Working on a new game: Casmage

I decided to start making a game of my own and by myself (for now). I originally started playing around trying to make some kind of Terraria engine with destructible environment, but when I got the idea for Casmage I dropped the destructible stuff because I thought it didn't fit the kind of game I wanted to make, but who knows, maybe I'll add it later.

Casmage will be a game focused on cooperation between players (yes, that means multiplayer, and I'm not just taking about local multiplayer, I'm talking about the real thing here, online). 

I play MOBA's a lot and what I love the most about them is being able to be creative when using your character's abilities and create those moments when you are able to pull off amazing plays to save the day or get out of a difficult situation, those moments when you feel like you are the best player ever. Those are the things I want to evoke in Casmage.

To allow a player to be creative with the kit of skills at their disposal the skills have to be very flexible and have a lot of breadth (was it breadth or depth? I don't remember right now), meaning that beyond the basic mechanics of the skill, there can be certain situations where it can be used differently.

So, flexible skills, amazing plays, and cooperation between players. I want the game to be almost unbeatable if you are playing by yourself, and I mean it. I'm talking about things like if you slip and let an enemy stun you, you will probably die unless a friend comes in to save you. How will this happen? well I'm working on it, but for now there's a way of picking up allies and move them around, so if your friend is unconscious you can just pick them up and take them to somewhere safer, of course there will be enemies on the way to that safe place but that's what the game is about isn't it?

I started a DevLog on TIGsource because I think that it's a bit less formal than this blog and the traffic the forum gets will kinda force me to keep working on the game. Let's say it's because I want as much motivation as possible. I will be updating the DevLog a lot more frequently than this blog tho.

So how much of the game is done? Not so much, since I'm a programmer I started... well... programming. I focused on getting the networking engine out of the way as soon as possible and it is like 95% done, so that's good. I had a bit of a headache last weekend working on it but it's almost finished.

As expected I also have to make the art and... I had to learn real pixel-art for that. I'm not saying that I'm good, but I have very high standards myself so I want to learn enough to make good art. 

For now most of the art is placeholder because I want to have a playable demo soon,

Enough talk, seeable stuff!

Flappy Jam: Risk of Bird

I recently delivered my entry for the Flappy Jam, which consisted of making a game similar to Flappy Bird, to show support to it's maker Nguyen Dong, who had to go through a very distasteful experience of receiving tons of destructive criticism related to Flappy Bird's quality and visual assets, and after not being able to handle the pressure he decided to take the game off the radar to get some peace. Because of this, the Flappy Jam was dedicated to not let hate win.

The premise was to: "Make a hard, almost unplayable game. Use assets inspired (not ripped) from classics..." Honestly I didn't pay much attention to the second sentence because well... while thinking about what game to use as the visuals for my Flappy game I fixed my mind on Risk of Rain, if you havn't played it yet I strongly suggest you do, because it's incredibly fun and with its own visual style it looks beautiful.

I wanted to emulate that visual style because I've always had a thing for pixel-art, and Risk of Rain's is pretty much awesome.

I literally made the game within 1 hour using unity, of course the game only consisted of a bunch of boxes moving from right to left and a small box trying to not get hit. There's something strangely refreshing in making such a small game, maybe it's because I'm not used to actually finishing a game so quickly... yeah, that's it.

Anyway, the gameplay was done and then I set to start making my own version of Risk of Rain. I really need to say that I didn't copy a single pixel from the actual game, all was made using the game itself as a reference (you can tell because the colors are not even the same, and some stuff doesn't look as good).

After I had finished with the art it was time to add some sounds, and wow, I did have a lot of fun making my robot guy explode over and over again after I was finished.

The resulting game was this:

I seriously enjoyed making this small and simple game, I feel like I may have learned some pixel-art skills right there, wohooo!