Internet Problems, Moving and Future Plans

On Thursday last week, my internet provider decided to throttle my connection which resulted in me being unable to stream anything unless the situation is resolved. The connection works for normal purposes but not for streaming as it needs a high upload bandwidth. A test in a live chat with a technician from my isp showed normal or even high values for my connection type and time of day which I confirmed with normal speed tests but on upload tests the bandwidth was worse and it even degraded from there to a point where even now normal speed tests show really bad results. The reason is the automated system that controls the allocated bandwidth for each paying customer meaning if the costumer is not paying on time the bandwidth is lowered and in extreme cases even cut. In my case being overdue a few days it was lowered and sadly enough to prevent me from streaming. All this will be resolved during the next week when the bills are paid and the system gives me back the normal bandwidth. EDIT: Well, it turned out to be my modem that I thought I had restarted already but apparently did not. I restarted the modem and everything was back to normal... damn, my head must have been elsewhere, read on to find out ;P

On a different note, my overall financial situation is not the best and as a measurement to cut monthly costs I have to move. Moving itself is not the issue but the location I do not like at all... back into my parent's house. I escaped there 13 years ago when I was able to get a nice apartment a bit further into the city I live in but now I cannot afford that apartment anymore and have to live in a house with my crazy family and give up the benefits of living alone (even though I will have a separate part of the house just for myself but there are only doors separating me from them).

The move will happen over the next few months and I hope to be able to work on my fantasy project without big interruptions during and after that time. The project has a high priority for me and I will do the best I can to keep working on it.

As for this week and the following I will try to stream but if that is not possible I will do recordings of my development process and upload them to YouTube. The same might happen with my gaming sessions on Sunday (tomorrow at least). I have not done much on the project on Thursday and Friday but I will do an bit of work on it on the weekend so that I will not fall behind "schedule" too much. Why did I put schedule in quotation marks? Well, I do not strictly have a schedule for the project and that is something I need to change gradually over the next few weeks just to figure out how long I might have to work on a specific feature. At the moment I am still working on outfits for the characters (pc and npc alike) and I have nearly two outfits for females and nearly one for males. Once I have two complete outfits for both genders I will move on to another aspect of development like maybe writing and structuring the player's path throughout the game a bit more. If I am really happy with the outfits I will try to put them on the asset store for a few bucks and will also give them to patrons on Patreon (in the appropriate tier).

First Fan Art and Patreon

During the last week of streaming development on my game, some viewers created some fan art for characters I put into my game at some point.

For the bar maid Mila who was created with the input of viewer Ashevre and others at an earlier time during the development I got three pieces of fan art:

Mila (front) by Ashevre

Mila (perspective) by Ashevre

Mila (perspective with comment ;P ) by ze_MEA 

There was one piece of fan art created for one character I created while getting the hang of Mixamo Fuse and was on Skype with a friend. The character is called Frank and he likes cross dressing and being fabulous...

Frank by Ashevre

On a different note, sometime last year I set up a Patreon account but did not create an actual page where you can do pledges at. I updated the info and opened up the page up for pledges. Feel free to help me out in any way you can here.

Update after a Long Time and 60 Days of Fantasy Project

Oh, wow, it has been a long time since my last post...

Well, I am still alive and I am still "working" in the games industry. Working is in quotations because I am still unemployed and only work on my own projects. One of these projects has turned into some kind of a full time job (without pay).

Speaking of that project, in December I played a pen and paper role playing session with some friends. The system we used was a home brew system of the DM, a simple system to get you going within minutes. The world was also his design and quite hilarious and we designed our characters accordingly. I played a hill giant paladin who was trying to keep the peace but was killing bandits with his giant stone boulder hammer causing a huge mess. His after-fight "ritual" was drawing runes to cleanse the bloodied ground and smashed remains were sinking into the ground and it was restored to a state looking before the carnage.

After the session, I wanted to turn the main dungeon into a level design project and started working on that in the beginning of February. My friends send me touched up floor plans to work with which helped me putting the layout together faster. It was just supposed to be a visualization of the dungeon and some level design practice for me but it turned to something more. 

In the middle to end of February, I picked up streaming again and besides playing games like Rise of the Tomb Raider, The Division (Open Beta), Stardew Valley and SkySaga, I did some streams with game development. I did pick a schedule for me that works comfortably and stream game dev for about 8 hours every day of the week, taking weekends off to get a bit of distance and not burn out. 

Last Thursday I took some time and looked up my times for the streams and noticed that I had been working on the so called Fantasy Project for about 60 days (53 days streamed and a few days more on offline work). 

From my initial small level design practice, the project grew to a big game project with a big world map (about 4 x 4 km) with a village, a few farms and the exterior of the brewery and more to explore. I plan on filling the map with interesting stuff to explore and interesting stories to discover. So far I have the base mechanics in which are simple first person adventure game mechanics. You use the mouse to click on highlighted objects in the world, right click gives you info and left click does interactions with the objects. At the moment the interactions are just text feedback but there will be sounds, particle effects and custom events for specific objects.

As I am working on the project alone I have to do not only level design and programming but also a bit of content creation in 3D programs. As my licence for 3D Studio Max ran out a long time ago I needed a new program to work with, so I picked up Blender and had to learn the strange interface and apply my previous knowledge in modelling to it. The first few models I created were simple cave entrances for my terrain but I had to move on from that to clothing creation for a character customization system in Unity (UMA - Unity Multipurpose Avatar). I kinda enjoyed that completely new aspect of model creation as my previous knowledge was in static level objects like walls or other simple level elements.

So as a conclusion, I am working on an indie game on my own at the moment live on Twitch. Come watch me on Twitch.tv/apolyon6k as I want to do all the development live and the plan is to get the game out by February next year (no concrete planning done yet). Pictures and more info on the game later ;)

Small Updates

Hi,
I updated some of the blog pages and the landing page.

Changed are made on Who Am I? and Stories.

On the first page, I added social media links for people who are interested to connect with me.

On the second page I added a link to the story blog I mentioned in the last post. So far I have posted one short story with a fake newspaper followup and the first two chapters of my most recent longer story over there. The blog format is not the best one for chapters of larger stories as they are ordered by date of the posts and as a result backwards.

The landing page is still a mess and I have to do more on it but so far I am not sure what it will look like as I am thinking about moving the blog over to a better address and maybe even another format like Wordpress or so. So far, those are just thoughts as I have not found a suitable server and URL solution for my needs. I would like to have just one address where you can find all the information and all the posts from this blog and the story blog in a format suitable for the content.

Updates after a pause that was far too long

It has been too long without any update, my life is still kinda the same. I am working on my projects and some of them proceed others fall victim to unfortunate time management. 

As for projects, my game projects have changed a bit. 

I will continue working on Zombie Sleepover at later date, a friend of mine (another game designer from the Games Academy who helped me with a three month internship at a local game company) is going over the design and is making a proper design document for a fun first person shooter.

Dork Tales is on hiatus at the moment and I might get back to it as soon as I get someone to help me out with assets like 3D models and audio files (music and voice overs). The ideas I have for the game I cannot realise as of now, meaning without money to pay for the help I need.

I started a new project to work with Unreal Engine 4. It is an idea I was toying with for some time and it is based upon Phaeton, the scifi world some friends and I have been working on for some time. It is based on Blueprints at the moment but I will change that for later iterations and convert them to C++, at least the most crucial systems.

Oh, I mentioned an internship earlier. I was having no luck getting a job in the industry with traditional methods but got an offer for an internship after posting in an private user group. I tweaked my CV and over those connections I got an internship at a local game company working with Unity. The project is off yet unannounced, so I am not able to talk about it. Working in a real company sure was a learning experience that changed my expectations a bit. I learned the importance of good structure in code and project alike and that communication should never be neglected.

On other fronts, I picked up writing again and might even start up another blog or something similar just for that. That will include the translations of almost all my stories into English as they are almost all in German. I also came up with a new idea for a story that I might publish along with the other older stuff.

I haven't really played any games for some time now apart from Creativerse but as much as I like the game, it is just a time waster, something you can play on the side while watching tv series or movies. Speaking of games, Fallout Shelter released on Android and I wasted some time and money in it so far. I would not really call it a game in the classic sense, it is just a clicker that tries to push some buttons like caring for your dwellers and leveling up as many of them to get better gear from the wasteland to have better chances of survival. It is a recurring cycle repeating over and over again without any real involvement and chance of influencing it.

Memories and other Stuff

Was talking to a friend and we reminisced about stuff we each did when we were younger. I was reminded that I had a lot of different story starts and one or two short stories that I have to translate at some point.

When I was in my late teens, I wrote a lot. Stories, Ideas and world descriptions for pen and paper roleplaying are stuffed in a folder on one of my shelves and catch dust. All of those are written in German and I want to translate some or all of it. There are two or three stories with quite a few pages (20 to 40) and one or two short stories that could be translated and published as is. One of the bigger stories I recently started to translate and already have five chapters finished. It is in a rough state and has no formatting or proofreading done. Parts of it might still be in German on a few pages and in the appendix. Here is a link to it on my google drive.

The translation is as slow as all my other projects even though I found a nice article about finishing writing novels with only a few words per day (how to push past the bullshit and write that goddamn novel a very simple no fuckery writing plan to get shit done). I just need to get my shit together and plan out my day better.

On the job front, I got a chance for a nice C# programming gig here in my city (yay, no moving) but it involves a test that will be send out next week and there are other candidates. I do not know my chances there as I am a bit rusty due to my long time being unemployed and only having done a bit of coding during that time. I have done different projects in Unity ranging from simple movement scripts up to plugins for the editor (parts of my adventure toolkit that I worked on), so I think that I at least know a bit about writing code for Unity. I will not make more predictions in that regard as I do not know what the test will be and I also do not know enough about the company to anticipate the scope of their projects apart from focusing on mobile games made with Unity.

As for what I do with my time, well the usual, gaming and watching american tv shows. The games I played recently were Creativerse and a game called "Timber and Stone" which is a bit like Dwarf Fortress mixed with Minecraft. Randomly generated blocky terrain and buildings as well as characters build out of small cubes. In a recent update they added slopes to the terrain and more detailed textures, it looked better for it.

Creativerse is switching to Unity 5 atm and they are reworking the movement system, so it is a bit different now but if that is good or bad, I cannot say yet.

I have not worked on Dork Tales as much as I wanted and Zombie Sleepover is officially on hiatus by now and could maybe call it canceled as well ;P

Indie Development: Self Made vs. Store Bought vs. Originality + a few updates on projects

In Zombie Sleepover, we recently hit a major road block, all our assets are store bought and we do not have an artist to change the textures or models but as the bought assets are nice and popular, a lot of developers are using them. It is fine for small things but if the sample levels from the content creators are used in games unaltered, they go a bit too far.

There is a huge package for medieval caves, dungeons and castles on the asset store and we found at least three games on steam and on other platforms with the same assets, even with whole level segments copied from the samples provided. I do not own the games, so I do not know if the content creators are credited enough and I do not know what the right way to credit store bought assets is frankly, shall I list all the packages I bought or not? Do I do that only if I do no alterations on the assets?

Store bought assets are fine for prototyping and if you are able to change them to make them fit your game better but using them unaltered in the end project seems kinda cheap but we were thinking of doing the same thing just because we do not have the artistic skills required to make out own 3d art or the textures like in those packages. As that stands, do we have a problem and need to hire an artist or is it ok to use those assets and make the game we want with generic assets but with our game play and level ideas? Will our game be less original as a result? Is it possible for a programmer and a sound designer to make a game on their own without going the "artistic minimalist route" or do crappy pixel art (not that all pixel art is bad, there are some really good pixel artists out there)?

Due to negative feedback on Zombie Sleepover and the amount of games with the same assets, we are changing the concept for the game to be something different (more on that later, as soon as we are done with the redesign). That will result in a change in our projected timeline, meaning the game has to redesigned a lot and we do not know how long that will take.

In the meantime, I am working on a few things in Dork Tales and hopefully get back to streaming on a more regular basis and keep it up this time (hopefully)

Still Alive and Kicking (or Shooting Zombies!)

Well, it has been a while (three month or so) but I have been trying to get my life back on track and Dork Tales is still on hiatus and the procedural terrain minecraft thingy is as well. Since Windborne basically stopped production I moved on to another game for my free time and it is another sandbox building game (who would have guessed, lol, like those too much) called Creativerse. Creativerse is a bit more like minecraft visually but not mechanically and I have about 400 hours sunk there since the end of August...

All that doesn't sound very productive and more like wasting time but it is not really because through the community of those two games I met someone who also wants to start out in game design and he has skills that I do not have and that are needed for indie development like an art and marketing background. We were playing a lot of coop and streamed that on his channel and we joked about starting our own company to make games. One day, he contacted me and introduced me to an old colleague of his who was willing to fund our first steps...

As we all played Skyrim and sandbox games, we want to make our our own mix of the two at some point but to start out with that would be a guaranteed failure! We have to start simpler and a lot smaller, so Loki, my coop buddy, came up with the idea to make a zombie fps. I am not a big fan of zombies in any kind of media but he convinced me and we started out working on a few level concepts and I started to write a simple shooter controller in Unity. With some assets bought from the store, we will be able to get a few levels set up in a short time and shoot some zombies. (Really like the asset store for Unity!)

Those are the little buggers!

They are cartoony and cute but can be quite deadly in masses as well:

The game is about shooting them and collecting coins to upgrade your weapons to shoot more of them... more or less ;P

The first part is nearly finished for testing, have to do the menu works next and do the weapon upgrades later. The plan is to have a working prototype (or vertical slice) up and running to test out between us and a few selected testers and with the feedback improve the game and then go on to Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight to get more eyes on it and a bit more funding to compensate us for the work done so far and finance the rest of development.

Development shot: Unity 4.6 with new UI system and a glimpse into one of the levels. 

How many level we want to have is not 100% clear yet but we are confident to produce quality levels in a short time frame to add a variety of different setups without going the procedural generated route .This approach gives us more control over the look and feels of every aspect of every level to include Easter eggs and different ways to finish a levels.

The types of levels we have planned at the moment are mazes, wave setups and boss arenas. There will be no open world and no crafting apart from upgrading weapons via coins. Coins can only be obtained in-game by killing zombies or collecting them in rooms, no option to buy them for real money in a store or stuff like that.

The game will be single player for Windows PC with the option to port it over to Mac and Linux. Multiplayer is not planned but could be an expansion later on with maps specifically designed for that. We aim for Steam as a platfom to get a lot of people to be able to see the game but will also publish it elsewhere like Desura or DRM free on Humble or GOG (long term goals, lol)

Dork Tales - Redesign in Progress

After a long hiatus, I started to redesign the existing levels of Dork Tales and get a better idea of the project's scope. Most levels have to be redone because the scale in the prototype was off. The reason for the scale differences were models from different sources and not enough focus on consistency.

The flow of the levels is not changed but there are a few more sketches for their layout that I brought over from my tablet and paper sources.

I did some blockouts for the start room and now I have to do some wall modelling and build up a few modular pieces that I can use in different parts of the world. The main look is sandstone that was smoothed out and has inlays and door frames carved into it. There should be no seams between wall pieces that have to be covered up by columns. All wall pieces are one sided so the the camera has no problem looking through them. For columns and other large objects that could block the player's view of his character, I might have to write a shader that makes them temporarily transparent.

The cat fish is being resized, rigged and optimized by my little brother who did some work modding Skyrim. He will also build me a base mesh for humanoid characters that can be used for character generation ingame and for most npcs though a plugin for Unity.

The UI is still based off Unity's old scripted GUI system and will be updated as soon as the new visual system is released.

Plans are that I will try to finish the redesign of the first two levels around next weekend (around the 8th) and after that move on to the next levels that are designed yet (as shown above).

Rare Signs of Life and Forays into Live Broadcasting

I am still alive and working on two little projects of my own. One of them is Dork Tales which is on hiatus at the moment because I prioritized another project.

The mysterious other project is a mix between Minecraft and a gathering focused real time strategy game. The terrain is procedural generated and at the moment still Minecraft blocky looking but I will try to understand the marching cube algorithm and use it for better terrain in the future. The rts part is not battle oriented but more focused on gathering resources and building bases. The whole concept is a bit rough at the moment but I will write up a game design document at a later stage and will work through that.

On another note, I am playing a lot of Windborne lately. Windborne is a "social sandbox game" by Hidden Path Entertainment, a Seattle based developer, where the player can manipulate the terrain and build whatever he or she likes. Another aspect is the interaction with npcs in the game but since it is still in active development and I am playing an alpha version of the game, the only interaction so far is exchanging crafted items for more crafting recipes. I like the game because it is like a better looking Minecraft without the survival aspects like hunger and monsters but with the exploration and gathering of resources needed for building. The developer are quite active in communicating with the community and taking suggestions on upcoming features. They even have a regular live stream where they show the game and sometimes play with the community.

The exposure to media like Youtube and Twitch has pushed me buy a new microphone (because the one I had was not working right) and I started streaming some game play of Windborne of my own on Twitch.tv/Apolyon6k. It is quite an interesting feeling talking to yourself on a mic in order to get your thoughts "on the air". Kinda like writing a blog for myself (;P) but with a chance of communication with an international audience with more exposure.

Hearing my recorded voice is really strange because I sound so different from my "inner voice", the voice I hear when speaking.

I am thinking about making more videos of games I have on my Steam library but never played before. Another thought I had was making a game development tutorial for YouTube, where I go over many aspects of the development process and maybe even make a full game from concept to gold status.