Dev-Log

January 2022 - Global Game Jam 2022.

 Theme: Duality. Time: 3 days. Title: greyscale

This one, admittedly, took a bit less effort on my part. The Coding for this game was as simple as the movement, left to right, and the mechanic. the mechanic was that when you press 's' it turns off all tilemap colliders (making the player fall through the floor/ceiling) then turn on the opposite colour tilemap collider then reverses the player's gravity. a pretty whacky mechanic but not too difficult. it was annoying working with the two colliders on the player, one on the head and one on the feet, but in the end, it wasn't a huge challenge.  my other job was to do the Key-door stuff which was irritating but again, not too challenging.

 Harry's job, in my opinion, was the true struggle of greyscale. He had to make many unique and intriguing puzzle rooms for a game mechanic we had just invented. On top of that, he had to make sure the player didn't soft-locked, stuck, or bored. plus he had to design the rooms to be aesthetically pleasing despite the artwork being just squares. a true challenge. The one thing which made all of this just a bit harder was the fact that we had two tilemaps, one for white and one for black which meant that sometimes he would place a block on the wrong tilemap (understandably) and the player would get stuck on invisible blocks. We fixed it in the end and made it so that we only have white blocks, and made one of the tilemaps black so that when you place a white block on it, it would appear black and therefore making it clear whether he cocked up or not. 

despite these challenges, harry was rushing through making as much as he could to get the game finished. a bit like what I had experienced with snowicide prevention. He managed to get it all done and I uploaded it just minutes before the deadline but there kept being bugs with the game so I was almost crying after reuploading the game the fifth time within 10 minutes. I ended up calling it "the_grey_scale_finaleV2.0.1.2ProXeditionDeluxGoTYGoldPlusFive.7z.xx10" lol. 

There's no official ranking on the GGJ website but we got 27 hearts which is rather mint.

-sam

then I made it so that the bacteria couldn't overlap each other in transit, fixed bugs then implemented the ability to drag around the map. next was the shooting mechanic. accuracy was based on the distance between the shooter and the shootee (but I didn't manage to incorporate walls into the calculations). when you click the shoot button, all the squares in a circle radius glow blue. then you can click any enemy on a blue square to shoot them. 

This sounds like a couple of decent features to base a game around but honestly, we were so far from the goal of a decent base game and uni was starting up again so unfortunately, I didn't have the time to make it into a fully-fledged game. I'm proud of getting the mechanic done as well as I did but I hate that I didn't get to finish it. We didn't have art, we didn't have music, we didn't have harry. it's purely a pathfinding algorithm + multiplayer. 

at this point, I declared it a practice game and decided to focus on my studies which I believe was a good decision.

-sam

May 2022 - ACM London Game Jam (Sam POV) 

Theme: none. Title: Child's Awakening. Time: 1 month

Another harry-less project and an absolute shit-show. We started this project with approx. 12 ACM students from all years and greatly varying skills, abilities, and work ethic but by the end of it, we had about 3 or 4, including myself. So what went wrong?

before I get to that, let's focus on what went right.  We made a decent game within the time limit with epic art and sound, functional gameplay, 2 types of enemies, moving platforms, cool core mechanic, deep lore(not that deep), 5 levels, and 4 unique settings. Honestly, it was okay in the end but we had a fair bit of trouble getting there.  

the design: the first and main problem with the game was the design. the game was either too hard or too easy. the platforms were a bit oddly placed and the path of the rooms was hard to navigate as many people didn't get how to use the flashlight mechanic. Also, the enemies were annoying instead of scary because you'd just die instantly to an invisible enemy. We initially had two designers, one first year and one 3rd year (experienced). That was the perfect mix because It meant there would be an influx of new ideas being moderated by experience + knowledge. However, sadly, the 3rd year was injured and physically couldn't take part. This means it was all resting on the shoulders of the inexperienced first year. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt because he did attempt to do the level design but it involved keys and a style of level which didn't suit the gameplay in the project. Then he just kinda faded out of existence.  This meant that it was down to myself and Miguel (artist) to do the design last minute (which neither of us knew how to do). Miguel knew the art and I knew the gameplay mechanic so it was down to us to do it. Also, I had to go to work at the pizza place so I was doing it up until the last minute which is why the ending is so abrupt.

The art: We had a cool 3rd-year artist with us in the first week who drew some cool concept art for the enemies but she disappeared and ghosted us after the first meeting so we couldn't rely on her for anything.  Next, we had an artist team member who was quite hard to get along with. She produced like two things in 3 weeks and kept effort at a minimum so that wasn't going to remove any stress from Miguel. 1 artist, Miguel, a legend, drew the art for the entire game. He made it easy for me to implement by sending me separate PNGs, sprite sheets with evenly spaced sprites, both black and white versions of each asset, and making the arm separate from the character. It was a lot of work for him but he managed it like a boss.

the programming: as the only programmer on the team, I had the biggest burden because if I messed up with the code then all of the art, sound, and (maybe) design would've been for nothing and there was no safety net if I couldn't do it or couldn't be arsed to do it. On top of that, because I was the only playtester of the game (as I had to look for bugs), everyone came to me with their questions and that was a fair bit of responsibility. I did get lazy at certain points but I had Miguel there to keep me on track and in the end, I did everything I said I was gonna do within the time frame. I even pulled a couple of all-nighters before the deadline but I can't recall what I did.

 the sound: I forgot to mention Rexland, absolute legend. he spearheaded the sound boys and kept his patience when working with someone slightly less experienced with making music. He produced 3-ish unique soundtracks and ginger harry made another one. the sound guys were spot-on. there was the issue of the sound effects, though. The sfx was done using foley and all the sounds either didn't fit their respective actions or sounded far too realistic for the 2D game. I think the problem there is that the person making the sfx didn't see any gameplay or art before making the sounds.

the lore: "write 12 diary entries please" "ok" she finished the entries within 15 minutes which either implies that she's quick with words or that they were going to be shit. We can all agree that they were all god awful but I didn't want to put this person down so I didn't say anything. The same person came up with the title and created the title screen without conferring with us about the title. I'm still not entirely sold on "child's awakening".

Despite all of this, I refer you to the "what went well" section. We learned a lot about working with a randomly-assigned team and how to deal with certain situations despite nonsense. I don't think I handled it amazingly or anything, but I learned loads afterward.

May 2022 - ACM London Game Jam (Harry POV) 

Theme: none. Title: Scatterbody. Time: 1 month

Now it comes to my POV of that same game jam above. As Sam mentions it was a randomly assigned team making my project Sam-less. My team flowed surprisingly well together, even without the 'sell your soul to get this done' attitude of Sam. We were assigned an equal number of students to the other groups but once again only some of them were willing to properly get stuck in with the jam. Roughly half of them were 'jammy dodgers'. By the end of it we had roughly 7 or 8 including myself, making us a bit luckier than Sam's group in numbers.

Most of these were artists, resulting in the art being very strong for this project with all areas needed in terms of art being well covered. We decided on doing pixel art for our game, as that way it was easier for everyone involved to have a consistent style and much less time consuming overall. I also learnt a lot about resolution during this while working close with the artists, and the importance of consistency throughout for pixel art. What was made was some really great stuff, Angie an artist from 1st year at the time was willing to animate the character's animations and create all the sprites for that and did these cool intro and outro cutscenes. There was only one minor hiccup with a scaling issue with the leg being massive compared to everything else but I just thought it was just funny and we moved on. Amber, a 3rd year artist helped where she could with some cool extra details along with some of the tile set. However, the majority of the tile set was done by Dan from the first year who was clearly experienced in doing so and made it easy for me to draw out the levels afterwards. Finally, Liam from the 2nd year helped out with the art for various background props in our spaceship setting. Sadly a few of these didn't make it in as I ran out of time creating rooms near the end, but there were some solid brooms and chairs in there I used.

Speaking of the design, this was a good chance for me to try and learn more about level design and experiment a bit. I think difficulty pops up as a problem though once again with this project, the first section of the levels involving the movement of the head was a bit too difficult, especially for it to be the very first section. Thanks to the programmer Stanislav, it was very easy to change the numbers surrounding the physics of the movement for the body parts. However I should have changed these numbers a lot more for the head and for the leg. The leg as a playable body part should have been thought about a lot more, it essentially played like a normal platformer and the level for it was one of the longest. This difference in playtime for the body parts was due to time constraints, since I waited to be able to play as the body parts in order to draw out the levels so I could test as I went along. This was quite a big oversight on my behalf though, because it meant the more complicated body parts to program had shorter levels, which is a shame considering the effort put in to programming them. The torso for example was one of the more interesting mechanics, but only had a tiny 1 screen puzzle to complete for it and that's it. This was partly also due to a loss of progress on the leg level, with me redoing it last minute, and at that point I should have thought to give the leg a small room and focus on the torso.

For the programming, there was only really one programmer, Stanislav. I could rely on him to program generally everything and we kept in communication and he would tell me what was plausible to do et cetera. Since it was just Stanislav carry the load of programming I stepped in a bit with my considerably dodgy coding techniques to do smaller things like the keys for the doors, tooltips and whatever. Stanislav was also quite good at making things easy for me as a designer to jump in and change numbers and everything being prefabs and all that. (don't worry Sam you're good too).

Finally when it came down to sound we had nobody up until the last few days, when Kirk in the 2nd year jumped in did what he could in the time. Even if there weren't that many sounds they worked well with the game, and he also implemented the sounds for us.

In short, I think I once again learned from this project. I enjoyed being the one to call the shots here but that role is better suited for Sam. I also am very conscious of what went wrong with this project in terms of my design, and it can be improved upon for next time. 

June 2022 - Passion Project (On-Going)

Title: furry farming (not actual name) Time: 2 months + ongoing was talking to personA in my kitchen and then personB  walks in "oh you're interested in game design right?" A says to B. B says "yeah but I have no opportunity to" something like that. So the business cards come out and B gives me an idea for a game. I figure it's quite a cool concept for a farming game and I'm interested in developing it. She's good at art and had fully planned out the story and gameplay within a couple of weeks so that's how it all started. Again, no harry, but it was alright. B has been very consistent with planning and I was working fairly hard during summer both at the pizza place and at home. 

it took a while to get the rule tiles working but I managed. there was so much to do and I wasn't able to do it all within summer, this will take like a year to be decent. it took 3ish weeks but I managed to get a few things done: movement, using items on a hot bar, using a hoe on dirt to till the land, using seeds on tilled land to plant, using a water bucket on tilled land to wet it, using water on the water to refill, creating a day/night cycle, making it so that if you haven't watered tilled land in 4 days it un-tills, making it so that you have to water a crop for it to grow, using scythe on fully grown crop gives you the crop with random chance to get more and the chance decreasing as the quantity gets higher.  plus bug fixing and weird stuff with art. I got a bit lazy at times but there was so much left to do such as NPCs dialogue, NPC pathing, Combat, Enemies, animal farming, Fishing, Cooking, Collecting wood and rock, Magic spells, upgrades, Inventory management, Shops, etc. It's too much for one man. I did as much as I could within the time limit, going out to coffee shops during the day to get more motivated and trying my best to relax at night but then August came around and I had to start with another game jam so I've left it there for now. 

the artwork is amazing though. always appreciated.

September 2022  - ACM Indie Games Group Assignment (Sam POV)

ABULIA

Duration: 12 weeks (3 months)

A Week-by-week account of a programmer in a collaborative indie games team.

September 2022  - ACM Indie Games Group Assignment (Harry POV)

ABULIA

Duration: 12 weeks (3 months)

A Week-by-week account of a designer in a collaborative indie games team.

The requirements of the assignment were to make a game with multiple core mechanics/systems but we must include controller support. 

Sounds simple right? Sure, if you were going for the bare minimum you could put together a 2D platformer with wall jumping, dashing, and swinging on a rope for a secure 40% passing grade. However, I was gunning to be the best. I was going to use this project to push the boundaries of what I'm capable of and go above what is expected of me. I chose to make the most programmatically complex game that I've made so far. (I scored 77% btw)

My Game Included:

• Procedural Map Generation

• A* Pathfinding

• Save Files

• Colour customization

• The creation and destruction of blocks

• "Friend" collection and discarding

• Ultimate ability bar

• Timer

• Dynamic shoot speed based on Enemies and Friends

The red ones are likely what earned me the most programming marks but the others were part of my creative design process and made the 'game' into a 'GAME' if you know what I mean.

 Procedural Map Generation

For this I decided to go with the Cellular Automata method. This Is where each square has an algorithm to decide whether it becomes a block or an empty space. 

1. Each cell on the grid can either be a wall or empty space at the start. (usually 50/50 chance)

2. Go through the grid and check if it has more or less than 4 adjacent walls.

3. If it has more than 4, make it a wall. If it has less, make it an empty space.

4. repeat steps 2 and 3 until the map is complete.

Whether you understand the algorithm or not, this will create a random Terraria-Esque cave-like map.

 A* Pathfinding

I didn't choose A* pathfinding because it fit the game or anything, I chose it because It was the most complex and effective pathfinding that I could attempt. The goal of A* pathfinding is to ensure that you find the shortest path every time. However, due to the nature of my game, it introduced a lag issue to my game. Nevertheless, I optimised it the best I could while keeping the pathfinding in the game. I like to think that this gained me more marks than it lost.

 Save Files

I mainly used this to save your colour settings between sessions. This is the very simple way that I was taught to use save files:

1. store variables in a c# class

2. on start, check if the user has a save file

3. if they do, load data

4. if they don't, class cl = new class()

5. convert the class JSON format and save it to Application.persistentDataPath

6. save the variables in the class

7. loading data involves getting all variables from the JSON file and putting it into the c# class

Overall

 I had fun on this project, this is the only project so far in which I've been able to creatively express myself using the skills I've acquired from working on the game jams.

December 2022 - ACM Winter Game Jam

Theme: World Of Snowcraft, Duration: 4 days. 

King Of The Chill 

What an experience this was. Just to give context: the uni Assignment deadline was the 13th of December, then I was away In Denmark between the 13th and 18th of December... The Game Jam began on the 19th of December. couldn't catch a break. I was knackered but I was also excited to do another game jam so I put on a brave face and worked as hard as I could. 

The team consisted of me, Harry, Kristian(programmer/musician), and Sab (artist).

 Idea generation 

For a start, the theme was god-awful, It was really hard to come up with an original idea when the theme is so explicit, but we ran with it. We opened a Miro and came up with a handful of ideas but we identified these first ideas as "within the box". Now we knew what "the box" had, we decided to think outside of the box. One idea was "what if it you had to freeze worlds with crafted items" and that spurred on the idea for King Of The Chill.

 Production 

We had 3 really decent unity programmers here and we were very able to produce everything that was designed. However, I didn't do my job as a project manager properly or at all. I should've realised early that the scope was too large, that objectives of the game weren't fully thought out and that the craftables were too expensive. Although it's not entirely my fault, I wish I'd been more proactive with the decision-making of the game rather than just blindly programming whatever harry wanted.

 Also, when you are working with friends, it's very important not to get distracted. I can't speak for the others but when I was in a call with Kristian and Harry, I was just talking and barely working. I did notice this later in the project, however, so I started leaving the call to focus-fire some of the tasks. music helps with this. 

One major problem we that Kristian had lost 3 hours of progress with the enemy AI. We were working on plastic SCM, on one branch, and Kristian was not pulling our changes for several changesets so when he finally did try to pull, his conflicting changes were overwritten. He then took a couple of hours' break to get over his loss but then he was back on the ball and redid it all. Absolute legend.

January  2023 - Banana For Scale[REMASTERED].

Just a silly banana game 

It was just me and Harry on this project, reigniting the passion for bananas. 

We wanted to try our hands at making a mobile game with the skills and experience gained from previous games. Over Christmas, I started progress on a title screen with the main focus of the game being presentation and content rather than features. I started by buying a UI buttons pack to fit the mobile game theme, then I downloaded the font from Bloons and bought a large pack of 3D models to play with.

 So, between the 3rd and the 16th of January, Harry and I woke up at 9.30 -10 AM every day and got to work on this project. It was two weeks of a good routine, a clear mindset, and lots of progress. Our ability to produce games has been better than ever and the process was very enjoyable and fun.

 In the game, you resize the objects to their correct size, you get peels based on how well you do, you can then use peels to buy different skins and maps which change the game slightly. There are also achievements that give you peels as a reward.

 We made sure to structure the game so modular in a way where we could constantly add to it. We can expand on:

• Banana skins shop

• Maps shop

• Achievements shop

• Objects to resize

• Warning screen dialogue

How much we add to this depends on how much time we have because University is starting up and I'll be programming two other projects.

The main goal for this game was to have a publishable app for the Google Play Store, we will likely have ads and this means that we will have an excellent portfolio game with proof that we can make money from this.

Sam's AAA Blog