After a few years of on and off work (to be honest, i was exhausted after working on Rick Henderson) on a small spin-off game to Rick Henderson i can proudly say the work is getting done. The demo of the game will be available for buyers of the Rick Henderson Physical Edition (the edition that comes with a floppy disc) for Switch and PS5 and they will get the access to a special repository on Steam while the game…
While Rick Henderson is happily being ported for Xbox, Playstation and Switch, i decided to make a small spin-off game that will be free for all existing and new Rick Henderson owners. It will be available to buy separately and i have yet to decide on pricing, but it will be somewhere between $0.25 and $0.50. What, am i nuts? Consider it a small experiment, i want to see how much traction and sales can a small and cheap game…
The most important thing, the flesh of the game, are enemy attack waves. In this short log i will show you how they are made. The process is a bit tedious and probably can be automated to a certain amount (which i will probably be introducing to add some random variety) but it serves me well and gives a decent amount of control over what i do. First, i choose what enemies will the wave contain (out of 40 enemies,…
I’ve been postponing this for a long time, but some time near the end of the past year i realized another overhaul is due, this time for optimization purposes. It’s a long and tedious process and can get you into a rabbit hole that can be hard to get out of. My recommendation is not to overoptimize, but do take care of bottlenecks as soon as they appear since they can get you back to square one too late in…
I posted a small video of an enemy from Rick Henderson on Twitter yesterday and it gained a lot of traction so i think it would be interesting to post some stuff on enemy design and how i do it. When i started making Rick Henderson i wanted it to be something unique with easily recognizable enemies defined by their faction, design and modes of attack. With something so ambitious as a one man project that works on more than…
Making the weapon itself First thing we need to do will be making the weapon that will actually be launching those missiles, right? It’s a plain and simple contraption made of two FSM’s i called FiringSystem and FiringTimer. Firing system will handle the missile creation, and FiringTimer will take care of giving the weapon a rate of fire. It’s basically a countdown timer of cooldown between two missile salvos. It’s a really simple setup. Firing System FSM Here’s the graph…
Nobody likes to read about failing (or maybe they do since it’s a great opportunity to learn from others’ mistakes), but it’s a harsh reality in this line of work. The most important thing is to learn something new, and that can be only managed through trying. And when you try, you’ll fail. A lot. A month ago i finally pushed the big, red START CAMPAIGN button on IndieGoGo and hoped for the best. After all, months of preparation were…
I find the value of audio in video games immensely important, on par with graphic representation. It enables you to pull the player into the world you designed and help him immerse in the way you imagined it to exist. I believe implementing sound is usually left as the last thing to do (when you work alone) unless you are making a music-based game, but when my inexperience with implementing audio into a video game is taken into account, there’s…
Needless to say, i made a lot of research on best time and best ways to launch the campaign. Here’s the graph from medium.com on Kickstarter campaigns from 2014. Obviously, i missed the train for December, which is one of the best months for launching the campaign. It makes sense, people spend more money in the holiday season and they’re a bit dry in the following month, which is January, and the worst month for crowdfunding campaigns. I don’t have…
After more than two whole years of toiling, sleepless nights, stiff fingers and dry eyes, i finally reached the point where i’m ready to show something more complete to the world and prepare for the crowdfunding campaign that will help me bring the game to a final release. While Kickstarter clearly enables a wider audience, it is not available in my country so i didn’t have much choice of a platform for crowdfunding – IndieGoGo was basically the only way…