Sunday, December 27, 2015

Multitasking in Spacejacked


The new set of arenas were designed with the intention to force players to keep an eye on the HQ at all times. Now it truly is about protecting multiple arenas simultaneously.

Friday, December 11, 2015

Monday, December 7, 2015

Another quick update!

The month of December is hell month - because we'll be cramping as much work as possible to bring Spacejacked as close as possible to completion. So far progress has been pretty good - a new set of arenas is up and running, 3 (in-game) days worth of waves have been designed and tested, blaster upgrade system has also been integrated, turret modification system is well on its way to making it into the game, plus, I'm currently working on a boss character. All in all, good progress. With any luck we'll have the entire January just for more polishing and testing.

Monday, November 2, 2015

Sunday, November 1, 2015

Another Musing

Making games is indeed tough, but I've never doubted my decision to embark on this career path. Sure I've had my fair share of worries and occasionally crippling self-doubts, but those are fortunate problems to have.

Having lost a dear friend to cancer has put things into perspective. I'm grateful to be in good health. I'm grateful to not have to worry about student loans - because my parents have the foresight to start saving for my education when I was still a baby (that and scholarship helped). And even though my mum nags at me all the time to find a "proper job", I'm grateful she's not doing much else to stop me. I'm just happy I have a chance to work on fulfilling a childhood dream.

In a few more months, Spacejacked will be completed and launched on Steam. This could change everything for all of us in the team... or not. But it matters not, I'll always be making games one way or another.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Oh yeah, new trailer

I finally got around to finishing the trailer a couple of weeks back. Some day I'll pick up better video editing tools. For now though, movie maker will have to do.


Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Some work-in-progress

We're now working on new arenas for Spacejacked. Here's a peek at some work in progress:


Background design courtesy of Victoria.

More to come! Notice these arenas are significantly shorter than the previous ones - there's a reason for this, and we hope we'll be able to share it soon! Stay tuned.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Crunch time is coming...

... I can feel it in my bones.

In any case, it'll be the final push to finish the game!
Go go go!

Sunday, September 27, 2015

Gasp! Surprise coverage!

It's been real busy (as usual). Most of my time of recent goes into creating levels for Spacejacked's story mode. I've also put together a new trailer, but will be tweaking it a bit more after showing it to Jon, and my brother, who's a film student.

Also, I've been tweaking Death Cabin at my own pace after its release, and the response from the community at GameJolt is really encouraging. Updates from this point on will be a little slow though, given my commitment to Spacejacked.

Interestingly, Death Cabin was featured in a couple of websites:
I've been "sort of" working on a platformer side-project, but to be honest I hardly have much time for it this couple of weeks. I'll show something here once it's more shaped up.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Time to make a platformer!

Here's a sprite for a new side project.

Hopefully I'll get this done by the end of the month.

Monday, September 14, 2015

A quick look back at development of Spacejacked thus far

It has been almost 5 months since Spacejacked got greenlit. During this period of time, we have worked hard on polishing what we have, as well as adding a challenge mode. Most notably, we have also worked on building a structure for the story mode - a mode that is taking a lot longer than we have initially expected (fortunately, it is starting to take shape).

In addition, Spacejacked was featured at PAX Prime 2015 under the Intel Booth (because we won the Best Linux Game award from the Intel Level Up Contest)! Here's a photo proof:

also featured: 1/2 of the Rotten Mage team

We've gotten some pretty good feedback from gamers who came to the booth to try out our game. That should give us the confidence and motivation we need to push on and finish the game by the end of the year.

Notable updates to the game thus far:


  • Colored text in dialogue box - I was away from work for 2 weeks no thanks to reservist training, and I returned to work to see that jon had added in a very nice touch to the game. Color text made the tutorial we currently have a lot easier to read.

  • A couple of new enemies - especially this jellyfish-thing here, its role is major in the story mode.

  • Changes to old enemies - definitely made Hugo so much more menacing

  • Complete revamp to the art and animation of turrets - we also took this chance to practically remove all delays from turret deploying and upgrading. Results - as observed from playtesting sessions, were extremely positive.

  • And did I mention the Challenge Mode? It sure as hell weren't easy building them.


  • Metallius - a special mini-game meant for the story mode. It's still pretty much untested, but we hope we get to keep it.

  • Gamepad support

  • Several other bug fixes, refactoring, and general polish!



Wednesday, September 9, 2015

A lot happened

A lot happened in the past couple of weeks.


  • Went to PAX to exhibit Spacejacked (sort of).
  • Death Cabin got published.
  • Confirmed sale of "You have to jump over the rings".


I'll elaborate a tad later.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Bump.

A video posted by @chinykian on
Ray effect courtesy of the jon.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

Quick update

Okay! Quick fire updates!

  • I've made some new animations for a number of new scientists for Spacejacked.
  • Integrating the scientists into the story mode is a rather tedious process. It's slow, but we're almost there. It's important that we inject personality into the game =)
  • I've posted a new game (YHTJOTR) up for bidding at FGL. It's been a few days and only one sponsor has viewed it - for 30 seconds. That really sucks (I'll be more broke than usual)!
  • YHTJOTR has nearly been ported to android in its entirety, saved for a couple of bugs. Jon has offered to help me with ads integration!
  • I thought I'd do some random doodles for a new side project:

Monday, August 10, 2015

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Scientist rescue missions

Finally! We're moving on to the next crucial task - rescuing scientist in Spacejacked. Seems like a pretty intimidating task, to be honest - especially since we'd need to figure out a way to fit it into our current game flow, which has pretty much been left untouched for ages, saved for the recently implemented day-system.

I'll start by animating some scientists, and before long things should start falling in place.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Musing

Having taken on a more active designing role on Spacejacked over the past several months seems to have taken its toll. Nowadays it feels like I'm in a constant state of worry about the quality of the game when we do finish it. What if people don't find the game fun? What if it doesn't sell? And if people don't like it, how would I answer to the team? Would I still have it in me to work on another project with the team? I feel responsible for people's enjoyment of the game.

Perhaps I'm over-thinking things; perhaps I'm just nervous because we are supposedly in the last major phase of development (putting the story mode together).

I'm glad I've found a way to cope, however. Working on short solo projects during the evenings is a hugely rewarding and liberating experience - I'm free to explore various ideas, and I'm not afraid to fail there.

Cutscene thingy


This is still in need of a few more touches (for one, the HQ screen could display a special notice during the transition).

The entire sequence as shown above is defined in xml, like so:

<hyperspace>
    <CameraMoveAction>hq</CameraMoveAction>
    <StarFieldSpeedUpAction>4</StarFieldSpeedUpAction>
    <CameraShakeAction>0.0025,3.5,false</CameraShakeAction>
    <StarFieldSpeedUpAction>0.25</StarFieldSpeedUpAction>
    <DelayAction>1</DelayAction>
    <CameraReturnAction>null</CameraReturnAction>
</hyperspace>

Friday, July 24, 2015

Cutscene stuff

Working on cutscene system on Spacejacked.
Keeping things as data-driven as possible (I think).
Soon there's be some proper structure to the story mode!

Also, here's a peek at the mini-game in Spacejacked!



Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Mini Update

I've resumed work on the cutscene system for Spacejacked, and has also done up a basic first level of a mini-game in Spacejacked. Will be posting up a gif soon.

Also, here's something I whipped up over the last few days.


Monday, June 29, 2015

Reservist Training is Over

So my reservist training is over, and it'll be back to normal working day in a moment.

I thought I have the energy to do more for Spacejacked, but I guess I really wanted the rest.
Here's what I've done from the spare time I get each night during the period of my reservist training.


  • Integrate publisher's highscore api into Death Cabin - now awaiting payment
  • Wrote a few bug fixes for Spacejacked - bugs that were brought to light during playtesting
  • And the following:

Monday, June 22, 2015

Good morning!

An idea struck me last week during reservist training regarding Spacejacked's single player mode. Maybe I can whip up something simple and show it to the team after my training.

Also I played The Walking Dead Season 2, it was amazing. 3rd Season couldn't come sooner.