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!
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!
(Note: December 1st hasn’t happened yet, which is why the numbers for that day are zero.)
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).
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.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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!!!
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:
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!
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.
Dungeon Mage
It came a little late, but after three submissions for certification Dungeon Mage finally made it onto the Windows Store! You can download it onto your Windows 8 machine for free here:
http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-US/app/c287985d-c3c2-4e0c-8a59-2c1070adccfe
A lot of work has gone into this game, so it’s great to finally see it available on its target platform. I’ve already found a few bugs (especially when the game is running on Surface tablets), so expect to see some fix updates soon.
ShroomDoom Studios Development Blog 