Motley Pixels

In August I took it easy and didn’t burn myself out. I made a good decision of launching two months after the game was in a playable state (but needed some fine tuning). So there was no rush.

A couple of major things done since last month:

• Fixed the camera – so it moves more smoothly. People were saying that the camera was rather jerky and harsh. I though I smoothed the position, but the zoom scale wasn’t being smoothed. So both change with smoothing applied, and the effect looks a lot more tolerable to the eye.
• I’ve added all the achievements to Steam. See image below of the achievement icons. I’ve almost got them all working in code as of this post, I just need to test them to make sure they all work. It was made quite easy thanks to a Godot addon: https://github.com/samsface/godot-steam-api (no need to build Godot from scratch with Steam SDK built in it)
• Probably fixed an issue when re-spawning – player would spawn in the ground. Resetting velocity I think fixes it?
• Generally improved controls so no more weirdness, especially with analog sticks
• Added amusing game-over sounds: https://twitter.com/MotleyPixels/status/1566047026714148864
• T-shirts! and other items available from RedBubble: https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Gravity-Flux-by-leofebey/122773651.WFLAH?asc=u Super important of course

Achievement icons:

The game is still set for Friday, 30th September 6PM (AEST/Hobart time). I am currently working on booking a venue. I have contacted a certain venue, but have not received a response yet. There will be a venue, (I have some fallback plans) don’t worry.

The remainder to-do list is getting a lot smaller.. Just forgot to get the stats page working, and finishing up the achievements. Then upload to Steam

I still want to do some more testing. I think I have at least one more chance to test the game, which I hope will be valuable.

Tas Jam

It’s awesome to see the return of Tas Jam, the local Tasmanian game jam events. It’s happening on 9-11 Sept at University of Tasmania Sandy Bay. I will be attending in some capacity. I guess I should try to make a game (I’ve historically been good at that) or just chill and volunteer being on the Tas Game Makers board. Event details: https://tasgamemakers.com/tasjam/

Other Projects

I have lots of other projects on the go, and of course I’m already thinking what to do after Gravity Flux is released. My next game will likely be “Sentience” the 3rd person shooter for PC and mobile. It’s a story-driven game with levels made with Trenchbroom. I think I’m going to enjoy working on it. I have other non-games projects as well, like a custom music manager and player program for PC (Win/Mac/Linux) and a virtual pet electronic “toy” / health companion. Having experience with electronics, that should be lots of fun as well.

Gravity Flux

More work has been done in July

• Added players jumping in the menu
• Improved input system to add/remove buttons pressed into an array (best way to do it)
• Made both 2D and 3D particles for MacOS and Windows/Linux respectively. Godot says that Macs don’t do 3D particle acceleration, so I’ll take their word for it and make the game switch between 2D and 3D particles depending on detected OS.
• Fixed small bug where player kept moving (falling) when paused. Oops.

A few things left to do

• Steam achievements! (many..)
• Fix bug where one controller doesn’t work in controller join menu (need physical gamepads to test)

As soon as those are done, I”ll do some more real world testing then hopefully start the releasing process (exporting and uploading to Steam). Could be earlier than scheduled date of Sept 29, we’ll see..

Wizards with Rockets

This game (that I’ve been working on since 2018) has been mostly on pause since early this year, but I’m thinking how to progress with it after releasing Gravity Flux. The plan is to finish the game up quickly. Not adding new features like physics, scripting and shaders. It’s just going to take too long and I want to learn a new programming language and graphics framework. Plus I’ve been feeling a little burned out from it being a long-term project that’s getting little progress.. Oh well, I’ve learned plenty about C.

So the plan is to make WWR 2, using C++ and SDL! Not too ambitious, no! I plan to get better at CMake as well. So I can just build on any platform with ease. I’ve chosen C++ over Rust, as I think it’s important to know C++ well in my profession (software developer), and Rust is still fairly new. C++ isn’t going away any time soon. I’ve heard about the new Carbon programming language, designed to be a successor to C++, we’ll see. It may take some time to achieve that. Still keen to learn Rust well at some point, but perhaps learning C++ will only make learning Rust more satisfying, from what I’ve heard. And SDL because it’s pretty popular and well known, an industry standard. A little more complex than Allegro by the looks, but still not absurdly complex with boilerplate (Hello OpenGL/Vulkan). Then I’ll have the fun of incorporating other features, like map loader, physics, networking, etc. Add all the libraries!

Sentience

I’m very excited to work on the next big game after Gravity Flux. It’s going to be a 3rd person action/stealth game for mobile devices and PC. I want to make a decent first-person shooter one day. This won’t be it but it’ll be similar, and less advanced. Perhaps a prequel.

I’ve given Sentience a bit of thought recently, and I have some neat ideas for it, some I want to keep secret until I’ve gotten close to releasing it. I’m going heavy with story and world building for what it is, and it will be a very art and story driven game, which will be an interesting challenge for me. I see some Blender tutorials in my future. I’m super keen to start work on it and show screenshots of my progress. I hope to get started right after Gravity Flux is released.

A slightly delayed monthly post, oops!

Last month, things slowed down a bit, but I have reached some goals with Gravity Flux. The gameplay is more or less complete! I just need to finish up the last menu – the player stats, and of course Steam achievements and integration. Boring and tricky compare to the rest of the game, but I’ll get there!

I am also planning on running a hybrid, online and in-person Godot Engine workshop. That has been taking up a lot of my time as well, and this month I hope to complete the main course content for people. If you’re interested, please join my Discord server in the Links page on this site. The course will cover making a clone of my game, Wizards with Rockets. You’ll see how quick it is to make the game, especially compare to making it with C programming..

So the workshop will likely take up most of my spare time, but I’ll try to make some progress with Gravity Flux. my plan was to release the game roughly mid 2022, which is still looking possible.

In other gamedev news, I’ve decided I want to make my own 3D game engine, much like I’m making a 2D engine with Wizards with Rockets, and improving another one of those core programming skills, C++ programming. I thought I’d try Vulkan programming, but we’ll see how that goes. I might cave in and just use Ogre3D or something much easier. This is going to be a very long-term project, probably longer than Wizards with Rockets will be, and that’s already been in development since 2018 (4 years).

Oh, and with Wizards with Rockets, I have been successful in porting the build system to CMake! This is one of those “dark arts” of programming that are notoriously poorly documented and very few people know it very well.. Sigh, I wish that wasn’t the case because it’s been a rough experience learning CMake. But I’ve forced myself into it as I’ve been using CLion IDE with a view to keep using it, and it’s a paid product, so I better learn it well!

Here’s the CMakeLists.txt file that defines the build process:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.22)
project(topdown_shooter C)

set(CMAKE_C_STANDARD 99)

if (WIN32)
    include_directories(win64lib/include)
    link_directories(win64lib/lib)
    set(game_LIBS liballegro.dll.a liballegro_image.dll.a liballegro_main.dll.a liballegro_font.dll.a
            liballegro_primitives.dll.a liballegro_dialog.dll.a liballegro_audio.dll.a liballegro_acodec.dll.a
            liballegro_ttf.dll.a )
endif()
if (CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME MATCHES "Linux")
    include_directories(/usr/include/libxml2/)
    include_directories(allegro_5.2_linux/include)
    link_directories(lib)
    link_directories(allegro_5.2_linux/lib)
    link_directories(libs)
    set(game_LIBS liballegro.so liballegro_image.so liballegro_main.so liballegro_font.so
            liballegro_primitives.so liballegro_dialog.so liballegro_audio.so liballegro_acodec.so
            liballegro_ttf.so)
endif()


file(GLOB topdown_shooter_SRC
        "src/tmx/*.h"
        "src/tmx/*.c"
        "src/dyad/*.c"
        "src/dyad/*.h"
        "src/minIni/*.c"
        "src/nuklear/*.h"
        "src/nuklear/*.c"
        "src/*.h"
        "src/*.c")

# This was useful.. https://gamedev.net/forums/topic/639698-allegro-and-cmake-so-close-but-won39t-compile/5038817/
add_executable(topdown_shooter ${topdown_shooter_SRC})
if (WIN32)
    target_link_libraries(topdown_shooter ${game_LIBS} -lws2_32 -lxml2)
endif()
if(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME MATCHES "Linux")
    target_link_libraries(topdown_shooter ${game_LIBS} -lxml2 -lm)
endif()

With this file, you then make a build directory, such as ‘build-windows’ and then run cmake .. to generate build files. In CLion it uses the Ninja build system, but it can generate build files for many IDEs such as Visual Studio, XCode or just plan Makefiles, like what I’ve been using. In CLion, all you have to do after editing the CMakeLists file is press build and then run to to run it. And it’s working for me!

That’ll be the last of WWR I plan to work on for a while, as I’m quite busy with other stuff. Such as Gravity Flux which is very close to being released!

Continuing the monthly updates. In What Now March 2022, I posted that I was working on mainly Gravity Flux, the settings, stats and steam achievements. I actually implemented the settings menu in the main menu, plus some other little fixes, such as more places you could get stuck in the levels. I also added support for analogue sticks! A requested feature. And some slight tweaks to the textures for side walls on the first level. And, just tonight I improved the background by adding a nice lens flare!

So for April, my list of things to do on Gravity Flux is pretty short! I am getting quite close to preparing it for a Steam release! Woo.

Some of the things left to do:

• Player stats by colour
• Steam achievements
• Plus-X mod by Cheeseness (executable support for files in zip files)
• And of course, uploading to Steam.
• And any other little bugs I find along the way.

I don’t think I need to make another build for release, however I might test the game out with some friends with several controllers before Steam release and the launch party of course. I have played it in a much earlier version, and it was fun, but it’s probably a good idea to play it again in it’s virtually-complete state.

So hopefully by end of April, I will be either done with the game or very close. Looking for a May-June release muahaha!

I haven’t forgotten about my other games, Wizards with Rockets and Sentience. However the less I focus on those, the closer this game will get to being released.. And that’d be awesome.

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