Devlog: Fates and Constellations #10

Recently added a new mechanic. Don't touch the red line(s)!

Devlog: Fates and Constellations #9

Creating the decorations in each level has become a repetitive task, so we looked into speeding up the process by first generating a bunch of sprites in "random" positions, then manually shifting individual sprites.

Devlog: Fates and Constellations #08

Got the game running on the iPad only recently.

Had to account for aspect ratio differences between devices, and the only way we could think of at the moment to keep puzzles the same across various displays is to do letterboxing. Not too big a fan of it, honestly, so we fade it out whenever we can - like during level transition, for instance.

Devlog: Fates and Constellations #07

It's about time to experiment with a new visual theme! Here's a mockup I did yesterday:

Devlog: Fates and Constellations #6

Thought it was time to finally work on improving the level transition so here it is!

BEFORE:

Unsightly bald patch. Weird pausing between transition.

AFTER:

Other than removing the pause, I've also populated the bald patch with randomly placed grass sprites. There was an effort to make the grass more or less evenly distributed. Rather than generating the positions of all the grass sprites randomly over a large arc, I've instead divided the giant arc into multiple smaller ones and proceed to generate a smaller number of sprites for each of them. Result seems satisfactory.

Jump Over the Rings Major Update (soon!)

I've been working on an update after gathering feedback from the peeps who's played the game and I'm glad to announce I'll be releasing the first major update to Jump Over the Rings very soon. Expect the following:

• 12 new unlockable costumes
• Ability to select a costume to bring into main game (used to only randomly choose among unlocked costumes)
• Alternate ring graphics for certain costumes
• New controls option
• More responsive buttons for smaller screens

Devlog: Fates and Constellations #5

Here it is, running on jon's iPhone!

Everything seems to run fine. Though I noticed we have a tendency of making the level too close to the bottom of the screen, causing my thumbs to obscure part of the puzzle. Gotta fix that.

Devlog: Fates and Constellations #4

This is a quick update. We finally got around to adding some visual feedback when the golden star is collected.

Devlog: Fates and Constellations #03

Over the last week we've added some visual feedback when a line is cut (admittedly, more can be done to further juice the experience). The gif below features one of our harder test levels.

It's come to our attention that some folks who I've shown the game to find the game somewhat intimidating. We might have to slow down the speed of the line, or introduce an option to pause it completely to see if it'll make things more manageable.

Devlog: Fates and Constellations #02

Here's a quick look into the level creation process:

We procedurally generate the splitting lines, choose the pattern that we like, then build the level based off the lines in our crude but functional editor.

Devlog: Fates and Constellations #01

Welp, I figure it's time I start treating this blog a tad more seriously. So, starting from today, I'll be updating this blog while simultaneously keeping this devlog up to date.

Now that tech powerhouse jon is absolutely tied up with porting Spacejacked to PS4 and PSVita by himself, it makes perfect sense for our company to embark on smaller title(s) that I can work for the time being while jon works his magic for the consoles. 

Along comes...

Fates and Constellations

That's the title we're going with for now. Said game is a puzzle game where you cut "rogue" constellations out of the night skies by splitting lines. Jon and I have actually talked about wanting to make this game way before we were done with Spacejacked, but never got to it. That said, the game as it is now is pretty darn different from how we first envisioned it (ain't that always the case).

How does it work?

For every puzzle presented in the form of a constellation, the player is given a limited number of splits. The idea is to split the line and cut the connections between the stars without actually touching the stars themselves. Bonus points if you touch the golden star though ;)

A major part of the game is how exponentially complex it gets each time the player splits the lines. We intend to fully explore this by introducing some asymmetrical splitting patterns some time down the line.

There are still a lot to be done, feature-wise. The following are just some of the stuff we need to do:

• Different splitting patterns
• More themes (visuals)
• Design Levels
• Title and menus
• Polish

Random Thoughts

Now, what started as yet another prototype is beginning to show promise. Obviously I couldn't be happier. That said, it's starting to feel a little weird that each of us are essentially working on completely different things in the company at the moment. I do enjoy having the autonomy and the ability to build the game with no roadblocks whatsoever - but I already have that with my side projects. That's what Death Cabin's for. That's what JOTR is. A part of me crave the time where we were all trying to unscramble the mess in Spacejacked during the early stage of production, each of us tackling a core part of the same game. With that in mind, I can't wait for us to launch Spacejacked on the consoles next year so jon and I can get to develop our next big project - one that is big enough for at least the 2 of us to work on simultaneously.

New Rotten Mage Side Project!

And a puzzle game too! Who saw that coming?!

Shoutout to Ottotinne!

Hey dude, thanks for sending in your costume designs for Jump Over the Rings! =)
Here's a couple that are getting worked on:

Jump Over the Rings out now for iOS!!!

App store

Auto-repair

Costumes!

Gameplay video!

Jump Over the Rings now out on Google Play!!!

PLAY IT NOW!!!

Quick Update

First thing first, I got myself a part-time gig teaching kids how to code and make apps. It's an interesting job - and I can see how it can be rewarding, but I'll also have to say that for the first time in a long time, I have a job that feels like work(yeesh). The past 2 weeks of internship (before the transition to a part-time role) has taken away a lot of game dev time, and now that internship's over, I can't wait to work on my own projects!!!

Here are my aims for the month of August:

• Launch Jump Over the Rings! on Android (90%)
• Finish Spacejacked's Easy mode (90%)
• Make a trailer for Jump Over the Rings!
• Help test Spacejacked on PS4
• Launch PC version of Jump Over the Rings!
• Have a webpage for Jump Over the Rings!

After observing many people getting stuck early on in Spacejacked, we decided upon giving players the option to make the game a little easier for themselves. There's also an issue in the game where players can be unfairly pinned into a near-unwinnable situation for a couple of early-game mistakes - that's something we're working on addressing as well.

I'm very proud of Spacejacked, but it should also be no secret now that Spacejacked just did not sell well at all. Few people have heard of it. A part of me is deathly afraid that no one in the team, myself included, knows how to prevent the marketing disaster from happening a second time to our eventual PS4 release. We ought to have a marketing plan soon.

Jump Over the Rings Gifs

Title

Gameplay and combo

When time runs out, Sudden Death happens!

Earn you ranks!

Alternative costume: Ninja

Controls

Soon to be released new game!

I'm have been working on a little game project using GameMaker for a while. My first mobile game project! Here's a few gifs:

Hopefully coming out on Google Playstore soon!

Still alive!

Sheesh, I'm getting lazy at updating my blog. That will change soon!
I've been busy with a few things at the moment, namely:

• Updating Spacejacked
• Working on my first mobile title (Jump Over the Rings!)
• Working on a new Rotten Mage prototype with jon

Details soon!

Also, we've recently added 3 new challenges to Spacejacked, so yeah =)

Free Spacejacked OST

Guess what? The Spacejacked Soundtrack DLC is available for Free! Soundtrack's by the amazing Sawsquarenoise.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/461060/

Install it now!

GameMaker: Collision with Background tiles

If you've ever checked out Shaun Spalding's GameMaker tutorial series, you'll see that he has a quick and easy way of resolving collision between the player and the wall objects. This is what I've been using for my current GameMaker projects, but a problem soon become apparent when I wanted to fill in the background with tiles.

The above features a room, with the player character terrain composed entirely of several objects, each one a black square of dimension 16x16(pixels).

This (the above) however, is what I want people to see in the game. This background is done up using a tilesheet with each tile of dimension 16x16(pixels).

Originally, I settled for a rather tedious method of first laying out the collision objects, after which I'll paint the tiles over them. The tedium soon got to me and I wonder if there is a way to automate part of this process.

This is what I eventually ended up with:

During creation of the room, I looped through all of the tiles in the room and created instances of the collision object in place of each tile. Note that the collision object (o_Wall) has been set to be invisible. The logic is about as simple as it gets. For a gml novice like myself, the bigger challenge is in reading through the documentation and finding out just what functionalities are provided.

In hindsight, it probably would have been a better idea to rewrite the collision to work with tiles instead. For now though, I'll stick to this method until performance becomes an issue.

Codename Ikaruman #5: New tiles!

Added new tiles! Used the background tiles feature in GameMaker. I wonder if I should invest some time implementing smart tiling.

Codename Ikaruman #4: Wall jump

Wall jump

Minor fixes to Spacejacked (v1.0.3)

Fixed Focus Laser Turret (before and after comparison)

Added Quick Start functionality

Codename Ikaruman #3

Improved landing animation!

Codename Ikaruman #2

Got variable jump height working. Should probably work on the landing animation more.

Codename: Ikaruman

Basic movement test. Gotta work in the variable jump height later.

Also, I came across a graphical bug that happened occasionally when I flip the object’s xscale to -1. Some odd texture UV issue where the entire texture is shifted one pixel to the right. I figure it was just an issue with floating point imprecision - the fact that the game is running in a small 320x180 resolution resized to 960x540 amplifies the bug.

Anyway the problem is fixed once I rounded off the x and y position of the object in the draw event before draw_self(). 

It's getting harder to be the optimistic one.

Yes, it sure is.

Codename: Combat Zelda

We took a 2-week break from working on content in Spacejacked and spent some time learning GameMaker by working on a Zelda-ripoff thingy pictured above.

So it's been a week

It's been a week since the launch of Spacejacked on Steam. It was a rather disastrous launch =___= (by that I mean, very few people know about the game). I'll go into detail a tad later.

Gif!

4 days

Oh my gawd.

8 Days

Holy crap

15 days

Launch day is 15 days away

Spacejacked is set to launch in 15 days. I can already feel the anxiety building as I work towards the Gold Master milestone. I hope everything will work out.

Work in progress animation

First time animating tentacles. Work In Progress.

Sneak peek!

Had to draw something for Spacejacked. Kinda like how it ended up.

Hidden compartment!

To keep the scientists safe =)

Announcement!

Just in case, there are people reading this blog, I'm just gonna announce that Spacejacked is releasing on 26 Feb 2016!!! Finally!

Development on Spacejacked will not end after release, however. We'll be working to add a few more updates - extra "chapters" and challenges and stuff we can think of =)

A look at one of the challenges in Spacejacked