet.

Toward the end of the month I took a trip back to my home town in upstate New York to visit my friends and family from the area. Traveling is always pretty exhausting for me and I don't really get a lot of work done when I'm spending every night in a different place and I don't really have a super solid work station, or even desk set up.

August

August I was back in the desert and able to work more on some various projects including Dan Adelman's website.

I finished the site sometime in August and it launched at the same time Dan officially announced he was no longer with Nintendo. He made some pretty big waves in the press which was pretty cool. I ended up using tumblr as the content management system for the site and that turned out to be a great decision as it makes things like hosting and maintaining it really easy, but the workflow of actually getting the theme hooked into tumblr is pretty annoying.

This month I became really interested in behavior trees and their potential application in the games I was working on, so I spent a lot of time working on behavior tree stuff which was a lot of fun. I ended up making a couple of short demos, but so far I don't know if I'm super convinced that behavior trees are great in action games like mine.

I also did a 48 hour game jam in Phoenix and made a cool game!

I got to use my recently acquired shader knowledge to make a cool looking game boyish game.

At the very end of the month I ventured off into Seattle to start my adventures at PAX Prime.

September

This month started out in the pacific northwest. I went to PAX Prime sort of on a whim since I didn't really have anything to show. I was mainly going just to meet up with people and have fun as a regular ole PAX attendee. I ended up showing some of the stuff I was working on to people with some videos, but I kept quiet for most of the trip.

I also got to start this trip off with a brand new smart phone! If you didn't know, I've been using a dumb phone up until this point. I got a Galaxy S5 right before my trip, and I learned the true power of having the internet in the palm of my hand when traveling anywhere.

After PAX wrapped up I hopped on a bus up to Vancouver and stayed at Indie House for about a week. There I ate sushi and coffee crisps and played Smash every day and night and it was the best week of my life I'd say. I did get some minor work done on wrapping up my game jam game from last month, and managed to release it on the Dreamcast's birthday.

When I returned home to the desert I got back to work on some features for Otter. I did a bunch of bug fixes and clean up and also updated the platformer movement component to allow one way platforms.

This month I was also trying out working out of an office with my friends from Team Colorblind. It was pretty cool, but I fell off the wagon of working out of the office after our next trip which was back to Seattle for an amazing weekend wedding of my friends Tommy and Shannon.

After I got back to the desert my sleep schedule ended up getting flipped up turned upside down and there went my hopes of working out of an office for awhile. I spent the rest of the month trying to get back into the groove of working since my summer of travel was finally done.

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Both August and July were filled with a lot of trips. Traveling is usually pretty fun when I'm in the moment of traveling, but a lot of times I feel like traveling really slows down my work which is really annoying. I also have a lot of anxiety when it comes to traveling and the build up of leaving and going somewhere can drive me pretty crazy. I guess a lot of it is that I don't like flying...

Overall I had a lot of fun over the summer, but I still feel like I didn't get enough done! Or I didn't get as much done as I could have... but maybe I'm being too hard on myself. Who knows! Next up is Part IV!

Let's continue the recap of a pretty strange feeling year for me!

April

Hot of the heels of Game Developers Conference I jumped back into work on Otter and Stratoforce. I got some more basic art stuff done, and finally tackled the topic of 2d path finding. Path finding is something that always felt like it was too complicated for me to figure out, but thanks to some tutorials around the internet and help from some great friends I was able to get something basic working.

I still don't totally understand how it works, and if I had to come up with a path finding solution that isn't detailed in an internet tutorial then I'm pretty sure I'd be screwed. I still haven't really figured out how to make it more efficient, and I'm pretty sure I have to figure out a better way to implement it in my game... argh.

I spent a lot of time doodling this month, and probably spent too much time overall doodling during the year. Oops.

May

Mainly just working on Stratoforce some more this month and got some of the menus up and running.

This month I also spent some time doing some pretty hardcore experiments with rendering in Otter. I was obsessed with the idea of trying to get sprite batching working with everything that is renderable in Otter. A lot of engines or frameworks support batched rendering out of the gate, but unfortunately SFML does not meaning that I have to come up with my own solution.

I ended up hitting a wall that I didn't understand how to pass. I got some basic sprite batching working, but ultimately it seemed like a waste of time because building the batches takes the same amount of time as just rendering everything with a crapload of draw calls.

Without sprite batching a lot of sprites are sent to the GPU when they're ready to go which results in a lot of draw calls. I assumed that this was bad because a lot of engines use sprite batching to reduce the number of draw calls. However when I got a system up and running in Otter to handle automatic sprite batching what I found is that instead of the rendering being slow from a lot of draw calls, the rendering ends up being slow because it has to construct the batch of sprites on the CPU to send to the GPU.

So I felt like I wasted a lot of time here and that was crappy, but it was still fun to try and set up the sprite batching system.

June

June was the month of shaders and web design. A lot of time was spent finally buckling down and learning a thing or two about GLSL.

A lot of what I'm focusing on is post processing shaders for 2d games. Shaders seem to have a near infinite amount of applications which actually makes it pretty difficult to learn them since a lot of tutorials out there on the internet cover stuff that I'm not even going to come close to using. Whenever I got anything up and running I tried to share the source code with the hopes that maybe someday a google search to my blog will help someone with similar goals out.

After some experimentation I ended up getting a cool shockwave effect set up in Stratoforce.

On the web design side of things this month I also started on a project that would ultimately end up being Dan Adelman's site. I had a lot of fun diving back into the web design world and seeing that pretty much everything is completely different. Responsive design is the big game changer, and making everything on the site mobile friendly. Pretty intimidating stuff, but luckily I was able to find a lot of helpful guides and frameworks to move me along.

I also spent way too much time doodling probably.

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Hmmm... yeah it seems like although progress was being made, it wasn't being made fast enough! Path finding and shaders were two big things that have eluded me for a long time, so getting those somewhat under control in my brain was a huge accomplishment, but I'm still not really satisfied. Getting back into web design for a quick project was fun, but I think I also used that as a distraction because I didn't want to work on my game all that much.

Part III is coming up!