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gamepopper · 3 years

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Unstable Grounds - Ludum Dare and the Future

Finally made a post on my website, I talk about the success I had with Ludum Dare, as well as some changes for the future.

So it’s been been several months since I last made a post here, life has been busy and it’d been more difficult to motivate myself for games development than it has been in the past. Most of my time outside of work had been preoccupied with personal writings completely irrelevant to games, including a book project that I had been working on and off since May 2019, and after Rogues of the Seven…

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#2021 #C++#Feature #Featured #game development #Game Jam #games development #Games Jam #Indie Game #Ludum Dare #Ludum dare 49 #video games

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gamepopper · 3 years

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Rogue of the Seven Seas - 7DRL Postmortem

Just written a short postmortem on my #7DRL entry: Rogue of the Seven Seas #IndieDevHour #IndieDevWorldOrder #Roguelike

Last week, the 7DRL Challenge took place. It’s the same game jam that I’ve done three times previously, where game devs have 7 Days to make a RogueLike, a turn-based procedural roleplaying game with permadeath. One of the benefits of this jam is that you’re free to choose which seven days to take, as technically the jam ran from the 5th – 14th March, but you could start at any time as long as you…

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#2021 #7DRL #Feature #Featured #Game Jam #Roguelike #Seven Day Roguelike

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gamepopper · 4 years

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Twist Turn Shoot Burn: A Postmortem

This was originally written as a blog post on the Ludum Dare website back on October 10th.

^^^ Click to Play ^^^

It’s now been just over a week since Ludum Dare 47 began, so an ideal time to reflect on how well things are going so far. I’ve been taking part in game jams for seven years now, and this was my 16th Ludum Dare, although you find that every game jam you do has a challenge…

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#2020 #Game Jam #Ludum Dare #Ludum Dare 48

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gamepopper · 4 years

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Straight Out Of Furlough

Today is my last day of furlough, looking forward to getting back to work but also a nervous about it.

So the pandemic is still at large, and despite being one of many employees that had to take a pay cut in March to keep businesses afloat and people with jobs at the company I work for, a number of people had to be furloughed in May as customers remained closed, I myself being one of them. Unfortunately, it’s happening everywhere where it’s non-essential, and the silver lining with mine was that…

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#C++#Computer Game #computer games #Furlough #game development #game project #Games #games development #Rectris #Tetris #video game #video games

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gamepopper · 4 years

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Gardening of Pandemic Proportions

Good start of the decade, huh? In February I was enjoying a break from game development outside of patches for Gemstone Keeper, as well as spending a nice holiday in Sweden. Then March hits, and a virus that started in the Wuhan province of China spread to pandemic proportions and every country was starting to lock down and encourage people to either quarantine or distance themselves from others.…

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gamepopper · 4 years

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Calculators of Pandemic Proportions

Good start of the decade, huh? In February I was enjoying a break from game development outside of patches for Gemstone Keeper, as well as spending a nice holiday in Sweden. Then March hits, and a virus that started in the Wuhan province of China spread to pandemic proportions and every country was starting to lock down and encourage people to either quarantine or distance themselves from others.…

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gamepopper · 4 years

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A Decade of Game Development

I thought I'd stay up all night writing about how I've spent ten years as a #gamedev.

Happy New Year everyone! It’s 2020, meaning it’s the start of not just a new year but a new decade (at least your one of those people insistent that the decade starts on 2021)! Needless to say, it has been a full ten years, and it’s fitting that nearly ten years earlier I started working on a computer game for an Extended Project at my Sixth Form project. I did a brief summary of what I’ve done…

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gamepopper · 5 years

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Gemstone Keeper is out on the Nintendo Switch!

By the time you read this, Gemstone Keeper will be available to download! #NintendoSwitch #IndieGame #Roguelike #Shmup

By the time you read this, Gemstone Keeper will be available for purchase on the Nintendo eShop in most of Europe, as well as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico and the United States!

Gemstone Keeper is an action twin-stick roguelike shooter where a brave explorer can traverse a large and mystical cavern to search for rare and…

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#2019 #Feature #Featured #game #Indie Game #indie games #news #Nintendo eShop #Nintendo Switch #Roguelike #roguelite #SFML #shmup #shooter #twin-stick #video game #video games #videogames

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gamepopper · 5 years

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The EGX Report

Last weekend I was at #EGX showing off Gemstone Keeper, and here's how I got on! #indiedevhour #indiegame #gamedev

It was more than a month ago that Gemstone Keeper was being shown to the public at a games festival. Last weekend it happened again, this time at the ExCel Centre in London. EGX is the largest video games expo in the UK, originally starting as Eurogamer Expo as part of the London Games Festival in 2008, eventually being hosted at Birmingham NECafter the closure of its main venue of Earl’s Court…

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gamepopper · 5 years

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Gemstone Keeper: Playable at EGX

Apparently I've been quiet on this, but yes: Gemstone Keeper will be at EGX London! #indiedevhour #sfml #nintendoswitch #egx2019

After many years of working on games, I can proudly confirm that Gemstone Keeper will be shown at EGX from the 17th – 20th October at the ExCel Centre in London, and it will be the Nintendo Switch version with both the single player Campaign Mode and the multiplayer Survival Mode. It will be part of the Tentacle Zone, ran by Payload Studios, alongside 17 other great indie titles.

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#2019 #Demo #EGX #game development #games development #games industry #Gemstone Keeper #Indie Game #Indie Game Developer #indie games #indie games development #news #Nintendo Switch #Tentacle Zone #video game #video games #videogames

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gamepopper · 5 years

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Insomnia Report

Finally, I've finished my write up on Insomnia Gaming Festival (i65)!

Last week, I was one of 24 indie game developers who showed off their games in the Indie/Tentacle Zone, part of the Insomnia Gaming Festival (i65) at the Birmingham NEC. Over a four day period, thousands of gamers got an opportunity to try our games, some in development for platforms, others being in early access or recent release. For me, it was an opportunity to show Gemstone Keeper for the…

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#2019 #Feature #Featured #game development #game project #Games #games development #gaming #Gemstone Keeper #i65 #Indie Game #Indie Game Developer #indie games #indie games development #Insomnia Gaming Festival #video game #video games #videogames

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gamepopper · 5 years

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Gemstone Keeper (for the Switch) for the Public!

I've written about some of the progress that has been made, and some shows that I'll be doing for Gemstone Keeper! #indiedevhour #indiegame @IGfestUK #RRE2019

Hello everyone! It’s been a while, but my game development focus has been majorly on Gemstone Keeper for the Nintendo Switch! Significant progress has been made to it, plus Ironbell and I (as well as feedback from devs of Naezith) have been continuing our work on SFML-Switch, fixing issues that we find. The submission process is currently in its early stages and with any luck there will be an…

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gamepopper · 5 years

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Ludum Dare 44 and Console Game Development

As some of you were made aware, I took part in my first games jam of the year. While I said in my End of 2018 In Reviewthat I’d be taking a break from game jams, Ludum Dare felt like the ideal event to take part in as it was in late April and is still one of the biggest and favourite of the online game jams. Even then I wasn’t fully aware it was happening until the week before when theme voting…

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gamepopper · 5 years

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End of 2018 In Review

Let's Get Ready for 2019!

It seems that because of how the internet and societies have changed so drastically, years now seem to feel like they’ve multiplied. I doubt anyone could really summarise what happened this year, as there appeared to be a lot of fighting back and forth. Outside of game development, I have had to deal with friends moving further away, my mascot costume being stolen as well as my grandmother…

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#2018 #C++#Computer Game #computer games #game development #Game Jam #game project #Games #games development

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gamepopper · 5 years

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Ludum Dare 44 - Tank Gauntlet

The last #screenshotsaturday of the year, and I've written about my final game jam submission of the year with Tank Gauntlet!

The year of 2018 is drawing to a close, and so for December what other game jam I should take part in but the 44th Ludum Dare. I decided to take part in the compo as once again I managed to have a free weekend to work on it.

Before the compo commenced, I used my previous experience with game jams including the 11 previous ones I took part in this year to write a set of rulesI think other…

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#2018 #Feature #Featured #game development #Game Jam #Games #games development #Games Jam #Indie Game Developer #indie games development #Ludum Dare #video game #video games

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gamepopper · 6 years

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Don’t worry to anyone who has been following what I’ve been doing this year, I haven’t missed October or November. I’m so close to finishing this goal of mine for 2018 and my next post will include not only that month’s jam entry but a summary of what I have done over the year. But for now, more jam games.

In October, I took part in 7DFPS, as the name implies the jam is focused around games in the first person shooter genre. The jam itself is probably best known for being the source of the wildly successful indie title SUPERHOT, where the prototype was created for the jam back in 2014. I decided to take part in this jam to see if I can add to the 3D game system I developed in September’s game jam.

One issue I had when working on this system was that I didn’t have a fully working software frustum culling system, this would allow me to avoid draw calls on 3D objects that were not in view of the camera. What you see above was the issue I had before. It took a number of trial and errors and reading on how to properly set up and transform the plans before I had it properly culling the right objects. I also added some other mechanics I need to make this a classic FPS, jumping while taking into consideration multiple floors and shooting projectiles.

As you can see from the projectiles, some of them were clipping unusally. This is a side effect of rendering textured objects in OpenGL with alpha transparency, any objects that are drawn after transparent objects will have the scene’s pixel data overwritten. The solution to this is to sort your 3D objects, first by making sure he fully opaque objects are in front, and transparent objects by their distance from the camera (aka depth/transparency sorting).

Then came the big additions, I used most of the same code from Fursuit Run for the enemies so they had the same 2.5D effect, but changed around the movement code and added the ability for them to shoot as well.

For the game’s hook, I wanted to have a mechanic based on Ikaruga, where only opposing colours hurt you and the enemy. As such I had to give the player and each enemy two batch renderers, one for each colour, to share one bullet group, as well as a flag for their current colour. Then I made sure the game checked what the colour of the bullets, players and enemies were during each collision to make sure that only opposing colours set damage.

Then it came round to the presentation, I decided to make the level much bigger (no easy task considering the original protoype used hard coded map sizes), changed the textures and added bloom so the game’s visuals had a neon aesthetic.

In the last few hours, I struggled to find how to give the game a proper goal for single players. As I was getting tired, I decided just to have an orb that the player must find to collect. The gun in the middle was the last touch, which also helped made distinguishing the player’s colours easier.

I managed to fix a few bugs later on, although I think I’ve done most that I can with this. Although one change that I don’t think will get finished but was cool was I managed to get multiple cameras working for one scene, which makes split-screen gameplay possible! So for making a number of improvements to my engine’s 3D capabilities, I call this a win. You can play RvB here on itch.io.

For November, I took part in the Desert Bus Game Jam, which started last Friday (9th November) and I managed to finish on Thursday (14th November). This jam is done in conjunction with Desert Bus For Hope, a charity video game stream to raise money for Child’s Play. The theme for each DB jam is around the desert bus, which itself is based on a notorious unreleased game of the same name.

I decided after two 3D games to make it slightly easy on myself while being experimental, so for my Desert Bus Game, you would see two perspectives, one to dodge stuff on the road and the other to keep your bus balanced.

Unfortunately, as of writing I do not have a proper physics system in Vigilante, so I made do with the standard collision system. The rear-view had a bus that leaned in the direction by changing the origin of rotation to the bottom corners. One low-level thing I did do for this game was to update the VSprite from using SFML’s sprite object to VertexArrays. This would allow me to adjust each vertex on the fly, instead of being restricted to a single square. It also allowed me to freely change the texture coordinates so I could do the endlessly scrolling roads, as well as skewing them. I hoped I would be able to get proper perspective to work, but even vertex arrays have their limits when it comes to skewed sprites.

You can play Bus on the Desert here.

One month to go!

7DFPS and Desert Bus Don't worry to anyone who has been following what I've been doing this year, I haven't missed October or November.

#2018 #7DFPS #C++#Desert Bus #Feature #Featured #Game Jam #game jams #Games #games development #Games Jam #indie games #indie games development #video games #Vigilante Game Framework

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gamepopper · 6 years

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