Tag Archives: Game Creation

Finally, some art

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Fullscreen capture 3302013 115220 PM.bmp

So, we’ve got a lot of progress on Assault Magister Tactics, including saving and loading the game, starting battles from a hub level, spawning at start locations, and a host of other cool stuff. But we just started on the artwork tonight; we’ve got a prototype character in there now, and she’s adorable. We’re drawing from Final Fantasy Tactics and Sprial Knights, super-deformed characters with big, chibi heads and expressive designs. Hopefully Unity’s new Mechanim will help save a bunch of time for our animations.

Long time, no see

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Okay, so if you remember, I was working on NaNoWriMo last time I posted, making it about 5 months since my last post. Gomen ne.

Voidspiral is working on a new game, called Assault Magister Tactics. It’s combining a lot of our old projects in to one coherent idea. We’re prototyping it right now, and its coming along well. Voidspiral is also publishing commit messages from AMT to twitter, so that’s cool. We’ve also got a kanban board for development progress over here.

I’m also learning C# finally, and I have to say, I’m perfectly comfortable there already. Yes, there are things that are better in C# than Unityscript. Yes it’s more powerful. Yes, it was more intimidating. No, there’s not that much different between C# and Unitscript. All told, I’m happy to add another language to my resume. I haven’t worked in it extensively yet, (aside from about a thousand lines on AMT) but I feel like I can solve any challenge given to me with enough time. Now, if only I had some books on well structured code…

I’m also finally getting around to music theory. I bought The Everything Music Theory Book, and it’s fantastic. So is Hooktheory.com. I’m learning so much from these resources I hardly have time to actually attempt making music. I’ve been doing practices, rhythm sequences, chord sequences, etc. My sheet reading is still very slow, but I’m getting the theory at least. I want to make AMT something I can do completely myself… Thought NGui looks soooooo good. As a designer, and an indie game developer, I want it so hard. I’m really trying to be frugal on this project though, so I haven’t gotten it yet.

I’m considering going freelance at some point, to spend more time on indie game dev and design work that I can enjoy, but that’s probably a long way off.

As for NaNoWriMo, I did win, and I topped over 80,000 words in November 2012. Total, that story is almost 100,000 words. I’m working my way through editing it, but I’m a little afraid that I like the story too much and I’m not being hard enough on it. I’m always picking at the details rather than the structure or events. Well, anyway, that’s still going. Someday I’ll bookstart that thing on Pubslush or something.

One last thing,  I’ve been trying to grapple with setting up Koken and using it for a new portfolio, but I can’t get it running in my test environment, so right now its a no-go.

Still on the table:

  • Oubliette 2 (Stalled at the Kickstarter Video Phase, I’m terrible at recording myself and talking to a camera about my games.)
  • MEK (Stalled at the Kickstarter Video Phase, Same Reason)
  • PixelTails (Stalled on the massive updates thing)

Thats it for now, and I promise to update more frequently. Again.

Construct2 and the widest market

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http://www.scirra.com/construct2

Construct2 is a game engine. I know I go through these things like a hot katana through butter, but this one has a certain benefit: it’s output is HTML5.

What this means is that unlike RenPy or Unity, we could feasibly publish a game to essentially anything that has the internet. That’s a pretty wide market. It also lowers the barrier to entry, so that all a potential user/reader has to do is visit the site. That’s a pretty powerful marketing tool. The more free, the better, the easier to access, the better. It’s all about making it so easy to get into the game that it’d be silly not to. Like World of Warcraft. It’s harder NOT to sign up than it is to actually sign up.

Diagram of Construct2 Visual Novel SysemAt any rate, here’s an interesting chart. I’ve found that there’s not a lot of people doing visual novels on Construct2 but it seems to be able to support the concept after a day’s investigation. So here’s our plan of making it work. It involves some ajax loading and csv funkiness, but ultimately, we’d be able to write games in open office and publish them out into Construct2. Pretty slick. Now I just have to roust my lazy artist self to do some real work.

 

Grid Align Panel Defunct: Use Vertex Snapping Instead

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Sorry, guys. I’m not working in unity enough these days to keep Grid Align Panel up to date. It will become free, somehow, either on the asset store, or available for download here on Arcandio.com.

In my own work, I found the Vertex Snapping feature to be more useful than my own tool. Just by holding down [V] unity changes your handle position to the nearest vertex and snaps to other vertices. It works like a charm with any tiling assets, which was essentially the goal of GAP.

If I ever find a way to fix the issues with GAP saving its data, I may promote it again, but don’t hold your breath.