BOXGAME – it’s 8 years old!?
Posted: August 20, 2021 Filed under: Patreon Leave a comment »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 đ
If you don’t know what BOXGAME is, Â 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 đ
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. đ
And even if all those future games suck, I still made this one and it made some folk happy. So, success!
Sophie’s Dice
Posted: June 17, 2019 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Hey, so I’ve been working on a dice roller lately and it is launching properly today. You can get it on Steam, itch.io, and the Play Store.
That’s all for now, for more frequent updates check my patreon and/or twitter.
Support me on Patreon!
Posted: December 15, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »I don’t update this blog very much anymore, and that is because most of my updates go on twitter or my Patreon.
If you support me on Patreon you can get access to a few games not on this site or my itch store, also $5+ patrons get a new work-in-progress game build every month.
So please consider supporting me on Patreon <3
Rose & Time – Remastered
Posted: July 11, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »So I recently spent a couple of weeks crunching on something secretively (or at least as secretively as I can manage :P), the result of this work is a new version of Rose&Time, which you can buy here (or if you’re fast enough, in this bundle here).
The main things that have been done are;
- New music by Aeronic, who I worked with on Swift*Stitch
- New character model for Rose
- New physically based materials for everything
- Newer menus from the OUYA version
- New story art
- New environment effects (clouds, rain)
- Different lighting on some levels (dusk, night, dawn)
- New rewind/paradox effect
- Much improved gamepad support
The rest of this post will be mostly how I went about going from this to this in just two weeks, so if you’re not interested in that kind of thing then don’t feel guilty for skipping it đ
So here’s what I used:
- Unity 5
- For it’s new physically based shaders and improved lighting/shadows
- Blender
- For making new 3D models (including high-detail/sculpted models) as well as making tweaks to older models (better UVs, nicer edges, that sort of thing)
- Substance Painter
- For creating all materials/textures, including for baking normal maps from high-detail meshes onto the game meshes
- Clip studio paint (AKA: Manga Studio) with FRENDEN brushes
- For the new story art, and some particle textures
- Colorful
- For new post-processing effects.
- Time
- I used almost every moment I could these past two weeks to get everything done for the deadline, I don’t recommend you use this tool too much for work, it’s exhausting!
So, the first thing I did was open up Unity, change the environment lighting to match the sky, add reflection probes to each level (the effect is subtle because there isn’t much that is very reflective, but it helps place the objects in the scenes), and fix a few issues that came up when upgrading the project to Unity 5, and try using the new standard PBR (Physically Based Rendering) shader on environments – they looked better, but didn’t look too great – but that’s what I was hoping for! I’d recently treated myself to Allegorithmic’s Substance Painter tool and was looking for an excuse to make use of it in my games!
Step 1 in making replacement textures was new high resolution models to use as a base. For this I used blender to make some tiling detail models in 3D which mostly matched the original textures (so I could use them on the same environments and all I’d have to do is swap out the old material for the new one). These were sculpted in blender and baked onto flat planes in Substance Painter
I had to do very little in substance painter to get the environment tiles to look how I wanted, the preset weathered rock material immediately gave the effect I was looking for, for most tiles I didn’t need to make any tweaks at all and just exported the new textures, put them in unity and had nice PBR (though not realistic, because realism is too often boring :P) environments.
I did pretty much the same for the props (spawn points, buttons, crystal, doors) though most needed a little more tweaks to get them just how I wanted, but the really big job was the new Rose model.
First thing I did was do a draw-over of the original rose model, to figure out what details I wanted in the new version, the design stayed pretty much the same though.
(As evidenced by the little doodles on the side, one of the biggest challenges with the new Rose design was just how to tie her scarf, most attempts resulted in failure and in the end I had to just put on a scarf myself and draw my design from that)
So, I made a high-poly model of Rose, a low-poly model for the game, baked the high detail one onto the low detail on in substance painter, made all the materials and applied them and had a brand new 3D Rose. Which fits in one sentence now, but it took several days to do in reality.
If you want to see the new Rose model in your browser, I’ve put it on Sketchfab here.
Once textured, I made a new rig for Rose, and made animations that mostly matched the old ones (I like them :P) – I did have to animate the scarf by hand though, it would have been tricky to use a physics solution for it that would work with the time-rewind mechanic. The result is the scarf movement is a little more subtle/stiff than I’d have liked, but it’s still miles better than it was!
Once I had all the core 3D stuff upgraded, I started work on environment effects. The most notable part of this was wanting dynamic effects like rain and clouds which animated, but also animated in reverse whenever the player rewound time. I tried a few things using unity’s own particle systems to get this to work, ultimately though this either resulted in broken particles or huuuuuuuuge slowdown when simulating minutes of particle animation each frame. In the end I came up with my own particle system which uses a lot of procedural generation techniques, but generating animation instead of space – Much like you can quickly specify a location in a game like minecraft and it can generate the environment around you based on that, I can specify a time with my particle system and it knows where particles should be without having to simulate the entire animation from time zero.
The main upshot of this, is watching clouds and rain animate backwards as you rewind time is cool as heck.
As for the story art, I was pretty rushed to get it finished on time, but I was rushing to finish it for the first version, and the update I made to it after, so it’s probably tradition at this point đ
Because I was lacking time, most all of it is traced over 3D models of rose posed as I want her. The advantage of my passable line work and shading, without having to spend an hour trying to get the proportions and perspective right with every drawing.
I think that’s most of the interesting stuff I’ve done covered, if you’ve got any questions feel free to ask me on twitter or send me an email đ
It’s been a long time since I made a blog post
Posted: January 2, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »You know, it’s been quite a long time since I made a blog post. I wasn’t too sure how to feel about it at first, but then I realised I didn’t like it. This is the very front of my site and it’s not being updated? That doesn’t look cool.
So I thought “I should make a new blog post”, but I didn’t have anything much I wanted to say. So I thought, “Maybe a blog post can be totally pointless.” and it turns out I’m totally fine with that!
If you read this, you wasted your time, but at least my blog has a recent post on it, isn’t that nice!