Super Happy Chainsaw Update and Games are HARD!

~ psyric

As the developer of a game you end up playing it day and night… over and over… every day… I ignored the fact that this basically amounts to practice! I am very very good at the game, and didn’t realize it. So when I played the game and thought to myself, “This is way too easy! I need to make it harder!” I was dead wrong.

Update 1.2 of Super Happy Chainsaw makes some small changes to the swipe mechanics.

Instead of swipes being chosen by complete randomness the game is now aware of the last swipe performed. Rather than complete randomness the next swipe will be intelligently random so that the user experience is more fluid.

OMG FREE!!!

~ psyric

Well I’m going through some major life changes. No, I’m not having a sex change. I’m moving out of the country! This has been in the works for several months and as such I’ve had to switch gears from using my spare time for app development and maintenance to getting myself ready for the move.

Since I’ve been away from app development for a stretch I came to realize something… I’m not going to pay off my house with this hobby. I will always end up sinking more into my hobby game dev than I will get back from it. That is just the fact of the matter and the state of the current market. I’m not discouraged and I won’t stop making games, but the stress of trying to make a career out of it has been lifted from my shoulders. With this realization come some sad news, maintenance and upgrades and fallen right next to cleaning behind the bookshelf on my priority list. Some poor soul already felt this when they left a support comment 3 months ago and I only just now found it amongst all the spam.

So to celebrate my epiphany, upcoming adventures in Japan, and the holiday season all my games are FREE. Yup, all of them… cept uPArt, cause that isn’t a game 😛

uPArt: Pixel Art Sketchbook

~ psyric

Unity3D not just for games!

I’ve written a pixel art drawing program using Unity3D that better supports my particular workflow than what is currently on the market.

It is designed to be similar to a sketchbook in that you just start drawing. All the finer details that come into play when exporting a piece of work come later in the workflow, you needn’t worry about placement or picking the wrong canvas size.

Once you’re done drawing you can then export your drawings to PNGs that you can grab through iTunes File Sharing.

You can find a full list of tools and functionality in the user manual here.

Visit the dedicated page for more details here!

What baby wants, baby gets!

~ psyric

The wife had a group project for her biochemistry class that forced them to look outside the box with respect to conventional means of information conveyance.

So I was volunteered to write a videogame about the chemical processes behind bioluminescence. Her team would compile the information and design the game. My responsibility was to take their design and make it tangible.

So for several weeks I’ve been working on Biolume, a lesson is bioluminescence.

I’ve gotten a few very good things out of this project. I’ve gotten much better at pumping out usable art assets on my own and in a timely manner. Granted they aren’t AAA BUT they get the job done and look better than stick men. The second was that I took some time to read up on screenshots and how they sell your app.

Below we see a screenshot of Flicker, next to a screenshot for Biolume. Big difference eh?

More details and/or support for Biolume are available at its dedicated page here.

Add-Iction, Oh my God it’s MATHS!

~ psyric

Keep it simple, make it fun. Add-Iction (←click for app page) was bouncing around in my head for the last few months and I wanted to take a break before I begin another heavy project like Guinea Ninja.

I’ve become quite adept at the Unity game dev pipeline so it didn’t take long to get all the assets in place and build the basic logic. Most of it was dragging and dropping in scripts from other projects.

The core of the gameplay was written in about 8 hours, I sat down at 5PM and at 2AM I had a test build.

I’m exctied as this is the first game I’ve written that I’m comforatable releasing for the Nook Color as it is visually simple and I think the generation 1 I have seems to handle it just fine.

B&N and Apple still need to approve the builds, but it is available on Google Play right now.

 

“Why didn’t you use that time to work on Guinea Ninja?”

Some people paint, some people sing, some people write, I program games. Programming games is my hobby and it is relaxing and fun. Projects like P.O.D. and Guinea Ninja are “work”. They are involved, complicated, complex. While I enjoy working on them I need the “bubble gum” projects in between to keep my stress level down. These little projects that I complete give me the sense of accomplishment that I need in order to continue working on a project that could take a year or more to reach completion. If all I did was work on the big project then I think I would lose sight of the light at the end of the tunnel and just start watching Adventure Time all day long.

Contract Complete!

~ psyric

Finally my contract project is done!

Path of Destruction is a side scrolling tank game where you attempt to destroy obstacles and enemies before your tank is destroyed by enemy bullets or crashing into obstacles. You upgrade weapons and armor in an attempt to get greater and greater distances and higher and higher scores.

This is the first game I’ve written that has been linked to GameCenter so you can compare your progress to your friends on a weekly basis. Milestone flags are rendered in the game to let you know when you’ve surpassed a friend’s weekly distance.

This was a wonderful learning experience and I’ve definitley got a great number of scripts that I’ll be using for games in the future. I also learned a great deal about UI design and physics logic. Guinea Ninja will benefit greatly from this new knowledge.

On that note here is a link to the game’s site Path of Destruction.

So my ToDo list now consists of…

  1. Add GameCenter to all existing games.
  2. Update Flicker based on user feedback.
  3. Update Flicker with 2 additional BGM tracks.
  4. FINISH GUINEA NINJA!!!

Flicker: Goofing around becomes a game.

~ psyric

What can I say, sometimes a proof of concept becomes a game. I recently purchased Ragespline for Unity3D and was playing around with grabbing individual points on the spline to move them around and spawn objects.

This lead to a simple game where the player moves around the screen collecting spheres that appear at the tips of grassy reeds.

Next I wanted to see how well Unity allowed me to process audio and the answer is… very well! I was easily able to process the playing music to find heavy beats and make the game sprites pulse to the music.

What I was left with was the core of a game, and that game is Flicker and the Quest for Dews!

Currently in review on the App Store, see the page linked above for full details.

Where does this leave Guinea Ninja? Mind your own business! That’s where!

Joking aside Guinea Ninja is asset heavy and as I’m doing all the art myself it is very time consuming. As Guinea Ninja is a personal project it has been pushed aside for a project that I’m being contracted to do. I’ll release details on the contracted project as permitted.

Guinea Ninja will see the light of day so help me Zeus!