Jono's game dev blog

 After many years away from this project I've returned, hopefully I will get a lot further this time. I decided to switch from Construct 2 to Godot, because Construct has a lot of limitations, a tiny community, and a lack of development. Godot on the other hand is pretty widely used, despite being newer, and since it is code first and based on a variant of Python, programming principles are easier to translate to it. This doesn't mean it is struggle free, but I've managed to learn a lot already. Anway, I've started working on Super Mansion Quest again, since I now have a better idea of what I want the gameplay to be like,   I made the decision that instead of having endless rooms, the maps will be contiguous, which means the architecture will also be more logical In order to support this properly I had to come up with a way to transition the camera between spaces and hide rooms when they aren't active, as shown in the gif below. I'm posting more about this on my...

It's been a long time coming but here's an official announcement: Super Mansion Quest is on hold again. There's many reasons behind this but the main ones are: I was meant to be working on only one feature (making the guns feel good) and I got sidetracked I don't really know how to create proper enemies that would suit the gameplay The progress I was making felt really slow and I didn't have much enthusiasm for it At the bottom of the post I have a partial list of what I achieved while working on it again. What I actually want to talk about is what I've been up to in between putting the game on hold and now. It started off with wanting to make a platformer that's smaller in scope than Super Mansion Quest. So I worked on a recreation of Super Mario Bros. World 1-1. I actually managed to get a fair amount done because there's not too much going on in that first level. I didn't make an exact clone because the movement in Super Mario Bro...

I didn't get as much done in 2014 as I wanted to, but I still managed to actually do a few things -Worked on 3 released games ( Swan River Swim , Quarries of Scred 1982 and Scourge of Tethys ) -Worked on a number of unreleased prototypes (Grapple Punch, Text Invaders, Monster Tournament and a few others that didn't have names) -Cleaned up and resumed working on Super Mansion Quest -Created a devlog for Super Mansion Quest on Tigsource -Turn 21, not really an accomplishment, but it is an important event that happened -Went to PAX Aus 2014 and got to explore Melbourne a bit more this time -Cleared a fair amount of games from my backlog and removed the games I didn't want to play So in 2015 I hope to: -Release the gun demo for Super Mansion Quest in a few weeks -Release a few games/prototypes -Create a proper art portfolio -Play more games -Read more books -Waste less time on the internet

Over the last few weeks I've been working on Super Mansion Quest, just so I could play around with making some guns in it. So far it's gone pretty well, I'm really enjoying working on it again. Added two new guns in the form of a machine pistol and a rifle Simplified the weapon creation process temporarily so I don't have to manage so many events for a single weapon Worked out how to convert Rounds Per Minute to the interval for each bullet (60 divided by RPM) Created a guide for creating new weapon types Created a room for target practice Added a recoil feature which makes the bullet spread of a weapon worse the longer it is fired Added dotted lines to measure the bullet spread Created a central dotted line to allow the player to line up long distance shoots easier Created a simple bullet firing noise Adjusted the pistol stats The machine pistol works really well because of the fast rate of fire and the bullet spread indicator. The rifle is cool because o...

Over the past few weeks I've been working on features and graphics to allow Scourge of Tethys to be played on Android phones and tablets. I was also working on a post about virtual controls which I hope to finish soon. I will be launching the game on the Google Play Store, but I still have to work out the details of that. Please only buy it if you have version 4.0+ of Android as it won't work on any previous versions. You can get the APK from itch.io for only $1. Buying it from itch.io also means you get the desktop version as well. If you have any problems with the game please contact me on Twitter

Recently I've been working on a few things for Scourge of Tethys and I've finally released it. The enemies now have some animation, the titlescreen has a little animation to it, the difficulty increases over time and each round gives a score bonus. The game can now be bought from itch.io for $1 http://jon-dog.itch.io/scourge-of-tethys

Over the last few weeks I've been working on updates for Scourge of Tethys. It's now sitting at V1.03 Major things I've added is a main menu theme by z0diakk, an online scoreboard, being able to play with a gamepad and a pause function. I've also added some small tweaks to the difficulty and controls so the game is more balanced. You can buy it from itch.io as pay what you want: http://jon-dog.itch.io/scourge-of-tethys It can also be played online at Kongregate & Gamejolt . I'm going to be doing a few more updates to the game over the next few weeks while trying to start a new project. Here's the full list of changes since the original release:

A space shooter game I've been working on for the last month called Scourge of Tethys has been released on itch.io as pay what you want In Scourge of Tethys you defend your home moon, Tethys, from the attacking aliens. The aim of the game is to get as high a score as possible You can also play it online for free at either Kongregate or Gamejolt. Kongregate: http://www.kongregate.com/games/Jon_Dog/scourge-of-tethys Gamejolt: http://gamejolt.com/games/shooter/scourge-of-tethys/30691/

So it's been a while since I've updated this, I haven't been updating much because I didn't like the address of this blog. I settled on Pixelated Adventures, hopefully this time I won't get annoyed by it and then stop updating my blog for a while. As a quick note, Grapple Punch is on hiatus because I couldn't come up with ideas for AI or interesting levels.  I also made a small piece of pixel art which I put on my Tumblr. So I decided to revisit making a museum in Unity , currently it only has a photo I shot and some pixel art of Reimu Hakurei because I was wrangling with Blender's interface and Unity kept on ignoring the textures I was updating. I definitely want to make it into a rather grand environment with lots of pieces across multiple mediums such as sculpture, sound and maybe even video. There's a lot of background stuff to sort out with that involving copyright, licensing and gathering art I can display so it's more of a long term pr...

2 weeks ago I became interested in making a roguelike again for some reason, Since I don't really like ascii graphics that much I spent some time looking for tutorials that involved graphical tiles. I didn't manage find a tutorial specifically for making a graphical roguelike, but I did find this post that meant I could easily convert an ascii to tiles after creating a game with the libtcod library. I remembered that there was a tutorial that used Python + libtcod so I decided to try that out. Over the course of a week I followed the tutorial and learned about all the shortcuts and features that libtcod provides. At the end of the tutorial a I had a roguelike with a lot of standard features such as spell casting, dungeon generation, equipments and even a field of view system. Unfortunately the tutorial wasn't as complete as I had hoped but it still gave me a good starting point. So I tried to add new features and realised that I don't actually know enough about...

After Swan River Swim was finished I launched straight into another game that I'm temporarily calling Grapple Punch. So far I've managed to get grappling and reeling working, and it only took me a few days work. Currently I'm working on combat to go along with the grappling, at the moment it's just going to be punching, but that will most likely change in the future. When combat is working well enough I'll work out how I want the game to look like and then make the art to match the vision. After that I'll probably make a few levels, find suitable sound effects and the game should be pretty much done. If you want to try out the game you can play it here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20792563/prototypes/grapplepunch/index.html The controls are arrows to move, Z to launch or reel in the grapple, and X pulls you towards the grapple.

2 months ago I started work on a game called Swan River Swim for the Australia Day weekend. I finished a simple prototype that weekend but I wanted to take the game a bit further. On Sunday I finished Swan River Swim after replacing the art and adding sound to the game. I uploaded it on Monday to Kongregate which was surprisingly easy, it didn't even take that long to be approved. In other news, I turned 21 on the 31st of March. To celebrate I had breakfast with extended family on Sunday and on Monday to a restaurant with Kamil and Sue on Monday. One last thing, Quarries of Scred 1982 is now out on itch.io! You can get it here for $2 and 20% of all proceeds go to charity.

So a few weeks ago Global Game Jam was coming up but I didn't attend for monetary reasons, instead I worked on an Australia Day game over that weekend called Swan River Swim. Swan River Swim is a game where you have to swim back and forth across the Swan River because your friends dared you, they also promised you beer. Basically you avoid boats, jetskis, jellyfish and algae to collect a 6 pack of beer for every 6 laps you finish. I managed to make the game over a two day period and you can play that version here . I didn't get it to the point I really wanted it to be at but I'm happy that I managed to get all of the obstacle types in. Right now I'm refining the game to make the game more balanced and more alive because it currently has no sound and very little animation. After I've finished refining the gameplay, added sounds/music and new graphics I'll be putting it up for sale and then start working on an Android port. The only thing I really need to add fo...

So Super Mansion Quest is currently on hold, because I got stumped with regards to AI and animations. Instead I'm going to expand the unfinished prototype I made during the last Ludum Dare called Monster Tournament. Monster Tournament (not final name) is a game about fighting in a tournament against many different alien species and monsters, the opponents you face and the arenas you fight them in are going to be randomised so playthroughs are unlikely to ever be the same. I'm currently working on a design document and defining the art style early on so I can aim for completed assets instead of prototype art that will be mostly thrown out when all the gameplay features are done. In other news, Legacy of Barubash is heading towards completion quite nicely, and over the holidays Kamil programmed a text adventure called Quarries of Scred 1982 which you can try out here. It's a fun game about mining through a cave system looking for diamonds while avoiding unstable rocks, f...

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....