Hungryum Games

Friday, 12 February 2016

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

Wednesday, 13 January 2016

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

Friday, 4 December 2015

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

Saturday, 7 November 2015

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

Monday, 19 October 2015

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.

Wednesday, 16 September 2015

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!

Monday, 24 August 2015

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