Basket Shot - Production Release!

I am glad to announce the mobile game Basket Shot is now freely available for download over at the Google Play app store! https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Hungryum.BasketShot

It's been a long roadmap to completion but all isn't done yet. I am still excited for all the future updates and new levels I plan to bring to Basket Shot in the next coming months.
Watch the video trailer if you would like to learn more:

https://youtu.be/aGeK47prgTo

Basket Shot - Beta Game Play!

BasketShot is nearing release ready with the success of it's Beta build! With four courts to unlock and eight levels with more to come I believe it's near time to put the game in the hands of the players. Here is a showcase of someone who has mastered the games mechanics from countless testing.

Link to Game-Play Video: https://youtu.be/nXruxLjFZeU
Test the game on Google Play: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.Hungryum.BasketShot
Let me know what you think or features you'd like to see in the game!

New Item Store!

Version 0.6.0 is out with a new Item Store! Finally something to spend those pesky gems on.

Customize the hoop or basketball with a variety of skins and show your flare.

Download the Beta for android at: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.Hungryum.BasketShot

BasketShot Alpha Build!

It's come a long way but BasketShot is finally ready for testing. The Alpha build has just been released to the Google Play Store for Android devices. If you'd like to give it a go please opt in using the following url: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.Hungryum.BasketShot

Feedback is welcomed!If you have any ideas for levels or just want to leave a comment, post it in this reddit page and I'll reply as soon as I can! https://www.reddit.com/r/BasketShot/new/

Kingdom Progress 5

Alright, a bit of update news on Kingdom's development.

So far there are two new units currently completed, the wizard and the troll, with a third on the way before the release of the next patch. These units will be Fantasy based compared to the original three which where Medieval.

A sneaky peak at these units:
(Wizard on the left, Troll on the right)

I've also been working on new buildings/structures for the "Fantasy kingdom", which will be situated somewhere in the mountainous region of the map. Once the buildings are complete I can work on the new level where they'll be used.

Another sneaky peak at the Fantasy buildings:

(Can you guess where the design is influenced from?)

And that's pretty much it; exciting stuff. If you want to stay updated with more Kingdom news you can follow my Facebook or Twitter at:

https://www.facebook.com/Hungryumgames/
https://twitter.com/Hungryum
  

I'm planning on an end of February release, so see ya when the patch is out!

Kingdom Progress 4

It's the start of a fresh new year and I'm just getting back into it after playing countless hours of Final Fantasy XV and a relaxing 2 week holiday. While the holiday was nice I think I'm ready to start work on my latest project; and that project would be Kingdom!

It's been a while since I last touched Kingdom. Unfortunately development of Outside the Box completely consumed all of my time with little to no avail. Total downloads have barely reached 150 with current installs sitting around 40. I think a big part of it's flunk was not marketing the game while it was being developed. Which is one of the reasons I'm bringing Kingdom back to life.

A couple months back Kingdom was featured by a prominent youtuber, BaronVonLet'sPlay, who played the early alpha version after discovering it on Gamejolt. Thanks to him and a few other youtubers who also gave it a go the amount of downloads skyrocketed and it seemed a lot of people were excited to see it finished.

Here's BaronVon's video if you wish to give it a watch:

So I got back to work on this ancient game of mine and re-coded the entire thing from the ground up as my initial code was a giant mess! It is now running a lot more efficiently with smoother camera controls and less calculations per unit. I've added a couple new features to the game. First up are the new attacking animations for all the units, bringing them to life and making them less rigid looking. Secondly are a brand new unit class, the wizard! Check it out below:

I've just about finished programming the unit but balancing still needs a little work. I'm hoping to get the next update out some time next month!

BasketShot!

These past couple of months have surely been keeping me busy. I've gone and started two new projects and am in the middle of restarting an old one (More to come on that).

First up let me introduce BasketShot; a basketball orientated high score game being developed for Android. The aim of BasketShot is to shoot as many hoops as possible in a row, for each successful shot you get a point, which contributes to your high score at the end. Missing a shot will result in game-over and will display your score for that round.

I decided to make the game fairly challenging, as most high score games are. This is because of three factors; The power meter that determines how much force goes into the throw, the angle you are throwing from and the timing of the launch depending on the balls height. If you can get all these factors correct it should create a nice arc for an accurate shot. I've still got quite a few ideas floating around of where I can further take this game but for now check out some pre-alpha game-play footage below!

BasketShot (Alpha GamePlay)

Eventually I would like to add various environments such as a stadium for players to unlock. I'm still deciding on the type of camera I prefer, the two choices being a first person or isometric view. If possible I might decide on both and use the isometric view for a level based trick shot mode.

New Trailer

As progress towards promoting 'Outside the Box' I decided to create a short trailer for the game's app page. Most of the footage was captured on my phone itself using a screen recorder while music was sourced from the game.  I think it turned out alright, I managed to cover the game's main features as well as showing off a bit of the tower maze at the end. Check it out below!

I'm also working on the first patch which will address most of the issues people are having with the game. Things like the absence of a settings menu to mute audio, missing sound effects for various actions and possibly adding a virtual joystick for those that find it more comfortable. Well that covers just about all of it; I'm still brainstorming new ideas for a future project or I might re-visit some stagnant ones. Look forward to it.

Outside the Box - Release!

It's finally finished!
'Outside the Box' is now a published mobile game. It's been quite the journey.

You can find it available for Android over at the Google Play store:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Hungryum.OutsidetheBox&hl=en

Apple App store coming soon... (Technical issues)

So after an entire year of development, starting as a small tafe project and working it's way up to a completed, fully polished game; I can truly say that it is finished. I have to say it's been a great learning experience to develop a game from a simple prototype, all the way to a polished, fully functioning game. Before I started the project I had no idea the amount of work needed to actually complete a game. All past experiences have been either just prototyping an idea or getting bored and abandoning the project to move on to something else; never seeing it to the end. I'm glad I stuck by it, even though part way I worked on a side project, another Tron game... (Which was just a small break to revitalise my motivation).

Unfortunately It hasn't all been smooth sailing from launch; what with Apple reporting a crash after they tested the game, preventing me from publishing to the App store. Hopefully I can resolve this issue soon, but here at Space Toast we are short on Apple devices to test on.

So what's next; well, me and the guys at Space Toast plan to work collectively on a new project, hopefully tripling our output. It's still in early development but we hope to announce the game soon. Look forward to it!

We also plan to showcase our games over at the Perth Games Festival next month and hopefully meet some local indie devs while we're there. Come see us if you get the chance to try out Outside the Box on October 1st at the  Perth Town Hall, cnr of Barrack St & Hay St, Perth.

In other news, the guys I work with at Space Toast have also recently published their mobile game 'Break Time!'. An Office simulator where the aim is to break as many things a possible.
Give it a shot if you have some spare time!

Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spacetoastgames.breaktime&hl=en

App Store:
https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/break-time!/id1133138365



So that pretty much sums it up. If I can share any experience from working on Outside the Box, it would be to always overestimate how long a task will take. The easy part is getting the basic premise running, it's the polish and content filling that are the most time consuming. I'll be sure to have a better plan for my next project.

Minor Setback

The hard drive I use to develop Outside the Box decided to crap out today, corrupting a bunch of scenes, scripts and assets. I only lost about a weeks worth of progress, it's a good thing I keep regular back ups. This wasn't the first time either, I've had previous problems loading metadata and the hard drive likes to disconnect frequently. Probably should have saw that as a sign it needs replacing.

Managed to recreate most of the progress I made today within a 6 hour long development session. Another benefit of working at Toast Space in an office like environment is that it really helps prevent distractions getting in the way.

All that's left now is to try and remember any bugs that I squashed during the past week that need fixing and to make more frequent backups.
Also need to buy a new hard drive...

Outside The Box - Development 4

It's now the beginning of July and Outside the Box is still under development. Many new features have been added, some removed, but I can clearly state the game is complete... mostly.

So in these past few months I've managed to finally finish off the last few 3d mazes. I've lowered my target from 100 mazes to just over 50 for the initial release. This way I can get the game into the hands of players earlier and continue adding more mazes in monthly updates instead for as long as the game keeps an active player-base.

Unfortunately the high score maze runner has been scraped to reduce development time. I feel it wasn't worth the time developing another game mode when there were two already. Instead I've added some of the features from the maze runner into the random maze, which includes upgrades and and an enemy to avoid.

There are now three upgrades the player can spend coins on in the random maze:
- Trail time, increases your trail so you can back track if you get lost.
- Power up, increases the time you stay in a powered up state to kill the enemy cubes.
- Field of View, increases your field of view to see more of the maze.

The Last thing I want to show is the Tower maze, the final level in the game. The maze took about two weeks to make, which includes building the maze and programming the camera. The biggest issue was the fact the player needs to move along the small ridge separating the maze floors to move up the next story. This caused a lot of camera flipping issues that took a while to tweak. All in all I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. The average time for solving the maze is around 7 minutes.     

       Upgrades                                                   The Tower Maze

That pretty much sums up all the work from these past few months excluding some bug fixes and additional polish. All that's left is to get the IAP store up and running, find some royalty free music or get premission from artists on Soundcloud and finish the credits screen that's shown after you solve the Tower Maze. 

Here's hoping next update is about the games release!

Outside The Box Development 3

Alright, so it's been a while since I've mentioned any progress with Outside the Box so I thought I would share a bit of what's new.

First up is the newly implemented Unlock System for cube skins, backgrounds and player skins. The game starts with all skins being locked, unable to purchase until the player begins the game. As you complete 3d mazes you're presented with the chance of unlocking any skin or additional coins through rolling a dice. After the dice lands and a side is chosen, say background, a row of backgrounds appear and start rolling sideways. Eventually the backgrounds stop and whatever is in the middle when it finishes will be unlocked. Now that a background is unlocked the player can find it in the store and purchase it using the in game coins.

I chose this system of unlocking then purchasing because if everything was unlocked from the start the player could just purchase their favorite background/skin/ball first, making the rest obsolete and the currency worthless. I think players will find it exciting unlocking different skins using this system.

GamePlay Footage and Unlock System

Next I've added the Save function, as you probably can tell, saves the game. A lot of planning went in to getting the save function working correctly. The game saves a multitude of data from which levels are completed, the levels time, your current currency, all the unlocked skins and all the purchased skins. These arrays are loaded from the start of the game and are saved at the end of a level and when the player returns to the menu.

And Lastly I created a maze walking A.I that wonders aimlessly around the 2d maze. I haven't quite figured out a purpose for the guy but he makes the maze a little more interesting. I might have him as an enemy in the Maze Trial game mode I plan to work on next. The Trial will have the player solving increasingly difficult mazes as fast as possible before their life runs out. As you travel through the maze the ball will shrink and when it's gone the game ends and you're presented with your score. There will be health orbs scattered throughout the maze that increase your size to go a little further and possibly the enemy to slow you down.

Well that's about everything, not much else is new besides a few bug fixes here and there and some graphical improvements. I've now finished 30 3D mazes out of a planned total of 100. Just 70 more to go! maybe... I always say the game will be released in the next month but this time I really am aiming for release! Thanks for reading and hopefully you'll try my game when it eventually comes out. :)

Space Toast and Encom Release

Over the course of Feburary I've been busy setting up my equipment over at Toast Space, a work space in the city that me and a few mates from tafe are renting. We also plan to collaborate on a few projects under the name Space Toast, check out the Facebook page! Now that everything's set up I can set aside my time and get straight to work developing the rest of Outside the Box.

In other news the side project I've been working on, Encom, is finally bug free and available for download. I've added a lot more since the last build including bike explosions, more sound fx, death cams and an arcade survival mode. In the future I plan to add an obstacle course featuring Recognizers to really test the players.

Download link for Encom:
Itch.io
https://hungryum.itch.io/encom

Or if you prefer to play in browser try:
GameJolt
http://gamejolt.com/games/encom-tron/120894
or
Kongregate
http://www.kongregate.com/games/hungryum/encom-tron

Encom(Tron) - GameDevelopment

Lately I've had a lot of free time; with my studies finally out of the way I can finally work full time developing games, except I've still got a part time job. Most of my development time has gone towards polishing Outside the Box preparing it for release, but as a side project I've been recreating one of my earlier games I made during high school, Tron.

The original game was made using Game Maker, a 2D game creation software that barely supported 3D. This time I had a greater advantage using Unity; in the span of 2 days I programmed the bike's movement and trail and had a playable build by the end. I've uploaded a video time-lapse of the first few days. It probably took me about a month to develop up to the same point while using Game Maker.

Time Lapse

Around a week later the game is almost ready for release, it just has a few bugs to fix and a bit of polish to be done. I also plan to add a few single player levels for those that want a challenge. After the first two days I forgot to continue recording so I left it for a while until I had a nice build to show. Here's some game-play footage of the game closer to completion.

Game-play Footage

Games Festival and Polycon

So for the past couple of weeks I've been kept pretty busy and haven't had much of a chance to post. Here's a summary of what's been happening.

First up was the Perth Games Festival. This year I had the chance to showcase Kingdom and Outside the Box at this years Games Festival thanks to my lecturer Andy at Central. The festival was amazing, I got to see some great local indie games and was happy to see people enjoy playing mine.

After the festival was Polycon, an expo for both the games and animation students graduating from Central. Again I got the chance to show of Outside the Box and a show reel I created a few days before. It was great to see everyone's work and have a few drinks to celebrate an awesome year.

So now that I've graduated all that's left is to get Outside the Box ready for an early release next year. (Hopefully)

Here's my Show Reel for Polycon

 

Outside the Box - Development 2 & Facebook Page

A few days ago Outside the box had it's first play test which turned out to be very informative. For the play test I had prepared 3 cube mazes, 2 sphere mazes and a single hexagonal sphere maze (A sphere shaped out of hexagons and triangles). From the players experience most agreed that the hexagonal sphere maze was the best thanks to it's complexity. They described the cube and sphere mazes to be too easy to solve and enjoyed the challenge of the hexagonal maze. A special thanks to Max (https://manstie.wordpress.com/) who provided the geospheres plugin for Maya.

A Screenshot of the Hexagonal Sphere Maze

I've also included a store from which players can purchase skins for either the ball, maze or background using the in game currency. This allows for a variety of customization options for the player adding a more personal experience. I'll be continually adding more skins as the game develops. 

In other news, Hungryum Games now has it's own Facebook page! 

I plan to use the page to promote my current and future projects and hopefully form a community around the development of video games. Go check it out, so far it's a little empty but there will be exciting news to come in the following months, so leave a like.... cheers!

Link to Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/Hungryumgames

Outside the Box - Development 01

So for the past month I've been working on Outside the Box, a collaborative game being developed for mobile. It has been making steady progress and thought I would share a little of what it's about.

First off, Outside the box is a puzzle game that features 3d mazes and random maze generation. These are presented as two separate game modes. The 3d mazes will be level based and will give the same experience to every player. We hope to achieve 50 or so levels before release. The random maze is a re-playable mode with each creation of the level being a new maze and each new maze expanding by 1 unit to the width and height. Below is a short video demonstrating the random maze generation.

Preview of the random maze generation

The game is making great progress and I hope I can release it by the end of this year. All that's left is to create the rest of the 3d mazes, 3 have been completed so far, and work on a variety of cube skins and backgrounds. These can be purchased with the coins collected throughout the game.

Class Game Project

It's been a while since my last blog post, but this week I would like to share another game. Yes, I have been working on a few two many games as of late and slipping behind schedule although this game was developed in the span of two weeks through the contribution of the entire games class here at Central Tafe and I'm quite proud of what we achieved.

The game came into fruition after Andy, our lecturer here at tafe, organised a small game jam between the two game classes to compete for glory. The theme picked was 'Get Your Arse to Mars', a rather odd theme from which the idea for the game was conceived.

 Gameplay image of the launch pad.

I was assigned the role of co-programmer working alongside Max and Adam, who are also skilled programmers. Working in separate projects to start, we built the foundation of the game using the Unity Engine and C# as our scripting language. We then moved on to combining the projects into one where a few issues arose but managed to get everything functional in the end.

Another Gameplay image flying through space

I feel we achieved making a great game in such a short amount of time and hopefully the late hours were worth it in the end. This has been another great learning experience for me working alongside other coders and seeing how they organise their scripts. Working as a team has also been very insightful into what it may be like working for a larger game company.

If you want to try out the game you can play it over at GameJolt:
http://gamejolt.com/games/space-butt-delivery/92095

Have fun!

Ludum Dare 33 Game Jam!

So Ludum Dare was last weekend running from August 22nd to 25th. Me and a small group decided we would partake in the jam this year and smashed out a small game with the theme of 'You are the Monster'. For those that haven't heard of the jam, Ludum Dare is a yearly competition for game developers to produce a short game in the span of 2 or 3 days. This usually means for those few days sleep is not recommended.  
Using the Unity engine the four of us spent countless hours making assets, programming, texturing and sound editing. I was tasked with programming and actually learned a lot of useful code practices while making the game. The final result was a high score game with random generated levels. The aim of the game was for the player to harvest the souls of dead MMO characters and send them to the game over screen, all the while avoiding the angels.

 Short gif of the game in action

Here's the link to the games download if you're interested to give it a shot:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56691

Also thanks to Mark, Luke and Max for collaborating in this jam.

Check out their blogs!

http://armsinmotion.blogspot.com.au/
http://irys12.blogspot.com.au/

https://manstie.wordpress.com/

 

 Maybe I'll compete in next years jam too.

Mobile Game and Kingdom news

Haven't had much of a chance to update my blog this week as tafe has been keeping me busy face rigging, sound editing and game prototyping. In the meantime I've started collaborating on a new game called Outside the Box. We plan to make an interesting maze game for mobile that will keep players coming back. The game features simple controls with the ball moving towards where the user presses.

Here's an early screen shot of the game working on a mobile device.

I've also been busy working towards the next update for Kingdom which I hope to include a new game mode with boats. The first boat, a Roman styled row boat, was modeled and animated yesterday. Today while programming the boats movement I stumbled across an amusing glitch which sent the boats sailing towards the sky.