Tag Archives: game development

Month of Updates

by in Game Project Updates, Gemstone Keeper and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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.

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Gemstone Keeper is on Steam Greenlight!

by in Gemstone Keeper and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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!

Procedural Meshes: Generating Gemstones Part 2

by in Game Project Updates, Gemstone Keeper, Procedural Content Generation and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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.

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Procedural Meshes: Generating Gemstones Part 1

by in Game Releases, Gemstone Keeper, Procedural Content Generation and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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.

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Weapons of Gemstone Keeper

by in Game Project Updates, Gemstone Keeper and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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.

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Understanding ASCII Art

by in Gemstone Keeper and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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.

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#GBjam, Game Development and Work Updates

by in Game Project Updates, Game Releases, Visits and Events and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I’m back and ready to update everyone on what’s been happening since I went to Japan last month, which was an awesome holiday where I got to go to the cities of Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Sendai, with highlights including seeing foxes at the Zao Fox Village, walk around Akihabara’s arcades, game and electronic stores, dressing up as a Samurai, going to the Ghibli Museum and Nintendo’s Old Headquarters! Despite being in very humid weather, and both my sister and I carrying our bags from hostel to guest house to hostel almost every night, we were able to see so much and yet miss out on quite a lot. We talked with other travellers and heard about seeing Mt Fuji and Sumo Wrestling in Nagano among others, but I think I can see them another time.

But only a few weeks after I got back, I was out again for a week in Ireland…which is why the longer than normal absence. I got to see some of the big towns and cities from Cork to Dublin, as well as a lot of countryside, however it did help bring inspiration for a game I recently made.
Welcome to Kilkenny Pub Brawl!

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IRDC 2015 Review

by in Game Project Updates, Gemstone Keeper, Procedural Content Generation, Visits and Events and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

So to sum up last weekend, when I went to Nottingham for the International Roguelike Developer Conference 2015’s UK event, I’m not kidding when I said I had little expectations, considering that the Roguelike genre is still fairly new to me, despite spending a year researching procedural level generation for my University dissertation. Despite this, I had a great time and was able to gain a lot from the games, the genre and the role of procedural generation from these two days.

Day Zero

Although I have met the event organiser Mark Johnson and Roguelike developer Darren Grey from the PROCJAM conference organised last year, I wasn’t sure if I was able to meet anyone at the pre-meetup, especially since Mark unfortunately went down with food poisoning before the pre-meet began. However I decided to head off to the Bell Inn and see if I could find anyone.

By chance, I went to the bar and a man sitting at the table asked me “You here for IRDC?”, that man was Johannes Kristmann, and with him was Paul Jeffries. We talked about games, had drinks, and they joked about IRDC events of the past and eventually more people showed up, including Alan Charlesworth, Tom Betts and Ido Yehieli. We all decided to have more talks and drinks at Darren’s apartment block until we all decided to head to our respective hotels to prepare for tomorrow.

Day One

These were all the talks that were given that day (taken from Mark Johnson’s blog):

1025 – “”And [my bot] vowed to return victorious!”: Spelunky as an AI Benchmark” (Tommy Thompson)
1050 – “Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Development” (Pete Hurst)
1115 – “Alternative Death Systems” (Darren Grey)
1140 – “Generative Design” (Paul Jeffries)
1205 – “Modability and You” (DarkGod)
1330 – “Making a Roguelike that uses Twitter Data” (Sean Oxspring)
1355 – “KeeperRL Development” (Michal Brzozowski)
1420 – “The Curious Expedition Development” (Johannes Kristmann)
1445 – “Murder Puzzle – No Longer a Roguelike” (Ido Yehieli)
1510 – “Scaling Brogue“ (Flend)
1535 – “Creating a Procedural Level Editor” (Me)
1600 – “Sir, you are Being Hunted Development” (Tom Betts)
1625 – “Algorithmic Generation of Global Racial, Cultural, Religious, and Architectural Variation” (Mark Johnson)

There were so many great talks, some were really funny and others were really informative, I even managed my talk, despite all my nerves. I spoke about a part of my University dissertation, the Procedural Level Editor.

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If you didn’t catch them on Twitch, all of the talks will be online on Youtube in the coming weeks. These talks were followed by curry, and then drinks at Ye Olde Trip to Jerusulem, possibly the oldest pub in England.

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Day Two

This was an experimental part of the day, where members of the public got to try out some classic and modern roguelikes such as DoomRL, Angband and Incursion among others, as well as a selection of board games that possibly inspired Roguelikes.

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So I had a really fun time, and got to speak to a lot of talented game developers about procedural generation and gaming in general. I got to talk about my University dissertation, and I also got to speak on roguelike radio about the conference, which should also be online soon as well.

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So I think it’s time to announce my new main project, during my dissertation I wrote a short prototype game to demonstrate the procedural level editor. I’ve decided to extend this game to be Gemstone Keeper, the roguelike twin-stick shooter. It will use the Procedural Level Editor, which I will also release for public use when it comes to a stable enough point.

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ThreeThingGame and the Ricoh2DFramework

by in Game Project Updates, Visits and Events, Windows Games Ambassador and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Between the 11-12th of June, I went up with a friend and fellow Windows Games Ambassador Aaron Smith, along with a games design student Nathan Holding to the University of Hull for ThreeThingGame, the University’s 24 hour games jam. The premise is that each team was provided three words, and were tasked with making a game that incorporated them. The games would be judged on how well they fit the three things, and the quality of the game overall and the winning teams would get prizes.

This was going to be an interesting event for all three of us, as despite being used to travelling around several campuses for events, Hull was way far out for us. We were also aware that the majority of students there had been at ThreeThingGame before and new how it all worked. However Aaron and I were a bit more confident in what we could pull off together since we went through a games jam one week prior, where we learned to have a proper functioning version control system that the tools can work with, as well as having an actual artist working with us this time. Our three words were Room, Moon and Lune, and from that we made a Lunar Lander style space game where you avoided asteroids and landed on moon bases.

We also had an additional tool to work with, my Ricoh2DFramework. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before on this site, but the Ricoh2DFramework is a framework for MonoGame. The purpose of the framework is to provide classes to assist with graphics, collision, input and audio among other functions. I was actually quite eager to use Ricoh2D in a game development project to see how well it works practically.

Game Development went rather well, and while there were some small issues found in the Ricoh2DFramework, they were easily fixed and all of those changes have been uploaded to the Ricoh2DFramework’s repository. There were also some performance issues that required some work arounds in order to avoid (slow downs, glitches and crashes galore), but in the end we finished the game.

What went right:

  • Proper source control: Using C# and MonoGame with Github is much better than the last games jam at Stafford, where we tried to use Unity with Git. Overall it was a nightmare back then to merge all the changes and ensure the project work. Using a system that is completely text based and readable made the process much more easier.
  • More prepared: Using the Ricoh2DFramework definitely saved some time in developing the game, and even though the framework had issues they were much quicker to deal with instead of having to build everything up from scratch.
  • Having an artist: Definitely enables the team to work on the game while assets are being created, instead of having to be made during or after development where issues can arise.

What went wrong:

  • Didn’t sleep enough: All three of us, me especially, thought we could spend the entire night working on the game. We didn’t. I could barely stay awake after literally staying awake for 24 hours, even with an abundance of food, drink and snacks to help us keep our energy.
  • Technical issues: While some performance issues were most likely due to some of the original code that was developed for the game, we also had numerous unexplained crashes from Microsoft and SharpDX libraries. This was especially bad when the game crashed unexpectedly with an unhandled exception while judges were looking at our game. This could’ve been one of the reasons why we didn’t get a place in the rankings, but since we were still using the Technical preview, hopefully issues would be ironed out afterwards.

Overall, I rather enjoyed ThreeThingGame. It’s a neat idea for a games jam and everyone at the University of Hull was very enthusiastic and eager to make games, which makes it even more impressive as the University doesn’t have a specialist games course unlike Staffordshire University.

Now it’s back to the Procedural Level Editor and my newest game project Gem Finder, where I’ve already started on new features…

Glow Drop DX and Global Games Jam are Out!

by in Game Project Updates, Game Releases, Glow Drop, Visits and Events and tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Over the last week, I’ve technically had to prepare for two releases, and guess what? Both games are out, and I’ve updated the game menu to include links to them! It’s pretty cool how both games were originally made at 48 hour game jams, and both are being updated as we speak. Feel free to read on about my experiences with Global Games Jam this year, and try out these two releases as soon as possible, all feedback is awesome!

Glow Drop DX

We Are Surrounded

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