So, once again, the last couple weeks have been something of a journey. First, and most impactful, we had a couple opportunities for funding come up. I don't know exactly how much is kosher to share on the still pending opportunity, but the other was the Best in the West small business competition which was put on by Bethel Community Services. I didn't hear about it till the last minute, but managed to through together an official business plan. In the days following my submission, I was told that round one eliminations were just to eliminate those that had no promise or no interested parties, and that my idea was interesting and promising enough that I would make it through just fine. Long story short, I was eliminated in the first round.

I'm trying to be salty over it, but I am disappointed. I'd have thought at least someone would  have got my vision for bringing remote Alaska into a new art form, but I guess none did. 

In other news, there's some new gameplay modes, namely a small hunting system, to allow players to hunt for their food while in forests. I've also rewritten the entire system used to handle cabin inhabitants, which allows for simple conversations between the player and the odd inhabitants of of the northern trails. 

There was also this little holiday called Valentines Day. It's true, Valentines Day is, like every holiday, a gigantic orgy of capitolism and marketing selling you garbage that you don't really want, but it's also the one time a year that people open up and are ok with other people being total saps. It's great, I love it, no one can pull me back from this ledge, cause Valentines Day is great. 

We've also had a meeting about music, and it's led me to needing to think more about the look and feel of BISC. It's led me to taking a couple days of reworking some of the prototype art to feel a little more grimy and lived in, which includes removing the happy go lucky puppy from the menu, and replacing it with a lonely cabin.

In any case, BISC is moving along, and it's gonna be great. Or at least OK.

Thanks, 

Wyatt White
the Mr. Pink of Indie Developers

These last two weeks have been really good. I managed to make a ton of progress on the back-end, as well as on the graphical side. The biggest addition is the ability to switch dogs on your team, each of which has it's own sprite set, speed, agility, and leadership stat. 

On the visual level, I've finally worked out a quick and scale-able solution to visually representing the dogs while running. Here's a quick demonstration 

First, the un-textured animation

... and then with the specialized overlays.

Using the overlays, I can give each dog it's own specific coat, and still have the freedom to modify the dog's animations if I so choose. 

I've also been putting a lot of work into making the game a little more user friendly and playable. One of the most frustrating was creating multiple screens for Cabins. After a stupid amount of work, I finally got it functioning like this...

So that's a thing that I got working. I also worked on a ton more stuff that's less visual or generally more boring, if you're curious about that you can look at this link, which'll take you to the exported change-log for the last lump of days.

This next week or so I'll be focusing on bolstering the cabins even more, adding in new dog interactions, adding more dogs, expanding the cabin inhabitant's interactions, and adding in more biomes.


Thanks,

Wyatt White 
not very good in big groups

During the winter break, I did my absolute best to work on BISC as much as possible, and I think I did pretty well. I managed to add a bunch of garbage to the game.

I fixed a bunch of issues with spawning obstacles and pickups, added a bunch of new random encounters, expanded the cabin system to allow for multiple screens, expanded the mechanical capabilities of random encounters, added a simple biome system, added mechanical implications of dog happiness, and like a whole ton more stuff.

Today's post isn't gonna be long, I really just wanted to keep up to date on what's up with BISC's development, so I'm attaching this last week's change-log right here (it's on Google Docs)

I do want to take moment to try and toss a little support to another member of Gamedev Twitter, Aur (@snoutup), who's trying his best to get a second game, Toaster Jam, onto steam. It's a great game and he's a talented guy and deserves your vote/follow. Check it out here.


Thanks,

Wyatt White
Finally crashed back down to earth

Developing games is hard. Developing them largely alone is really hard. Sometimes things don't exactly work out as planned. The plan was, once upon a time, to finish SiC and then work on something more marketable, something that'd be interesting to normal people as wells as established gamers. Though after SiC failed to gain any traction, I've needed to take things in a different direction. I don't yet know if BISC will be at all interesting to non-gamers, all I know is that it's what I want to build, and at this point as an essentially solo developer I think that's what's most important.

SO! BISC is what we're working on right now (by we're I really mean I'm)! BISC stands for Bro, It's Supes Cold  and is also the name of a prototype that I'd worked on long ago, before I'd even started on Monotaur. Originally, BISC was a cold focused ripoff of Don't Starve, but I wasn't anywhere near good enough to do something that complicated back then, not to mention it was too late for a little guy to get on the survival crafting train, even back then. Now I'm working on a radically different BISC, only having cold weather in common. Now-a-days, BISC is a little different; Running from a United States that elected the populist, borderline fascist President Kline Hande. There's a fabled escape far to the north, but no one knows exactly what sort of escape it is. Braving the cold, you must set out with your trusty dog-sled team to escape the ever expanding clutches of President Hande.

Anyway, the exact details of the moment to moment gameplay is still being nailed down, but I do plan to run a small beta in the next couple of months( CodeGod willing)

So! That's what I'm working on! Fingers crossed y'all will be able to take a crack at it sooner than later. 

Thanks,

Wyatt White
It's a wonder I walk, with my foot perpetually in my mouth.

This should be a short post, it's really more of a general update on the states of things than anything else, but there have been some odd changes as of late, so this may be worth a read.

First of all, the next game is done! It's a small 2D slash-em-up game heavily inspired by the Evil Dead and other splatter films. Right now we're still receiving and implementing art, so it won't be available until early December at the soonest. We still haven't decided 100% on a name, but rest assured once we do we'll be spamming it everywhere.

Having completed almost all the code for the hack&slash game so quickly, I decided to start work on a few more prototypes for a bunch of different games. In the end, I've effectively axed all of them for now, save for a weird west themed hardcore roguelike centering around a wild west world populated with skeletons. I've been working on the prototype for just under a week now and have already implemented a number of the most basic systems that're needed for an RPG. I don't know when this one will be done, or what it will be by the end, but I'm very excited to take a chance on constructing a living and weird world for players to explore. 

In other news, SiC was a huge flop. As of writing this, tomorrow will be exactly a month since SiC was released. Of the people who played it, most seemed to enjoy it, and a tweet from ItchIo was helpful in getting a small second wind of views and downloads, but in the end SiC's store page has been viewed only 413 times and downloaded exactly 80 times. I've done a lot of reflecting in the last month about the scale of SiC and have come to the conclusion that it can't matter. I'm not a businessman, I'm not making games to turn a profit, I'm here to express myself and create experiences for others to enjoy. It's a disappointment when you spend so long working on something, just to have very few people play it, but in the end I didn't necessarily make it for everyone else, I made it for me. So that's what I'm gonna keep doing. I'm gonna make games that appeal to me and that I think are fun or interesting, and if there's a market for them, then great, if not, then fuck-it.

Anyway, if you want to help support us making these games, I've got a patreon you're welcome to contribute to, or, ya know, just check out our games. 


Thanks,

Wyatt White
Welcoming everyone, once again, to the Inevitable after

It's been over a month since the last blog update, and what a busy damn month it's been. We've managed to finish and release SiC, produce a patch, and start on our next game. Today I just wanted to take a quick second to get out some thoughts and comments on where things are and where they're going.

Fist off, SiC's release. If I had to describe the release in one word, I'd probably use 'Quiet'. Thankfully I have as many words as I like.
Any indies that aren't established in the industry already know that the biggest issue with growing as an indie nowdays is exposure. All the tools that make game development easier and more accessible also bring in more and more people. Now, I really don't think this is bad, I think more people making more games helps spread ideas and grow the community, which are good things. Though it does mean that it's very hard to get anyone to pay attention to your game, especially if you don't have incredible graphics or some inherently sell-able gimmick. SiC Had neither of these. After a few artists fell through, I did the graphics myself, and the game-play is a pretty standard old school shooter.

I thought if I could just get people to try it, if they'd just play it or see it played, people would see that it was worth their time and at least download it, if not play it. After emailing over 50 YouTuber's of most every size, I only got one response and did not get a single shred of extra publicity from it. I don't know why not a single youtuber cared, and at this point that's out of my control.
The people who did play the game seem to have liked it. I've gotten a few messages through email and twitter expressing that players really liked the game, which was really encouraging. If it werent for the people who hit me back about liking the game, I'd have considered it an abject failure. 

In closing, I really messed up SiC. I stand by the quality of the game, I think it's a damn solid shooter, but I messed up in getting it in front of people. I spent 14 months working insane hours on SiC, I really cared about this game, all to have it come out to a chorus of crickets. I spent a week or so moping around, I ate copious amounts of pizza, drank Mountain Dew till my eyes bled. It was a little rough, not gonna lie. BUT, I've picked myself back up, and am in the process of finishing my B game, which we'll be talking about in a sec here. Before we do that though I just wanna say a big thanks to the people that played SiC, and an even bigger thanks to the people who bought it. You guys keep me going.

NOW! Time for the more interesting part. THE NEXT GAME! I've been in love with the idea of doing A and B games. A large project, followed by a small project, followed by a large project, and so on. SiC was the A game, and while it certainly under-performed, I was already working on a B game before SiC was released. RLL is that B game.

RLL is a short, small-arena slasher about a lone pirate beating up a shit-ton of undead pirate ghouls before summoning and destroying their Ghostly King. It's not meant to be anything profound, just a small comically bloody way to spend a few minutes of your time. 

Note: Most of this is still my prototype art. We've got a dude sprucing it up as we speak.

While we don't have a date set in stone, RLL is aiming to be dropped onto the internet sometime in early December and will be available for free.

I know this was a metric ton of text, but thanks to those that read through and to those that actually care about what we're trying to do here.


Thanks,

Wyatt White
Human Lump extraordinaire 

I have no idea how many times I've misspelled that track in the last week.

It's been a couple weeks since I updated the dev blog, but for good reason. I've been furiously chipping away at the final issues plaguing SiC. In the last two weeks, I've managed to record some voice barbs for the main character, fill out more lore, crush countless bugs, fill out sound design, completly rewrite a lump of rendering code for the HUD/stars, and create an entirely new saving system. It's been a busy week for both myself and the other contributing to the project

With release right around the corner, there probably won't  be many more blog updates before SiC is out and available, so I want to take this time to plug the soundtrack by the ever talented Michael White which is available right now on BandCamp, or, you know, from this hand little embed right here;

Anyway, while that's available right now, the actual game still won't be out until 15 October, so mark the date and bookmark the page. Write it down in your diary or stick a sticky note on your favorite milk jug. Whatever you do, make sure you don't miss 15 October, 2016.

​
Thanks, 

Wyatt White
Pretty good eyes, but only in person.

SiC is clipping along. I've spent a chunk of time this week to quietly work on graphics more, which has resulted in six visually new enemy sprites as well as some significant rewrites to several NPC dialogues. Nothing about the world has been changed, more I've updated NPC's to be more in line with the game's reality. Some of these lines were put in game in the first six months of development, when the game was still supposed to be about space pirates and world ending hammers. Anyway, we've finally implemented enemy sprites that're in line with our lore, we've got speech that lines up with our lore, we've got an inciting incident, we've got a beginning, a middle, an ending, we have characters, we have game-play, we have juice. I think things are really coming together.

I've spouted a lot of doom & gloom recently, especially if you follow my Twitter, but in reality, taking out the stress of making something that will pull in money reduces the stress immensely. I still am doing my absolute best to provide a game that's worthy of a $5 price tag, but now if people don't feel the same way, they're encouraged to pay what they think is fair, or nothing at all. That means it'll likely make virtually no money, but in the end, I'd rather people feel like they got their money's worth and make less money, than people feel like they got undercut and make more. Of course that situation assumes the same people buy in either scenario. In any case, I hope everyone checks it out when it's released, I hope y'all like it so much that it makes you cry. 

On other news, I just launched a Patreon for people interested in supporting development in a more long term way. The specific perks are explained on the Patreon page, so check them out if that seems interesting.


Thanks, 

Wyatt White
I swear, I leave my desk sometimes!

The last two weeks have been fantastically productive. We've managed to get hundreds of eyes on the Steam Greenlight page, we've filled out the sound and visual design of SiC, and crushed loads of bugs. We've also gained a lump of insights about what SiC is now, and what we need to do while releasing and trying to promote it, which will hopefully get the game into as many hands as possible. 

Visually, I've been working more on later stages of the game, without going into too much detail (I'd really like to keep some mystery in the later stages of SiC's progression) there are some changes that happen later in the game. I made the assets for this change a month or two into development, which was about 10 months ago now, so I figured the effects and assets needed to be updated. I've generated a couple GIF's of the new effects and assest, the first compares the old fleshy animation(top) with the new fleshy animation(middle) and then the newest update of the effects(bottom).

Apart from late game weirdness, we've also been working on player animation, screen effects, fun little bobbles, and new enemy behaviors. This next GIF has examples of all of those, excluding the new enemy behaviors. 

The little bobbles don't really do anything, they're more me expressing my love of the bobbles I always keep over my desk. We've also drastically improved the screen effects, replacing my hideous red circle popping up on the screen when the player takes damage, now we've got this nice little gradient that doesn't make you want to cry. We've also got new character animations for walking up and down that look less like a box sliding around on marionette strings, and more like a person walking. . . or at least they hint at the feeling of a person walking. All together these changes make SiC feel a lot more like a real game, and less like a lump of code, graphics, and sound effects. 


This might be a weird shift in tone, but recently we(Myself and Michael White, who's producing music for and helping with the business side of SiC) have come to the admission that SiC's development has not gone to plan. When I set out, it was to make a game that I'd been dreaming about for a couple of months, something that was even more of a passion project than the other games I'd worked on. I'd been unable to really lock in and work on it due to my and my development partner's attachment to the project we were working on, which was CobWoyyz, and lack of any real free time. Anyway, that partnership ended (kind of badly, if you were following my twitter back then I'm sorry for your loss) and so did CobWoyyz. I needed to take things with the next game in a radically different direction. So instead of do something like the slow and measured CobWoyyz I decided to take the years and years spent playing old FPS's and top down shooters and try to crystalize them into a new game. The goal was for the game to take 12-14 months. I'd work 10 months alone, then use the game I generated in that time to secure an artist and a musician, the skilled team members add their valued skills, we finish the game on time and release for something like $3 - $8. When that 8 month mark rolled around, I wasted a shit-ton of time contacting and trying to coordinate with several artists. Each fell through and wasted valuable development time and in the end, I'd decided to do it myself. The biggest issue is that I'm a pretty trash artist. I've done my best to learn, but in the end I'm not going to be able to generate commercial graphics, even by indie standards. Breakdown in skill artists working on the game causes my master plan to break down at the last step, which was to achieve Steam and sell for a real price.

In the end, the end being two days ago, we decided to amend the last step. Instead of pushing to get onto steam, we're essentially admitting commercial defeat. Instead of trying to release for a hard price-point on the largest digital store on the internet, we're going to release SiC as a pay what you want release on itchio. While itchio has a far smaller user-base than Steam, it's also free and almost unrestricted. Itchio also allows us to provide players with the entire game for free. I've been informed that this is an objectively bad business strategy, though with the graphics being what they are I don't think SiC is something I can reasonably expect the average player to spend $5.99 on SiC, so we'd rather some people that play it and don't pay than people don't pay and don't play. The only difference between the paid and free version is that at the end of the credits, the free version will have a little prompt that'll ask if you wanna drop us a few bucks and take you back to the store page.

In any case, SiC is still coming to PC on October 15, and you'll be able to play it and even give us some money for it if you'd like.


Thanks,

Wyatt White
Every diamond is just some coal that got the shit kicked out of it.

First off, a bit of news. In the last 48 hours, a lot of advances have been made with [SiC] mainly in the promotion field. I shot & cut a beta trailer on Saturday, Sunday I launched [SiC]'s Steam Greenlight page which, for those who don't know, is sort of like the tryouts for American Idol, but for indie games. Anyway, I've been aggressively pimping out [SiC]'s page to get as many views, and hopefully votes as I possibly can. We've gotten a few comments on the page.

​Some of the comments have been positive, others have been constructive criticism, others still have just been negative, in any case, I've come into some usability tweaks and options that need to be availabe. Primarily, even from the short GIF's and promo video, some viewers complained that the screen shake was somewhere between annoying and sickening. While I intend the more powerful weapons with more screen shake to impart both a feeling of shooting a big bad gun and a feeling of slight disorientation, I totally understand that this might be an issue for someone with more sensitive eyes or who just doesn't like the disorientation. 

So, rather than double down claiming artistic intent, I decided I needed to add some usability tweaks. Now players will be able to tweak and toggle music, crosshair, particle fading, and now screen-shake.  

Hopefully we pass through Greenlight soon enough and land on the Steam marketplace, and if not, well we'll still be launching [SiC] on October 15.

Thanks, 

Wyatt White
This is my part, nobody else speak. This little light of mine.