Jono's game dev blog

It's been a few weeks since the last update on Super Mansion Quest, I've made progress and am way past the Stencyl version in terms of content and features at this point. Current tasks I'm currently trying to get a inventory system working. Half of it is done so far, the x and z buttons can now call functions for different weapons, before that I had weapons linked to a single button. After that I'll either get the saving/loading menu working or start work on the first boss. Additions I made a temporary title screen and a main menu that's half finished. Rockets and homing missiles are implemented, they work pretty well and the missile launcher is a lot of fun to use, it needs to be more balanced but it's going to be a late game weapon anyway. The skeleton head has newer art now because I felt like redrawing it There's also explosions and death effects now which make it more satisfying to kill the skeleton heads and fire rockets. Other notes

The game now has a working title of Super Mansion Quest and is being rebuilt in Construct 2 after I hit some walls in Stencyl a few weeks ago. Here's a screenshot of Super Mansion Quest in Construct 2. Construct 2 is really cool because making it do some things is simpler than it was to do in Stencyl and that has made getting the game back to where it was fast in some respects. I had written a part about the lack of a tile based map editor but the latest beta has fixed that (along with an inbuilt TMX importer), so now I don't need to worry about that part at all. The only real downside so far is how tied into the HTML5 system it is, I think that causes the desktop export of the game to be 54MB as opposed to the web version which is 354KB. I've managed to get most of the old systems implemented so far and along the way I put in some new ones like enemy and player knockback, an ammo counter, reloading and a spin attack. There's a few things I need to rebuild b

A while back I hit some walls in Stencyl which caused me to move to Construct 2. There was some big issues like the lack of global behaviours and debugging tools. There was also a lot of smaller issues that put me off using it any further like the lack of community and the 3.0 version being nowhere in sight. 1. No global behaviours In Stencyl there are things called behaviours and these allow actions to be executed, they are applied to either scenes or actors. Unfortunately they can't be applied globally which means that behaviours controlling the GUI and menus need to be applied to each and every scene manually, this becomes unmanageable when dealing with a lot of scenes like an RPG or room based game. The workaround to this is making only a few large maps but that would mean coming up with a completely new camera system and then working out how handle all the spawning of enemies and items based on the room you enter. It'd be just as messy if not messier than making su

So it's been a few weeks and I've managed to make some progress, not as much as I had hoped but at least I didn't stop completely. 2 extra coloured floor tilesets to make different rooms look a bit more distinct open doors so I don't need so many switches a directional dagger attack keys for opening various doors added a health system for enemies and the character animations and poses for the character to make the movement look and feel more natural lots of small tweaks and additions that I've probably forgotten about I still haven't come up with a proper name for the game or the character so the working title is Mansion. The major bug that's holding up a lot of progress is the player being duplicated when I switch rooms, If I can't fix this in a reasonable amount of time I'm definitely moving away from Stencyl because it's a rather problematic bug. The only other bugs I know of right now are some collision issues for movement, t

Over the last few weeks I've been working on a top down action adventure game, inspired by games like The Legend of Zelda. If you follow me on twitter and missed the original few tweets and the few screenshots I've posted you've probably been wondering what the hell I've been talking about. The main character is a maid because I like the look of the outfits, so I decided to build the story and character around that. She's mainly inspired by characters from various anime series and Sakuya Izayoi from the Touhou series. She'll be able to use a variety of melee and gun based weapons along with a few cleaning tools for puzzles and boss fights. The story isn't really a priority at the moment and is subject to change but it currently involves the main character fighting demons and the undead to rescue her master who is at the top of the mansion in some room. I'm currently working towards making a small representation of the game which I'll hop

It's been a while since my last update for multiple reasons, I'm still working on Legacy of Barubash, I now have some semblance of a social life and I've also started on a solo game project. It doesn't sound like much but it's been enough to keep me busy enough to not update this blog which is admittedly low on my priority list. I've found that I don't really like the review format I'm currently using, it's not really that restricting but it feels too formal to me and I usually end up wasting time writing about certain sections that I don't really care about which feels like a waste of my time, it's usually the sound and music part that I find hard to write about because I don't really understand the critical language or have a very good understanding of music and sound. I'm also getting rid of the scores because my reviews and thoughts on media aren't very objective and I can easily see how my own biases influence my reviews.

From Monday the 15th of July to Tuesday the 23rd, I was in Melbourne for PAX Australia with Sue and Kamil to show our game The Legacy of Barubash This post is about about the daily events, the second post will be about the actual experience, people I met and the city itself. On Monday we got on a flight at like 6AM or something and landed in Melbourn at 11AM? After that we got settled into our hotel room which only had 2 keys which really sucked because there was 6 of us staying in the room, it really limited us in how often we could go our own separate way, after that I went to the local Harbourtown for a bit and got some lunch, for dinner we went to a Chinese place in the QV building.

Tobe's Vertical Adventure is a rather simple platformer game released for PC on the 19th of July 2011. It's about some guy being dropped into caves by his girlfriend while looking for treasure, what exists of the story is told through very static cutscenes. The gameplay consists of moving downwards while collecting gems, avoiding hazards and heading for the large treasure chest at the bottom, once you open it a timer starts, the level changes slightly to open more paths and you need to get out as quickly as possible. It's a pretty good idea for a game but the execution just isn't there. There's two power ups to collect, one is balloons for gliding and the other is a portable rope for climbing. Unfortunately they are only useful in a limited amount of situations and I couldn't find a way to switch items so you need to use the balloons up before you can use the ropes, this is frustrating when you are trying to escape. There's two characters to choose fr

Nichijou is a slice of life comedy anime, about the students and staff of a school. It originally started as a manga in 2006 but was made into an original net animation in March 2011 and then into an anime series in April 2011.

Once again a bunch of games/movies/anime I either haven't completed or don't feel like writing a full review on. The Fast and The Furious 6 An action movie about fast cars and rich criminals trying to get back a friend that they thought had died by working with some government guy to prevent other criminals from obtaining certain technology, it's a very very dumb movie but it was fun to watch with friends. The Big Lebowski A comedy about an unemployed guy who calls himself "The Dude" and gets involved in a series of strange events because he shares his name with a rich guy. Very funny but the plot is inconsequential and the ending to each part feels kind of anticlimatic and ultimately pointless. Animal Crossing New Leaf Animal Crossing is a strange game, it's about playing a human who lives in a village full of animals, there's no real point to the game apart from paying off loans. Apart from that you can just play very freely and do activitie

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is a 3rd person shooter with some adventure elements, it was developed by Naughty Dog and released in 2007 for the PS3. Uncharted is a game about a fictional descendant of Francis Drake called Nathan Drake who finds a map to El Dorado and sets off to find it along with his old friend Victor Sullivan and a journalist called Elena Fisher. Unfortunately after a few chapters both of them are gone after the first few chapters, so you have to deal with Drake talking to himself and looking at things in the distance. Thankfully he does find Elena after a while and that's when the story really picks up and gets much better.

Another post for media that either has too little content for a full review, hasn't been completed, or I just don't feel like writing a whole article for. Lume Lume is a point and click puzzle game, all of the level is actually filmed which makes it look really nice and then the characters are added on top, the main aim of the game is to get into the house and to set up a windmill to restore power. It can be completed in under an hour if you know what you are doing, I ended up using a walkthrough because the puzzles felt so unorganised and it wasn't that great at telling you how to do things or what you needed to do next. The first puzzle was obviously the easiest but it requires you to clean up a whole rotating wire puzzle just to connect some wires together and the other puzzles require a similar tedious effort. It feels kind of empty when you complete the few puzzles there are because it says that it's only part 1 of Lume. I had high hopes for this game after

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is a Hack and Slash spinoff game from the popular Metal Gear franchise, it focuses on the character of Raiden who's also starred in Metal Gear Solid 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4. It started off development as a Kojima Productions game but was eventually handed to Platinum Games in 2011. It was released in February 2013 for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, I played the PS3 version so any controls I mention will be different for the 360 version.

Been playing and watching a bunch of things but haven't had the time to finish them. Games: Deus Ex: Human Revolution: This is actually the kind of cyberpunk story driven game I've been looking for, it's a sci-fi game about the advancement of humans by merging themselves with technology and the possible side effects, reliance problems and the new class divide it could create. The graphics are great and it actually shows they had artistic aspirations and art direction, which is something I wish more games would do, unfortunately the performance isn't exactly the best. There's a lot of chatting to people and interesting decisions to make, even your combat actions and exploration effect what people say and think about you. One thing I really like is how much they make the game mechanics into something that's actually part of the game, upgrades that give you new abilities are augments and all of the HUD is due to your eye augmentation .

Ratchet & Clank: Tools of Destruction was released for the PS3 in 2007, it was made by Insomniac Games and was the first game in the new R&C trilogy for the PS3. The story feels a bit too serious for what the Ratchet and Clank have been, there's some humour but it's lacking and only happens when Captain Qwark is around, everything else is treated as a "go here, do this" situation which leaves you feeling like the game is walking you through it's forced story instead of being a weird and wacky adventure with no real urgency even though there's an over the top villain about to destroy the galaxy.

Okay this one is late and as such will probably be the last one so I'll try to write about everything I watched and played on Friday last week. I didn't really do too much focused stuff after that day and I still haven't gotten around to the art part which I'll try again later. Anyway on Friday I watched an episode of Serial Experiments Lain and Guilty Crown, played demos of Bayonetta, WET, Scott Pilgrim VS the World and Katamari Forever and I also watched Kill Bill Volume 1. So let's go through all of that.

Alright I didn't manage to get any art done so I think I'll just do all that on Sunday, it's a bit too hard to split my mind between reading subtitles and drawing something at the same time. Anyway today I watched Haiyore! Nyaruko-san which is an anime about a guy who is saved by a cthulhian creature in the form of a silver haired girl. It is incredibly referential to the Cthulhu Mythos, other anime, manga and video games, it even has a blog dedicated to listing all of this http://nyaruref.blogspot.ca/ 

For the next few days I'll be playing a whole bunch of games and watching movies or anime and then writing small pieces on their visuals along with some art to show the characters and try to mimic the style. I'm going to keep it fairly casual so I can spend more time on the art and play/watch part instead of being fussy with the writing. Anyway, first up is Kill Me Baby AKA Baby, Please Kill Me. It's a comedy anime based off a 4 panel manga. The story focuses on an assassin and her dumb friend, it also features a ninja who doesn't really know any ninja tricks and a nameless character who tries to make an appearance but always misses the two main characters.