The Lock-On Hat
Back in the Viewtiful Joe Commentary, I talked about programmers as de-facto game designers, since their implementation of certain systems has an implicit effect on the mechanics. I’ve been experiencing this first-hand in subtle ways which are hard to define but now that the state machine stuff is more mature, I think I have a concrete example which shows the intersection of these...
An update on some stuff I've been working on. The video is an hour long so I figure I'll let it speak for itself. If you're not interested in specifics, it's probably enough to just skim the video and see the visuals for yourself.
Also a reminder that pledges will resume shortly. I haven't had time to put together a blog post but I hope the video is enough.
2021-11-30 13:04:41 +0000 UTC View PostNo action required on your end. Pledges will not be processed for October, they'll resume at the end of November.
I made middling progress this month, mostly on two fronts.
Firstly, I continued making fixes and improvements to existing systems. This includes a nice restructuring of the player and enemy objects under a shared parent. I think I've done this in a flexible way which allows enemies to inherit default behaviours for impulses/collision/animation or override just the part...
2021-10-31 13:53:56 +0000 UTC View PostPlease forgive the minimal editing, would take ages since it's 3 hours long. Enjoy.
2021-10-01 18:36:10 +0000 UTC View PostIt's somehow the end of the month and I don't have a topic prepared so I'm thinking about answering questions in an audio log instead. If you have a question related to the design/development stuff I've been talking about lately then fire away. Bonus points if it somehow gives me a reason to explain my thoughts on a specific topic like fairness, cameras, narrative, etc.
You don't have to be a patron to ask something but either way I can't guarantee I'll answer it. If I don't get enough...
Resurrection
Proxima needs a rest. I decided to leave it behind after feeling like it needed to be expanded but being unsure how. As soon as my mind was able to relax, I began having good ideas again but it still feels like Proxima needs more time to soak. I’ve moved on to Betelgeuse in the hopes that expanding my skills as a developer is a more valuable use of time than dwelling on a single idea. Best case scenario, some of the work I do on Betelgeuse will make the path...
Some more progress on movement and such. Will probably mess around with particles and shaders after making a few more refinements/improvements here. Looking for a change of pace but want to avoid returning to collisions a while longer.
2021-08-28 03:07:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Just a video discussing recent additions. Still need to iron out a few bugs and try some further improvements I have in mind.
This system was built alongside Victor so it took a lot of time to refine as new features were added. That said, occasionally I would go to implement a new action and find it only took a few minutes thanks to my previous efforts, this is ultimate aim, ensuring that actions can be created or tweaked as quickly as possible.
While it looks good at the moment...
Hello everyone,
Just a reminder that pledges will reactivate soon. I figure Patreon probably notifies you of this somehow but another heads-up couldn't hurt.
In related news, it's been an excellent month for progress. Proxima's collision system had already been created to handle bounding boxes of various sizes so Betelgeuse was able to hit the ground running with a taller character.
Since collisions are already in a good place I had the opportunity to take on a new challenge: s...
2021-07-28 16:28:15 +0000 UTC View PostProgress on Proxima stalled this month, I also got distracted by E3 and then playing various games. As a result, I didn't do enough work to justify pledges so the Patreon will be paused until next month when we'll resume. If you've never been through a pause before, it's a simple process which doesn't require any action on your end. I'll put the Patreon into the Per Video mode until the charging period for this month is over, then I'll swap it back to Per Month mode, skipping a month.
...
Over the Hump and Into the Ceiling
Slopes and collision response have been a sticking point for the project so far but it’s looking like those dark times might finally be over. Behind the scenes I’ve also implemented - or at least made great progress on - two other concepts which form the basis of Proxima. Lets just say one has to do with level design and the other with enemy design. Th...
The First Mistake
What do Shovel Knight, Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, Celeste, The Messenger and many retro games like Mega Man have in common? None of them have slopes. This isn’t some kind of metaphor, I mean they literally don’t contain slanted surfaces.
Perhaps the preceding list is enough of an argument to demonstrate that slopes aren’t necessary but some others rely on them. Dustforce, N++<...
2021-04-30 17:17:20 +0000 UTC View PostStarmap
While it’s not motivating to assume you’ll fail from the outset, the reality is probably that most games never see the light of day. With that in mind, it seems like I’ll need more than one card up my sleeve if I want to improve my chances of actually releasing something. As you might imagine, I’ve come up with a few ideas over the years. Four of those could roughly be described as 2D Action Platformers. They each have a different focus but the point is the...
I'm about to start my first full day of development. Seems like it could be useful to have some tunes ready so I built up a playlist over the past while. It's an eclectic list filled with spoilers and some weird picks which mostly just remind me of specific games or moments. Some of these play at extremely important points in their respective games so you might not want to listen. ...
2021-03-01 09:33:33 +0000 UTC View PostFirst things first, the Patreon will remain open. Amazingly the pledge total has gone up since I announced the hiatus so I’d like to extend a huge thanks to all of you, new and old for the support. In case you missed it, February was mostly spent working on the Teio Form Mod for The Wonderful 101. Despite having only made that post a week ago, I’m once again feeling pressure to provide value so he...
2021-02-27 16:35:07 +0000 UTC View PostHello blunderful ones, I just released the second version of my Wonderful 101 mod which now has a name: Teio Form. Since it’s the main thing I worked on for the past few weeks, I thought I would take some time to talk about certain choices made during its development.
The interface itself now has a princely theme.
Harsher Scoring
This is the closest anything i...
Hello everyone,
I’ll be taking a break from the channel for the rest of January. The patreon will remain open in the meantime so it’s your call whether you want to continue supporting me or not. If so, you should think of it as a contribution for the videos I’ve made rather than the videos I will make though because I can’t promise I’ll be making any more.
As some of you have noticed, Meta Microvideos feels like an ending. The only question is whether it’s the end of a...
2021-01-10 22:43:32 +0000 UTC View PostHaven't clocked much time in this version yet so there might still be more to say but here's my early thoughts.
2020-05-11 10:29:46 +0000 UTC View PostJust an update on how things are going, nothing crucial in here so skip it if you're not interested.
2019-07-28 14:48:37 +0000 UTC View PostYou’ll have an easier time understanding this post if you’ve seen my Devil Daggers and/or Return of the Obra Dinn reviews.
Here’s some trivia. The “Potentially Slightly Misguided” bit at the end of the Obra Dinn review was originally written like so:
“It’s a petty complaint but less petty than it first appears. If you think it over, hopefully you’ll feel I’m justified in giving Obra Dinn a Devil Daggers out of ten.”
I included this joke partly because I s...
2019-05-19 19:26:30 +0000 UTC View PostHi All,
You're probably all aware of this by now but the hiatus ended a little while back, hopefully you enjoyed that Breath of the Wild review. It took a long time to come together but I have several other videos in the works as well. Assuming my plans come to fruition, there'll be less videos than last year but more minutes. In other words a longer average runtime. I can't say whether or not you'll like which games I choose to talk about but I'd like to share some more info so you can...
2019-03-16 18:08:37 +0000 UTC View PostWhen I finished Metal Gear Solid for the first time I was just a kid so its references to previous games and themes of selfish genes went over my head but the most confusing part of all was the end credits. Basking in the afterglow of finishing a cool game, I was totally caught off guard two minutes into The Best is Yet to Come when I realised the song was being sung in Irish. In an interview, composer 2018-12-21 03:10:27 +0000 UTC View Post
Hi all, thought you might like to see what arrived today, my Super Nt.
Although I've played plenty of SNES games over the years, I've never actually owned the system. There was a one console per generation rule when I was growing up.
I don't like buying stuff second hand and this thing has HDMI out which makes it perfect for two reasons, it's new and it can be used for high quality video capture...
2018-11-20 16:32:51 +0000 UTC View PostHi All,
Now’s a good time for an update.
TL;DR: Current plan is do another writing retreat like last year. From now until January I’ll be writing as much as possible, getting a headstart on next year’s videos.
It’s been a good year for the channel but all good things come to an end. In January I had 14 scripts planned for this year but sometimes the plan has to change. Mega Microvideos was originally a two-parter which got katamaried into something bigger. That leaves 3 mor...
2018-10-29 12:32:10 +0000 UTC View PostHello everyone, I don’t have any major news this time, I just thought it might be nice to give a little update on how everything’s going.
First of all I want to say thank you for helping us reach the goal on this page. Over the last couple years I’ve been dipping into my savings which have depleted a fair amount. I realise that’s my own fault but I hope it’s clear that my sparse updates came from a place of caring too much, not too little. That hardly makes it better but it is what i...
2018-03-05 00:26:33 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s with great pleasure I finally unpause this thing.
In case you missed it, I’ve posted a Devil Daggers review to the channel which is the 1st of 8 similarly sized scripts I’ve been working on. I’ve also been writing a 6-part series on the Zachtronics problem solving games. Most of them are now written and the plan is to turn them into videos, one every two weeks is what I’m aiming for.
This was basically one big experiment to see if writing my videos in bu...
2018-01-30 17:39:54 +0000 UTC View PostAs promised in my previous post https://www.patreon.com/posts/moving-14419446 I'm putting a pause on the Patreon since there's no video this month. Read that other post if you're confused about what's going on.
Now that I'm settled in the new place I want to try a slightly different kind of workflow so there might not be a video for November either. However long it takes I'll only turn the Patreon back on wh...
2017-10-24 09:57:38 +0000 UTC View PostHello everyone, I thought you should know that I've signed a new lease so I'll be moving soon. This is obviously going to cause some disruption while it happens so the channel will have to take a backseat for a while.
The point of the move is pretty straightforward. I've been living in Dublin all these years where rents are high but now that I work from home I can move somewhere further out and get a better place. I've been trying to make this happen for ages now, it's caused some headaches bu...
2017-09-17 15:37:07 +0000 UTC View PostI’m back to save you from boredom, one video at a time. First things first, you’re probably wondering why my absence has resulted in a relatively short video about Downwell so let’s address that. TL;DR at the bottom.
I’m aware that very few people wanted me to do a video on Devil May Cry 1. Personally I’m very happy with it (I think it might be my favourite of my own videos) and I would hope that even if the game itself didn’t interest you it’s still a worth...
2016-09-22 23:23:56 +0000 UTC View PostHi All,
I tend not to talk about my personal life much but this news seems pertinent. I've decided to leave my day job and try my hand at this video stuff full time. I figure this is the kind of thing you should know beforehand so I’ve taken some time to lay it out.
Why?
First of all we're nearing the point where youtube earnings + patreon donations = enough for me to subsist on. Also if I’m not tied to my current job I might be able to m...
2015-10-30 19:26:12 +0000 UTC View Post