The Hero and The Hound

So yesterday a game I made was released as part of #meditationgames, which means that today, it is no longer playable!

I am planning on making the game available to patrons later in the year sometime, but the point of the meditations is short new games appearing for just one day, and something else the next day, so I’m not gonna re-release it too soon. Make sure you check the meditations launcher every day this year though, there has been some great stuff so far and each game takes 5 minutes to play tops 🙂

If you want to watch my game played, a couple of people recorded their experience and put it on youtube here and here.

UPDATE: I added some of the source for the game to my itch.io collection of unity systems, so if you want to make a game like this then you can, it’s called “Story Slideshow”

<3 THE REST OF THIS POST WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS! <3

Anyway I’m gonna talk a little bit about the game and its development partly in case anyone is interested, and partly because I love talking about this because honestly this is one of my favourite games I’ve ever made 🙂

So part of the “rules” for meditations is there is a very limited amount of time you’re supposed to spend working on the game, it’s essentially a private game jam where you decide the theme yourself.

Once I had decided what I wanted to express (the feeling I got playing FF7 when first leaving Midgar and I was all “OMFG THERE IS MORE?! I THOUGHT IT WAS ABOUT TO FINISH BUT THERE IS MORRRRRRE! <3<3<3”) I quickly realised my big problem was gonna be: there needs to be a lot of stuff in a game, and then you need to surprise someone with a lot more stuff to give that feeling. So a lot of the design is built around getting a lot done in a tiny space of time.

I ruled out high-resolution art because I know I’d spend longer on it trying to get it to look good enough. I committed to a slightly scruffy style too so I could start drawing and not lose momentum. I planned everything out in a text file and swapped out as many scenes/shots as I could for reusable ones or ones that were only marginally different (so there are a lot of hero/hound shots that are reused or reused with slightly different expressions, or flipped, or fighting a different enemy). I had to cut a whoooooole lot of stuff I had planned for after the king died (I think in the first draft, the king died like 1/4 into the game instead of halfway, and the wizard had sub-bosses to fight and that kind of thing).

Honestly, most of the planning was cutting things so that I could make it all in the time I had. The actual time working on the game itself was about 8 hours total I think, a few hours programming, getting the interface done, and drawing the reusable art (which is the least scruffy art, partly by design since it gets seen the most, and partly because I did it way before the deadline started looming :P)

Anyway, like I said; I’m really happy with how the game came out, and especially happy that it was received well by the people that played it. I’d really like to make more games like this tbh!

Digging!

I was gonna try limiting my patreon updates to once or twice a week but I’m already gonna throw that out. I’ll update whenever I want to! 😀

So I just got digging working, I think I said in my last post that I expected this to be the last big challenge for updating the map display but it turns out it was only a medium-big challenge, only about a day’s worth of work 🙂

It’s obviously a pretty OP ability whatever the mechanics turn out to be, so it’s unlikely to be a default ability you can use without any special items/spells/whatever but I figure it’s a useful thing for testing so it’ll probably be part of this month’s build when I release it (probably at the end of the month, like last time)

Maps! (They don’t love you like I love you!)

So uh, today I’m working on map generation! I’ve got this new “tile style” type system that I’m putting through it’s paces so tiles can be brick/stone or whatever, the generator can specify that and the “DM” picks the appropriate tile pieces and puts them on the board.

Also I’ve got each new generated dungeon floor’s dimensions being random, that threw up a few bugs of course but they’re all fixed now. Next thing I want to do is making a kind of “generation guide” system, so for each floor I can specify what generator to use & what floors it will connect to. From there I can start work on a map generator that is a bit more clever and doesn’t ever spawn monsters on staircase tiles blocking off an entire floor (that happens sometimes rn D:)

Sorry if I’m updating this patreon too often now? but it’s just how I am, I work LOADS in bursts and then have a week or so where I can’t do anything and hide from everyone, so you’ll get a break before long anyway. I hope that’s OK!

Dice!

Update: The filesize is way better! Also there are sound effects, better lighting, I’ve included the custom face settings that I wanted – overall it’s a much better and more interesting build!

Hey, happy holidays! Here’s a thing for you!

Video above describes it, it’s not got everything ready that I wanted ready for you, and some of the more unusual dice haven’t had their collision meshes tested for fairness yet, but it is totally usable!

Sorry about the filesizes though, I wanted the dice to look nice (nice dicey dice nice dice nice haha) so the textures are huge… in future versions I’ll probably try something else since I want this to work on mobile too 🙂

You can download the dice thing from itch if you link your patreon account, click this sentence. (I’d attach it to patreon but… these files are biiiiiig).

Anyway that’s it, I hope you like it, I hope you are having a good solstice time, I love you! <3

Happy New Year!

Hey everyone, happy new year! Just a few notices so that I’ve got them here for you and not just mixed in with my messy twitter feed:

• Have you checked out meditations.games yet? Every day this year it will deliver you a new small game (like, 5 minutes long max) that you can only play on that day. It’s a really cool project!
• December’s monthly build is going to be early this month, sorry it’s late but I was super focused on my dice thing and didn’t want to stop work on it for something else 🙂
• Yes, that means two WIP builds this month
• This year is probably going to be mostly about RPG stuff I think, that means my dice thing, getting back to my tabletop roguelike, and maybe a few other dicey/faux-tabletop things.
• I will work on other stuff too, I’ll keep intermittently doing There Shall Be Lancing stuff as usual, maybe Dusk Child 2 and Dead End too
• I love you <3

That’s it for now, I hope you have a great 2019!