Hey it's another recap post to see if I actually did anything this year, yeehaw! I think I did some stuff, but it's never enough!

April

In the magical land of Super Sky Sisters I thought it would be an amazing idea to make some sort of graphing system for the end of each round that is played. I remember this being pretty fun to work on, but I have no idea if it was worth it. Then again, I never have any idea if anything is worth it!

Look at how cool that looks though!

More work went into the menus:

And a help screen:

May

It looks like this month I started to run out of steam after working on a bunch of menu stuff for what felt like forever. I think this was the point where I realized all my work on the menus and UI stuff was totally eclipsing the amount of work I had done on the game, and that probably did a number on my motivation.

I was doodling a lot this month.

And I also did a presentation at the Phoenix IGDA about making explosions and that was pretty fun.

This was when Sky Sisters began to feel like a weight. I became so close to being finished with it but I just felt like it wasn't there. I had to do the player animations, and I still, cannot do it. Whenever I try I just end up making garbage art that I'm never happy with, and I still feel like the game is just not there... if a game is just "okay" then it might as well be just total crap, right? Nobody will play an "okay" game when there are so many amazing games out there.

Whoa okay don't want to get carried away on a rant just yet. I'll save that for another post. Let's just get to the next month...

June

Okay so let's procrastinate on this game by adding more useless junk to it. I don't know. I worked on making the graph at the end of a Sky Sisters round super optimized so it wouldn't take a long time to load for long rounds.

I then buckled down and tried to animate some of the enemies for Super Sky Sisters and well it went okay I guess.

I ended up redoing that animation later because dang it is so bad.

I also began my existential crisis about the future of my game engine that's still happening today. Was it a good idea to even make this engine? I guess I've had a lot of fun with it... and people are using it... but is it really good enough to ship anything with? I don't think I have enough technical background to push it much further, and it probably needs a lot more work to be totally sound... I don't know! Another rant I'll save for later I guess.

I did this animation for Sky Sisters that just looks way better than everything else in the game, whoops.

I guess by now I was feeling better about Sky Sisters with some animations getting done, but as usual I'm pretty sure I was a horrible mess of stress and anxiety as I just tried to push forward on everything. Neat.

This is something I've been doing year after year as long as I can remember (like 2 years I think) so I might as well keep up the tradition. It's time to go over 2015 and figure out how much of a mess it was! It's going to be a wonderful trip down memory lane three months at a time...

January

To start things off for 2015 I signed up for toggl which is a neat time tracking thing. I only use the free version and I've been tracking things in broad categories, but I think this turned out to be a pretty good idea because I can finally see how much time I'm spending on various things throughout the day, week, month, and year.

This month was also apparently when I first prototyped the game idea I'm currently working on now! So I've already been working on this game for about a year... I don't know how I feel about that. Time goes so fast and I hate it.

Toward the end of the month I worked on a tool to use Google Spreadsheets to sync data with my games. I ended up making an external tool for Visual Studio that can end up parsing a google spreadsheet and turning it into a .cs file full of data. A lot of people seem weirded out by this but I guess when you're working solo having all of your assets embedded into the code with autocomplete and intellisense options is really handy.

I also was able to finish a new splash page for my website which features my game first and my blog second. I felt like a lot of people were probably coming to my site to find my games so I wanted to put those first and foremost.

February

February was heavily spent on the new version of Super Sky Sisters which I have... uh... still failed to release. I also worked a bunch on Otter and pushed a lot of neat updates.

(What's great about writing this post is that I'm going back and looking at what I posted and I'm totally rediscovering what I was doing that month.)

I also dove into more shader stuff for Sky Sisters as I worked on the background sky for the game. What's funny now is that I don't even know if this will end up being the final background for when the game actually does come out someday.

Not a whole lot else other than more Super Sky Sisters work going on for February, which in retrospect seems really nice. Focusing on one thing for a month feels pretty good usually!

March

Some part of March was spent at Game Developers Conference, and if I recall correctly I got super duper sick this year. Recovering from traveling and getting sick took a little bit longer than usual, but I did get back into it and continued work on making some cool boss monsters for Sky Sisters.

More work went into the menus and making them feel all neat and stuff with a fancy transition. Having a cool transition that isn't just a fade out and fade back can really add a lot of personality to a game!

Another whole month spent on one game? What a miracle. Toward the end of the month I was laying out the rest of the menu and hud stuff, like stats and hud options and everything a real video game needs.

Things were looking pretty good at the start of the year and I was doing a lot of work on Sky Sisters! But what will happen next? Will I keep up this pace or will I be side tracked down a dark path into oblivion? Find out in the next episode.

I think things are finally settling down in good ole Denver, Colorado. I probably should update the little paragraph about me on the right. I have my desktop PC all set up and going again with my ridiculous four monitor set up, so I got back to work by diving into itch.io.

You can now find almost all of my downloadable game titles available on kpulv.itch.io! A lot of the games there also have the option of tossing a few bucks my way in exchange for a zip file, but all of my free games are still available for free.

Itch.io seems like a really great platform and I feel really inspired whenever I visit. It feels a lot of like an underground scene of video games which is a pretty stark contrast with booting up Steam. Nothing against games on Steam, but I don't really think the big games on the platform really do anything for me anymore... but that's a blog post for the future (if I feel like diving into my taste in games, oh boy.)

I'm getting back online and back to work on my contract work, as well as Super Sky Sisters and one or two of my other prototype ideas.

It's been a pretty crazy week for me! Last Sunday I packed up my car and started off on the trip to Denver from Phoenix. Stopped in Santa Fe for the night and ended up in Denver the next day. I stayed with some friends for a couple of days, and through some weird stroke of luck and good fortune found a place to live the day after I got here.

So hopefully pretty soon I will have some internet hooked up, but for now I'm sitting in Roostercat in Denver with my laptop typing this up. I'm really anxious to get back into a schedule of working on my projects.

I'm also going to be on the lookout for Denver game dev meet ups and so far CiGDA seems like the best bet.

Until I get back into the groove I probably wont be posting too much here but I still want (or need) to make my post quota for the month. Hopefully by Monday things will be back on schedule and I can get back to work.

After my time in the four days of sickness and chaos known as PAX I hopped on a bus with wifi that dropped me off in Canada. I'm chilling out at the indie house of Vancouver for the next few days and working on some various game related things.

I have way too many game projects spun up already but this week while I'm in Canada I wanted to spend all of my time on a new prototype and work on some things related to Otter. I'm spinning up a little metroidvania style thing.

I still have Super Sky Sisters, the island game, a dice game, and now this all in the mix... but I tend to just work on whatever thing I feel strongest about at any given time, which now happens to be a metroidvania. At least I do plan on sharing the source for the metroidvania system I made for Otter so that anyone else out there using it can work on their own. I am using Ogmo, and so far just one class that links all the levels together based a position usually set by the player entity.

I feel like I just got to Seattle a second ago, but it looks like PAX is already coming to close. Hard to believe that 3 days of insane exhaustion have already gone by. I thought I would just quick list off some games that I checked out that we're super neato:

Viking Squad: Co-op lane based brawler thing that has the procedural levels that all the kids love these days. Had a lot of fun playing with some folks.

Chasm: Procedural metroidvania (my favorite) that is feeling really good these days. I think I played a build one or two years ago that was kinda cool but didn't have a super solid feel yet, but now I think it does. I do wish for a few things with the movement, but I understand that not everyone wants to make a game with movement exploits.

Timespinner: Another metroidvania but this time not procedural. Freeze time as of right now feels like a Super Metroid ice beam that just captures the whole world instead of just enemies. Cool system with weapons that are orbs that float around the player.

Futuregrind: Kind of like a Trials game but with a crazy future bike that grinds of rails built with my favorite colors. Interesting and expressive controls and movement. Trying to get a high score on the tracks leads to some pretty interesting scenarios once you master the techniques. Really good feel, these guys know what they're doing.

Shovel Knight Plague Knight DLC: I liked Shovel Knight a lot and the new Plague Knight DLC really changes how the game is played entirely. Plague Knight's movement options are really interesting. Combining double jumps, bomb jumps, and hovering from tossing bombs leads to really expressive possibilities.

Shantae: The new one is looking really really nice and has a good mix of 3d world and 2d sprites and animation. This kind of look is really hard to pull off but I think they're doing a good job. They're using Spine to do sort of frame by frame but also transforming animations which look really smooth.

Freedom Planet: This game is totally insane to me because it was made in Multimedia Fusion (Clickteam Fusion) and I have no idea how it can possibly work. I'm saying it's a Sonic the Hedgehog like and it has the full platforming engine of a really good 2d Sonic game. There's three characters to play from, and it has awesome stages and art. It's just a good solid game. I actually bought it awhile ago, but haven't played it that much yet, but seeing at PAX leads me to believe I should get to it pretty soon.

The King's Bird: Never heard of this game until playing it at PAX but boy was it great. Momentum based platformer. I'm sold already. Very fluid controls and just all around excellent game feel. Has a cool flying mechanic and so far just the two demo levels are pretty fun, so I'm interested in seeing more.

I've played many many more games but at the time of writing this post I can't think of them all! Everything in the Indie Mega Booth and the Indie Mini Booth are worth checking out so go through those lists! Now to just survive the final day of PAX.