Combo Gravity

Hey, I’ve been away for a bit, but I hope I’m coming back and will be more regular. As for the creative process, I’m still searching for ideas and prototyping a lot. Despite gaining some experience over the past few years, sometimes certain ideas in my head don’t fully translate into something playable. Below, I’d like to talk about a few small prototypes I’ve been working on recently.

It all started with the desire to capture the atmosphere of a dungeon crawler. I wanted to maintain the grid-based movement, but this time I incorporated monster battles. After some testing, I decided to abandon the grid and opt for more action and movement in all directions. Even after implementing enemy movement and a simple game loop, it still didn’t feel right. I was missing something engaging. I decided to go back to grid-based movement but with a twist! I changed the perspective to first-person. Once I had the basic mechanics, I came up with a completely different idea… which I’ll try to write about in the next post.

So, I’m struggling with jumping from one idea to another, but I don’t think any of them were bad. I’d gladly pursue all the ideas, but there’s one opponent: my limited processing power.
As part of this prototyping, I came to one conclusion: I much prefer designing gameplay where I rely on specific principles, such as grid-based movement, and the game rules are governed by clear and predictable algorithms. Debugging errors related to physics and, for example, an enemy passing through a wall frustrates me to no end.

In summary, my adventure with gamedev has not stopped at all; in fact, I came up with the idea that I could release each of my games on Friday the 13th. The next one falls in September 🙂
On a completely unrelated note, while programming, I listen to a lot of ambient music, which I would gladly share. Avith Ortega, a producer from Mexico, perfectly resonates with my Silent Hill-loving heart:

Stay safe!

Hey, this is probably the last post about the Lost Recall game. With each subsequent post, I’ll try to describe the progress of my current project.

It’s been almost three weeks since the game’s release. I’m pleased with the sales. I thought only a few friends would buy it, but it found a bit wider fan base. However, don’t worry, I’m not buying the most expensive house in Beverly Hills just yet. I’m still trying to promote it, but I don’t have any plans to further develop it. I have a sequel in mind, where I’d like to improve many things I encountered while creating it, but that’s more of a distant idea. Right now, I’m focusing on a new project. It’s not that I’m abandoning anything. I did what I wanted to do, and now I’m moving forward.

Currently, I’m prototyping two ideas, about which I don’t want to write too much yet because it’s too early. They probably won’t be logic games, but anything can still happen. I think next month I’ll be able to share the first gifs from the new project.

Stay safe!

Great news! My game is now available on the Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2588760/Lost_Recall/
I’ve also created atrailer, which is available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtlUiXM-9Og

I think it’s time to summarize how the work on the game progressed. The idea to create something bigger that would be released on Steam came about 1.5 years ago. Back then, it was supposed to be an action game. The stylistic was similar to Last Recall, although the robot could move freely and shoot in any direction. However, at a certain point, I decided that I would prefer to make it a puzzle game. Looking back, I’m not entirely sure where this change came from. I probably thought that creating a puzzle game with a finite number of levels would be faster to complete, and that logical puzzles would give me a lot of enjoyment. I also struggled with creating acceptable movement physics for the main character.

The idea for the action game was put on hold. I started planning and designing what the final game, which I intend to dedicate the next few months to, will look like.

I spent over a year on the game, which amounts to about 500 hours of work on the project (I mainly worked on weekends and at night). The biggest financial cost turned out to be getting onto Steam. The fee charged for each production is $100. I also spent the same amount on a music license and tools to help me create 3D models (Asset Forge).

I’m proud that I managed to program and design most of the game by myself. I didn’t use any ready-made Unity plugins or rely on materials found on the internet. I also created the trailer and promotional materials on my own. This taught me a lot, although, at certain moments, I would have felt a great relief if someone had done part of the work for me.

The biggest challenge in creating the game was two things. One was designing logical puzzles for all those 200 levels. It was exhausting and required a lot of creative thinking. The second one was dealing with recurring thoughts of giving up on the whole project and starting something new because starting something new is much more enjoyable than persisting for so long on one project.

I’m currently working on fixing the last few bugs and making sure everything works as I intended, as the Steam release is scheduled for early next month. Of course, I’m also working on another game, but I’ll probably share more about it in a month or two.

Stay safe!

This will also be a quick post 🙂
I’m still in the process of testing and fixing. There are quite a few bugs, but so far I haven’t come across any that completely broke the game. Here I will improve the animation, here I will add something small. Generally, polishing the product.

The worst part is that my mind is becoming aware that I’m slowly finishing work on the game and it’s starting to come up with a bunch of new ideas for the next title. I know that until I finish Last Recall, I won’t start on any new project.

Oh, I’ve given up on putting GIF images on this website. Those things take up a lot of space and because of that, the whole page was loading at around 50MB. I switched to mp4 files, which have autoplay and loop enabled, and I think that there isn’t a big difference between them and GIFs.

I hope that next month I will have more interesting information.

Stay safe and enjoy playing games!

This will be a quick status.

I am at the point where I have finished programming all the planned elements and designed all the intended 200 levels. Now, I am playing, testing, and checking if everything works as I think. My Steamworks account is ready, and the game’s store page will appear on Steam any moment now! I think I’m aiming for a release at the end of September.

That’s all for now, but I promise the next update will be more significant <3

I hate creating levels for this game. The greatest pleasure for me comes from implementing new game mechanics and elements for creating levels. To me building levels feels like rather a secondary task. Of course, skillfully combining different elements within one level brings satisfaction, but the planned 240 levels seem like a distant goal to me.

However, during the process of creating levels, I occasionally encounter situations where two connected elements start behaving in a way that was not intended when I initially created them. In levels that require more dexterity than logical thinking, there are turrets that shoot missiles. To save time, I used the same object that the red robot uses to shoot. As a result, the missile-firing turrets end up destroying crates they come across, opening up possibilities for creating several levels that utilize this mechanic.

Unfortunately, I don’t have anything more exciting to write about this month. Besides creating levels, I’m currently in the process of learning how to publish games on the Steam platform. If everything goes according to plan, the game page on Steam should be available by the end of July.

Stay safe!

Lost Recall has a storyline that is conveyed mainly through short texts that can randomly appear at the beginning of levels. Once a text appears, it will never repeat again. There are not many texts, about 50 at the moment, but enough to convey something. I came up with the idea that the tone of the texts will intensify with the progress of the game – the more levels you complete, the more the texts will reveal about the presented world. Thanks to this, I avoided placing them permanently under specific levels, which would take a lot of time. Randomness often simplifies many things 🙂

The game, besides logical elements, also has skill-based elements. These include avoiding spikes coming out of blocks. As you know, if spikes come out on a particular field, you can’t stand on it or enter that field either. However, there’s one trick – if we time it right, we can pass through fields that are currently changing. This is well presented in the gif below:

The whole difficulty lies in having a good sense of timing, aided by the sound of the spikes retracting and extending, or so it seemed to me… I had trouble playing the game despite trying to time it with the “beat”. I wondered if the sound was maybe too late. It turned out that the sound was emitted at the right moment, but had about 100ms of silence at the beginning. It took me a while to figure it out, but once I located the cause, a quick fix in Audacity solved the whole problem:

Interesting fact, it was not my idea to allow the player to pass through the changing spikes. It works like this because I implemented a slightly different system for detecting whether the player is standing on spikes rather just checking if the spikes are overlapping with the robot. Each tile has a flag indicating whether entering that tile is lethal for the robot. However, this flag doesn’t perfectly match how the tile looks. I will try to explain exactly how it looks with the following professional diagram:

It’s nothing groundbreaking. Many games use such systems. In this case, it makes the player feel like they narrowly avoided death.

Stay safe and keep playing games!

Yo, this is the first post on the blog which will be about my struggles in the world of game development. I don’t know how often I’ll be posting here. I hope the posts will take the form of something like notes documenting the projects I’m working on.

I’m doing this mostly for myself. It’s something that I hope will motivate me in creating my games. The chart below shows how often I work on my project (the more green, the better). As you can see, I work in bursts – sometimes I’m fully motivated and working late, and other times I switch to standby mode. I don’t want to work every day, but I’d like to balance it more.

The timing of creating this blog may not be the best, as I’m slowly finalizing work on Lost Recall (more about it in future posts) and already outlining my plan of action for the next title, but hey! There will never be a perfect moment.

Wish me luck!