itch.io

took a break from working on bosses..
to work on enemies  😓

this four armed gal is out to resurrect enemies
and fire homing missiles at you

her legs are jetpacks - kind of like those water based ones
only this one works using an acid of sort

she is also supposed to cast various spells later - once I think of some 🤔

many of the existing enemies got rebaked again

I probably mentioned it before: this tech doesn't work well with vertex colors
in fact vertex colors ruin the lighting making them look flat

before realising this I baked them as lightly and with as little shadows as possible
so now I had to redo it again   🤔

some boring stats, so far there are
22 unique enemies (7 neutral 15 mite worshippers)
7 bosses  (1 almost finished - 6 wip )

there are many more enemies planned

but there is more than enough for the opposition and they will be added as extras later
at least that is the plan 🤔

I'm afraid the heyday of itch.io is long gone - and that is for most online game markets no matter how big - today if a game is not on steam it might as well not exist 🤔

if you are looking for exposure on itch I suggest entering one of them game jams
(but don't expect hundreds or thousands - just to be at least seen by someone)

still as it was suggested before me: screenshots, description, good thumbnail
at least give people some idea what they are in for 😓

I upgraded from making models all day to working on boss code all day
I'm making the clear mistake of trying to work on all bosses at once

so far the stargazer boss is turning out well

then we have the bandit behemot who somehow got himself a military grade gatling
and proudly strutting around with it

his aim could be improved though 🤔

turns out that making a convincing tornado effect is not easy
I either should drop the 3D model or the particles
both turned out well but have a disagreement about how this effect should work
on the other hand I thought making the player fly up and swim around in the air
will be the hard task but it was working in like 5 minutes  🤔

overall things seem to be going well but slowly
so far only one boss idea was cut
it was seemed to be easy but .. well it wasn't
no need to panic yet

american politics are  important  for the entertainment industry  
every 4 years people eagerly await the results..  to see  what crops to plant this year 🤔
democrats win: time to make zombie games 🧟
republicans win: time to make vampire games  🧛

go for it 👍
(also feel free to post a link to it here)

one advice I can give you is to make the game easier to market 🤔
give people who make streams, trailers or just screenshots for the game an easier job:
put some landmarks on the tracks (instead of just generic tracks)
maybe some portraits for the drivers (something humorous perhaps)
and in a racing game cars are everything
make them as flashy and robust as possible

you seem to have a concept that has the potential to stand out
but you need to drive it home (pardon the expression 🤭)
right now it feels a bit too basic
(I learned this lesson the hard way myself making one of the most generic RTS games ever 😓 )

handsome fella isn't he? 🤭

it's all about that winning smile:


(and perhaps a firm handshake? 🤔)

damn this thread makes me feel old 😓
(but hopefully sharing this might inspire confidence in someone.. something something never give up things like that 🤔)

I started working on the bosses
thing is they really bring the game together
back in the day of arcades bosses used to take quarters off kids (as a form of early digital bullying)
some see them as exams for checking you are familiar with game mechanics (nintendo seems to insist on this)
and some see it as some sort of extra challenge just for difficultys sake (fromsoftware's schtick)
but in reality they are just for showing off
a sort of extra entertainment factor
and the story of the game can be planned around them
and of course they look good on screenshots and trailers 🤔

anyway here we got the stargazer
inspired by a fish that bears the same name
which got it's name for looking up
not so much gazing at stars but at potential prey
of course with no prey around they might gaze at the stars

now the idea here is that the ocean might be gone
but the show must go on
and many animals just adapt and get on with their business


often learning new tricks in the process


I often envy people who can afford concept artists or to make
elaborate plans about the games themselves
my little ms paint scribbles pale in comparison 😔

thank you for finding this 👍
I'm not sure how this happened: you have custom map completed screen
as the background of the level select screen which shouldn't happen 🤔

(the jack-o lantern just means the model was not found - these pumpkins are the default model
also the white texture means the texture was not found)

anyway if I understand correctly:
you played through the main game and the cut maps and this broke the level select? 🤔

also to answer your question: you get the same secrets on all difficulties
you got an achievement for beating the game on every difficulty but this
didn't went well because higher didn't unlock the lower ones 
I kind of misunderstood why people want achievements 😓

and a few more screenshots (I kind of ran out of space on the previous one)

originally I used a very old tech by reading the depth pixel out to see if a flare is visible
turns out there is an extension in opengl - originally meant to see if objects get rendered but just counts pixels drawn
that could be used for this - so what is happening here is that if the center of your flare is visible
you draw it over geometry that is close to you - for the most part it works just as well with regular sprites 🤔

you can now play through as if it was a cheap 3rd person game
the Zortch model is now much better (but still very cheap, it's all programmer graphics after all)

as you might have noticed the style is a little different
in the original game I made lowpoly models and tried my best to paint them up by hand (with various results)
the new models are all started as high poly models and baked into lower poly counterparts

I accidently discovered that todays modelling tools are perfectly capable of replicating Shiny's Messiah tech (circa 2001)
of course they were early adopters - nowadays all non lowpoly modelling techniques involve creating a high res model
and then somewhat making a lower one with better topology and baking the textures onto it
of course modern games bake the layers seperately (diffuse map, normal map, specular map, who knows what else map)
in this case all the lighting is baked into one single diffuse map

so I do a high poly version of the model using various primitives then make a voxelised version (Sculpting->Remesh in Blender)
then I throw some decimation on it and clean it up as much as I can and do the dreaded UV map
one downside of this technique that the models look awful with vertex lighting
and upside is that this means I don't have to calculate the model normals for animation

here are some new features that were added (that were not in the first game)

so I've been trying to write a postmortem for the first Zortch game
turns out writing a postmortem is not my forte
here is a very short one

Things learned:

• people insist on 60+ fps for their games now 
• it's not a good idea to make a game single threaded (vsync is unreliable)
• if you have your own engine you need to plan for multi threaded from day one - as windows doesn't like multithreaded opengl (unlike linux)
• people are all about the PS1 nowadays (low poly, unfiltered textures and so on)
• a game that is always on sale is probably not a good model (seems to confuse people, low price associated with low value)
• people will eventually demand gamepad support - might as well add it on day one
• you cannot make a level simple enough where people not get lost
• if your game is not on Steam it might as well not exist 😓
• if you publish your game on Steam either add achievements on release or don't bother later (unless you want to start fights)

(also formerly known as the Zortch expansion pack)

in the previous game Zortch has escaped from the planet of the Brainsuckers
and after a short trip in her new spaceship she falls onto a desert planet
due to an accident with microwave popcorn

she now finds herself in a conflict between the natives of the planet
the human settlers and a bizzare cybernetic cult that worships mites

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Links:
devlog of the first game
the first game
youtube version of the devlog

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a lot has happened since the release of the first game (about a year ago)
things got crazy, the game got a lot of fans it featured in many yt channels 😵
(of course compared to the big players like HROT or Ultrakill, Zortch is still just a speck 🤭)
I made a lot of patches and drunk on confidence started working on an expansion pack..
it only meant to be a map pack with a few new things
and then I realised that the engine is not up for it
so I rewrote a few things to make it extendable
and then things got out of hand 😓

I still insist on calling it an expansion pack however
as I don't have any better ideas (let's just settle with sequel)

most of the devlog has already started in a short youtube video format this time
but as the original had it's devlog on itch.io I felt bad not having one here as well
I'm much less organized nowadays and sometimes just end up posting devlogs
to friends or any poor soul that comes across 😓

it's really just a 3D clone of 'Cat Gets 100 Stars' because I love that game 😓
https://archive.org/details/cat-gets-100-stars-projector

not in the browser
but there is a projector version of the original flash one:
(included here in the downloads) LAB_v2_projector_f25.zip
and there is also a remake: https://mutantleg.itch.io/lab-v30

😉

use grenades 😉
(you might need to find some hidden on level1)

I assume you already know about Zortch? 🤔

I'm glad you had fun 👍
you mean like an fps or a wolf3d cloneish fps? 🤔

problem is marketing methods change over the time .. simply because things change over the time

it seems that nowadays it's streamers and influencers opinion that people go for
otherwise there is just too much noise 🤔
if you want your game to be really popular you need to get really popular yourself first
like I see countless youtube channels with people working on unity games for years
posting their progress and such - with seemingly no chance of them ever finishing it
but gathering thousands and thousands of subscribers
now of course many yt channels will never get there
and I'm not sure those who did how they did it
but being attractive and popular irl seem to help 🤔
it seems to be a catch of 22 to be honest - it is often said you need money to make money
I guess it's true for other things - you need popularity to make more popularity 🤔

from my observation there seem to be a trend for which games this happens:

• very very hard games seem to go viral (e.g. dark souls, the worlds hardest game)
• horror games with jumpscares (e.g. fnaf, amnesia)
• multiplayer games (e.g. fall guys, recently helldivers 2)
• remakes of casual games that gone viral previously (e.g. flappy bird - before that  helicopter game)

there are probably many more examples - pretty much anything that can be used for livestream content 🤔
overall it seems to me you need a different kind of skillset for making a viral game than just developing a good game
like there is more to it than just working hard .. seems beyond graphics and content too .. maybe it's just luck? 🤔
anyway I wouldn't be able to tell you what it is - I make the mistake that I make games that I want to play with
and in my games people usually get stuck on the tutorial level among other shenanigans 😓

I tried to give myself a project that would take 1 month, in reality it took about 4 to 5 months. 

I can relate to that experience all too well  😔

I can assure that there is nothing wrong with you - (the more I read about ADHD it seems to be just a description for a healthy person but that is a whole another rabbit hole 🤔)

I think in general we tend to forget just how big of a project a video game is - especially nowadays with all these tools around - it's easier than ever to a make one and everyone seems to be a game developer churning out great games everyday
and for many the hardest choice is where to begin - everyone wants to do it perfectly and get it right on the first go 🤔

but in reality successful games also have hundreds of prototypes and and many many less successful ones behind them
many of them are created in teams, professional talent with big budgets 
and of course the sensible answer - mentioned by other replies - is to work your way up from small projects to bigger ones
but on one hand that is boring and on the other hand if you asked what a small project is I wouldn't be able to give you a confident answer 🤔

anyway one advice I can give you that comes from experience:
it doesn't matter how much you work on a project or how big is it or what it is
the only thing you need to make sure is to work a little on it every day
and eventually it will be finished
(it will be only finished though - success, money and fame are not guaranteed 😓)

well you can already add custom maps to the game
it's just no custom maps were finished yet
until there is at least one I just see no point adding any workshops   🤔

that would be the ideal situation
but in practice as a solo dev you usually have very small development costs
so with a publisher you essentially just paying a bunch of people
that tell you that your ideas suck and you should implement theirs
and then somehow end up shipping your game prematurely
because they also set the publishing date 🙄
I guess I'm a bit cynical about the whole thing .. 🤔

marketing seems to have the only trick publishers have left 
but the thing is marketing changed as well
how would you market a game nowadays? 🤔
especially a smaller game? (anything non AAA)
there are no gaming magazines, gaming sites are not really trusted anymore,
people don't watch tv, everyone is using ad blockers etc.
apart from hoping that your game goes viral by getting endorsed by some big time youtuber influencer
or building on band recognition - I guess a publisher that has a track record of publishing
great games previously might help - apart from that I just don't see what they can do 🤔

increasing the size of the team doesn't necessarily mean you will be able to make better games or faster 🤔
if you are not an idea man and you can dev  by yourself (and do the majority of the work anyway)
then it's a better idea to buy assets or pay people to make assets for you
because in the end it's the graphics that costs the most and takes the most time on a project
and you just don't get any real benefit from hiring someone full time or having office space
it's an old school practice but times changed: you no longer need a publisher now,
the internet got good enough you can work with people all over the world etc.
(so to sum it up: growing doesn't bring enough benefits to be worth it)

many reasons:
- because the whole point is working alone - at least for the dev part
- sometimes what seems to be great success - is only a critical success and not enough to create a studio or hire

it's a custom one (c++, opengl)

(and the original was also a custom one - just inside flash with as3)

I'm sorry 😔
best I could do is some nuts.wad  recreation 🤔
(but then so does anyone with the editor)

there is a very good reason why there isn't one (and probably won't be):
I simply suck at making arena games 😔  (which I guess is kind of ironic)
attempted to make many in the past .. but well I don't really have an explanation
I'm just not good at making them🤔
and as you found out I try to make up for it with other ways (e.g. making enemies agile etc)

1 - this is really strange - there should be particles when you hit someone
(do you see particles at all? e.g. hitting walls and such? might be a rendering bug if not 🤔)

2 - some of them do (you get batteries out of the bloops - err. 3 legged spiders, some enemies leave ammo etc)

3 - there is no ingame map sorry (it's not as easy to implement with full 3D maps 😔)

thing is the editor is a fully dev tool - it's provided as-is without support
because it's not very user friendly I'm afraid 😔

still I'm glad you liked the game 👍

thank you for finding these 👍

sure, I checked out Ruffle a while ago but it was not quite there yet (probably because it's AS3)

what sort of updates are you thinking of? 🤔
as far as I'm concerned the game is complete.. apart from making sure it runs on new windows versions I don't plan any updates

sure, here I made a quick tutorial:

I'm glad you enjoy it 👍
(indeed very few people try this mode .. I guess it's because the resurrecting enemies? 🤔)

so far there is only a shortcuts.txt (it's a developer tool so there is no gui and you need to use hotkeys and built in console to do things)
I managed to make a small tutorial on how to make a pool: https://imgur.com/a/xEsuI6N
and there are several scattered replies on this very itch.io forum (feel free to ask anything yourself)
I guess I really should compile all of these together into one big tutorial some day 🤔

there was some progress with the workshop support - so far I found an external tool for uploads
only one big obstacle I found is that steam likes to download the workshop stuff to it's own folder
and I need to figure out a way to grab these paths using their API  etc.
(and also add support for the game to able to load maps and textures from anywhere and properly restore those in save files)

of course you can already share custom levels (the workshop is just a extra convenience)
it's just there aren't any custom maps yet 🤔