Update: Milestones and Priority Changes

Time for my obligatory biannual update post! I need to do these way more often.

Here are a few awesome milestones:

  • My YouTube channel just passed 10,000 lifetime views! Wow! Thanks to everyone who’s watched.
  • The channel’s also about to hit 100 subscribers – we’ve got 7 to go!
  • Dungeon Mage turned 2 years old! I finished coding it in July 2013, and got it published in August – Where has the time gone?!
  • SpeakEasy, Infinite Parallax, and Easy Mobile Controls are all on the front page of the GameMaker Marketplace!

Other than that, not much has changed, because I have not spent much time programming! (At least not games.) Life has just been way too busy.

I’ve also had some emotional ups and downs along with a few reflective moments that have made me start to reevaluate whether or not game development is a hobby I really want to pursue any more.

I haven’t disclosed this before, but I’m a high school student. I’ll be a senior in the fall. Going into high school, I was pretty crazy about getting an actual game shipped. The closest I got to this was publishing Dungeon Mage, which I coded in about a month and a half during the summer following my freshman year. Most of the major projects, published and unpublished, that I’ve worked on got developed around this time period. My work output peaked during early high school, and since then, as I’ve gotten more and more busy with other things, I’ve worked on and published games less and less. (I have three or four fairly polished prototypes I’ve just been too lazy to put out there.)

In addition to being busier, as a person I’ve started to burn out a bit, and my life priorities have shifted. I’m not yet sure how or even if game development fits into them.

Most recently I’ve been working in web app development using a platform called Meteor; it’s pretty nifty (and also reactive). But even webdev I haven’t touched in over a month, and I’m not sure when I’ll go back to it. I’m kind of taking a break from computers.

I’m currently doing an internship in New York City working with refugees; it’s turning out pretty great, and I’m enjoying spending comparatively less time in front of screens.

What I’ve slowly been coming to realize is that time is a very limited commodity: I don’t have a lot of it, and it’s most important for me to spend the little that I do have on things that really matter to me. And right now, I’m not sure gamedev is one of those things.

I’ve learned a ton from the work I’ve done; I’ve picked up a lot of skills, and I’ve got the beginnings of a resumé. But it’s time to move on. I’ve been doing this since I was eight years old (almost a decade now), and I’m going to try something else. I’ve been screwing around on SoundCloud lately (and when I say screwing around, I mean screwing around – it’s all pretty bad), and I’m thinking about starting a new non-gamedev-related YouTube channel. I might even start regularly writing a blog. (Medium is a pretty cool website for getting written content out.) I’d also like to improve my art skills. One of my biggest priorities is to establish an actual social media presence, because so far I’ve done a terrible job of networking. (As an introvert, I’m kind of terrified of the social Internet. Gonna change that!)

But honestly, I have no real plans for anything specific, or even anything technology-related. I’m just going with the flow. If that flow leads me back to computers, great. If not, great.

Thanks to everyone who’s followed my sporadic progress over all these years. I appreciate you and the support you’ve given me. You guys are great!

I’ll probably come back to gamedev, maybe when I have a little more time on my hands.

But for now, I’m putting the game-development side of ShroomDoom Studios on hiatus.

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SpeakEasy goes live on the GameMaker Marketplace!

Announcing SpeakEasy, my third asset on the GameMaker Marketplace!

Using in-game lipsync with your animated characters is easier than ever before.

Import keyframe data from the lipsync program Papagayo and play it back in-game to bring your characters to life.

SpeakEasy can be easily integrated with GameMaker’s Spine runtime, letting you bring animated dialogue to your skeletal animations!

ShroomDoom Assets Top Over 200 Downloads on the GameMaker Marketplace!

Great news, everyone!

I haven’t written about this on this blog before (I honestly just forgot to), but way back in August, I started publishing assets on the GameMaker Marketplace, an art and software distribution platform that’s basically the GameMaker equivalent of the Unity Asset Store.

And my assets have been doing really well!

Asset Sales November

(Note: December 1st hasn’t happened yet, which is why the numbers for that day are zero.)

Easy Mobile Controls

My first asset was Easy Mobile Controls, a set of scripts for more easily implementing control schemes specific to mobile platforms in games.

It’s done really well – as of this writing it’s been downloaded 174 times, and made about $9 in revenue (although I’ve been giving it away for free lately).

Infinite Parallax

My second asset is Infinite Parallax – although I uploaded the final polished version of it to the Marketplace two days ago, I actually started working on it towards the end of August. It got shelved until this week because of school. But it’s finally out, and free through tonight!

Infinite Parallax uses fancy trigonometry (or really, just geometry) to calculate layer positions for an unlimited number of objects on the fly. It makes faking 3D environments in 2D games really easy by implementing parallax scrolling.

It’s also doing really well – it’s had 34 downloads in 2 days! (Although no revenue. Yet.)

The combined total number of downloads is 208, which for obscure software products on a fledgling niche platform is amazing!

If I have time (and I probably won’t, since I’m going back to school Tuesday), I’m going to polish components of the Indies vs. Pewdiepie game jam project and upload them as assets.

Indies vs Pewdiepie Game Jam Timelapse!

Here it is, as promised.

19 hours of game development condensed into 7 minutes.

(I actually spent more like 22 hours on the game, but a lot of that either didn’t get recorded or was spent sketching on post-it notes in the real world. And then I spent another 4 to 6 hours configuring twitch, editing this blog, and editing/uploading YouTube videos.)

You can play Super ‘Splosion Fun Time Go!!! on GameJolt.

Indies vs Pewdiepie Game Jam Update #2!

Few! It’s over. Those were three really intense days – especially Sunday (non-stop development from 8 AM to 12 AM, except for a brief running break).

Unfortunately, I didn’t actually finish a game.

I finished a very promising prototype of a game that implemented a whole bunch of new tools and ideas I’ve never been able to use before. But I didn’t actually finish a game.

Here it is on GameJolt: Super ‘Splosion Fun Time Go!!!

The game’s a half-baked mess, but it’s got good parts:

  • The under-the-hood AI and character control system are really solid and flexible
  • A complex implementation of Esoteric Software’s Spine runtime let me make some really cool procedural animations
  • The art I was able to finish is (for the most part) high-quality and stylistically unified

I also recorded 19 hours of twitch footage which I’m using to make a timelapse of the entire development process. (It’s really cool to watch an empty source file explode into a 2D-shooter over the course of 7 minutes. The video is sped up by something like 120 times.)

Would I do this again? Maybe. But I’d do a few things very differently:

  • Keep the features list to a minimum, and take a very rational, this-is-cool-but-we-probably-won’t-have-time-for-this approach to cutting from the final design document.
  • Solidify game mechanics before art. It doesn’t matter if your game looks pretty if it doesn’t play well.
  • If possible, I’d work in a team. I might have finished this project if I had had twice as much time to split between art and code – or if I had had another person sharing part of the workload. (Double productivity = more possibilities.)

Have I learned anything? Not really, or at least not anything life-changing. But I do have a cool base project to work from and the beginnings of some very high-quality art assets I could potentially sell on the GameMaker Marketplace. And I’ve also gained a few YouTube subscribers from my Update videos. (I think the timelapse will really bring in views once it’s uploaded.)

It’s been a crazy weekend – thanks for coming for the ride.

Indies vs Pewdiepie Game Jam Update #1!

It’s Day 2 of the Indies vs Pewdiepie Game Jam!

I’ve made progress, but I’m behind schedule. The basic mechanics are (sort of) in place, so now I’ve gotta start working on art assets.

I’ll be streaming on and off again on my twitch channel.

Stuff’s happening!!!

Update and Announcement – I’m Competing in a Game Jam!

It’s been WAY too long! I’m really sorry there’s so much time between updates. I’m still here!

The situation’s the same as last time: school is my life, and it takes priority over game development. (Darn.)

But as of today, it’s Thanksgiving vacation! Or as I’m going to call it, Turkey Week!

I’ve actually got time to do stuff and develop things.

It turns out, by super crazy coincidence, that my break coincides perfectly with GameJolt’s Indies vs. PewDiePie game jam. So I’m going to enter it! (It’s my first game jam ever!)

I’m starting a little bit late, but I think I can still finish something.

I’ll be posting update videos to YouTube on my progress throughout the weekend, and I’ll also be livestreaming parts of the development process over on my new twitch channel.

Wish me luck! Peace.

Update!

I’m alive! This blog hasn’t been updated in about half a year, so I thought I would post to clarify that ShroomDoom Studios still exists. I’ve just been very, very busy! We’re (I’m) a one-man team here at ShroomDoom, and I’m also a full-time student, so school takes priority over developing whenever I’m not on vacation. I have been working on some projects, but none of them are big enough or complete enough to post about yet. You may be wondering, “Why hasn’t there been a Dungeon Mage update?” Well, there are two reasons:

  1. As I already said, I’ve been really busy with school.
  2. The software I used to develop Dungeon Mage, GameMaker Studio, has undergone multiple updates that have essentially broken Dungeon Mage’s code base. The game is playable, but prone to crashing and unable to load player save data. (So basically, it’s worse off now than it was when I released it back in August.)

This really sucks, because there’s a bug in the current published build of Dungeon Mage that skews the touch input it receives on Microsoft Surface tablets, which essentially renders the game unplayable (and also gets it lots of one-star ratings). This game-breaking bug was an under-the-hood problem with GameMaker that has been fixed since August. Unfortunately, it’s been replaced with a host of new problems. I’ve been considering re-writing the game from scratch, but I don’t think that will be possible because of my schedule. What I’d really like to do is make a game with Unity 3D (which is way more stable than GameMaker).
So the good news? I’m not dead. The bad news? As of now, the current version of Dungeon Mage is (I’m hoping to get around to a sequel, though).

By the way, I finally made an actual logo!

shroomdoom_logo_small

Dungeon Mage Cinematic Trailer and Almost 1500 Downloads!

In celebration of reaching almost 1,500 downloads on the Windows Store (1,490 to be exact), here’s the cinematic trailer for Dungeon Mage!

It took a lot of time finish, and it’s not perfect, but it’s interesting. A gameplay trailer is also on the way. For those who want to know, this trailer was animated in Blender 2.6.