Tearcell Arcade

Nuclear Winter: Giraffe

After learning about the Godot engine and completing some basic tutorials, the May challenge became making a basic 2D platformer.

Nuclear Winter: Giraffe was a concept I worked on in the 90s with a language known as Dark Basic. An arcadey game by its nature, with basic platforming elements, you control a giraffe and have to dodge all sorts of things. Loosely modeled after an old cartoon 'Sheep in the Big City', NWG is meant to be over the top and cartoony. Arcade mode was the original goal, but as I finished the loop rather fast, Story mode was added to challenge myself further. Unfortunately it was created without a plan, and it shows in the level design and lack of 'fun'.

For my year after retrospective, check out this blog post.

Boundless: Chronicles of Aronacht

The June project started as an attempt to make a vertical scrolling endless platformer for mobile devices, with an emphasis on timed jumps, vertical agility, dashing, and a bit of combat for fun.

This was obviously a bad idea from the start.

Thankfully within a week I was able to identify this, and converted it to a more combat focused 2D platformer instead, going for a Castlevania inspired idea I had backburnered for some years called 'The Chronicles of Aronacht'.

Mistakes were made and the 2D beat em up, became a mini metroidvania.

Please note the Richter Belmont sprite, and portraits of Alucard and Shaft are used without permission and are fully owned by Konami. I do not own it, I do not make money off of it. It is a placeholder used for educational purposes. To avoid accidental distribution no direct download of Boundless will be available.

For my year after retrospective, check out this blog post.

Godotcraft

A bit bored of 2D platformers, I decide to switch gears completely and try an RTS game. The genre isn't as popular as it used to be, so I figure it should be pretty solved and probably won't be hard to get things up and running properly.

That was obviously incorrect. There was little to take from the previous projects that was relevant here, and I complicated the learning curve by starting out as a Starcraft clone and going for an isometric viewpoint. While I'm proud of the work that I accomplished, this can only be considered a tech demo at best. You can select units, make them attack units, move them around, some will harvest and return stuff to the building nearby. But you can't make them attack buildings, and there is no steering behavior. It's ready to expand into something more, but overall just was too much to take on from scratch in a single month.

DragAndDrop button uses forked code for the drag and drop controller and is available here.

For my year after retrospective, check out this blog post.

Fun with REST

While I had hoped to continue some work on the RTS project, hoping to turn it into something more than just a tech demo, that didn't end up happening. Instead my focus went to this site and learning how to better create, maintain, and use backend apis. The API needed a project to tie it together, however, after all you need a real world problem to really bloom.

The Safeharbour projects have long needed a builder to get updates to the end users as fast as possible, and this was a good use case for an API. The mobile app could pull the data as JSON, and format it up. Backend database was easy, but we needed a front end. My experiences with that can be read on the blog, but I ended up using Vuejs. This was a lot to learn in a month, but I succeeded and now a useful tool can be deployed to my customers that they weren't expecting.

Tool building as a whole may not be the most glamours aspect of game design, but its a very important one, and hopefully I can use this experience to build useful tools for a team down the road. While a full release of the tool isn't something that will happen since its for customers, a self cleaning demo version will be made available shortly, so you can play around with it from the direct link below. To access it, use the credentials august_demo with the password gametoolz.

Blue Noise

Nothing like coding a game again to take your mind off endless server configuration and javascript frameworks. The challenge this time was my own take on a classic Zelda-like. Blue Noise as linked below has some interesting beginnings, and doesn't quite realize its zelda-ness. It doesn't feel like a zelda adventure, and the controls and responsiveness are not quite an action RPG either. This is the first time I'm afraid the vision didn't quite come through, and this is mostly because I was unable to focus my time enough to finish BOTH sides of the game. That second side, will become the October project, but this month saw me learning Pixel art basics, getting involved with the Godot community via Plugin testing and debugging and other things that took away from the games scope.

Still there is enough here that I'm proud of behind the scenes, to give this a passing grade, despite being a couple days late.

Blue Noise - Streets

This month is sort of cheating, as it is a continuation of Septembers project. Streets adds the point and click element to the Blue Noise project, then I went and integrated the existing stuff into the new stuff. But I DID also tweak some of the old stuff and built up 4 new levels in the 'zelda-like' engine. Contract work and real work also made progress very end heavy, but I am VERY happy with the results. For the first time most of the art assets are original work by me, and its sloppy but it's mine. More contributions to great plugins like SyndiBox also decorate this month.

Overall give this one a shot. It actually feels like a game now. If you haven't tried last months, this month is better, so just skip it. Consider the Windows download however. I wasn't able to get the export on the HTML version bug free, and it's prone to hang ups during level loading. No crashes, but its a bit jarring.

GameJam - The Kobolds of OSHA

This month ends early, but was also a double feature of sorts. I decided I'd do this gamejam in October, and for those not in the know, a game jam is a challenge to make a full game in a stiff time limit. I always intended to compete, but originally wanted a year of practice first. But I felt ready, and notified my friends they could all help if they wanted. Many did, perhaps more for me than because they 'wanted' to, but I'm still appreciative. With help arou,d we first practiced the iteration process with a project codenamed 'StormRider' that will become more a focus later. You can try the builds of storm rider starting from b001 through b014 here: https://www.tearcell.com/arcade/stormrider/b001/

We used a similar schema for The Kobolds of OSHA and MUCH more details on the process can be found off of the itch.io page, here, as well as looking through the blog for the gamejam tag. Thats where you'll find the final GameJam version, but you can check out the builds starting from b001 through b017 here: https://tearcell.com/arcade/gamejam/mixjam/b001. While 017 is the final version, the direct play link for this one will point to the itch.io upload. Windows download will be made available after judging is complete as to not accidently cheat.

As I write this the judging is still going on. The marketing is sure stressful! Stressful enough to force a break on gamedev at least until December. Gamejams are worth your time if you want to sharpen your skills, but are also pretty draining.

IMP - Item Manipulation Project

IMP was the 'other' idea for the Gamejam back in November. The idea was to mash together a falling block puzzler with an 'inventory management game' like in Resident evil 4. We decided it didn't fit the mash up theme well enough and went with Kobolds of Osha instead, but put a pin in this one for later as it seemed like it would be fun to play. So this month was focused on really making the proof of concept for the idea, and I think overall it is a success. This is a collab with long time colleague and art support Leia Harris, and she is busy working the art direction, which unfortunately is not really present outside of concept art for this month long project.

IMP is not complete and will continue development and get a mobile release in the near future, so consider this a sneak peak of what we're trying to go for.

Guardian Aces

I've long wanted to do a scrolling shooter. I loved those types of games as a kid, and there is definitely alot of interesting directions you can take the simple concept. My idea here was modular ship building, where you could unlock weapons and parts, that would affect handling, firepower, etc, and enemies would be made the same way! This would allow fun gameplay variations, random enemies, and all sorts of fun things. Perhaps shops to buy parts, or a roulette to get weapons!

Unfortunately I haven't quite gotten over scope creep, and this was FAR too much to do in a month. The beast got out of control, and none of the fun parts are visible or editable by the player at this point. The skeleton isn't bad, but overall this isn't a fun playable experience within a month of work, thus its a failure. As I wasn't able to even get a menu/ui done, I'll be pasting the credits below.

https://tilation.itch.io/multi-size-mythical-dungeon-tileset

https://dinvstudio.itch.io/dynamic-space-background-lite-free

https://free-game-assets.itch.io/free-enemy-spaceship-2d-sprites-pixel-art

An Asenturisk Music Nation production (c) Dewan M.I. Mukto.

https://soundcloud.com/muktodboss-studio/space-party

Ed is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

https://soundcloud.com/ed-vaselo/ed-vaselo-op103-vintage-space-movie

https://soundbible.com/1802-Alien-Machine-Gun.html

https://freesound.org/people/JarredGibb/sounds/217459/

https://freesound.org/people/NenadSimic/sounds/157539/

https://freesound.org/people/Iwiploppenisse/sounds/156031/

1 Bit Wonder

After the disappointment of the January challenge, I wasted 2 weeks, and then went full ham to try to catch back up. I had no plan, no art, not even a genre in mind, I just started coding and seeing what it lead too. The results were truthfully great, and I'm very happy with 1 Bit Wonder, despite it having 4 or more bits. Weirdly the original concept was actually RPG based combat, but that just goes to show how little direction this actually had.

Conceptually this project is just ALOT of playing around with collision layers. You can only collide with things that are the same color as you, and I just run with that. I was barely able to scratch the surface of the concept, but I think there is alot to work with.

This one was a slog I'm afraid to say. I seldom had the drive to work more than 30 minutes any given evening, and so total hours on this are very low compared to other months. While I loved the concept of revisiting Kobolds of Osha in a sort of Child of Light-esque game, and while I've ALWAYS wanted to make a classic JRPG style combat system, I just couldn't find the drive in the end. That said what was accomplished from scavenging the last 10 months of projects is pretty impressive, and really shows how far I've come in the last year. Most of what was written previously came over to this project with minimal adjustment. Things such as:

• The event system from Boundless (also in 1-bit-wonder)
• The dialog system from 1-bit-wonder (variant of Boundless dialog)
• Assets and animations from Kobolds of Osha (obviously)

And what is new is great and reusable. Just in the end I guess I didn't want to make a platformer, and that stifled the creative process.

And so here we are a year later. Tired but wiser and ready for one last competition. Ludum Dare 48, and it was everything it needed to be and more. I ended up with around 11 people helping me here, with FOUR artists, truly a blessed coder am I. We had original art, original music, a unique concept and dedicated coderS with an S, actually multiple people working on the code. As of this writing I don't know how well we did, or where we scored, and in the end it doesn't matter. The journey here was everything I hoped it would be, and the competition, a victory lap.

While the monthly work may be done for now, who knows what lies around the next corner.