Bring Me Polish, And Viewers6/2/2024 It's been a long 7 months since my last post and gosh do I have a lot to share with you! Not a lot of personal life news to share but I do have a lot of video game development to show off! Sprinkling in the good stuffI've been slowly but surely building out new content. I've tried to make each area feel unique by utilizing a series of unique colors or visual styles.    Item/Inventory ReworkThe previous inventory system (represented by a backpack) had significantly more slots than the new system has and this led to some overbearing gameplay. Tracking 12 active items and a ton of passive items begins to feel like chaos pretty quickly. All of that aside... the items felt boring. My new approach has been to make every item feel special and provide some visual flair where applicable. You have to equip the items to specific body parts which creates a better sense of immersion. Foot items generally provide speed or fluid immunities which is important because you can't have 30 pairs of running shoes anymore.   Some more improved scenesThere were many moments where I felt like I was losing my mind while building content and would redirect myself into rebuilding a scene or expanding on a previously built level.     New MusicI've recomposed the entire soundtrack (aside from one song) and it has had an immensely positive effect on the gameplay experience. I don't want to share it just yet but I promise that it's probably pretty good. Twitch Stats ReportWith Twitch, consistency is key, it seems. I've maintained streaming 3 days a week and it's starting to pay off! I intend to keep going into the foreseeable future. 
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An Intermission and Then Redemption11/18/2023 The past two years have been a slow rising boil of emotions and uncertainty, and this past 6 months has been a quiet pause from all of that uncertainty. I explored who I was and what I wanted from life. Suddenly, I was single again and had to learn to navigate the world alone, and for the first time, as Fern. I've learned how to do my shopping alone. I've learned how to wake up by myself and smile at the little rat staring back at me in the mirror. What I'm really trying to say is that I found myself amidst the quiet moments I've spent alone and I'm so happy that I did. Twitch Streaming Redemption ArcIn finding myself I found my confidence, again. I feel comfortable being myself anywhere, in front of anyone, and I don't fear their judgement. This newfound superpower started with some excessive dating and has landed me back on Twitch. I felt that I was ready to be seen and to provide a positive and loving environment to my soon to be internet friends. The support I've received has been shocking. I'd say I'm generally a positive person but not necessarily someone people want to be around or to listen to. But recent developments have proven me wrong and have encouraged me to have more faith in my own voice and personality, and most importantly to love myself. Show Me The Video GameStreaming every day as fortunately forced me to work on Bring Me Hope significantly more often and with greater focus. I've grabbed a couple of gifs for you to showcase some of the more significant changes made to the game over the past 6 months. New ContentThe Frosted Caves have been expanded up with a level-gated section towards the end of the dungeon. Here you'll find a few new enemies, 4 mini-bosses, and a unique one-off item.  Seems like this part of the caves is a bit less abandoned. Camera PolishThe game felt moderately good before but I felt like I could maybe squeeze out 10% more happy-brain juice if I put some subtle screenshake and better camera-following behaviors into the game.  There's a sense of speed and flow to the movements. This is highlighted by the camera following just behind the player. Elemental Interaction ImprovementsFire should make water evaporate. Ice should freeze water. Fire should spread. Oil should explode if it's touched by burning grass. Thoughts like this led me to overhaul the elemental interactions. Most of these behaviors were already implemented but there was no visual flair.   An Experimental Parry SystemLast night I decided to add a parry feature to the combat system. The idea is to provide another tool for handling combat encounters. More tools means more variety in gameplay and that is almost always a good thing. Please keep in mind that this parry needs a LOT more polish.  User Interface ChangesI've never seen anyone complain about it but I knew I could do better. The first thing I did and the most major was the main menu. New music, new art, new visual design, the whole thing. I also did some touchups to the inventory UI.  Twitch Revenue ReportAlthough it goes against the parasocial and elusive nature of being an online personality, I feel that sharing this information is an important part of sharing my path to being a successful indie developer. I've streamed for about 1.5 months consistently and the general growth of the community has been fantastic. I've received a lot of support in the form of subscriptions and donations. I'm not showing non-twitch donations but that accounts for about half of my revenue. My takeaway is that people really enjoy a warm, welcoming, and accepting environment. Just being yourself and putting out the best version of yourself consistently can help you foster a community of your own. I also spend a lot of time with my community via Discord voice/text chats but I don't think that's a huge part of it, and I'd go as far as to say it negatively affects my twitch turnout at times due to overexposure to the Fern.    What's Next?I'm planning on continuing my daily streaming, keeping track of all the cool changes, and more blog posts. Thanks for reading!!!
Me talking about myselfI wanted to make a game that expressed every single emotion that I have felt over the past 28 years of my life. A game that can capture all that I love and care about and condenses into a 20 to 40 hour experience. I knew the journey there would be difficult but holy shit it's a lot of work. I've been pushing myself to work more which looks like, an 8 hour day at my day job, and a 2 hour (minimum) follow up to that on this game. On the weekends I probably manage 4 to 8 hours a day on this game. That averages a minimum of 18 hours of work per week on this game. Now considering the amount of hours spent on this game each week, I hope that you're as proud of me as I am to see what has come from this work ethic over the past 3.5 months. Actual ContentI've taken a big step back and have brought in a stronger focus on incorporating the story (more about this later) into the world and its many features. One very important part of the world is the wind. More specifically the dust in the wind. It's special dust.  Look closely and you'll see tiny dust particles in the air It might not look like much but this tree sway effect required a completely new approach to rendering walls. Some chunking here, batched rendering there, ya know.  Tree tops sway in the wind I showed some of my friends the grass and they said, "It's weird that it all moves kind of like, sporadically." My little brain translated that to, it's not realistic enough and so I've made all foliage react to the wind as though it's passing through it from across the screen.  Wind passes through grass in a more realistic way now. You can see the wind sweeping through it. Unnecessary NecessitiesThese tiny puddles provide some basic but visually pleasing reflections.  I added depth-sorted water reflections. Usually we render the world from bottom-to-top, for water reflections we do top-to-bottom. Nobody cares about or notices these things, but I do, and this game is about my view of the world, so get used to extremely accurate reflections.  User Interface TouchupsThe inventory color palette was just a tone too bright. I dimmed it down and made the backpack more of a rectangle. I also tweaked the reds/greens of stats on the left-hand side.  The item hotbar for equipped items had to get changed. Previously you had to hold CTRL or SHIFT or CAPSLOCK, and press one of the for ability keys, Q, W, E, or R. Look down at your keyboard and imagine trying to do that in real-time while engaged in combat. This new approach gives you 3 sets of 4 abilities and you press Q to hot-swap between them. This feels much more inline with traditional game mechanics. I also this is this is much more controller friendly.  Writing A StoryThe story for Bring Me Hope has never been put down onto a page and that's because I didn't have a fully fleshed out story yet. I had a lot of keys points and important storylines that exist in my lil brain but nothing concrete. Well thanks to Obsidian, a free writing tool that absolutely fucks, I have started the process of writing it all out. Before you glance below and pass judgement onto me, please consider that I am no writer and producing literal pages of written content for both quests and character backgrounds is exhausting.   Just imagine what it says because I'm too self-conscious to share the inner workings of my mind Cutscenes & QuestsI'm ashamed to admit that I thought that I could get away with cutscenes made of hot glue and uncooked macaroni. I broke and gave into my frontal lobes desire for systemic solutions to things. Sorry, basal ganglia, not today.  An example of the menace that I once was (old code) The idea with this new approach is to provide a simple solution that my monkey brain and both understand, and navigate with ease.  Quests get built in one place, oh that's nice There are quests which contain scenes. Scenes contain conditions and actions. A condition might be "walk into a room". An action might be, "pan the camera to the left". Pretty straight forward right? When we walk into a room, pan the camera to the left.  ConclusionI am feeling good about my progress and have put in the work to provide myself with the tools to start building things faster. I hope for future blog posts to contain this much content if not more.
The support of my friends and coworkers is something that I never take for granted and really has kept me going on this project. Beyond everything else, I want this to be the last game that I make for a while once it's done. It's important to me that I really wrap up all the things I want to say into this game. It'll certainly take me at least a few more years but I'm more than happy to give that time and energy to it. Thanks for reading! Getting The Most Out of Every Scene2/7/2023 Up until recently I feel that I've been dragging my feet in terms of committing to building out this project in a serious way. I've had long-term plans for it but nothing else has really been set in stone besides some crucial story elements. I've started to work on this again consistently and really have been pushing myself to invest more of my time into building out this game that I love so much. The opening scene, enhancedStep 1 This is where we were at when I wrote the previous blog post. These lights use what is called additive blending. This means we take color data (red, green, blue, alpha) and add the values of our new colors to it. So a full white light would turn those values to (1, 1, 1, 1).  Step 2 Lights have been changed to be a bit more dim and a lot more colorful. These lights use normal blending. Which does not do a whole lot to make the scene feel vibrant. Still seems kind of muddy.  Step 3 We apply a bit of over-exposure to the lighting and then a tone map on top of that. There is also parallax foregrounds (see the rock on the bottom right). The scene now is vivid and significantly less muddy.  Let's talk about depthDepth is a fascinating topic in video games because there are 3D games that feel flat and there are 2D games that feel like they are 3D. Perceived depth is an interested topic because there are so many ways to communicate this information to the player. Color and focus Using our primitive monkey brains we can derive that focusing on shiny things gives us dopamine. Looking at bland, boring, not shiny things steals away that dopamine. When building a scene you just have to think about your audience, in this case, Neanderthals. An easy way to determine how washed out a scene is, is to apply extreme contrast to it. First we'll look at the original art style and use this technique.   It's clear that a lot of the screen is bright and extracting a sense of depth from this scene is very difficult. The bright flowers help but they don't save the day here. Now we'll look at the new art style (including the tone map) and ideally, we can quickly perceive depth purely from the colors in the image.  Looking at the high contrast image, we can see that everything except the background is fairly visible. This means that players will be able to quickly derive information from a scene. Foreground When things are really close to us, they appear larger, and sometimes out of focus. They also appear to move faster than things that are further away.  Following a visual frameworkBuilding a set of rules to follow when it comes to building content is very important. It allows you to work within a little box that feels nice and comfy.  Game Maker Studio's new audio effectsUp until recently I've always exported two versions of every sound effect. One with reverb, and one without. It's a huge pain in my little butt and the new audio effects are a fantastic addition to my toolkit. Creative work on large projects is a marathon, not a sprint. It has been about 3 years since I started on this project and I'm starting to get nervous about the length of this development timeline. The changes I'm making still feel significant enough to keep me going. Fern News™For months I pushed onwards through the unforgiving landscape known as capitalisim. My knees buckled under the overwhelming weight of my cost of living. Working full-time is a feat and it's one that I don't have a great track record with, however this time I'd say I'm maintaining a more sustainable routine. I have had much less time to work on personal projects, but I make time here and there. Pretty New GraphicsBloom is a trademark in the video games industry and more often than not it is done very badly. Thanks to some fancy new shaders I found on the marketplace, I'm finally doing it right. Motion blur is the next greatest sin in the video game industry. Guess I'm a sinner because I added it. It's optional of course.  Hitboxes (are probably important)I decided to write a way to visualize hitboxes and it turns out that I screwed up hitboxes pretty badly.  The hitboxes are meant to be large but not below the hands.  Boss FightA cursed knight by the name of Guppo awaits you at the end of the Frosted Caves. He is one of the many side bosses I intend to add to the game.  After some conversation he gets up and proceeds to get nasty with it. I don't intend to show more than this until I get around to a trailer, but I promise it's sick.  (Flashing lights) Bring Me Hope, IRL Edition4/11/2022 Never before have I had so much content to share in a blog post. Make some coffee and get ready for some subpar blog writing! I made sure to put nice pictures to make it up to you. Fern News™This past month may have been the most productive month of my life. A lot has happened since my last post. I live in a new place, by myself. I've taken up contract work and intend to survive on my own as most adults do. Moving and rebuilding my life has been a jarring experience but I think I'll be ok. Shadow Alium?At last! We get a glimpse at some story for Bring Me Hope. Sea Cave CityAfter getting through the opening areas you enter Sea Cave City, home to some fish people or something. There are lots of various quests to be acquired and interesting new locations to explore. Let's take a look at Blaow, the son of Boom Boom. Blaow wishes to be taken to the Frosted Caves south of the city but alas it's full of danger! Danger only you are equipped to physically beat into submission.  Here we see Clawdia and Shellsea sitting in a bedroom full of tension. It was through this scene that I learned how much I love yellow dresses and therefor, drawing them.  A Real Artist Huh?Drawing the interiors of homes, a new cave, and lots of other tedious animations has brought me to the peak of my art to date. It was at this moment of artistic bliss that I decided it was time to revisit Alium's animations. I set out with the goal of giving our protagonist a lot more bounce and sway. Motion should feel fluid and natural right? It has always felt satisfying to run about, but I wanted to extend the character's hair length a smidge to give more room for fluidity in its movement.    Frosted CavesSouth of Sea Cave City lies the Frosted Caves... a mostly unexplored cave system that mysteriously produces cold weather and snow. The deeper you go into the caves the closer you get to revealing the source of this phenomenon. This is the first semi-optional dungeon in the game. You'll be able to just play through the bit required for the story or go deeper and discover a hidden boss that awaits you at the end of the dungeon.  I would like to talk more about dungeons and the design of them more in depth but until I have some decently compelling content to showcase, I'll leave it at that.
Maybe one day I'll be a real artist3/5/2022 COVID seeped in through the walls and attempted to banish me to the shadow realm. Thankfully Julia and I survived. That aside I've been pretending that I'm a talented artist, slowly rebuilding and adding visual content to the game. Here are some pretty GIFs for you to examine with your eyes.  Jumping over holes  Defeat looks approximately 100% more anime now  The new Sea City town with tall grass TilesetsBring Me Hope use tilesets which make up the floors and walls in each area. Now that I'm an artist it is I that must create these tilesets. Here's a look at what I have done so far.  Thoughts on the creative processBuilding experiences is my favorite hobby. Music, sound, art, game feel... it all comes together to provide a unique experience. I've learned in recent years that it takes a lot of your human juice to build new things. A beautiful date night might fill you with a sense of excitement and love! The role of an artist is to turn those emotions into a picture/song/game that others can experience. Converting emotions into an experience is a skill that you have to practice regularly and it's one that I hope to get better at as time goes on.
That's all I really have to say. I just wanted to share this perspective with aspiring artists. Living The Rat Lifestyle1/14/2022 The life of an independent software developer could be compared to that of a rat. For months I've quietly nibbled on work getting ever closer to the goal of long-term survival. Here's the cheese I've stashed away since last time.
Bring Me Hope looks different?The Possum Tom's advice was to shift background colors down in value (darker) and middle depth (less important stuff) objects into the middle values. This is the only scene I've completely reworked so far. Rat artists move slowly but steadily.   SpritePile 2.0 and Xor's shadersI asked Xor to make SpritePile beautiful. I said, "I have all the 3D data ready to go, make it pretty pls". Like a rat parent I provided the hole in the wall for my rat family to flourish.   Coming outI'm not going to use my development sharing space for this topic since it's a bit personal. Although it went against my rat-like nature, I came out a few months ago, I left the comforts of my rat den, (actually about 2 weeks after my last blog post) and life has been much better since then.
A Quiet Endeavor, Months of Silence8/7/2021 I've been silent for the most part for a few months now and hopefully for the better. Here's what happened since the last blog post.
Four months later, what got done? You can teleport between praesidios (checkpoints) now.  One of the optional bosses (Guppo) is partially finished. We have a unique set of art just for this encounter.  You can find items in chests now. We did a very "Zelda-like" animation for this because dopamine.  Combat is actually fun now (don't pay attention to the random unfinished art). I'd argue that it can feel pretty anime at times.  You like tech do ya? Here is some home-brewed verlet physics. We use these for banners.  Here's the super fun and exciting text parser that I threw together.  What you are NOT seeing in this post There are a number of new characters (both friendly and opposing), lots of new items, a questing system, and a lot of other new features. This is a very large game and I struggle with its scope on a near daily basis. Here's what I'm hoping to show you in the next post... but let's see it in a list format, for all you list nerds.
Crunch Time (From Home!)4/7/2021 We're just weeks away from launching our Kickstarter and the pressure has never been so apparent. Our finances are dwindling and like a cactus in the valley we are hoping for the drought to come to an end. Here's where we are at! Gifs and Eye Candy  We've got a logo now!  New environments (we're missing lots of props still)  Magic beams are a thing now (still needs some polish)  New decal system (vertex buffer based) What you're seeing here is ambient occlusion, kind of. We built a tileset of shadows that I dynamically create based on where walls are. We build it into a vertex buffer and then draw it. It is super performant and adds a lot of depth to the lighting within any scene. Finally Seeing Our Game This is one of those games that you can't really play until you've laid out a good amount of content and all the core systems are fully fleshed out. Imagine how disappointing it would be to play an MMO with no other players. Some features are vital to the experience you want to deliver.
A few weeks ago we started to see glimpses of what Bring Me Hope could be. We had finally finished the perk system, marking the last core feature to be implemented. Now we just need about 15 more minutes of story content and we'll have a very satisfying demo. AuthorI've spent 12+ years learning/working around game development. I love all sorts of interactive media. I'm also a mediocre musician. 
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