T w e n t y S i d e d

I don’t know if they’ve appeared in any of the screenshots yet, but one of the mechanics in the game is a system of power-ups. The leveling system provides numerical improvements: More speed, more shields, more damage, etc. The powerups provide functional improvements: bouncing laser shots, homing for your missiles, highlighting of obscured enemies, etc. The game is currently set to drop one on every level. If there’s a boss on this level, then the boss has it.

For a while you could only carry one of these at a time, but that wasn’t very interesting. When you picked one up you would drop the previous one. You could pick it up again if you didn’t like the new one, but I quickly found that I liked some better than others and once I had my favorite they were no longer useful as a reward. Since they were random, it was possible to get my favorite on level 1 and then never care about powerups again until I died. (Powerups last until death.) That’s like a first person shooter that gives you the best weapon in the game at the start. It’s just setting the player up for disappointment.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 19: Unbalancing the Game”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

A small announcement before I get to the post itself: Last entry I mentioned I needed music. I didn’t expect that multiple people would be offering to compose original music for my game for free. I’ve been quiet about these offers for help so far because I didn’t know how to respond, but then composer Fawstoar made this track and I couldn’t say no.

But here’s the thing: I’m really nervous about inviting people to make tracks for the game, because I’m the absolute worst sort of person to make music for. My tastes are lowbrow, but I’m also incredibly picky and I know nothing whatsoever about music. I’m sure everyone has run into the classic Clients from Hell stories, where a client keeps asking for changes because they do know what they don’t want but they don’t know what they do want and in any case they lack the basic vocabulary to even express their preferences. So you wind up with a client repeatedly asking you to change the color scheme of the website and it isn’t until your sixth revision that you discover the color isn’t the problem, it’s that they wanted the buttons to look more “glossy” like [huge boring corporate site that’s looking kind of dated] and they’re actually colorblind and couldn’t even detect most of the changes you were making.

That client? That irritating jackass? That’s me. You don’t want to make music for me. I’m an idiot. I want a very specific kind of inoffensive electronic music, I lack the knowledge and language to explain what it is, and I don’t want to pay for anything. Who would want to deal with that?

While I’m wise enough to see that making music for my game would be bad for you, I’m also selfish enough that I’m willing to offer the chance if you want to try. But rather than asking someone to go out and make music, I’ll just leave the door open for submissions. If you think you have something that fits, just leave a comment with a link to the track on Soundcloud or Youtube or whatever and I’ll give it a listen. If I like it, I’ll put it in the game. If I don’t, I will probably avoid saying why because I don’t want you to spend two days re-working it only to have me still not like it because I gave you bad advice.

Obviously I’m not looking for exclusive rights. I just want tracks that I’m allowed to use in my game. And if you don’t want to do hours of work trying to please an ignorant slob who might not finish the stupid videogame anyway? I don’t blame you.

The mood I’m going for is… uh. I guess pretty much the original Descent:

Except maybe not quite so… 1994 MIDI-ish? (See what I mean about me being a horrible and difficult client?) Perhaps the Unreal soundtrack would be a better example. Tracks don’t need to be epic long compositions. In testing, levels currently only take about five to ten minutes, so a two or three minute track that’s looping-friendly should do just fine. Most players won’t even notice the repetition in that timeframe.

Some of you have already linked to your work on Soundcloud / Youtube / Jamendo. I’ve listened, and I’m considering some of them. We’ll see.

Anyway, let’s talk about the game:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 18: More Robots”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Tomorrow will mark the 8 week point of this project. I’ve been coy about where I’m going with this all along. Am I going to sell this game? Will it be on Steam? Linux? Will it support [esoteric thing]? Will I do a Kickstarter? Humble bundle? Mobile port?

So far I haven’t answered these questions because I don’t know myself. Eating is good, which means money is useful, which means selling the game would be really nice. But I have no idea what’s involved with that. I haven’t worked on commercial software in several years, and even when I did I had a company handling all the messy product-marketing, money-collecting, customer-servicing, tax-paying, digital-distributing crap. All I had to do was program and some mysterious process converted the code into paychecks.

But now I’m more or less working alone. I need to do all that crap if I want to ship this thing.

Oh, I also need to finish it.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 17: The Next Stage”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.