Time is a Gift

Unless you’ve been a coma and are just waking up to the world events you know that society is limiting it’s social outlets as the world reels under the pressure of the Corona Virus. It would be easy to take this time and feel like it’s all wasted because I can’t do the things I would normally do. Instead, I need to keep focus on my game development, and spending time with my family at home. It does make me uncertain about what the near term future will look like but overall I don’t think this will last for to long.

One of the things I talk about when I date is that the worst thing someone can do is to say, “That was a waste of time.” An attitude like this puts us in a lower state of mind. Some of my best stories come from awkward social situations, and they accelerated my ability to understand how I need to change myself. It’s still important to set boundaries, and understand that every choice we make passes up another one. Typically when I meet someone I will ask, “If you were qualified for any job, then what would you do?” I follow that up with, “What are you doing right now to get there?” It’s a tough question because I had to realize if I really wanted to be a game developer and follow my dream that choice would pass up others. Even worse as I enter the job market I’m getting man handled by the programming tests that I’ve been taking in order to get a software job. It’s made me question my own decisions for what I focused on for the past 6 years of my life. That’s why it’s so important to finish this game and get it out there.

I’m preparing to release another closed beta for the game. I’m worried about the dialogue, I feel like it’s not going to be well received. The positive thing is that the relationship that ended isn’t effecting me as much as it used to. I managed to really focus on playing the game “Slay the Spire” and realized that during the play session I was able to get fully present to it and shut out my thoughts of future and past for a solid 2 hours. I think that’s the mark of a good game. When it makes you get lost for a little while that’s the mark of a game that’s doing what we want it to do. Sometimes for people with low impulse control this can be a bad thing. I was so thankful to be able to quiet my thoughts down for 2 hours that I messaged the developers and said thanks.

I hope that my game can be like that for people. Something that they enjoy so much that it takes them out of their normal day to day grind. I put a lot of passion into it, but it will never be fully perfect. My oldest son proved that to me when he found a game breaking bug this past week. It should be an easy fix though so I’m happy he found it. He’ll be getting some extra pizza and ice cream as payment, which is how I pay most of my game testers. All jokes aside I’m happy to be where I am, and I can’t wait to have Six Aspects shipped even if it will only be an early access while I polish out all the other pieces.

This week I need to work out the screenshots and videos so I can get them on Steam and my website for the media. I spoke with my friend that is helping me with the company logo and we’re hoping to have it ready around the middle of April.

Finding Motivation

We fixed the leveling problem, and we even have the cities displaying text now which is exciting. The issue I ran into last week was maintaining my own motivation to get work done. It stems from a lot of things going on in my personal life.

It’s difficult to put a finger on it, but if I were to guess one of the other parts of my life isn’t running at the capacity I need them to be at. In the book “The Mystery Method” the author Mystery talks about how everyone has three main needs. The three needs are health, wealth building, and social life. Health focuses on working out and eating healthy. Wealth building is the ability to make money. Social life has to do with love life and socials with peers. He goes on to state that if you were to rate those categories from 1-10 and any one of them is a 1 then the others will take hits as well. Honestly I’d say that I spent the bulk of my time working on socials this week, and I worked out on one of the days. Both things seemed to help reset me.

I feel better tonight but now the week is over. Still I should finish a couple of things and get some more done. I’m hoping to finish all the baseline text for the game and replace all the enemies with prefabs to get the next beta released. The good news is that my artist delivered a new cursor icon for me today.

I spent some time with a new friend on Saturday watching the anime Re:Zero. I often like to watch an anime I haven’t seen yet when I’m getting to know someone. It creates a connection with them. In the anime we watched the basic premise is that the main character can get killed and come back to make changes and figure out how to get the best outcome to move forward. It’s kind of like a video game with the idea of Groundhog Day.

It made me go back to some recent events in my own life and wonder what things would be like now if I was able to go back and make some key changes. I guess that’s what makes life, life though. We don’t get a chance to try again, and most people love to say things like “given the choice I wouldn’t change a thing.” I’d say those people are a lot less tortured by their analytical thoughts though.

Going back to “The Power of Now” Eckart Tolle says that we need to make sure we don’t spend to much time living in the past or in the future. We need to live in the now. I found that my drive to pick up my kids was so long that I had an extremely hard time staying present during the drive. My mind drifted back in time, which caused a lot of emotions that I wasn’t ready for. It’s easy to start spiraling out of control, but understanding what is happening to me is the first step at least. I need to spend more time keeping my thoughts in check and not let them get away from me to keep my productivity high.

Eckart says that you need to step outside of yourself and become the observer of your own thoughts. Most of the time when I do this I laugh at the character of myself as I agonize over things that become more trivial from that vantage point. It’s sort of like what authors have their space characters describe looking down on the earth. “It looks so peaceful”. From that vantage point you would have no idea that there’s a presidential election, a disease outbreak, or uncertain future outcomes on the horizon in general.

It’s important to do internal work to understand what’s happening inside yourself so that you can learn to control it.

Empty Nest Equals More Productivity

As I’ve said before I’m a single dad. My kids went to stay with mom for spring break which means that I should have a huge amount of productivity this week! Specifically I’m making enemy pre-fabs and replacing them in stages and adding the stage dialogue to all the stages for my beta testers. I wanted to have a solid beta out on Thursday but ran into a new problem related to the town blessing script. Still working on displaying the buff to the player. It displays on one town then it doesn’t display on the next one. It’s likely it’s an order of operations problem, or a pass through problem. Worst case scenario my mentor Chris will be able to help me fix it.

We finally fixed the enemy leveling issue which means that the enemy levels are being set now instead of added to every time you start a stage. So its full steam ahead on getting things in place. It’s really easy to get scatter brained and feel overwhelmed by the amount of things that need to get done, but I’m coping and doing my best to focus. On the other hand with problems like the text not displaying properly I could become to focused on it and lose productivity that way. It’s important to set limits on the things that I’m working on when no progress is being made and come back to them later.

I really need to get the press kit page on the website working so that I can push out to the media and hopefully get some coverage. I need to take some screenshots and make that video which will be a focus this week as I don’t have to worry about taking care of my mini me army. Things are moving along well, and I feel good about the progress I’m making.

Change is Inevitable

It’s difficult to say how much I appreciate all of my experiences in 2019 that made me a better person. I really pushed my own boundaries in learning how to socialize better and it made me better as a person. It also prepared me for my current transition. For those of you that don’t know I’m transitioning out of the military and doing a job hunt while I finish this game. I’m also dealing with a move soon, and I’ve spent some time dating as well. I’m just so very grateful for the things I was able to experience this past year.

I’m not sure I can put a finger on how I feel about the major changes that I’ll be going through soon. I guess I’ll be sad to see parts my old life go, but happy to have made the choices that I made. I’m very excited to start the next chapter of my life, for myself as well as my family. A concept that I’ve been repeating a lot is how that in experiences and relationships it’s so very important not to look at something as a waste of time. That’s something that people that are always looking to take from others do. I can say that because I was the type of person that was always looking for what I could get without giving before I started really working on myself. It’s very important to be on the “same team” with people giving a lot of value and being free from outcomes in which you don’t get a lot back. No matter what when you give positive energy you get it back in my experience.

The game is clicking along now as I polish and find little things to fix here and there. There is still a leveling issue with enemies in game. I’m going to add a “level” column on the spreadsheet to help with this problem a bit. I’m looking at building a beta page and a press page on the website this weekend. I added a feature which allows me to set enemies as “boss” types which means they cannot be moved off of their base even when defeated. A big part of the game is winning combats to push back squads, but this is the right move as the old way would make battles play out in an unsatisfying way at the end.

Still working on some nuances to the text system. The big issue is that it triggers if the enemy controls the town, so we’ll be changing that soon as well. I almost have the town buff notification working. The issue is that the roll happens after the text gets launched which means that the message hasn’t changes yet. Also you shouldn’t get the buff on the town if the enemy still owns it.

I need to start building out the enemy and player types as well as the spells used. I’m a little worried about how much time that will take. I will get some time back over the spring break week I’ll have less obligations to eat up my time.

I’m writing the story and it’s mostly going well. I had a trusted friend look at my writing and he said it was passable. It’s a good thing this game is more about game play than narrative! Some of the ideas are that your main character will give some memories of their life, and unfold things before the mission starts. I’m doing my best to not make this voice in your leaders head ambiguous as a male or female but it’s tough. I’m sure the overall tone will come across as male, because I’m writing it and I’m male.

I’m leaning toward making the game “early access” with the hopes that people will be more forgiving for the complete vision not being fully implemented yet. The game might ship without sound controls and some other bells and whistles initially. It’s only going to have 12 of the 30 stages I want to include, and I’m not sure how many character classes I’ll be able to ship with. Things will likely change after launch. Classes will need to be balanced, dialogue will likely change. I want to integrate steam into it with achievements and cards. I need more feedback and right now my beta testers haven’t given me enough, but I get it everyone is busy.

I’m committed to pushing out a stable product that will be mostly fair and as bug free as I can make it.

Keeping focus

I found that I had a little trouble staying focused on the project this week. There was more than one thing that distracted me. Still, I managed to work on the game a little each day. I started working through some ideas for text that I want to have on the towns, and some before I go into a stage. I’m a little worried about being judged or having the internet twist things into something extremely negative. Then again who knows how much attention my project will actually get.

I listened to a lot of Rami Ismail this week, and he has had a lot of insight into some of the things I’ve been working through. The plot line that I’m developing seemed alright, but when I stepped away from it there was a situation in which I asked myself, “why did I write this? I don’t really know this type of situation because I haven’t lived it.” I decided to make a small change to what I had written, and I think that it was for the better.

The enemies leveling at the beginning of the stage is still an issue that I didn’t quite get solved this week. When I was working through it with Chris I had to laugh because one of the programming patters we used had come up with a recent programming test that I took. I had never encountered that syntax before and so it was interesting that I’m going to likely be using it in my game to fix this issue.

Working through my Steam settings, I added a soundtrack section for the game and set prices today. I changed the names of the tracks from Level 1, Level 2, and Force Organization to “Leaving Home It’s Time”, “Leaves Fall As Do We All”, and “Choose Your Destiny.” I thought those names would be a bit cooler. It also made me realize that I need to put together some legal paperwork for it as well.

Today I took a look at Rami Ismail’s Press Kit software, and realized that I already pay for a website which could handle what he was doing, although Squarespace is a bit more expensive than his method for sure. It was still a good idea to look at his page to template my own Press page on the website. It isn’t live yet but I’ll probably set it loose after I make some sweet game screenshots. I put a little bio for myself in there talking about my methods for developing games, and some of the trials and tribulations. I made it pretty personal mentioning the fact that I’m a single father, and that I’ve had plenty of failed relationships. I’ve had my share of hardships to get this far for sure.

So far of the 30 beta testers I sent a link to I’ve only had one give me feedback. He said he enjoyed the game though, and so that’s a plus. Rami said that it might be impossible to enjoy your own game because you already know all it’s tricks and hidden stuff. I’m not sure, I did really enjoy sitting down and playing the game on Thursday. I had to check some code that’s supposed to display the average level number of troops in it. In order to level them up I had to play a stage and finish it. I had a lot of fun just setting up the units, which was a big deal when I first started working on Six Aspects. I’m planning to make beta testing a bit easier soon.

I really hope to have this leveling troop problem squashed on Tuesday. I started looking at the code but started to think that I wasn’t utilizing my time to the best of my ability. I’m still looking at a different way to handle the data as well.

One step closer!

Closed Beta Deployed!

This weekend I sent out some closed beta tests of the first 12 stages for the game with some content not completely built out. I hope I get some solid feedback but I’m not going to hold my breath. If you want to be in the closed beta then message me and I’ll see what I can do. There’s a lot of information included in the package like a Non-disclosure agreement. This past week I did a lot of work putting that together for the game. I found a major bug that I’m working on fixing, but it might stay in with some proper gating it could actually be a good thing. I had some of my testers that want to play on mac and so I’ve been trying to get that working as well. So far it’s been a bit difficult and I’m attempting to change the version of Unity to compensate.

The exciting pieces of content that I’ll be working on this week will be adding a variety of enemies and skills to the game as content. We already have a fireball attack, a healing effect, and some really interesting Area of Effect spells. We have Area of Effect that can hit the whole team randomly, disperse the damage evenly, hit specific rows or columns etc… This should make the creation of units a lot more interesting in the future.\

I finally listened to Vlambeer’s talk on YouTube titled “The Art of Screen Shake.” It was interesting and it did make me think. It’s primarily how our background and culture effect the choices in games that we make. It’s not at all about “screen shake” which was disappointing for about 30 seconds. As a challenge to myself I think that I want my next game to have no killing or destruction in it. It seems like in general that’s what most games are about. It’s an enjoyable mechanic but I feel that there’s probably more I could be exploring.

I’m hoping that I can get some sort of community that comes together to send me suggestions on the types of things that they would like to see in the game. I’m a little worried about writing the text for the towns. I’ll probably end up doing something pretty uninspired, but that’s ok because I’m pretty focused on making good game play. The narrative will be mostly focused on world building over character development anyway.

Full Steam Ahead!!!

As of today I’ve been fully added to Steam as a partner and I’ve paid the fee to get Six Aspects up on the page. I spent some time looking through all the additional information that needs to be added to get the game live. I added the following description.

“Six Aspects may be the first Same Time Strategy (STS) game melding the accessibility of turn based systems with the taxing nature of real time strategy. This unique feature makes it highly accessible. Leverage the aspects of earth, fire, wind, water, lightning, and ice to re-take your rightful home in a fantasy world. Enjoy the strategic depth as different terrain types won't just shape the backgrounds but the very battles they are fought on!

Command 6 units made up of up to 7 troops to strategically control each stage. Initial release will include 13 stages with plans to build out to 30. Play your way! Expand your forces with 10 Male and 13 Female classes by using the unique duplicate system. This system ensures that you will never have to start a character from level 1. More classes are coming soon!”

The page isn’t live yet so don’t look for it. The numbers aren’t completely set in stone. The current release date I’m looking at is 6 Mar 2020 at 7am or 5-6-7am 2020. I thought that was cute. I have to say that I’m still pretty worried about it. I went back and played the last demo I put out which was 2 years ago. Wow, there’s been so much added and fixed since then. I actually reminisced a little about where the project was and where it will be soon. The pressure is on now, and I really feel like it’s motivating to have a date in mind even if I might have to push it back a little.

I downloaded the Steam SDK and started looking through some tutorials so that I could integrate it and stat track for my players. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to adapt my save system for the steam cloud features, but I want some basic functionality at the very least.

Sometimes I feel like the game isn’t that great, but as I wrote the description it made me feel a lot better about what I’ve been working on. I really feel like it has a lot of unique things that push things in other directions compared to what we’re seeing in the strategy genre in general.

The people that made Darkest Dungeon released a new game today. It’s a Diablo style turn based game with psychological factors. I’ve always respected what they are doing in the world of strategy RPG type games. Maybe someday I’ll build something that would be worth comparing to indies like them.

Level Building Is On Track

Things are clipping along at a promising rate. I’m almost done building all the movement zones for the first batch of levels. It’s exciting to be able to get things done so quickly. I’m running into a couple of landscapes that I didn’t expect and will likely have to build some additional combat scenes. Right now I’m looking at building a beach front and a bridge. The next step will be building out the enemy units and the level texts. I’m also contracting some more music, and some writing for the levels.

This is the second week that I’ve written a blog on my website. I’m trying to keep this pretty regular, but I won’t make any promises. It’s likely that not a lot of people are reading these but at the very least it will be good to have something to look back at.

This week I also sent some additional information to Steam to get the ball rolling. It’s exciting to be at this stage. I’m not entirely sure how I’ll handle it as I know that the general gamer audience can be harsh sometimes. It’s my first release and I think it’s important to be as authentic about it as I can be. I know that there are going to be some rough edges to the game, but the bottom line for me will be that I finished something that’s functional and as good as I can make it.

This past year I did a lot of self development and it’s become applicable in so many areas that I’m glad I made the decision to take the time to learn. One of the lessons that I learned was about being “free from outcomes.” The idea is that I go into an uncertain situation with the best of intentions while giving as much value as I can. If the situation goes well then my day is only 1% better, and if it doesn’t go well then that’s fine I still have value, and I don’t draw my value from the situation. No matter what happens I’ll be moving into my next project after I finish this one.

Preparing for release of Six Aspects

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted any updates on my website, but the game is still very much alive. I’ve been steadily chipping away at it and have started the process to distribute it on steam. It’s likely that there will be no new demo’s but there have been a lot of features added as I polish the game for release. I will also have to go through some bug testing and figure that it might be a bit rocky at release.

Right now I’m primarily working on building out the stages which comes in 5 passes to get a stage completed.

Pass 1 - basic landscape work

Pass 2 - blending textures and creating movement zones

Pass 3 - adding enemies to the stage

Pass 4 - creating dialogue and naming cities

Pass 5 - play testing

I have 28/30 stages basic landscapes built because I’ll be going back to create the first 2 stages last. That’s a developer tool that Miyamoto talks about. Developing the first stages last to make sure that they will teach the player how to play the game. I’m going to focus on the first couple of stages likely releasing the first 7 or 10 stages. The plan is to have a price point of $20 on steam which will increase to $25 once the full game with all the stages is released. If someone purchases the game at $20 they will not have to pay for anything after that. This will be an incentive for early adopters.

Setting up a business and figuring out what the math behind the project sales has been interesting to say the least. As some of you may know Steam takes 30% of the profit from game sales unless you sell more than 1 million units. Add to that the corporate taxation and when I get the money out of the project I will only earn about $7 for each $20 sale. This is due to the way that I’ll be declaring my company which will mean that I’ll be getting double taxed. I didn’t make this decision lightly. I did a lot of research and although I could have had more pass through money per sale my personal assets would not be protected which is very important to me as a single parent. I hope that you the consumer will understand and find enough value in my game to purchase it and enjoy it.

I’ll be looking for additional distribution through other entities like Humble Bundle as well which could give me some better margins.

I’m very excited to finally release a game that I’ve been working on for so long and I hope that you will enjoy it too.

GenCON 51 2018 New Build New Life

It's been a heck of a year this year and I'm lucky to be able to go to GenCON again next week.  Six Aspects is finally getting to a point where all of the features have been implemented, and the next step will be building all the content.  I recently moved into negotiations with an artist to make faces for my enemy characters.  I've put a lot into this game over the years and it's good to see that it will be a finished product soon.  I didn't get all the features I wanted in the game but that's what sequels and DLC is for right?  I hope that you like my game because I've started to get to a point where I don't know if it's all that good or not.

I hope that you like the demo!

Click here to download the demo!

YouTube Video of me playing the game

Click here to watch the YouTube Demo Video!

Pax South 2017

I'm back from Pax South this year and that means that I'll be able to post a link to the newest demo build for Six Aspects!  There's so much new stuff that we've implemented in the game and it really feels like I can see the light at the end of the features tunnel.  I really learned a lot at the convention and have recently made some choices about the game.

The first one is that I want to look into contracting out the art to get it done.  After speaking with some developers at the conference I learned about some good asset options that might fit my budget. 

Next I want to get this game finished.  It's been 3 years that I've been working weekends and other random times but it's time to go really hard with the completion of my bachelors in sight.  It would be great to justify getting my own booth next year if the game is in greenlight status.

I also thought about the plot line for the game, and I think that I'm going to go fairly minimal with it.  Right now I don't think people will be as interested in plot as they will be in gameplay.  I'm also thinking about how to make the towns less intrusive during the stages.  I still want the game to play really fast.

Finally I'm thinking about how to implement class changes in the game.  Originally I thought that I'd just use a scrollable list, but I'm starting to think that something akin to the talent systems in MMOs could work better.  This would allow the player to see all the options that their character has open to them.

Here's a link to the game I hope you like it!

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5osppzhsg9yzllt/AAAKuEti70ShvvIg5F4_1Beta?dl=0

GenCON time means new demo release I hope you like it!

Wow, it’s already time for GenCON again this year can you believe it?  I’ve always focused on releasing my latest updates for Six Aspects close to the convention and I’m really excited to share all the updates with you!  The build that I’ve got to show you is really shaping up to be something that I think a lot of people are going to enjoy.  We’re starting to finally get to a place where most of the core gameplay mechanics are finished so that we can move on to fine tuning, adding lots of characters, iterating on ideas, and of course having a lot of fun!

From the last build to this one we’ve added the ability to defend towns just by standing in them they become your control zone!  This means that taking over towns matters more.  We’ve also started the ground work for a monetary system although it’s not fully completed yet.

There’s now more information on the force organization screen that you’re greeted with when you start the game and this is the first time that you’ll see our new character the thief!  She only gets one attack per combat but it’s a heavy hitting attack!  I wanted to get more characters in the game but this is all I was able to do right now.  My modeling has really stepped up from the soldier model to this one.  It’s likely that I’ll re-do his model in the future at some point in time.

There’s a new leader system in the game now.  Every unit requires a leader and if it doesn’t have one then you won’t be able to start the battle, so you’ll need to set them up before starting.  If your leader dies, then your units will auto flee back to your base and then promptly leave the battle.  Make sure to defend your leaders!

The final update is the new ability to flank and back attack your opponents!  Wow, this is one of the coolest things about ranked unit combat in my book.  There are a couple of bugs associated with towns that we’re aware of right now but it works fairly well.  For now, this means that a flanked unit might be exposing its softer troops like mages, archers, and most importantly its leaders.  In the future each row will change the type of attack your character can do.  This means that those mages are throwing fireballs in the back row but they’re doing a wimpy staff strike in the front row when they get flanked or back attacked.

The future of the game is looking amazing!  I can’t wait to get more classes and features in so we can start building out levels for the game!

Come find me at GenCON!  I’m working the Ninja Division booth and if you’re having trouble getting ahold of me just tweet to me @Errantsquire !  I’d love to hear what you think about the game!

New link to the demo!

I removed this link check the most recent post for the newest demo version!

Pax South 2016 & new Six Aspects build

I'm excited to have my first opportunity to work in the games industry.  This year at Pax South I'll be working for Soda Pop Miniatures/Ninja Division at their booth.  I'll be teaching people how to play Super Dungeon Explore and I've spent the last month and a half catching up with my painting of their models.

That's not all I've been working on though.  I've also been keeping up with my tactical fantasy game which I've decided to retitle Six Aspects.  I feel that the new name is much cleaner.  It's been super busy this last week as I've gotten together with my friend and mentor Chris DeLeon to stamp out some game breaking bugs.  I'm happy to report that the demo is at a playable state and you'll find a link to the new build below.  If you're reading this Chris thanks for all of your work on the project.

I hope to see you at Pax South this weekend to teach you how to play Super Dungeon Explore and you can talk to me about my game when I'm not working.

Link to the game demo!!!!

http://www.mediafire.com/download/5kxbz2pj67gpn54/Six+Aspects+Pax+South+2016+Build_Data.zip

The decision to focus

It's no secret that I have a passion for games, but I've found that, that very passion has been getting in the way of me making my own game.  Specifically the Hex $100k tournament has been a little bit to much of a focus.  On top of that I haven't been doing as much development during the week and so I've come up with a new system to keep myself on track.  The deal is that I'm not allowed to play any real games unless I get my work done that week.

Each week I'm requiring myself to spend 10 hours on developing my game and if I do that then I'm allowed to play Hex or other games.  If I do 20 hours then I get to go out to a cool restaurant.  So far it's been working this week although windows 10 has been a serious hindrance.   Windows 10 seems to be screwing up Unity and Blender which is unacceptable.  One other big decision this week is to only use Blender for my modeling pipeline and forget about other pipeline solutions like UMA (Unity Multi-Purpose Avatar), and others like it that I've looked at.  I might revisit them in the future after I've finished with this project but for now it's just a lot faster for me to build all my own models.

Lastly along with my 10 hour weekly commitment to game development I've decided to become more active with this blog, that way I can be accountable to something.  Anyways there's a lot of decisions that happened this week which should have a positive impact on getting my game going.

Six the Aspects of Man Alpha Ver 1.0!!!!

I finally have something that's mildly playable please download the game try it out and let me know what you think!

http://www.mediafire.com/download/4zdfmf0df54dcc3/Six_the_Aspects_of_Man_Alpha_ver_1.01_Data.zip

GenCON 2015

My heart was racing this morning as I woke up at 5am and discovered a major problem with my trip to GenCON this year.  I had made all the arrangements but only for 2 Days which would mean that I would need to call Expedia to see if they could help me sort things out.  Luckily I'm not hurting for cash and even though the cost was quite steep I was able to fix the dates and I will be attending the convention again this year.  I've done a lot to prepare this time around.  I purchased a new video camera, made some new business cards, and have submitted my interview questions to Hex for my interview this year.  To tell the truth I'm super stressed out about the whole thing.  The last couple of days have been a marathon to get something that will be playable before the convention starts.  Of course I'm still working on my video game Six the Aspects of Man and it's at a state that's mildly playable.  Today Chris Deleon and I will be working on creating win conditions and death conditions for the game.  I've done a lot of the groundwork but I'm worried that I won't be able to post it to my Squarespace website.  My wife has been rather unsupportive of my endeavors which hasn't helped me much either.  I just pray that God will help me in my time of need.  Speaking of which I need to spend more time praying.  Honestly I don't think that I'll get very far with this game without God's help and I haven't really been giving Him the credit that He deserves for helping me get this far.  I suppose that only time will tell what His will is for me and I need to be receptive to it.  Changing my itinerary has placed me in a different hotel, and that may afford me some opportunities that I wouldn't have otherwise.  I'd say that having this deadline has been good for getting things done with the game functionally although it's also trying at times.  I really hope that I can get a demo set up, but if I can't then plan B will be to post a video of myself playing it.  I hope to see you at GenCON and if you're one of the many that I give a business card to this weekend thanks for talking to me!  Make sure to check out my game and let me know what you think.

Pax South

As I write this I'm nervous about the video I'm compiling.  It's the first real look at my tactical fantasy game which I've named "Six: The Aspects of Man."  The game actually doesn't look that bad but of course I still feel that it could be better.  This weekend I'll be attending Pax South and really hope to glean a lot of good information from my fellow indie developers.  I know that I haven't been much on keeping this blog up nor have I been doing my dev VLOG's but I have been working on the game and making more progress than I had before.  Other things that are going on right now are a future family move and I'm also working on my Computer Science Bachelors degree.  There's a lot to juggle these days but I suppose it's better than being idle.  I'd just like to say that working with Chris Deleon has improved my productivity on the project 10 fold and if you're serious about making game I highly recommend looking at his Hobby Game Development program.  Hope to see you out at PAX, wish me luck and don't forget to give me some feedback on my game Six: The Aspects of Man!

Happy Thanksgiving!

The last time that I made a blog entry was before I went to GenCON which was a long time ago.  Rest assured that I'm still developing games, and much like most people there's a lot that goes on in my life just like everyone else.  Thanks to my work with Chris Deleon I've made some real progress in creating a combat engine that's inspired by the old SNES Ogre Battle.  I'm hoping to have it done by the time that PAX South comes around in January.  It would be nice to have at least a YouTube video of the combat playing out to show people that I meet out there.  I've recently started using Trello and am thinking that future blog entries will simply be excerpts from my notes that I take down after doing a game development session.  I've also started working in Blender and it has been somewhat arduous but I'm getting more efficient at using it.  I'm hoping to have more blog entries for people that are interested in testing out my fantasy tactical game in the future which has yet to get a name.  I have tossed around some idea's like "Battle Squire" or "Mercenary War."  Honestly I'd like to make up a word that's two syllables.  Oh well it's a rather low priority right now.  Right now I'm working out the in combat targeting system.

Thanks for reading!

v/r

Charles Zammit

GenCON Here I Come!

     I'm very excited to be going to GenCON again this year!  Last year was my very first experience and I remember thinking then that it would be a long time before I would be able to go again due to the cost and time associated with it.  Luckily things worked out and I have the support of my wife to be able to go again this year.

     This week I had a huge milestone in my company when I created this website!  There's not much on it right now but everyone has to start somewhere.  I didn't have any time to do my development video this week, and there wouldn't have been much to say anyways.  Work has picked up recently and so I don't have the kind of time that I had when I created Constantine I & II.  I'm still working hard on making my next game though.  I'm still focused on creating something that will be similar to one of my all time favorites Ogre Battle.  Chris DeLeon has made some great learning tools for me to control units in three dimensional space in Unity 3D and so I've started to script the combat which will trigger once they engage each other.  This led me to some more trials and tribulations.  At first, I had a really hard time programming the combat card for each unit to be read in.  Specifically I was misunderstanding the syntax necessary to create variables inside a class.  After working on it for somewhere between 2-3 hours I did have a breakthrough.

     When I'm working on something intensely it's probably one of the worst feelings to know what I want it to do and not be able to get the program to do it.  The sheer amount of euphoria that I feel once I've discovered the answer is truly awesome although it doesn't always cancel out the pain that got me there.  It's just like Chris DeLeon says in the "Hobby Game Development Handbook" - you have to practice making games, you're not just going to wake up one morning and know exactly what to do (DeLeon).

Thanks for reading my first blog post!  I've been meaning to post some of my D&D 4.0 modules for the public to read and use.  If you've played my game Constantine you may notice that some of the scenario's in the game are based on the modules.

Enjoy!

http://www.mediafire.com/download/0i9v2riwvs678bd/Ophen+Modules.zip

v/r

Charles Zammit

Errantsquire