sábado, 9 de dezembro de 2017

Dev. Journal #1




   Alright, boyos and girlos, I don't really have much to talk about but I also have tons of stuff to talk about. Does that make sense? I didn't think so, either.

   This is just going to be me self promoting myself to rise in the industry so I can eventually swim in money narrating the progress of my projects, ideas and just life as a dev. in general. All because I want future Phill to be embarassed of how bad and ineffective he was a few years ago. Hi bud.

But anyways!

Anadma:


   So, these past few weeks I actually made stuff... -ish.
Remember Anadma? The cute grey block with eyes that I talked about a few posts ago? Of course you don't, but she has her own demo right now!

Here's a link for it: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/702511

And no, Newgrounds isn't as dead as you all might think. Shocking, I know.
  Anadma started off being a learning project, and still is, that's why I dropped it as a "demo". I feel like I learned everything that I aimed to learn with it, and I'm happy with it, and that is why I didn't finish it, I learned everything that I needed from it. Who knows, maybe I'll finish it one day, but for now it's my little learning project and will always have a place in my heart. it's nice to have a "Pet Project" or a "Learning Project".

With this one, the most important lesson was that shopping games can still please some folks. Then again, this wasn't exactly a shopping game, it was more of a Stick RPG clone. For those of you who played Stick RPG, you know that it is a simple game despite all the events that are in it.

I was able to learn about "Level/Scene Switching" which was a real pain since it is not that easy to tell a computer "Yo, I want you to teleport me to that scene in front of that door there", especially when there are multiple doors in that scene. It's easy now that I learned it, but dang.

It was also nice to learn about Upgrading systems and Money, "Time" and Goal systems. Play the game and you'll understand what I mean.

In general, it was perfect to learn how to deal with a game that deals with several scenes where you have to keep track of several items and data that had to be saved.

Super recommended to make a clone or two of a game like this as practice (or more).


PongBreaker:

Well, I'm gonna mention this one just because it kinda helped me with the next topic.
It's pretty self explanatory, I made a mixture of Pong and Breakout, really simple, as practice for the Ludum Dare 40 that would happen in the following weekend.

If you wanna try it out,

Here's the link for that:
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/702734

It's always nice to go back to the basics, once in a while. At least, I enjoyed myself.


LudumDare40:

Alright, so this was my first time participating in the Ludum Dare, or any game jam for that matter.

Here's the link for my entry: 
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/40/infected-pong

I made a game called "Infected Pong", and it is exactly what it sounds like: Pong + Viruses.

Amanda came up with the idea of having a game where your computer is infected with viruses and you have to deal with that somehow. I really liked that idea, but I wanted something more, something more challenging! So I thought about adding a game of Pong in the background!

So I started off by designing the main idea which was to have viruses to pop up in the screen. A simple coroutine did the trick to simulate that. You just had to click a cross button in the top to get rid of it, simple stuff.
Then, I went ahead and implemented Pong playing in the background, which was easy because I remembered most of the code that I had used in PongBreaker just a few days earlier.
I felt like the game was a bit tedious as it was so I wanted to add some sort of anti-virus that would contain upgrades to help the player. This was a bit more tricky because I had trouble thinking in what upgrades I wanted to implement. Eventually I came up with 4 simple upgrades and I figured that that would do.


So that was all the logic done! On to the graphics and sounds.

I wanted to simulate a windows UI, so I made the little hills with the sun as the background and created the "Anadma", "Waterfox" and "Folder" shortcuts so that it actually felt like its own computer.

I think this is when I stopped for Day1.

For Day2, I didn't have much left to do, so I polished some physics, added 2 other types of Viruses, added some more graphics and made the music and sound effects, which I'm quite proud of.

When the time of submiting came, my Standalone resolution was being a little pain. The graphics were all out of place and my Canvas were all larger than intended. And nothing that I did to fix it was working. So, ultimately I had to leave it as HTML only in itch.io and Newgrounds. So that was a bummer.

Nonetheless,

It was tons of fun! There's a reason for why experienced developers recommend game jams for beginners. It helps you with dealing with stress and deadlines, you'll have a theme to get an idea so you don't get stuck in that process, you meet lots and lots of people who can make incredible games and are willing to rate yours in the process!

It's an amazing experience and I do recommend it to all the beginners, even if you don't feel all that confident!


Online Requests:

On a smaller note, I started doing some online requests for anyone that is interested.

Small stuff, no full time projects. Already helped a couple of strangers with their projects, made a "Spawn, Kill, Spectate" system and just gave some general tips and clarified some topics that the other was having problems with.

What I am planning to do with this is start small, making some projects for free to build up my portfolio and then start charging small fees later on, a man's gotta eat, amiright?

SO! If anyone wants help with anything, DM me while it's free I guess, it's still gonna be for a while but hey, you never know!

Check all the projects that I made up there to see what you think of my work. I have some other things on GitHub too (@phillserrazina) for any of you interested!

My point being (TL;DR):

I made two games...-ish, I participated in my first game jam and I'm starving for a job that does not involve making food, serving food or trashing food.

Here's to the first Phill's Dev. Journal, folks.


Sem comentários:

Enviar um comentário