PlayCanvas Competition - I'm in!

One day late to post this, shame on me.

PLAYHACK with PlayJam competition link:

http://blog.playcanvas.com/playhack-with-playjam-starts-today/

So this is quite a distraction, and will delay Chapter 2 of Mothrina.  I had gone back and fourth yesterday about it, since I really want to get the more polished engine done.  But I think I'll try for it.

The publicity and practice will certainly help, and the pressure of the contest will help me to "break in" my new home's "office" space.  The prize would be nice but I think I need to be a bit realistic and say that with no mobile games under my belt yet, I doubt I can really pull off a winning entry.  Hey, I can dream. :p

Mothrina Chapter 2 is currently in a bit of a bog down while I try getting an editor built using Multimedia Fusion 2.5 and the Mothrina Engine v2 "talking" in the same file structures.  When I get that all working, I'll have a guide to setting it all up here on the blog.  I actually have a draft but it's not ready for publishing as I have since discovered several better ways of doing things along the way.

PlayCanvas in general seems like a pretty fun tool so far.  Not sure how it stacks up professionally, but I've been having fun building the basics of my contest game concept today.  Nothing ready for publishing just yet on my contest entry.  I intend to publish a Work In Progress on PlayCanvas as soon as I have something remotely playable.

Part of the contest is to keep a regular dev blog on PlayCanvas during the development of your game, so the actual game updates will be over there.  I don't want to keep up with cross posting here.  The dev blog will be open as soon as I publish a version of the game, so for now there is no link I can hand you.  But I will be sure to post the link to this blog once I've got that started.

Anyway, super excited to be attempting this and learning yet another toolkit.  I'm sure I'll have a much better idea how PlayCanvas all works after the contest deadline passes.

Wish me luck!  And if you are entering as well, I wish you the same! :D

Delay of Game: Developer has Moving Issues

Mothrina Chapters is not dead.  Just wanted to get this out there for my blog followers.

My family is moving in a land called Real Life.  This means things are getting cleaned up, packed away, and shipped to a new house.  The majority of my stuff being packed is also the stuff I use while developing games(or to de-stress while doing so).  Also, packing is very time consuming and seems to zap one's energy.  Must be those real life motion controls.

I'll just keep this short.  I have lots of ideas and plans, but all of them are on hold while I move.  The moving date is the 6th, but of course unpacking will happen over the next weeks following that.  There's also some Real Life MMO events called holidays somewhere in there.

So everything in Mothrina or other game development land is on hold for the next month or so while I piece together my/our new life.

It will live again, eventually, but for now I really need to take a step back and breath.  Expect silence followed by an opening report on the development once I get my new "office" up sometime mid/end of next month.  Stay warm!

Mothrina Chapters - Control Update Patch

I'll keep this one short.  I have resolved a control issue with Mothrina Chapters: The Ruins of Death.

For all people interested in playing the game, instead of downloading directly from the contest version, please download from the updated version link in the contest description.  Hopefully this fixes the "controls not responding" problems for good.  (It's pretty much a raw reading of the input at this point, so there really is not much more I could do then this.)

Here's the link again to the contest page:

http://contest.gamedevfort.com/submission/384

Thanks!

Dev log: Mothrina Engine Version 2, planning phase

First off, I'm really beginning to wonder if anyone even played my little adventure.  

In case you missed the link the first post, I'll plug it here again.  I'm starting to sound like a broken record at this point, but hey, I'm really desperate for players.

Mothrina Chapters: The Ruins of Death

http://contest.gamedevfort.com/submission/384

I have posted it just about everywhere I can think of over the last few days, and have not heard back from anyone.  Not even a little piece of "that was fun" or "your game sux!111".

Well, ok.  One person mentioned the controls were broken on the AGK steam forums and tweaked the code to support their (strange) keyboard.  And a few other users there complemented me on releasing the source code with the game, as they could poke around and learn how to better structure a larger project.

That's all I really got though.  None of those things really let me know if the game itself is good or just tedious or makes people angry or sad or just bored.  No idea how anyone reacted to the story, no idea if I was too vague with the clues and what happens or if there was "just enough" for a thinker to piece what happened to the Ruins of Death.

Some say "Silence is Golden", but for this instance, I don't think that applies. :/

Info on version 2 if you view the full blog post.  Cut time.

Mothrina Chapters: The Ruins of Death - IGDC Game Release!

Proudly Presenting: Mothrina Chapters: The Ruins of Death

There is a readme with an in-character letter to the character you will be playing, and some gameplay instructions, included in the download with the game.  Here is the link.  I hope you enjoy playing.

http://contest.gamedevfort.com/submission/384

What, you are still here?

If you could spread this link around and get more eyeballs looking at it, it would mean the world to me.  It's a free game after all.  Please share the contest link, as opposed to the download link.  I really need the potential votes.

If you have any feedback, storyline questions, or just want to yell at me because your party members are rolling terribly, I can be reached at:  darkgrif@gmail.com  I'd love to hear from you!

I am thinking strongly about expanding this engine in the future, and making a few more full length chapters.  If I do, the other chapters would be much longer, allow you to roll up characters and name them, and in general be much more feature rich.  I might do a "pay what you want" release, or I might sell each chapter as a lower cost full game.  Lots of ideas for the future, but nothing set in the cold Mothrina stone just yet.

Anyway, you should be playing the game instead of reading this.  Go play, and enjoy a small adventure in the land of Mothrina!

Why I Have No Game Dev Fort Entry...or Making the Most of Failing Deadlines

Alas, I'm going to probably have to admit defeat for this year's Game Dev Fort contest. 

 My dungeon crawler's arrays have been giving me hell, combat barely even ends properly, and I have NO story event code yet. With only a few days left before the 7th and at least one of those lost to cleaning the house, I think I'll more then likely be forced to wave a white flag on this one.  I bit off WAY more then I could chew for the timeframe.  

I had two ideas at the beginning, and went for the longer shot.  I really should have gone for the easier of the two games to complete.  But excitement of entering and a severe misjudge of how easy a new coding structure would be to learn clouded my judgement.  In the end, had I gone with the easier of the two, I would have been done in a couple of weeks and had a small minigame to show for it.  (I'll still be making the other game, at least in prototype form.  Can't promise anything on that yet.)  

But I'm a dreamer, and I dream BIG.  And a month sounded like a long time when I first started.

---

On the positive side, if I can ever tame my code and finish filling out the commented sections, I'll have a decent Might and Magic like dungeon crawling engine running with my custom ruleset.  

With really crappy editor support, and support for attaching events to walls and full spaces, this could go pretty far. It also has a mouse driven "point" interface, which means "touch" support for tablets. I'm using AGK, so android porting should be pretty smooth, though I can't test the phone because I happen to own the only android phone hardware that AGK has issues with.

So though I am extremely disappointed to be unable to enter the contest, I also have to look at the positives. I would have never tried out AGK without the humble bundle and this contest to motivate me. And I now know a lot more about how to structure a program in DarkBasic (and what to avoid, which is 50% of my current dungeon code, lol).  

It's a bittersweet sort of feeling right now.  I keep wanting to plow ahead on my project, but I know already that there is no physical way to get the code and the game written and tested in time.  I certainly won't stop dev crunching till the deadline date itself, but at this point I'm mostly doing it out of sheer madness then any real chance of having a game entry.

And gosh darn it, I can certainly say I've given it my all. That's a prize worth having all it's own.

Some notes on the App Game Kit tool, a small mention of Pro Motion, and plans for the future after the cut.

Smiley Gems High Scores and Ads System is going down at the end of the month.

Mochimedia is going down at the end of this month, and taking most of the social and high scores of Smiley Gems with it. 

Their parent company has ordered them to shut down. Much sadness. :( I don't have time to look into alternatives yet, so for now the system should just cease to function but still let you play the game itself.

If anyone knows of a system for ads and high scores that works with Multimedia Fusion 2, and is free to get, point me in that direction. I don't have a solid web host or server to run such a system on, so I cannot write one myself.

From March 31st, 2014 onwards, the game won't have high scores or any of the Mochi powered systems in it. So Smiley Gems won't have ads, but it also won't have any way of posting high scores. The game itself should still function for those who just like to play it.

I'll update the games page of the blog to point to newgrounds, since the mochimedia hosted page is going down as well.