Toxic Sewer on GameDev Market

So I was surprised with some great news today. My tiles just got accepted on GameDev Market, please show your support and pick up a copy if you like them, or tell others about it if you don't need them.

In addition to that, Degica finally got back to me and told me that they have accepted the tiles as well, so they will soon be available on gamedevfort.com as soon as their art team puts together the promotional materials for the marketplace.

In other news, all my side-projects and smaller projects which have been in the works have just been shelved in order to free up time to focus strictly on a single project. The large RPG which we started four years ago is finally taking the front seat and will be the sole focus of Bang Bang Attack Studios from here on, until the release day.

Lots to do, and lots to learn to get this project rolling in the right direction. I will be posting more about the development soon.

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.

First Sale

I was just pleasantly surprised to learn that I actually got a sale on my HTML5 sliding puzzle starter kit on CodeCanyon!

This is the start of a whole new world for me. I'm very excited about the possibilities that are now available to me!

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!

Zombies Til Dawn

Well it's been a little while since I posted anything. Even though I completely missed out on LD32, I finished my game anyway and today I am here to announce the fully-playable and mobile-ready (to the best of my knowledge) HTML5 game Zombies Til Dawn.

You can play the game by clicking here.

I opted to avoid the use of any third party libraries. The game is made with pure JS, and should run equally well on all platforms. I've tested with my desktop in 3 browsers, and my android phone and tablet. I'd love to hear if the game works or does not work on your iOS devices or your browser.

I kept a log of all the time that went into the game, and it totals at 13 hours, 13 minutes, and 13 seconds... yeah, lol it surprised me too.

The game has an adsense banner so I can try to make a few pennies off of it. If you really like the game, I'd be happy to sell you an ad-free license. Contact me.

So... I know you are wondering What IS Zombies Til Dawn?

Zombies Til Dawn is a turn-based strategy game where the goal is simple. You must survive until dawn. Your means of survival is in surrounding yourself with explosives and hoping that the zombies get blown up and don't get to you.

I hope that you enjoy my little game. Well, not little, but minimalist. It clocks in at 1965 lines of code! Please, try out Zombies Til Dawn and let me know what you thought about the game!

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.

Pushing Pixels

I have spent most of today working on some isometric tiles for a client. Tasked with creating damaged roman roads with a near photo-realistic aesthetic. I am needing to really stretch my pixel pushing powers to get this one done. I don't think I can show off the work publicly yet, so I won't be posting any screenshots of the set until I clear it with the client.

In other news, we've not been getting any positive feedback from publishers for our HTML5 game. So that sucks. Still waiting to hear back from a few more. I'm not going to get my hopes up though. I think the market is done for.

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.

Pouring Java

I've spent most of today working on some in-house tools for increasing productivity. I got tired of writing out boilerplate code for my Java classes, and using an IDE's class wizards was annoying me to no end, so I ended up writing a little command line utility which I call pour. Get it? You pour java...anyway...

I developed my little tool using Ruby, since it is so great for string manipulation, and easy file handling. Pour is short on features, but works exactly as I expect it to, and only outputs exactly what I want, and is far faster than any class wizard I've found.

I can specify a local template file to pour, and it will use it to create the classes, or, I can create a template in my home directory to use the template globally, or I can use the built-in template. I can specify to generate an entry point function, and I can specify a package. These few features turned a task that normally takes about 3 minutes, and turns it into about a 5 second task.

In addition, I set up gradle and grunt for a very simple auto-build workflow that allows me to focus on the code editing, and not on having to build the project, run tests, build the jar, and execute the program. I can just edit the code, save it, and my auto-build setup does the rest. Very fast workflow. I like it a lot, and I'm going to have to find a similar solution for my C++ development now, because this kicks major ass.

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!

AxonoxA

In order to further my learning of Modern OpenGL development, I have decided to create a side-project of a yet to be determined size, called AxonoxA for the time being.

If anyone holds the rights to this name, my apologies. I am not looking to commercialize this project, and the name is simply "Axono" from axonometric, which is something I was reading about when the inspiration hit me. Then, because of my love for symmetry, I turned the name into a palindrome by adding on xA to the end.

With this project I am giving myself a technical and creative outlet for breaking up the stressful studio project developments, and my more stressful freelancing career. I think that overall this will in turn make me more productive, and a happier person overall, and learning something new doesn't hurt either.

AxonoxA is developed with C++ using OpenGL 4, SDL2 and GLEW libraries.

I am using stb_image for loading my textures, and I am currently looking into using Assimp for loading 3d models, with custom binary model compilation to come later for optimization.

My first milestone has been reached with achieving a simple diffuse lighting textured single-mesh rendering. I have learned quite a lot in the 14 hours that I have spent on this venture so far. My next milestone will be to bring multiple models into AxonoxA and "walk" through a scene using common FPS controls (kb+mouse combo).

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.