Continued from Part 2.

July

I started out July working on Otter, but late in June I started to run into some walls that were slowing my progress. I got to the point in which I needed to figure out collision detection, and even though I had a lot of resources at my disposal I just couldn't make a dent in my task of implementing a bunch of collision types. Circles, rectangles, tile maps, lines, and points... I just couldn't figure out the math behind it for the longest time, or the best way to implement all the functionality for detecting overlapping colliders.

This was pretty frustrating, and I felt like I couldn't work on anything else until I solved these issues and finished the collision detection code. The result was that basically for the entire month of July I got close to nothing done when it came to Otter. I tried to focus on some other minor tasks which I was slowly able to complete, but I was starting to feel depressed about the whole thing which feeds into the cycle of not being able to work on stuff due to depression which makes me feel even more depressed.

I also started this month by making my hair blue though, and that was pretty cool.

July also marks the yearly trip to Las Vegas for EVO which was a lot of fun, but right after the trip I got incredibly sick for a couple days. That totally put me out of commission as far as game development work goes for about a week. Also I got big into Street Fighter 4 again after Evo and played it alot until my trip to PAX in August. Once I travel any sort of gaming obsession I have goes out the window, and then I feel too rusty to pick it back up again.

My special bonus feature footage from Indie Game: The Movie also finally came out on Steam that month, making me into a famous movie star.

This month had a lot of fun moments, but overall it felt like a pretty big bummer. I wasn't working on stuff as much as I wanted to be, and I also had some issues with anxiety and depression which makes working with my brain pretty difficult. It's tough to focus on game development tasks when some of my brain cycles are being spent on anxiety and all that kinda crap, but maybe next month will be better!

August

The core issues that were starting to cause anxiety and depression actually started up in May if I recall correctly. I was having some minor stomach issues which lead to some run away anxiety. It's one of those things where I get a pain in my stomach that doesn't go away for a long time, and then I start to obsess over it, and eventually I've convinced myself that I'm dying of some horrible disease, which makes everything worse until I can somehow break the cycle.

So actually in May and June is when I first started to feel anxious, and then finally in July is when it started to actually cripple my ability to work on things.

But that was then, and this is August. My productivity on Otter slowly started to increase as I was able to make some breakthroughs with the stupid collision code that I was struggling with so much.

I also somehow became a global Twitch emoticon this month as well. If you type DogFace into Twitch you'll see my face pop up. Why? Well, it's a long story involving me, FrankerZ, and Steam emoticons. I go over it in this blog post. This was a pretty weird experience, and it still is strange seeing my face pop up in Twitch chats every once in awhile.

I ended up doing a little web work as well this month as I whipped up a site for Gravity Ghost. I still do web work every once in a awhile, but it's starting to feel more and more foreign to me as I focus so much of my time on game development.

The very end of August was my trip out to Seattle for PAX which was a blast. Afterwards I headed up to Indie House Vancouver (actually located in Richmond) which brings me into September.

September

My productivity stated to return to me this month as I was surrounded by some amazingly inspiring and talented people during my travels in the northwest. I was working on an example game for Otter that I was planning on using as the big example project that would hopefully explain how to use the various features of the engine.

Most of this month was pretty low key. After my return home to the desert I was able to keep working on Otter and the example game, and I was making a lot of progress.

My trip to PAX also inspired me to try out Spelunky again. I watched a couple of live streams of people playing the game, and also went to the Spelunky Video Armageddon panel at PAX in which Colin Northway played all the way through and beat Hell in front of a live audience. It was awesome to see, and I wanted to get that good at the game too.

I played Spelunky before on XBLA but never really got into it. I defeated Olmec once or twice, but didn't really have any interest in Hell. Eventually I got frustrated at the randomness of the game determining how far I could make it, and stopped playing until after I got back from PAX. I picked up the PC version and went all in.

I started using a lot of techniques that I learned from watching live streams and videos from expert players. Then after one and a half days of playing, I was able to secure my first victory over King Yama.

I still play a little Spelunky, but I've been traveling since mid-December so I haven't played it quite awhile.

So far this has been quite the year. My engine was shaping up to be pretty promising and usable, which I didn't really expect when I started out. Only three months to go now!

Stay tuned for Part 4!

Continued from Part 1.

April

As soon as I got back from my trip to Game Developers Conference I was starting to feel like I wasn't really working on the right things. I was working on my Heartbeat game from the Global Game Jam earlier in the year, but the more I looked at it, the more I realized that I didn't care enough about it to work on it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with the game, and my patience for using Flash as a game development platform was wearing thin.

I eventually decided to just scrap the whole project. It's still sitting in my Flash Projects folder somewhere, but I won't be going back to it at all at this point. The most frustrating thing that I was running into was that even with just a 320 x 240 game window with a couple of layers of pixel art I could not get the game to run at a stable 60fps. It would continuously drop to 30fps and I couldn't figure out any way to fix it. I had a lot of performance issues with Offspring Fling and I was lucky that I was able to solve most of them, but even still the game runs like garbage on older CPUs and this frustrates me and any of my players that are running older PCs.

I made the decision to jump ship from Flash and begin to explore the ocean of game development platforms and programming languages. I started out by using Haxe along with HaxePunk which was a port of Flashpunk to Haxe. Haxe was very similar to using ActionScript so I felt comfortable in it. I was also able to continue with using FlashDevelop as my IDE.

My early experiments with HaxePunk were great, but the problem I eventually ran into was that HaxePunk was just starting out and was nowhere close to being usable to make a full game with. HaxeFlixel looked promising, but I have no experience with Flixel, and I vastly prefer the style of Flashpunk's architecture, so I had little interest in switching.

During this time I also experimented with Adobe AIR on iOS. I managed to get some stuff running on an iPad 4, but the performance of Flashpunk on the iPad was just completely awful. I tried using a new version of Flashpunk that was never released that used Stage 3d as the core, but even with that the performance was not to my liking. My time spent developing mobile games was very brief, as I quickly realized that I do not like playing games with the touch interface. I also discovered that most of the games available on the app store are just disgusting. Looking at the top selling games in the app store felt very similar to walking through a gross casino in Las Vegas... but I digress!

By the end of this month I made the TIGJam 5 website, another site for my friend's game, and I was feeling pretty lost when it came to making video games.

May

I began May with a blog post that seemed to get a lot of attention from people. I talked through my current state of mind of not knowing where to go next with game development. The response to the blog post was huge and a lot of people reached out with their advice.

I had tried a lot of things, including something called SFML for C++. SFML is a multimedia framework for C++ that provides an easy to use API for graphics, sound, and even networking to some degree. I tried using it in C++ but quickly found that C++ is still not the language for me. Through the comments on my blog though and chatting with some other developers I found that SFML had a C# binding, and that seemed like the most promising road to take.

This is when I officially started working on what would eventually become Otter. I just started with an empty project in Visual Studio, downloaded the latest version of SFML for C#, and started cranking away. I was using most of my knowledge from FlashPunk to construct the engine, and I was learning C# as I went. I was pretty much just flying by the seat of my pants.

June

I spent some of June in San Jose for the wonderful TIGJam 5. It was an amazing time and I spent a lot of time making some progress on Otter, and experimenting with what would be my next game. I also spent a lot of time playing Magic the Gathering.

I believe this was also the month that Steam announced that they would be introducing Trading Cards. I worked like crazy to get some Offspring Fling cards into the system as early as possible, and it ended up paying off with a small spike in sales for me when the cards were released. I was able to get my cards out before a majority of games.

After getting back I was working more on Otter. Nothing too exciting, but little did I know that looming ahead was a few weeks of depression and not being able to get anything done.

Stay tuned for Part 3!

Another year gone by and time seems to be moving faster and faster. 2013 was definitely a different experience for me than my previous 3 or 4 years in the wild world of making video games. I dedicated a lot of this year to leveling myself up as a programmer and an overall developer, but I still feel like I wasn't as productive as I wanted to be. Let's take a look at what happened!

January

I tend to begin every year with the Global Game Jam. It takes place in January and it's the perfect way to burst into the new year with some rapid fire game development. The theme last year was the sound of a heart beat, and I made some sort of metroidvania using that theme. I made a sweet time lapse of the game's development, and some game play afterwards.

February

I started working on my heartbeat game for awhile as I was still using Flashpunk at the time. I was expanding my framework that I had built around Flashpunk while using it to create this game. I was adding all kinds of cool stuff like Bitmap Text, some support for constructing a metroidvania world out of a bunch of level data from Ogmo Editor, and platforming with slopes. It was a lot of fun working on features like the map rendering, and the platforming camera, and all of the different moves that the player could get.

I also released an asset generation tool for AS3 using Python since I was sick of adding every level to the game manually. As far as I know it still works, so you should give it a try if you're using AS3 and FlashDevelop for making games.

This was also the month that I decided to start posting on my blog a lot more. I aimed for 3 posts a week, with most months resulting in 12 to 15 posts of some kind. Since I spent so long in the shadows of working on Snapshot and Offspring Fling, I wanted to try being more open about what I'm doing. I started treating my blog more like a tumblr where I could just post one off short posts, doodles, or just some thoughts about stuff. Amazingly enough I managed to keep this up for the whole year.

I was also working on a little web application for a table top RPG that my friends and I were playing, and I also set the world record for the fastest Any% run of Lyle in Cube Sector!



I was pretty busy this month!

March

This month was a big deadline for me since it was almost a year since I pledged to release 5 games in one year. I had two games left to release before I went off to Game Developers Conference and I managed to release both Namiko and Super Ninja Slash just about a week before flying out to San Francisco. I had also released Snapshot, Offspring Fling, and Jottobots previously.

I also spent a lot of this month still working on my Heartbeat game, and adding more features to my AS3 framework with a nifty NineSlice class for Flashpunk. I actually did a lot of work on this game now that I look back at it... I had some really neat looking menus and stuff!

I ended the month with the Spring Sale on Steam with Offspring Fling being 50% off, and I flew out to San Francisco for a week of insanity with thousands of other game developers. I had a blast at Game Developers Conferecce, and spent a lot of it jamming (or at least attempting to, I was incredibly tired most of the time.)

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Watch me make All the King's Men at lightning speed. 48 hours worth of screenshots compressed into just 4 minutes of footage. I only took one sleep break in the entire course of the 48 hours, so I was pretty loopy by the end of this.

I recommend watching at 1080p if you can!

All the King's Men was created using Otter, my 2d game making framework built in dotnet and SFML 2.1.

Last year before GDC I had a small part in creating a completely custom set for Magic: The Gathering based on the indie game development scene. The full set ended up being 360 cards total, and I'm responsible for about 45 of those cards! I even made it into a couple of cards myself, with Kyle Pulver, Game Jammer, and Rapid Prototyping. My cards were the ones about Source Control, Multimedia Fusion, Lyle in Cube Sector, and a couple of references to Bonesaw, Snapshot, and Offspring Fling.

Update: The indie cube has been taken down. I suggest reading this to find out more.

Here's just a small sample of some of my favorite cards, you can check out the full visual spoiler to see the rest.


And now a card that I hate with all of my being because Edmund used it on me every game and kept stealing my best creatures from my hand:


Blue is so annoying.

You can now own your very own Momma from Offspring Fling thanks to Frank'N'Stitch! They're available right here on Etsy, along with an awesome Offspring Fling scarf. 100% home made!

I've had a lot of requests for plushies over the past year but couldn't really find a good way to make it happen until now. These plushies are also approved for flinging around a puzzle platforming level.