So just as I was about to start on the next boss in Gemstone Keeper, an issue arose that I needed to resolve over the weekend. Due to licensing issues regarding the font I had been using to produce the graphics for Gemstone Keeper for over a year, I had to switch to another font. This would not be a problem for a vast majority of games, however when you are developing a game that uses ASCII art, with designs built specifically for that font in mind, this was a time consuming issue.
Category Archives: Gemstone Keeper
August is a Busy Month…
So I have been around quite a few places this month, because of this my progress on Gemstone Keeper has been a bit shakey. Progress pretty much stopped earlier this week because I fell ill on the Sunday evening and I’ve only managed to recover to a working state on Wednesday. There has been one main update if you follow me on Twitter, the new spider boss! Designing this boss allowed me to improve my skeletal code as well as try out a new boss mechanic, slowing the player down with webbing!
So I’ve been to three key places:
Electomagnetic Field 2016
This is a bi-annual festival for all things geeky in the world of technology, software, cyber-security, hacking, mathematics ect. I camped for three nights with running electricity and wi-fi (yes, really) provided by the organizers and there were many workshops, talks and projects dotted around the place. I went back in 2014 after a friend invited me and I loved it so much I’d thought I return. It was a bit further than last year (Guildford instead of Bletchley), but they definitely expanded in size and activities. Everyone was also given a badge that you could connect via wi-fi and run apps, I even wrote my own! Would definitely look forward to it again in 2018:
Berlin
This was a proper vacation for me, and unbeknownst to me until days before I went, I was going to be in Berlin during the same time period as Gamescom was running in Cologne. I did think about visiting Cologne for a day to check out Gamescom but I felt the cost was too much and I wanted to see Berlin. It was also near the end of this trip that I caught a bug so the flight back was painful. Still a very nice trip to have, seeing the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, the Book Burning Memorial outside Humboldt University, even the Computerspiele Museum, so I did at least one video gaming thing in Germany.
Insomnia58 Games Festival
Yes, the one that starts tomorrow! I’ll be at Insomnia58 and I’ll be bringing Gemstone Keeper to the Indie Zone with me! It’ll be there for all four days, although I might wonder around every now and then to see what the festival has to offer. But if you are visiting the Birmingham NEC from the 26th – 29th, go check out the Indie Zone, there are loads of cool independent games on show there that are worth trying out.
Month of Updates
This was originally from an announcement made on Gemstone Keeper’s Steam Greenlight page. I’m ashamed to admit that I wasn’t being very responsive on the GL page and it wasn’t until a friend confronted me about it that I decided to make up for it. I answered (technically) two questions that were left hanging without an answer from the comments of the GL page on the announcement, and as of writing I have been attempting to reach one user who was especially frustrated by my lack of response. Here is the segment from the Steam Greenlight announcement:
Firstly, Would this game by any chance be based on the Gemstone Warrior and Gemstone Healer games of ye olde times?
Surprisingly, I was not aware of either Gemstone Warrior or Gemstone Healer before I first read this. I was looking into the ASCII designs of Dwarf Fortress and use of Roguelike elements found in Spelunky and Rogue Legacy. It’s remarkable that a set of ARPGs centred around Gemstones has been around while I’ve been working on this.
Gemstone Keeper is on Steam Greenlight!
Yes, it is finally time! The page has been published meaning Gemstone Keeper is officially on Steam Greenlight!
You can go vote directly on the Steam App by going HERE on the Steam Website HERE.
This is both an exciting and nervewracking day for me, as this is the proving grounds to see if Gemstone Keeper has what it takes for Steam. So for this week I’ll be checking every now and then, try to get the word out alongside with making updates to the game.
Updates such as more work with the level effects, I’ve gotten the wave effect sorted, however I recently found a bug when trying to capture the game so I may have to rework my method of applying effects. The challenge involves having the effect being applied to things within the game world (i.e. the player, creatures, level layout, objects and even the UI) while not being applied to stuff that isn’t involved with the game world (specifically the pause menu).
Another bit of progress that has been shamefully late (sadly I couldn’t have them ready for the video) are the items. These are secondary pieces that unlike weapons, are optional, but you may find them useful once you can have access to them. Certain items planned include medikits (regain health), grenades (explodes the walls and nearby enemies), gem scanner (find where the gemstones are) and more. These items are however limited per level so it’s important to use them wisely. At the moment I’ve got the triggering system for them ready, with one of the challenges being visualising them:
Unfortunately one thing I have missed out on is providing a playable demo. I want to have a demo ready but it’ll have to be in the next week or so while I check through bugs and ensure a demo build is stable enough to distribute. So watch this space for a demo of Gemstone Keeper!
Ludum Dare and Steam Greenlight
This last week of April is going to be a busy week, and May will be even busier, so I’d figure it’s best to write this out now. Last week I took part in Ludum Dare 35, with 48 hours on a surprisingly rare free-weekend (my weekends are usually filled by going out and hanging out with people or going to events, such is life). The theme was shapeshift, so obviously a lot of games involve changing shapes with a few that either use shapeshifting in either the levels, the monsters or even in the mechanics.
While the theme voting was going on, one of the suggested themes was “Two Colours”, and so all my ideas were pretty much blurred out by one of my favourite games of all time: Ikaruga. So I decided to combine shapeshifting ships with colour shifting bullet absorbing, this is where Spinstar comes from.
This was quite fun to make, particularly with the animation and the bullet patterns, you can go vote on the game here or play the game directly on itch.io here. I’ll be voting on games still, hopefully I’ll get a good score like my past entries.
On other pressing matters, I plan to take Gemstone Keeper to Steam Greenlight. I have already been working on the Steam page itself, but I’m giving myself three weeks to fine-tune the page, get the trailer finished and let as many people know about it as possible.
I’ve been working on the trailer, I’ve had difficulties getting game footage until recently, I might write about it once the Steam Greenlight page goes online but it all comes down to trying to find a method that outputs videos with the least washed out colours and as little blurring as possible.
I’ll also keep progress of the game where I can, I’ve been working on bosses and I want to get started on items.
Procedural Meshes: Generating Gemstones Part 2
Last time I talked about writing a gemstone generator for Unity, in this part I’ll talk about taking that script and making it work in SFML 2 using C++. What makes this challenging is that Unity is a 3D engine with a Mesh class making it easy for procedural geometry, while SFML is a C++ framework made primarily for 2D games. The most SFML gives you is the sf::Vector3f object, which allows you to store 3D [x,y,z] coordinates, which means the rest of it is up to you. As of writing, this is the approach I went to generate 3D gemstones in Gemstone Keeper.
Procedural Meshes: Generating Gemstones Part 1
So two years ago as a student researching for his thesis, I took part in the first procjam. Organised by Michael Cook, this is a games jam that focuses on procedural content, whether that be games, art, text, tools, anything that can make something. Last year I decided to go a bit basic, write some pre-existing noise and maze algorithms for the Haxe Programming Language, which I eventually tweaked and published on Haxelib and Github as MAN-Haxe.
Last year, I decided that for my current project, I was going to do something relevant, and this time use no pre-existing algorithms, this is where the Gemstone Generator comes in. I have images of the meshes below that show the progress from early successful generations to the final most generation test before the UI layout was cleaned up and the demo was uploaded. The generative process is now being used in Gemstone Keeper, albeit with a different rendering process considering I’m turning Unity’s Procedural Meshes into SFML meshes.
Weapons of Gemstone Keeper
So for this week (11th – 17th January) I decided to focus on weapons, a pretty important element of twin-stick shooters. I didn’t want to stick with using one weapon for testing, so I decided to see if I could make a few more for the game. This should explain how I approached the problem and what the weapons system currently looks like for Gemstone Keeper.
New Year
Celebrate what you have accomplished, learn from what went wrong, and most importantly you must move forward. Hope everyone has a great 2016!
One of my goals for 2016 is for Gemstone Keeper to be on Steam Greenlight. I’ll will be sure to have an alpha build ready for play within the next few months.
Understanding ASCII Art
It’s pretty easy to see that I’ve taken the step of using ASCII art in my next game, Gemstone Keeper, and it’s pretty difficult to not notice it if you see the screenshots I’ve been posting for #IndieDevHour or Screenshot Saturday.
This writeup will explain my understanding as mainly an outsider and relative newcomer to the ASCII art and Roguelike Development scenes, and hopefully explain my reasons why I chose to move to ASCII art, and how I am approaching it to make my own style to the art form.
GAMEPOPPER 