Game Development is a funny thing. I always like to think of it as trying to make a sculpture out of just dirt. You start out, and you're like, 'Shit I know exactly what to do, gotta get this handful here and that one needs to go there, and it'll all add up to that.' and you just get to working. You put together the handfuls and it's great, you sit back and you're super excited that you got some little effect just right. Then you take a step back and you see you've spent four months just tinkering with the big toe on one foot of the sculpture. No biggie right? It's what you gotta do, so you keep working. Hundreds of hours come and go, just tapping away furiously on that keyboard. Eventually you've got each foot together, and it took you way less time than the big toe, but then something happens that changes how you look at your sculpture.

Then you catch a glimpse of one of the guys making a sculpture near you. Not only is his sculpture damn great looking, he's also making it out of a material far better than  dirt, but he's also only been working on his for like, a half hour. You're overcome with a futile feeling. I mean, if this guy's making that fantastic thing so quick and well, why would anyone even look at your thing? Why would you even keep working on yours if it's not gonna be special? If no one's gonna appreciate it, especially when it's going on display next to all these really beautiful statues? 

That's where the allegory ends, just sitting in awe of this other guys statue. I run into this a lot, in  a world where all these fantastic games are either here or coming soon, things like Strafe and Nuclear Throne, who needs some college student's little top down shooter about blasting space pirates and spooky plants? What am I doing spending all this time cobbling together a game out of spare parts and bubblegum? 

I guess I don't have a really good answer to my question. The best I do is to keep my head down, I guess I've been doing this long enough to know that, but is that good? Shouldn't I have a greater goal? I really don't know. I mean, it's not like I can stop, things always go bad when I don't make things.

So maybe in the end I don't have a choice. Maybe it's all a compulsion? Maybe I keep my head down and code because I die , in a way, if I don't. 

I dunno.

Well, that's what's on my mind at the moment, it's a little bit of a downer. 

Wyatt White
An Ego Echo Chamber

Small update. New logo is coming courtesy of our new artist, Biomatter. It's not quite finished, but it does look pretty damn good already. I literally just wanted to post to show all the people who care that the new logo is looking good and all that shit.

Anyway, take a look.

Pretty cool right? I mean, pretty cool, of course it is. 

Wyatt White
No place like 127.0.0.0

Well, It's been a long road. I've spent, christ I don't even know how long, over the last 6 months working on Doomer. Still, it's a long ways off, most of the game assets are still my trash pixel art, menus have little or no animation, things are just unpolished overall. This certainly isn't a showy "We're setting a release date!" post, more just, that we're pretty damn close to being mechanically complete. All the shooting works good, all the things get hurt when you hit them, all the walls are solid and the levels don't crash when you spawn into them. There are a few straggler's left to get, little things like the super secret special weapons and enemies aren't complete yet, but they're not far off. 

That being said, it means we're nearing the next stage of development, which will be a lot less changing base systems of the game, and a lot more about adding new effects, building out levels, adding animations, and polishing up all the elements of the game.

Now to the less awesome thing. My schedule will be changing around soon, as I'm going to have to get a job to pay for school and living expenses. I think I'll still have a reasonable amount of time to work on Doomer, but in all likely hood I'll be losing several hours a week of time I would have spent working on new elements of the game. 

I do still plan to finish Doomer. I still enjoy working on it and playing it to this day, so it's certainly not getting canceled, I really just wanted to let those that have been following Doomer know that things might be a bit slower the next few months. 

In other news, there's a new CakeNeq Games logo coming soon. I've seen it, and I'm a fan, it certainly looks leagues better than the little janky mess I whipped up all those months ago. 

Thanks,
​
Wyatt White
Sleep is for babies

It's pretty official, there's an artist doing graphics for Doomer! Biomatter(the new artist) has been a long time friend of mine, and has contributed bits and pieces here and there to games I've made in the past, this isn't the first time we've tried to do a game together, though this is the first time we will succeed in working on a game together. He's already been an invaluable sounding board to bounce ideas off of, and I'm super excited that he's stepping to the forefront to lend his artistic talents.

We've already added in new blood sprites, and reworked the gore system to work better with some of the new look for blood effects. Having someone else working on a game along side me is a frightening thing, but doing it with a long time friend and someone who is undoubtedly far more intelligent than me seems to mitigate that fear. 

Anyway. A play through Sunday night exposed a bunch of glitches and bugs that I hardly see anymore, so I've got a list as long as my arm of things to tweak, remove, fix, and otherwise patch out. So there likely won't be a big 'OMG look at this cool new thing' this week. Though, with how much bugfixing sucks, there likely will be a hopelessly bored/sad post later this week about how awful the entire endeavor is going, just a heads up. 

Anyway, I've been super into Doom for a long time, but just recently myself and Biomatter discovered BrutalDoom. I just wanted to take a second to tell all of you that It's pretty damn great, also you can download it here. It's an expansion of Doom's mechanics, graphics, and it's awesome. On top of that, the new Doom comes out May 13 and I'm exceedingly excited. Words can hardly describe. 

Anyway, that's my lot,
Wyatt White
Alison is pretty cool, like not awesome, but pretty cool.

I'm a little stuck right now. I've been tinkering a lot with really base systems recently, stuff like general application collisions, how bullets work, and how enemies detect and handle losing the player. In the end I've tinkered a lot, cut a ton of redundant code (~200 lines) and blown upwards of 6 hours the past two days. Now I'm empty though. I feel like I need to make the universe and gameplay, but I also know that I need to work on the actual technical stuff, or all the time put into the world is all for nothing. 

I'm honestly not sure what I'm trying to say in this post, I didn't start with a point or really anything specific to say. The game is still moving, and I'm still enjoying the time I spend with it, but yesterday and today have been disheartening days as far as actual development goes. 

There is good news! Art is in production! The plan is to wipe away all my lazy art and replace it with shiny, new art! So that's exciting! Fingers crossed there should be a new logo and maybe some new in game art to show off this weekend. 

That is all, as far as I know.

Wyatt White
Like a skinny Johhny Bravo

This post is going to be mainly about the new additions to Doomer's visuals, but I wanted to take a moment to point out that today (technically yesterday at this point [wow it's early]) marks Doomer's 6th (count them, six) calendar month in development. That doesn't mean it's been in development for six months, which will be true on the 8th of Febuary. Should I have waited till the actual 6 month anniversary to mention anything? yea, probably, but do you know what's better than one celebration? TWO! So here's a little gift from me to. . . well, me.

So! Anyway, in the last few weeks I've been trying my best to be working on mechanical changes less and focusing more on effects. I've completely restructured how most of the sprites are called, eliminating the strange performance issue's we'd had. This also grants us significantly more freedom with what we can do to each sprite in game, and less sprites needed overall, which  allows us to shrink the file size even more. We also have an artist helping out, 
I haven't summoned the courage to see if he's gonna do all the art yet, but I'm getting there. Once I've got him locked I'll share how you can check out the good junk he does. 

Something I've been meaning to add for ages now are secrets. Areas that reward players who're paying attention. They're nothing amazing at this point, just little ammo caches and a score boost, maybe an out of depth weapon or some armor too. They're aimed more to be fun little pick me ups, and won't significantly jack up the level balance. Here's what they look like right now,

They're not like, amazing or anything, but they're secret. Another recent addition that I'm liking so far is the new system's ability to easily draw a gun attached to an enemy. It wasn't that it was impossible before, just a little uncomfortable and inefficient with memory. Now we're drawing them quickly and easily, and using about the same amount of  power as before. While wandering, each enemy points the gun in the direction they're moving, when the baddie sights the player, they level the gun at the player, and start blasting away.

So! That's some of the new stuff I've been working on recently. Things are a lot more polished now compared to when I started, and I hope that things will keep on this trajectory. 

Wyatt White
More hoodie than human.