Redbubble

It's been quite some time now since I last posted anything. Mostly because I have been using a different computer and haven't had blogger open 24/7 like I had on my main computer.

Anyway, some updates are in order. For starters, I created an account on redbubble which you can check out here

You will find my digital art creations that I have selected for publishing on products. Theres some really neat shit there. If you have some spare cash and want to support my developments, please buy something!

In other news, I am working on a 2D top-down action RPG in Unity. No story in place at this time, but the game will heavily revolve around one of my favorite mechanics -- BLOWING SHIT UP! I love being able to destroy just about everything in a game, like in the Ratchet & Clank game series where you smash things to collect bolts. I want to also have non-perma-death for the things that get destroyed, so like you can walk into a town and burn everything in sight, leave, and when you return, it's back new to be burned again! >:D It's gonna be a hell of a lot of fun. I'm mostly in the early prototyping stages right now, with no final visuals and lots of ripped and shoddy art at the moment. Once I have something that isn't copyright infringing to work up some screenshots & gifs, I'll show off the project.

On the Market

I woke up to a pleasant surprise this morning. CodeCanyon accepted my item with the new documentation. You can go grab a license by clicking here.

I am quite excited about this, and hoping that I see enough sales from this to give me a reason to continue to put up more items for sale. I have several more starter kits planned, and after a little while of watching this first one's sales, I will figure out if this is the way that I'm going to go with releasing the other kits.

If there is anything you would like to see me create a starter kit for, please let me know!

In other news, Zombies Til Dawn got accepted into the Game Shop on fgl, so I'm excited about that too. Hopefully I get some sales from that. And also, you should really give the game a play on Kongregate, as that will help support me and my developments!

Lotta Documentation

Hello, May!

Okay, well CodeCanyon rejected my item saying the documentation was lacking. So I spent a couple days writing complete and thorough documentation, as well as a thorough "idiot's guide" style ebook for those non-technical people that want to buy the item, and I also went through all the code and overhauled everything to make it as clean and simple as I possibly could. And I've just resubmitted the item for review. Hoping that it gets accepted this time. If it doesn't, I'm just going to end up selling it through my new Gumroad account. More on that later.

In the process I found Remarkable, a rather useful tool which lets me write in Markdown and then export a shiny styled PDF document. I'll be using this software quite a bit.

I have also learned quite a bit about HTML5 game development, and with this new-found knowledge, I am planning on putting together an educational course which I will be selling in the near future.

Behind the scenes

The past few days I have been carefully considering our studio's next move. Some things have come to light which have brought us to a position of needing to make some serious decisions with how to proceed. We have a few new projects that are starting the early stages of concept and design, and we are working on some new marketable resources which will become available for purchase in the near future.

I am working on a high resolution stylized castle tileset completely in vector format using Inkscape. I'm pretty satisfied with the results so far. I will have some visuals to show off soon.

Something fun

I have realized that I really want to work on an RPG. Nothing massive, just a simple down-scaled fun little RPG. I thought of first creating a typical top-down 2D RPG, but I wanted to create something that I could possibly turn into a larger game down the line, and I wanted to learn some more new things and hone my current skill set. Thus I have chosen to build a 3D RPG for the first time. I don't expect this to be a simple project, but I do intend to bring it around full-circle from concept to completion. I am creating a 3D remake of my SAWD RPG project. I am taking the game world and expanding from ASCII graphics to full-blown 3D. I am going with a low-poly aesthetic for my own sanity since I am the one modeling everything. I'm going to use low-resolution textures as well, with 64x64 being the most common size texture, with maybe 128x128 for characters. I'm not going to use normal mapping, or complex lighting.

3D modeling will be done with Wings3D for the static meshes, and I have yet to come to a decision for animated models. Textures will be created with GIMP. The game development will be done with Unity 5 using C# scripting.

Indie Legwork

We are trying to locate a publisher/sponsor for one of our HTML5 games, and have been contacting as many as we can find. You would be surprised how many there are, and how much effort it can take to dig up their contact information and write them! Each has their own set of quality standards and requirements too, and many are not English-native, so acceptance may require localization. Hopefully we find a bite soon and can actually see a return on our investment.

Mobile Music Creation

Working on a piece in AudioSauna
(blurred notes and removed keyboard to avoid illegal reproductions of my work)

For one of my HTML5 games, I needed to create some music tracks which were not crazy-long and large files, and sounded great on my mobile devices' shitty little speakers. I typically use SunVox for my music creations, however, I recently have started using a web-based composition tool called AudioSauna.

This tool provides a multi-track sequencer and apparently a sampler (which I have not used yet) and a piano-roll for editing patterns. Two synthesizer modules can be used to create nearly an endless variety of sounds, which opens up the doors to creativity.

You can save your project files to continue working on them later, and you can export both loops and your full song to .wav format.

This amazing tool is easy to use, and I highly recommend giving it a try for your next music composition.

Patching Pitch

It's not so much fun to find that you overlooked things in the production build of a game. And that typically means you're left with no choice but to scramble to patch things up. I've issued 3 patches for Pitch so far. Hopefully I don't find any more things that need patched up. The whole process is pretty irritating, and repeating it is even worse.

In other news, I'm searching for a market for my HTML5 casual mobile game which is finally finished and through beta, and I have gone through and fixed up the reported bugs and balanced the gameplay to the point where I am calling the game done. I've contacted a couple places so far, but no responses just yet. If you have any great recommendations on how to profit from a mobile-ready HTML5 game, please do not hesitate to get in touch!

into the Pitch on Google play Store

For all you users with android devices that can access the Google play Store, you can download and install our latest release, into the Pitch right now.

Get into the Pitch now.

Android AppStore users will need to wait a day until the game is available there. I will make another blog post once the game is available on the Amazon AppStore.

The Darkness Shall Take You

into the Pitch mobile marketplace graphic

It's done. Finally. I just finished the process of putting Pitch on the Google Play store and the Amazon App store. I will post links on this blog to the store URLs once the game has finished going through it's review/submission process.

Until then, you can simply enjoy the gameplay video I created using Open Broadcaster Software, PowerDirector, and Unity 5.

Pitch is Done

Well, almost. The development of Pitch is done. Now comes the not-fun-at-all part of being an indie game developer... The preparation of play store marketing materials, uploading of the apk, and the actual marketing campaign itself.

But for now, I need a bit of a breather. Going to work on freelance stuff and my AxonoxA project probably until Monday; Then I will start the grueling process of distribution and marketing of Pitch.

Pitch Update

I finished up the Game Over Scene for Pitch, a handful of Animations, a few UI components, and a single C# script to drive things, and I'm rather happy with how it turned out. This being screenshot Saturday, I tried to record a video of the scene to put up here, but apparently my recording software isn't up to the task.

Oh, here is an idea... I'll try using my android tablet to take a video of my monitor... won't be quality video, but it might work...

Hey, cool! That worked out better than I expected. Well, that is my progress for the day. Ignore the 0 meters of the Final Depth... that actually updates when this scene is reached from the main game. Since I was simply playing the scene in Unity, the depth counter was not updated.

Loading Ass

Such a stupidly funny name, Assimp or, the Open Asset Import Library is a fantastic little utility which I just successfully integrated into my AxonoxA project. Now I can load up any models I create without having to worry about the little details like tessellating faces before exporting, or exporting to an incorrect format. It works really quick (faster than my previous hand-rolled OBJ loader) and handles multiple meshes and mesh hierarchy (which AxonoxA does not at this time. All meshes are compiled into a single mesh in AxonoxA.)

With my goal reached for the day, it is now time shift gears back to my windows machine and Unity so I can work on Pitch some more!

Recovery

Well that was not a fun time. We here at Bang Bang Attack Studios are finally back on our feet again, and I put in some work on Pitch last night, and worked on the main Play scene a bit, and got the majority of the mechanics implemented. During my recovery I also went through an Intro to Modern OpenGL tutorial series and learned some things that have been eluding me for years, so that's cool. Time to try to catch up with some of my freelance stuff that has fallen behind this past week.

Break

I took today off from working on things to celebrate my anniversary with my wife a day early, since we had to go out of town today anyway for some errands.
I also put filled out my profile on indigodirectory to try to win a Macbook Pro. Fingers crossed!

Yesterday I got some decent progress with Pitch done. I finished up the Title and Main Menu scenes, and started to work on the Play scene. Very pleased with this iteration. It's even better than the first. I plan to jump back in with Pitch development tomorrow, but for now, bed time.

Pitch Update

I've been working on Pitch off and on since I got up today, and  have been making decent progress. This post will be short compared to my last one, as I don't want to spend a lot of time writing it so I can get back to Pitch. :D

Splashing Around

In the final 2 hours last night before I headed to slumberland, I managed to rework all the assets for Pitch, and build the Splash Scene over from scratch, and I think that it turned out pretty well. I am going to give a quick rundown/tutorial on things here both to add more non-rant content to my blog, and to have it as a reference for myself for future projects. :D

First things first, I auto-cropped all of my texture pieces individually with GIMP, leaving me with a folder of images which I then tossed into CodeAndWeb's TexturePacker Pro (Which is worth every penny for the Pro license!) and exported a Unity - Texture2D sprite sheet and packed PNG texture file.

Then I grabbed the TexturePackerImporter C# script from the Unity Asset Store. It's available for Free, and simplifies the process of getting your sprites into Unity greatly. Once I had the TexturePackerImporter.cs file in my Unity Project under the Editor folder, I was then able to drag in my sprite sheet and packed texture files (textures.tpsheet and textures.png) right into my Assets and the TexturePackerImporter script went to work and sliced up the packed textures into nice little sprites for me to use in Unity. Excellent. HUGE time-saver.

The last iteration of this project I had sliced my textures manually, and it took me a couple hours to do. This iteration took me all of 3 minutes, and that time was mostly for my LAN folder browsing! Thank you to CodeAndWeb GmbH!

Now, with the sprites in my Unity project,  I now started with a fresh scene, and added a UI Image to my project which adds in the Canvas and EventSystem objects which are necessary to drive things with the new Unity UI.

Next, I dragged my splash sprite from my imported assets into the Image Component's Source Image field and clicked on the Set Native Size button to quickly set the Rect Transform's dimensions to my source image's dimensions.

Then I opened the Animation window with Ctrl+6 and clicked on Add Property button and added a key frame to the Image.Color property, and then tweened the Color.a property from 0.0 to 1.0 to fade in, then a few seconds later in the animation, a tween from 1.0 to 0.0 to create a fade out.

At this point, all I need to do (and have not done yet) is toss a new Script on my Main Camera and use a Coroutine to wait the duration of my animation and then call Application.LoadLevel to load in my next scene. And Boom, my Splash Scene is complete.

(The Splash Scene in Pitch is actually more complicated than this, but the same techniques shown here were used for all the elements. I'm just using several animations and Images in the Pitch Splash Scene)

Programming takes time

Pitch progress went to the back burner again as I spent most of today working on some in-house tools to help make my freelance art jobs go a bit easier. I've got a lot of stuff that needs to be done, and I haven't had the right tools to get the job done without a lot of trouble, hence the need for specialized tools.

Lots of Ruby scripting has taken place today. Far more than I had planned, and time just flew by. I'm maybe 30% done with the first of a set of tools, so it looks like Pitch will have to wait a bit longer. I wish I could clone myself and work on multiple projects simultaneously without worrying about if it were done or not.

Friday the 13th

Well, the infamously superstitious day has struck me down. In the process of adding the settings menu screen to Pitch, somehow the planets aligned and virgins were sacrificed and the rest of the screens stopped functioning correctly! And to make matters worse, I've learned that I need to restructure things globally throughout the game to accommodate the needs of handling sound and music volumes separately. So, it's pretty much back to the drawing board for Pitch. The beta will have to wait a bit longer. Looks like I am back to a blank slate once again. I've got some kinda luck...

Premature Pitch

Well, okay maybe I was a bit too hasty. I realized that I forgot an entire menu screen in the game, and so I've been working on fixing that today. I am considering giving TestFairy a try for my little beta test, which will begin as soon as I finish adding in the missing settings menu screen!