Spooktober 15th – Vlogs!

So I realise I’ve not been posting much this month (at least, not compared to before) but I have been recording a vlog every day. So if you want to watch me slowly transform from a “yay I can do this!” Sophie into an “Oooooooooh noooooooooooo!” Sophie, this playlist is here for you.

> linky <

I’ve not uploaded all the vlogs yet but the playlist does extend beyond my last Halloween game post (the 7th I think?). I’ll upload more when… well, tbh I’ll do it when I’m procrastinating and trying to avoid proper spooky game work 😛

anyway you’ve earned a gif I guess, here’s a gif 🙂

wow that’s a 43mb gif… my shaders are not gif friendly I guess D:

Monthly Build 2017/10 – Phone Phantom!

I’m busy working on my Halloween Game this month but since that will be  released this month (hopefully!), I put up a poll for what game I should share instead and the winner was Phone Phantom.

There are windows and mac builds attached. No linux version sorry – making that would require updating the project and making new builds which I just don’t have time for on top of finishing my Halloween game. If you want it tho, just ask and I’ll add it to my November to-do list 🙂

BOXGAME – it’s 8 years old!?

OK so I’m writing this before I actually launch my patreon but I guess post-mortems like this might be something I’ll write from time to time, plus if I post it now then when I do launch new patrons will actually have something “exclusive” to check out 🙂

If you don’t know what BOXGAME is,  I recommend just heading over to the game’s itch.io page and downloading it (for free <3). The tl;dr premise of the game is “puzzle where the faces of boxes are 2D platforming play areas, and crossing the edges does weird stuff with gravity”.

So basically it’s a puzzle-platformer with a weird gravity gimmick, I’m pretty sure every indie developer has made one lol, but BOXGAME is the one I made (OK, well, one of the ones I made :P).

BOXGAME specifically is important to me for a bunch of reasons, not least being that it’s the very first Unity game I finished, and it kind of set up a lot of how I approached games and what I had access to for… well for years afterward.

In 2009 I dropped out of university, I’d become disillusioned with the idea of games industry work, I was struggling with my “transition”, and though I didn’t understand it yet – my anxiety was starting to take root stronger than ever and I had no idea how to cope with it. My student loan for the year was getting thin and I really needed to prove to myself that I could make “pro quality” games for myself, that I didn’t need some big company to give me permission.

Something I had in no short supply of back then though, was motivation. I was already a veteran of a few game jams by this point and I was always ready to try making something new. It didn’t hurt that I had a brand new toy to play with – Unity had just released for windows that year and I’d put some of my loan towards it (no free Unity version in 2009!) because I’d been wanting it for a while.

I also had a concept for a game I wanted to make – one I had pitched for a team project whilst at university (that the team developed and finished themselves while I was busy avoiding everyone and dropping out) but I wanted to take the concept in my own direction. here’s some sketches and stuff I originally did for the team project if you’re interested – most of this stuff didn’t make it in to BOXGAME but a fair bit made it in to the team’s version I think;

(you know, looking at these now… it’s giving me all sorts of ideas about working on the game again… dangerous!)

Anyway, back then all I needed was motivation and a concept I liked so once I made sure I had the blessing of the team to do my own thing with the concept, I spent 3 weeks deep inside of unity, blender, and the unity3D irc channel and by the end of it I had a game.

Which was a relief.

And what’s more, it was a game people seemed to like! This was a big deal for me, whilst I’d had little novelty stuff kind of blow up on the internet before, this was the first of my games that was really one of MY games. It convinced me (for better or worse) that this “indie game development” thing probably was something I could do.

I was super wrong but I didn’t realise that for quite a while, maybe I still haven’t realised it properly yet because here I am, still at it 😛

That might seem like a sudden negative take on things but whilst I really do have a special place for this game in my heart, it essentially cemented some really bad stuff in me – for years I was *convinced* that a game is only worth making if I am excited enough to make it quickly and in one burst, that it’s only value is in how many people write about it on prominent blogs or video channels. BOXGAME was both a vindication of what I was capable of, but also it cemented a bunch of bad habits that even today I have to consciously fight off whenever I spot myself doing them.

I guess as part of the post-mortem I could talk about the various planned “deluxe” versions of BOXGAME, or the sequels, or go into just how hacky the shaders are because I was just starting out in unity but… tbh mostly it’s just not interesting! Everything I worked on during those three weeks of development is a blur for me, and everything after is just mistakes and wondering why nothing I did could recapture how excited I was to work on the game in the first place. Updating the game occasionally just so it remains playable is about the only remarkable thing I’ve been able to do with it in the past 8 years, and whilst I look at those concepts above and think “might be cool to add new levels with that stuff” or that I might like to make new models or shaders or something… the game as it exists now will probably be all it will ever be.

But that’s OK, I’ve got other games to work on, games that I might not be psyched for all the time, games that I’m not gonna destroy myself to get finished in 3 weeks. 🙂

And even if all those future games suck, I still made this one and it made some folk happy. So, success!