Fledgling Videogame Developer

This spring has been pretty quiet for me from gamedev point of view. There has simply been no energy and motivation to start anything new. I've done fixes for some previously released games and tried to draft one new mobile game concept, but that's all. Maybe I have lost my spark? However, decided to upgrade my gamedev hardware last week and bought Lenovo Legion T5 gaming desktop with pretty ok display controller (RTX3060), 16GB RAM and Intel i5 CPU. This is not a true high-end computer, but the price was reasonable and the performance is enough for my use (mobile game development).  Currently there are 500GB+1TB SSD drives working as a mass storage. Backups are taken to 4TB USB drive.  Display is still the same old 24" HD monitor, but I am planning to buy 32" 4K display in close future.  My previous Lenovo Legion laptop has served well for last 4+ years as my main tool for Unity development. But now it is time for it to retire and move to my daughter's use (drawi...

After 6+ years of existence and hobby-based game development, WestSloth Games is now part of a freshly registered company called Westsloth Oy! My family member needed to set up a company for invoicing occasional work, and we decided it's time to make Westsloth a real game company! To secure company's finances our main businesses are computer hardware and software consultancy plus office and financial management services. But game and app development stays as an essential part of Westsloth and we hope games will start generating revenue in the future. This change does not have much impact the way we develop games: At the moment I am doing development on a part-time basis (my day job has priority). But of course things can change. And as before, we know we are still ramping up our game development competence and our target is to do every new game better than the previous one! Transition to company control is ongoing and there will be some changes e.g. in WestSloth Games ...

For some reason, hyper-casual games seem to be one of the hottest thing in mobile gaming at the moment. Just do some googling and you will notice that they really are trending. This weekend my target was to do fast-paced game development, starting from a concept and resulting to a published game. And goal was achieved, even though there is still lot of room for improvement. Anyways, my coding skills got some practical exercise, what was the purpose of this project. "Rocket to Uranus" is so-called hyper-casual game for Android. It is available at Google Play Store .   Some statistics: - Total of 15 hours of time (3 evenings) - Approx. 400 lines of new C# code written + ~100 lines of re-used code - 10+ art assets drawn with Inkscape - 2 Unity scenes created - Lots of testing, debugging and bug fixing -Jussi

It's been a long time since I was inspired to write a tutorial. But now I am able to provide you one more idea for Construct2 use. There are probably several ways to implement top-down 2D starfield effect in Construct2, but I think this is one of the easiest ones. By using this method, you will need only two particle objects to implement very simple starfield in no time! From events point of view you will need only " on start of layout " event, like this: This example was build for window size of 480x640 pixels, but the layout itself is twice as high (480x1280px). The reason for this is that particle object generates particles from single point only. User can define the size and direction of the cone, but it is not possible to change the width of the creation point. So all generated stars are not moving exactly to the same direction (motion is not parallel). You can get rough idea of layout view from the figure below. To make stars moving as paralle...

I started App Store Optimization trial  in the beginning of September for an Android game called "Del Gibbon's Mad Maths". Based on Google Analytics data, it seems that this trial was not successful at all (what a surprise!). Target of this trial was to improve the game visibility at app store and get more installations. Both targets failed miserably: there were just handful of new installations during the last 3 months. This was the first time I was trying to do any sort of keyword research and optimization, so I guess the result was expected. But what were the reasons for the failure? I guess it was a combined effect of my inexperience in ASO plus usage of related key word research tools. Also, the quality and attractiveness of published game was not too high. If your app is crap, then it is pretty difficult to market it. At least your supporting material, including thumbnails, screenshots and videos should be high quality. What I can do better next time? Pro...

Here are some general guidelines that should help to get your first gamedev projects proceed, and even completed in a reasonable time. 0. Prepare to sacrifice your time and effort Ok, you have idea for a game. But are you ready to make the effort to implement it? If you want to get your ideas ready, most likely you got to do it yourself. No one else will do it for you. 1. Start with something small and simple.  If your first game project is large and complex, you probably won't finish it. 2. Select an engine that fits to your game.  There is no need to shoot birds with cannon. Try different engines and use the one that fits for your purposes. 3. Create lots of prototypes and small games.   Select the ones that work for further development. Gather experience on suspended and unfinished projects.  4. Test the mechanics in early phase.  Find out if game mechanics is working as soon as you have working prototype. Try to define game's "fun facto...

This is just to inform, that " DualBall " flash version was released yesterday to Newgrounds (click picture to access the game). Judgment process has already been passed, and users have rated the game to 2.88 stars (out of 5) currently. But it is a bit different story if this was worth all the effort. For some reason, this game has several setbacks during the development process (HDD failure, migrating from Linux environment to Windows, some lack of motivation, lost asset library, etc.). Anyways, we were able to finish and publish this game. We started developing this game somewhere in the beginning of August. I had an obsession to try how two objects could be controlled by turns using just one mouse button (or touch on mobile device). Even if I have not yet released any mobile games, I have spent lot of time thinking the UI for them. Anyways, when you are planning a game for mobile devices, you should keep in mind that controls should be as simple as possible. The...

I've been bit busy with my daily work for last couple of weeks, so gamedev activities have got less attention than normally. But still there has been some progress since my last update. My original plan was to finish and release "Dualball" flash game in the end of September, but now it seems to take some more time. Game itself is in pretty good shape: the mechanics works, there are no detected major flaws currently, and 75% of planned levels are ready and tested quite well.  We have done thorough testing ourselves and a number of serious bugs have been found and corrected during the process. Gameplay tests have been run on both computer and touch-screen tablet to get some extra coverage. It has been interesting to see that some bugs are not easily visible on both platforms: E.g. "ball ground check" routine worked fine on computer, but on tablet there were strange malfunction with it. So I strongly recommend you to test your games on multiple platforms in...

We have been working on two separate game projects in parallel. Now one of them is in quite mature condition and it is likely that it will be published in a couple of weeks. So it maybe is time to shortly introduce the game concept? Working title for the game is "Dualball". This is a platform game where player controls two balls at the same time with single click (or touch, depending on the device). The challenge comes from the parallel nature of this game: you must be able to do some multi-tasking and time your clicks correctly. Timely performance is rewarded with coins that are spread on the levels. Collecting all coins is not always straightforward, and you have to carefully think what kind of a sequence is required to clean up the level. We have been testing "Dualball" on flash and Android platforms, and it seems that the latter one is bit more convenient for this concept. However, game will be released in flash format first. Android version will follow ...

No matter how simple your game is, or how well you plan it. In any case it is 110% sure that there are several bugs included in your masterpiece. And fledgling game developer surely has more bugs than the experienced ones. :) Here are my thoughts of this matter. Major and/or often occurring bugs are usually very easy to detect, and they are relatively easy to find from your code. You just need to find (or know) where certain functionality is located in your code and check the difference between desired and existing operation. Fixing the bug might not be so straightforward, but at least you know fairly well where the fault is. But then there can be very nasty bugs that occur rarely or even randomly. Sometimes it is very hard to understand if some behavior is really a bug, if it can't be easily reproduced. And locating these bugs from your code is very difficult if you don't have clear idea where to look for them. Luckily here are some ways to ease up bug hunting. I am us...

Here's the latest chart showing the daily " Turbomole Trial Run " views over last 38 days. Total number of views is at the moment 36105, so there has been in average 950 views per day (source of data: Newgrounds Statistics). Still going strong, although the momentum is gradually slowing down. I decided to publish this game also on Kongregate, because it required very minor modifications. Basically, all I had to do was to remove Newgrounds API stuff and replace them with Kongregate equivalents. Since game was created with Stencyl, it was just matter of removing some blocks and selecting the new ones from the list. Another thing to do was to setup the Kongregate Statistics for the leaderboard implementation. And, of course, you had to remember add the block called "Setup Kongregate API" in the startup scene, to make sure that everything works as expected. BTW, there has not been too many views yet on Kongregate, but at least one comment was already receiv...

Most of the negative feedback on our games has been related to the poor quality of graphics and/or animation. I have to admit that these comments are appropriate: Our gamedev "team" currently has no artist at all, and actually all graphics are so far been drawn by me. And I'm really bad at drawing. Anyways, there has been a need for graphics and animation in our games. So I have tried learn to draw at least something using Gimp, Inkscape or Aseprite. Tools itself are not an issue here: there are plenty of tutorials and online manuals available. But even if you could use all tool features perfectly, it does not help a lot if you have no eye for art. I thought at some point that pixel-art would be a solution for me, and I dug out this tutorial:  Pixel Joint forum: Creating Pixel Art . Basically this tutorial was fine and everything was understandable, but I did not have enough perseverance to follow the guidelines. The theory of anti-aliasing and dithering was qu...

It is hard to know without prototyping how game concept would work. So during the past week I have built several prototypes to find out if I have something useful in my mind. This process takes some time, but at least for me it is important to get some kind of a visualization how things work on the screen. Static modeling with paper models, sketch drawing, or even using Lego bricks may also help to visualize game mechanics or rules, but I need to have something more dynamic to see the full picture. At this point, few ideas seem to be better than others, so they probably are worth further development. Although we are planning to move gradually out from flash games, it seems that we will still create at least one new game for that domain. The reason for this is that we know the tool (Stencyl) quite well and we are also familiar publishing flash games through Newgrounds and Kongregate. Publishing games to mobile and/or HTML5 is mostly unknown territory to us, so why not try to sta...

As defined in the "roadmap", we decided to make updated versions from our two flash games. Because the plan was made and the work seemed to be quite straightforward, I started evaluating and updating "Turbomole Trial Run"  flash game.  Game was originally created with Stencyl and published using the Mochimedia distribution network. I had no intention to do everything again from the scratch, so I dug out the latest development version from my backup disk and started to explore how game was implemented about half an year ago. I have to admit that my old "code" (i.e. Stencyl blocks) is not too easy to understand, mostly because of the bad "coding" style and missing commment blocks. But anyways I got an idea what I've done before, and started planning the modifications.  First task was to remove Mochimedia API blocks out from the game, and replace them with corresponding Newgrounds stuff (leaderboard mainly). I also started new game pro...

First part of my summer vacations is over, and tomorrow it is time go back to work. Luckily, I have still one week vacation left in the beginning of August. :) My game development activities have also been quite minimal for last couple of weeks. However, there is a small exception: I've been discussing with my brother how our gamedev activities should be continued for the rest of the year. And as a part of this process we have tried to sketch a roadmap for upcoming game releases. I work full-time in large telecommunications company and all my game development is done in leisure time, so there is a clear need for some kind of a rough plan to keep things progressing smoothly. First of all, we have a plan to release three html5 games in the next six months: Two smaller ones and one large one. Smaller games are planned to have relatively simple graphics and gameplay, so we are able to finish them ourselves quite smoothly. There are already technology demos up and running for both ...

I decided to write some kind of a post-mortem analysis for " Soccer Breakthrough " flash game we released around 21st of June to Newgrounds (and Kongregate). Overall rating for the game has been 3+ stars at Newgrounds and 2+ stars at Kongregate. But there has been huge variation in ratings from different players: Some players have liked game a lot because of it's simplified gameplay and medal system. They even have encouraged us to continue same way with future games. But then there have been several comments concerning the lack of realism, the fact that game gets boring quick, most of the sounds are irritating (in fact, they are), and so on. I have even received direct requirements to change literally everything in the game. Yippee. Soccer Breakthrough was originally intended to be a HTML5 game with very simple gameplay and simplified graphics. However, we had very tight schedule because of my holiday trip, and we decided to make this release with Stencyl because ...

Alhough I've been creating game prototypes with Construct 2 for last couple of months, I decided to do yet one more flash game with Stencyl. I am not too sure what was the original reasoning behind that decision, but anyways the game was published today. "Soccer Breakthrough!" is currently available on  Newgrounds . Game has leaderboard and also medals (or achievements, whatever). Now I just sit and watch how our little game will please gamers. I am also planning to create HTML5 and mobile versions of this game, but before that I will carefully analyze how flash version will do on portals.  My vacation period started yesterday, and for next three weeks I don't have to think about System-On-Chip design at all. So I might have some more time for game development. But now I am having at least one week without any work or game related activities, and try to recover from the stressful last days at work... -Jussi

As mentioned in previous blog article, my target was to attend FGL's "week long game jam" with one idea. However, after four days of work I realized that I am not able to make the game as playable as I wanted to. So I decided to freeze development work, and quickly drafted a new concept that was possible to get to up and running in less than one day.  In practice it was ~7 hours before deadline when I started creating the game. But the development work went quite smoothly without any problems, and in the end I got the game ready in 5 hours. So there were still some margin left. :) It works best with some touch-screen device supporting HTML5, but you can try it also with computer+mouse combination. You can find game also from FGL, if you have account there.  Next step would be to polish the graphics and make some improvements to the gameplay. Edit 7.6.2014: No special success in jam, but got some valuable feedback how game could be improved. The most important t...

I started sketching a game for FGL's "week long game jam" , and noticed quite soon that I have a game idea that would need smoke animation. I did not have previous experience how to create one, so it was time for few trials. One of them proved to be useful for me, and here is description how it was done with Construct2 . First of all, I tried different styles of "particles" or objects for a smoke. My target was to create something like volcano-style smoke, meaning that it will appear in certain point and starts ascending slowly to the sky. Simultaneously, this puff of smoke expands and gets thinner (=opacity decreases), and at some point it disappears totally. Just like in the still picture below: I tested couple of options for creating a smoke object, and ended up something like described in the picture below: Somehow, round shapes looked the best, but I tried cloud-like objects also. The background was light blue, so dark colors were better in this...

I started evaluating new game development tools for a few weeks ago. My target was to find out which kind of tools are available for creating games for e.g. HTML5, Android, facebook etc. During the search I happened to find out that there was a Construct 2 jam ongoing at Newgrounds, and realized I did not know anything about the tool. So I installed it to my windows desktop and started to find out how it works.  Tool itself is quite easy to use, and so far I have created couple of demo HTML5 games that can be run on almost any platform. Tests have been run without problems on linux and windows PCs (using browsers), Nokia Lumia (Windows 8 phone), and couple of Android phones. Earlier I was skeptical about the performance of HTML5 games, but to my surprise at least these specific demos were running smoothly on all tested devices. Even if I have not much experience on developing game for multiple platforms, I have at least one guideline to share: Keep in mind what input devi...