The time of procrastinating on this is OVER! This week I finally tackled one of my big remaining tasks for Super Sky Sisters: The intro sequence for the Demon Sister battle! (Mega spoilers, whoops, but hey, you're reading a dev blog so you get to know all the secrets.)

Here's the start of it:

The rest of it I'm going to put behind the "read more" link since these gifs get pretty hefty. For whatever reason my motivation was way up this week! So I was able to knock this out pretty quickly (just two days of time, yeehaw!) I think I gained a lot of spirit from the demo I did last Saturday where people really enjoyed the game.

Anyway to check out the rest of it, hit that read more link already.

Last week during Game Developers Conference I had the chance to defend my crown as TowerFall World Champion. The folks at Showdown, as well as the San Francisco area TowerFall community put together the Indie Olympics which featured a whole bunch of games, but TowerFall was center stage.

The tournament was probably the most legit TowerFall tournament I've ever attended. It was pool play with two players advancing out of each pool, and then top 16 all the way down to one. It was also double elimination which was super cool. The whole event was incredible, and you can watch it all right here, but for now here are my streamed matches:









Good games!

At the start of the new year one of my game development dreams came true! That one game I worked on a billion years ago, Snapshot, was selected to be one of the games showcased in Awesome Games Done Quick!

This was a pretty big deal to me! I love the speed running, the speed running community, and Games Done Quick is like the biggest speed running event ever! This year they raised 1.2 million something dollars for charity, and reached over 200,000 viewers during the event!

But wait, there's more! Not only was Snapshot selected to be a part of the event, but I was also invited to appear live via voice chat to help commentate the speed run! The whole thing was captured on video:



I ended up having to wake up at six o'clock in the morning to catch the run in my timezone, but it was totally worth it. I think we ended up having 100,000 viewers for the Snapshot run, which is absolutely insane, and I'm guessing the largest audience I'll ever "appear" before. I'm happy I didn't puke during the run!

A huge thanks to Games Done Quick, Blechy, and Nightmare for setting it all up. You're all the best!

So originally I had planned to write out this whole thing about what my plans and changes were going to be in 2016, and I really felt like I had a lot of things to say about what I've been up to and how I've been doing mentally and all that kind of stuff, but then somewhere along the way I just kinda lost all the motivation to do that.

When I was writing the 2015 posts at the end of December I felt like I had some really intense feelings to scribble down, but as time went on those feelings kind of faded and I felt like it would be weird to write about them at that point.

Things felt a little derailed by the holidays, friends visiting, and Awesome Games Done Quick going on, so I never felt like I was in the mindset to write out a big heartfelt post about the new year. So now here is my best attempt at some sort of reflection of the past, and/or look at tomorrow...

By this point of the year my life was really weird! I just got back from a bunch of traveling, moved out of the house I had lived in for a long time, and was staying with some friends and their family of three kids and three cats. Now that December is officially over I can finish my year recap.

October

By the time October started I had been staying with some friends for a week or two, I think, so I managed to get into some sort of routine. It's actually all a big blur in my mind as to where I was staying.

I spent some time finishing the last of the Otter examples I had planned out.

I even did a cool example on shaders which are still unbelievable magic to me.

This was the month I actually dove back into working on Super Sky Sisters as I somehow found some motivation again. I think the motivation came in the form of a double shot of espresso mixed with black coffee every morning.

Against everything I stand for I started adding a progression system to the game in the form of unlocking some various items from achieving certain goals.

A lot of people that have played builds of the game have requested some sort of progression system so I caved to their demands. I understand that a progression system does invoke positive feelings for a lot of people because unlocking stuff is fun, but I feel that a lot of games have these systems that shouldn't. I'm still not sure if Sky Sisters falls into the category of benefiting from a progression system.

I also spent some time adding an online ranking system to the game. It's an incredibly simple system, but I'm hoping it will provide players with some sort of ever lasting to improve their scores (it probably wont.)

I had spent a lot of time working on my game projects at a local coffee shop, and time just flew by. Suddenly my girlfriend's job offer came through, and it looked like our lives were about to change significantly once again. She accepted the job, and by the end of the month we would be making our way from Tempe, Arizona to Denver, Colorado.

November

We're already through most of the year and to the first month I spent in Denver. I spent some time getting myself and my games up and running with itch.io.

Wow look at all those cool games! It is really neat to see a bunch of animated gifs of stuff you've worked on (and released!)

Of course being in a new place now has inspired me to start a brand new prototype, but actually it's not so new! It's actually the same prototype I had back in January of 2015, but I started it a new as I had a lot of new ideas and a much clearer vision for it.

The first step of this new prototype was to make a sweet ui system.

I'm actually pretty happy and proud of this system I put together for dragging and dropping things! I do want to get it to a state where it's shareable, but right now I'm still finding the occasional bug and oddity so I don't want it out there quite yet.

Of course I made some more otter examples for cool things like tweening.

Eventually my prototype started looking more like this:

And my view from my desk went from a suburb street in the desert to a cool overlook of some of downtown Denver!

So overall moving has made my motivation go up quite a bit, but I seem to be channeling it into really weird things like not finishing Super Sky Sisters...

December

Work continues on my weird RPG prototype thing! Just grinding along at my task list at this point.

I really dug into the debug console portion of Otter as well as I started using it more and more for the RPG prototype. I went through and redid a bunch of the api for it as well and made use of C# attributes instead of weird debug command registering methods. The more I learn about C# the more changes I end up making to Otter, since Otter pretty much was my "learn C#" project.

The last thing I did was started working on inventory menus for my RPG prototype.

And that pretty much brings us to right now. I didn't end up traveling this holiday because of the recent move, and because I usually really dislike going back to the east coast in the winter... but of course this year would be the year that the east coast has the most amazing December ever recorded with record high temperatures. Well, I guess it's not that great since that means we're just inching closer to becoming Venus.

I mostly spent the week of Christmas and New Years off of programming. I've been spending a lot of time on art stuff, and hanging out with some old and new friends. Now I think I'm ready to start 2016!

We're already halfway done with the year and what a year it's been. The summer is upon us. The birds are signing, the children are playing, the dogs are barking, the ice cream is melting... it's the best time of year except where I was living at the time which was Arizona because the temperature gets up to about 115 and you can't really spend a lot of time outside without dying.

July

This month was dedicated to working on Otter to make it into something more usable for the general public. The main problem with the engine at the time was that I kept updating it and I had totally outdated example videos.

I buckled down and got a simple content management system up and running on the Otter site and started churning out examples. I wanted to focus on getting potential new users up and running with the engine so that I could hopefully expand the community, which would lead to more people using it and contributing to it hopefully!

I also went to EVO this month with a bunch of amazing people and it was the most amount of fun you could possibly fit on a bun.

August

August was a pretty strange month because I spent most of it traveling. The first half of the month was pretty much spent visiting my home land of the Northeast. It's much more pleasant to visit Upstate New York in the summer than the winter... although this year the winter for some reason it's been 60s and 70s, so shout outs to El Nino and global warming, I guess.

Also what made it strange was it was the official end of the indie house in Arizona! After living together for like 5 years or something crazy like that, we decided it was time to go our separate ways. I think this was for the best, as you probably need some change in your life and your surroundings to keep growing as a person, and it felt like things were getting stagnant in the desert. The plans to move out were in motion, and I still had more travel to do, so things were going to get crazy.

I only had a limited amount of time before I had to take to the skies once again though. I did a little bit of reflecting and I had high apply pie in the sky hopes of maybe finishing Otter to a 1.0 version, but I kinda don't think that will ever happen with just me working on it unfortunately.

I did some more examples for Otter for some more complicated stuff like collision detection.

And loading tilemaps

The end of August came, and suddenly I found myself in Seattle for PAX for my yearly summer trip up to the Pacific Northwest.

September

This was a pretty weird month to say the least. It more or less began in Vancouver as I went to visit the indie house up there. So what did I do when I got there? Well I started a brand new prototype, of course!

What else am I going to do surrounded by really cool people working on cool stuff? Working away at grunt work to finish a game feels really crappy when you could be working on a sparkling new project which is probably a big part of my problem!

I became pretty obsessed with moving platforms and getting wall jumping to work with them and all this kind of stuff... so I went down a rabbit hole of despair pretty quickly.

So when I returned to Arizona after my wonderful adventures full of good times, friends, and sushi, I had some reality to face! The indie house was undergoing renovations, and I was in a strange scenario where I didn't know where I was going to live yet...

My girlfriend Corey had applied at a game studio in Denver, Colorado back in July. We still had no idea if she was going to get the job or not because they had been pretty sluggish at keeping us updated on the status of her application. We were basically stuck in limbo because we didn't want to sign a lease on a new place if we were going to be potentially moving to a new state.

When I got back to Arizona I immediately packed up my room at the old indie house, and Corey and I opted to go stay with some friends of ours. They had a spare room in their house, and were kind enough to let us crash there for what ended up being a pretty long time, whoops!

So I found myself in a new situation where all I had access to was my laptop for working on stuff. My desktop was totally packed away, and all I had pretty much was a small table and an air mattress. It was pretty cool actually... I went from having a lot of stuff around me to almost nothing.

I ended up going to a local coffee shop just about every day to work and I noticed it had a pretty strong effect on my motivation and work ethic. I continued to work on my platformer ideas from a coffee shop in Gilbert, Arizona.

I got to the point where everything felt frustrating though because I just ended up aiming too high as usual.

The problem was that I had been exposed to Mario Maker, a game where almost everything interacts with everything, and you can have stuff move and push and carry other things, so I wanted my platforming system to be able to match that... and also have slopes. What is wrong with me!

I ended this month with some more Otter examples.

So by this point life was feeling pretty weird! I had just got back from a bunch of travel and now I'm in a spare bedroom living in a house with my friends and their three little kids, and three cats. Things were pretty chaotic, but it felt like a lot of fun, and a cool change of pace. I still had no idea if I was staying in the desert or moving to Denver at the time, but I had a feeling that we were going to be going to Denver in the near future.