I just released Across Kiloparsecs, a short science fiction visual novel, on Steam.
It focuses on the death of a close friend under mysterious circumstances. Was it just an accident, or are there hidden forces at work?
It has a soundtrack of ambient electronic music written by Bloodless Mushroom (me) and is my first visual novel. Enjoy. 🙂
I started building games in April 2023. It’s been an interesting ride so far, and I’ve learned a lot from just under 8 full months of full-time work. Starting from zero, here’s what I accomplished in 2023:
It’s less than I’d hoped for and more than I’d feared.
It will be interesting comparing these numbers at the end of 2024, which will be my first full year as a solo indie game developer barring any unexpected life changes.
With Into The Inferno development, I reached the point where it was time to get a better save-game system than the existing hacked-together-in-an-hour XML file. It had been on my to-do list for a while as part of evolving past the “you get one save slot, and that’s it” stage.
I have a ton of experience with C#, so throwing something in an XML file is second nature. That’s not necessarily a good or bad thing, but some of the legacy bits are strongly disrecommended by Microsoft at this point (BinaryFormatter for example).
I decided to “do what everyone else does” and get a copy of Easy Save from the Unity Asset Store. It’s immensely popular and highly recommended and it seemed like it’d be the shortest time-to-implement of the available options.
Fast-forward 8 hours later. I have a working save system with three save slots and it’s better in every way than the previous system. I was able to re-use a lot of my existing data code, rewrote some of it to be cleaner, and have “summaries” that are saved as part of the game saves that say where and who the party was at the time of save, and the interface changes necessary to support all of this.
Before:
Loading From the Main Menu – Before
Saving At The Inn – Before\
As you can see, there’s just “Load Game” but you have no idea what you’re loading. Similarly, saving the game is just “Save Game” with nothing beyond that.
After implementing Easy Save, this is what I have:
Loading From the Main Menu – After
Saving At The Inn – After
The first screenshot shows what comes up after you click “Load Game” on the menu. The summary text is localized in realtime, so in Spanish you’ll see that Archie is a “nivel 1 guerrero” even if you saved the game in English.
The second screenshot is saving the game from the inn. Saves at this point are an intentionally-limited resource (for better or worse), but at least now you have more control over them, and it’s easy to customize the number of slots that there are.
In the future I’d like to add Steam cloud save synchronization, but I have no idea how tough that will be. In any case, Easy Save made what I thought was a 40-hour task into a single day project, testing and UI changes included, and I definitely recommend it.
I’ve posted a demo version of Into The Inferno on Steam. It includes roughly half of the game — the main town, the three wilderness areas, the orc village, goblin village, gnoll village, and the first of eight dungeon levels.
Into The Inferno – Main Town
There’s still a lot more work to do between now and the October launch, but it’s mostly cosmetic and translation work and the gameplay itself isn’t going to change much.
If you’d like to offer suggestions or feedback, you can hit the F12 key from within the demo to send comments.
The sequel to Into The Inferno, Crossing the sands, is now available to wishlist on Steam.
A small desert village in Crossing The Sands.
It’s scheduled for release in spring of next year. That’s some distance from today, but I wanted to be sure that people who like Into The Inferno when it releases have the option of keeping their eye on the sequel.
I’m running a small Kickstarter to help put a final coat of polish on Into The Inferno and get it ready for release.
Check it out, this might be something you want to play.
Beast Dungeon roguelike RPG screenshot.
Beast Dungeon is a roguelike RPG that I’ve been working on.
As of today it’s live for sale on Steam. This is my first Steam release, and it feels good to get something finished and out into the world.
Here’s a demo of what it’s like to play Beast Dungeon.
In the last week and a half I’ve put a lot of work into Beast Dungeon.
What’s been added? More dungeon variety, more monsters, more items, UI improvements, adding the endgame, adding a high score list, adding tracking of monsters killed, and adding localization in Spanish.
The new kill tracker in Beast Dungeon.
At this point, it just needs a bit more translation and few audio tracks and it’s done. I anticipate it being completed within the next week. Wishlist it on Steam, it’s releasing soon!
I wrote a classic-style roguelike RPG called Beast Dungeon.
A screenshot of the Beast Dungeon roguelike RPG.
It’s available for download on Itch.io:
https://dragondropper.itch.io/beast-dungeon
I plan to continue working on it and release a finished version in the next month or two.
If you’re building your audience or business primarily on YouTube you should probably think again, or at least have a backup plan.
Google can and will destroy all of your work at a whim, or with a bad bot decision, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You have no recourse, and there is no “manager” you can talk to.
In my case, I had been posting logs of my journey starting a game development studio. It started with a few videos detailing my goals and my process of learning the Unity game development framework, then with demos of the process of building my first-person dungeon crawler game Into The Inferno. It was totally normal stuff, just like hundreds of other channels are doing or have done. This approach is a time-tested way of telling your story, building an engaged audience, connecting with the world, and having more success than you would have without telling your story. This is the sort of thing YouTube was designed for in the first place. Or so I thought.
Just shy of two weeks ago I woke up to an email saying that YouTube had deleted my channel for “spam, deceptive practices, or scams”.
This was a pretty big surprise. There was no warning, no strikes, and no indication what, exactly the problem was. They didn’t indicate that there was something wrong with a particular video, so I really had no idea why my channel was deleted. There was nothing deceptive. If anything, I might have been too honest, bordering on oversharing. There was certainly no scam. I wasn’t trying to get people to do anything, or asking for money, or selling anything (yet). My game wasn’t even ready to wishlist on Steam.
I only have two guesses, and they’re vague ones. Maybe they decided that posting mostly videos on the same topic (my video game development) was spam, even though all the videos had different focus and were in different stages of the game’s progress. Or, since my account was nuked right after I uploaded a video describing how I had implemented in-game shops where you could buy equipment, recharge your mana, or heal your characters with the gold you get from killing monsters, maybe that was it, MAYBE they thought I was talking about some sort of real-money transaction thing. That’d be a stretch – since shops are just a standard mechanic that thousands of games have, and I wouldn’t ever consider adding real-money transactions to a game because that’s dirty, disgusting, slimy, and wrong. People who put real-money transactions in games should be ashamed. Look for the “Log 15” video on this blog if want to review that one and venture a guess.
Assuming it was just an algorithm glitch — after all, Google is not very good at algorithms, and they often make very dumb assumptions (I speak from experience since I’ve had quite a few websites over the last 20 or so years) — I sent in an appeal. The auto-responder said that they’d reply within 2 days.
Now, 12 days later, I have received a response.
“Hi Dragon Dropper,
We have reviewed your appeal for the following:
Channel: Dragon Dropper
We reviewed your channel carefully, and have confirmed that it violates our spam, deceptive practices and scams policy. We know this is probably disappointing news, but it’s our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all.
How this affects your channel
We won’t be putting your channel back up on YouTube.
Thanks,
The YouTube team”
Again, still no indication of what the problem is. Whatever it was, I was definitely making YouTube an unsafe place.
They did NOT delete any of my other YouTube channels associated with the same email, some of which are more than 10 years old (my band channel, my vintage synthesizer demo channel, and some various other music channels). They certainly did delete any motivation I have to maintain or grow any of those channels.
I’ve switched all of my video hosting to Vimeo and re-uploaded all of my videos. They’re visible here on this blog at xangis.com or you can see my channel on Vimeo here. The first 15 log entries were hosted on YouTube. If you want to watch them and figure out why they might have insta-banned me, be my guess. I’m out of ideas.
I’ll miss those ~10 subscribers, and the extra organic visitors that YouTube brings, but at least with Vimeo I won’t have to worry about some random bot arbitrarily declaring that I am a scam because you can give in-game gold to a healer to have your injuries repaired in one of my games.
Take caution, a random deletion could happen to anyone, including you, and there will be nothing you can do about it.
Into The Inferno is a retro-style grid-based first-person dungeon crawler RPG. Battle monsters and increase your skills in order to rescue a group of children from a horde of demons.
Battling snakes in Into The Inferno.
I’ve had a lot of fun working on this game, and it’s something I’ve been dreaming of for years. I must admit I really enjoy playing it, and now it’s in the “polishing and tuning” stage with an expected release in early fall.
Walking through town in Into The Inferno.
The very first programming I ever did was game programming.
It started with my Commodore VIC-20 in 1984. The computer’s manual had some BASIC programs you could type in and run. One was a Space-Invaders-type game.
Well, naturally, after typing in this game and playing it for a bit, I wanted to start making changes to enemy colors, speed, and score values. This was how I started programming.
It continued when I got a Tandy 1000 EX that ran MS-DOS and started writing games in GW-BASIC. By now I was coding much more detailed and complex programs. They were still text-only (ASCII), but I was creating them from scratch, and they had much more detailed mechanics.
I remember well a text-based gladiator combat tournament game that I spent the better part of a year working on, at about age 10, in addition to a few text-based adventure games.
Later, as the Internet started to grow, I became interested in multi-user dungeons. There were various codebases — Diku, Merc, Envy, Circle, and others. Not only did I work on some existing games, I also created my own, starting with Illustrium Arcana, and later with the Basternae rewrite, Basternae 3: Phoenix Rising. If you look at the “Basternae and ModernMUD” topic on this blog, you’ll see that I was working on them well into 2013.
When I was finishing my college degree in 2004, I took some classes for credit at The Game Institute and got a job with a company working on simulators for the US Army (among other government contracts). It was basically a video game company, but replace “fun” with “realism”. I didn’t really work on any graphics code, and ended up specializing in audio and network communications. This was the first and last job I had in video games.
My strong knowledge of audio programming and networking protocols took me on to develop parts of the Authentic8 SILO browser, work on a home automation system, and build the various audio applications I released as Zeta Centauri.
Now I’m returning to my roots and learning Unity. It’s incredibly intuitive, and the programming is easy and natural thanks to the many years I spent writing C# code.
I’ve started with the “Complete C# Unity Game Developer 2D” course available through Udemy. I’m about 50% of the way through, and the deep, thorough coverage coupled with real hands-on coding projects has been great for the learning process. I’m definitely going to take more of the Gamedev.tv courses because they really know how to teach.
Tarf killed the dragon on Dragonwilds. I still haven’t come anywhere close — best I’ve been able to do is level 3 at 12th place.
I recently expanded the monster pool on Dragon Wilds by a third. It’s still the same impossible old-style text-based combat game, but now with more things to get killed by.
Enjoy:
There’s a game engine designed for building massively multiplayer online games. It’s called Multiverse. It was originally a proprietary engine, but it went open source at the beginning of the year when the company that created it went out of business.
I played with it a bit back in 2010 before I left Ohio. When I moved to California in the second half of 2010 I ended up working in the same building as Multiverse, Inc. They were winding down the company when I arrived and I ended up buying one of their old computers, a monitor, and an office chair. I met the founder, Bill Turpin, who also happened to work with the database admin where I was working when they were both at Netscape.
A while later they open sourced the project. I didn’t have the spare attention cycles to dig into it for the first few months, but started tinkering with it again in April. It’s a lot of fun to play with, but needs a lot of work, especially in the ease-of-use area.
I joined the development team and have been contributing the occasional bugfix. To find out more visit this website:
www.multiversemmo.com
I can’t believe I never heard of this before now, but apparently there’s a Dark Age of Camelot server emulation project:
Unsurprisingly, the most popular server is based on classic pre-Trials-of-Atlantis DAoC.
Not that Bast3 needs more things to distract me from it, but I’ve been tinkering with it a bit, and may eventually put up a custom server. Not soon.