As you may or may not know I live in the desert out in Arizona, and in the summer it can get to be quite hot. Just a few days ago we hit an almost record high of 117F! That's 47.2C for those of you outside of the US. So for the past two weeks I fled the desert and returned to my native land of the east coast.

I spent a lot of time visiting family and friends that I don't get to see often because of living on the opposite side of the country. I did bring my laptop and had the best intentions to try to sit down and do some work while I was on the road stopping from place to place, but it just didn't happen. I decided pretty early on to turn the trip into a proper vacation and not do any work, or think about any work for the entire duration of my trip. That's a pretty big deal for me because I can't really think of the last time I actively tried to not do anything for that long! Overall I think it had a pretty good effect on me.

Now I'm back in the desert where unfortunately it's still 110+ degrees outside for the time being, but that's all the better reason to stay inside and work on games and other stuff. I'm going to try to catch up on posting on my blog, work on some of my projects, and catch up with Otter examples. At the end of the month I have another trip coming up for PAX, so I gotta squeeze in as much time as I can before that.

Now resuming normal operations.

The Steam Summer Sales are upon us again and that means you can grab Offspring Fling for just $3.99 on Steam.

Offspring Fling feels like it was made a lifetime ago. It's already been three years since it came out and I'm not entire sure where all that time went! I've been having a lot of fun working on small projects, and working on Otter but eventually I will have to buckle down and make a REAL GAME again.

Thank you to everyone who has supported my game development career! From through buying my games to just reading my blogosphere webpage. I'm able to keep going and keep making stuff and keep experimenting through your support. Thank you!

Just got back from Game Developers Conference last night! I'll be writing up some sort of thoughts and feels post about it soon, but for now enjoy some matches from the TowerFall Invitational put on by Humble Bundle this year!

Greg Lobanov vs Matt Thorson


Me vs Connor Ullmann


Me vs Frederic Tarabout


The tournament was absolutely incredible this year. We had over 70 entrants in the whole thing all playing 1v1 best out of 3 (and the grand finals were best out of 5.) It was hosted at Folsom Street Foundry which was just an amazing venue to say the least. I really hope this continues and becomes a solidified GDC tradition!

2014 is now totally done. As I mentioned in my posts before this it felt like a pretty weird year overall. Usually at the end of the year I feel like I have some sort of body of work to show for it, but this year felt like I didn't really accomplish much. I mean when I look back at it all I really released as a finished thing was Dan Adelman's site, and Starforger, which was a little game jam game from back in August.

Warning: This post is pretty dang long and has some rambly sections. Proceed at your own risk! (There aren't any pictures.)

The year is coming to a close... it feels like it just started!

October

October started out as a huge month for Otter with the addition of the polygon collider!

Polygon collisions were yet another thing that I never thought I'd be able to figure out, but finally after all these years the separated axis theorem finally made sense to me... or at least it made enough sense for me to code. I don't think I still fully understand the mathematics behind it other than it's kind of like casting a shadow of the polygons and seeing if the shadows overlap.

Another big thing that was alluding me was a basic skeleton system for entities in Otter.

Something I want to do in Stratoforce is make enemies out of individual pieces that all can be interacted with. Sure there are tools like Spine and Spriter but I couldn't really figure out how to wrangle those tools into giving me a bunch of individual objects instead of just one sprite with some collider data.

I continued on with making enemies that can form a snake, and then a snake made out of entity skeletons.

I'm pretty excited about how I can use this to make huge stuff in my games, but I still have to clean up the API a little bit to have it make more sense. I tried to use it at a game jam, but it turned out a little more complicated than I thought so I need some more practice and refinement with it.

Meanwhile in shader town I was able to get a color grading shader implemented with Otter and that's yet another thing that has been alluding me for a long time.

This is something I've wanted to get working ever since I started trying to use shaders with Otter, and finally I understood what the secret ingredient was: a 3d texture! I never understood how it worked until one day I sat down and everything clicked.

October was pretty awesome in terms of unlocking a lot of things in my brain that I never thought I'd understand or be able to do.

November

November is the beginning of the holiday season which also tends to be bad for productivity for me, but maybe it didn't turn out as bad as I thought it was going to.

First I released a more cleaned up version of my palette index shader for all of the GLSL people of the world to use.

Then came along another Phoenix 48 hour game jam that was cosponsored by Xamarin. This was an awesome game jam and I made a cool (yet to be released) two player co-op game.

I also recorded my screen for the whole thing and released a time lapse of the entire production of the game during the 48 hours:



I also spent some time this month on some productivity booster tools. I noticed some points of friction during the game jam, so I wanted to address those. One of my biggest slow downs is getting assets imported into the game, so I wrote a tool that will parse a directory of files and generate a .cs file with references to all of the files.

I wrote one of these before for Actionscript, so this one is a C# version of that. I also got it hooked into Visual Studio as a keyboard shortcut so whenever I change any files in my assets folder I just hit the keyboard shortcut and my class is immediately updated and now my auto complete knows all the paths to all of my assets.

Along with that I pushed some big updates to Otter and started on some cool stuff like bitmap font support and started to change some of the core logic with how entities are added to scenes and how components are added to entities.

Later that month I started on a clean version of my game jam game from earlier. I wanted to rewrite the game from scratch because the game jam code became really terrible and I also wanted to use this as an opportunity to try a very intense component based game architecture on a small project.

I also started working on a board game with some folks in Phoenix and that's been pretty fun so far.

December

I started December with a big breakthrough with Photoshop animations!


It turns out using the video timeline with a video group of layers is the best thing ever because it actually makes sense and it lets you use onion skinning.

I spent a lot of time working on more board game stuff with my friends in Phoenix.

We're trying to make a truly engaging co-op only game inspired by some co-op games that we've tried over the past year. So many games are all about co-op play until you get to a certain point where it's then one player vs. the rest of the players, or co-op play but there are individual scores leading to players making decisions that will screw other players over.

I'm sure I'll have more to say when the game has progressed further as right now it's still in the early prototype and play test stages.

The rest of December was pretty weird because I got kinda trapped in a pit of crazy anxiety. Currently I'm sitting in my mom's house in upstate New York which means I had to travel and fly to get here. For whatever reason this particular trip gave me terrible anxiety. For about two weeks leading up to the flight I was feeling pretty awful and riddled with depression and panic attacks. Yahoo.

I think I might be reaching the point where I'll actually have to do something about my mental issues, but first I'll see how the rest of my time in New York goes, and how my flight back to Phoenix ends up being. I really tend to bounce back and forth with being totally okay with flying to feeling overwhelmed with panic about it.

So now I'm wrapping up 2014 by writing these blog posts about 2014.

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It seems like these three months were pretty productive! October and November especially which I'm surprised about November. October seemed to be an incredibly huge month for me as I tackled so many things that I thought I would never be able to figure out. Maybe I have been making progress after all! The final next part will be more of my thoughts on the year now that the recap is totally finished. Stay tuned!

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!