this is the first post on this website since the jekyll days. so there's a lot I want to talk about that I havent had a chance to record.

• AENB - three minutes to cataclysm *namechange pending
• untitled randomly generated chamber fps
• untitled multiplayer arena game

AENB - Originally for Brackeys Spring 2023 Game Jam

This project is still in active development. Unlike the rest of the projects that are in this post, this one is being developed as a team. Development started as part of Brackeys' Spring 2023 Game Jam. Unfortunately however, due to improper planning and blame that I will take full responsibility for, we did not have a compiled version uploaded at the due date. The discord bot for late submissions also broke during the grace period, which we assumed we could use. In the end our submission was denied.

Despite this, development continues.

The main idea wasn't very unique, it was going to be a game where you played as an astronaut on a foreign planet. On that planet you would fight aliens, harvest materials, and construct machines. These machines would then help you gather more resources, and the cycle would continue.

I was particularly inspired by the unreleased game Nova Lands. There's a free demo available right now, which I played a few weeks prior to the game jam. Nova Lands showed me that you could make a resource gathering / base-builder that was intuitive and simple. The game didn't need extensive text descriptions, youtube tutorials, or a wiki window open to understand. The key to me was how straight-forward the progression in that demo was, and the fact that it didn't contain a million different systems.

So a lot of my initial pitches I gave to the team were based on that demo. Afterwards we threw in a good chunk of Factorio into the mix, and we had our gameplan.

My responsibilites on the project varied quite a bit. For this project, I was the team's only art guy. Pretty much all of the art, save for anything that got through the cracks, was made entirely by me. This also includes animations and music. I was also responsible for a portion of the gun code, some tweaks to enemy behaviors, and a tiny bit of my initial UI code still exists, although it has been mostly overwritten.

Currently we're preparing for a considerably large update, although development is much more spotty now that the jam is over. The whole team is made up of college students, so we have other priorities to take care of. We can't do full time. So right now it's mainly just me and Joseph Roussos for the time being. Casey Wohlers is talking to us still, but he's not able to dedicate any of his time personally. Wohlers was responsible for a majority of the major technical systems. He's been helping out Roussos in refactoring the inventory system, which has been the focus of most post-launch work.

For me personally, I've got a lot of different things to clear through in the coming months. Hopefully this update can launch by the end of May 2023, which is my target date I think, and then I plan on leaving the project alone for some time.

My tasks for the update are (mostly) as follows:

• Lighting Rework
• Environment Redesign
• Advanced Enemy Behavior
• A New Boss
• Quest System
• Ending Cutscene Update
• Various other mini-mechanics & items

The work I've gotten so far focuses on the Boss, Lighting, and Environment Redesign. I talk more about the specifics for these goals in the another post that will be published at the same time as this one.

Untitled Randomly Generated Chamber FPS

This is the project I have the least to discuss about right now because I'm picturing it mostly as a technical demo more than anything. It's built on the base of the "untitled multiplayer arena game", which has a lot of stuff going on technically. I wanted to just focus on the core aspects of that game, the movement controller, gunplay, and some animations, and box them off from multiplayer, replay systems, and a bunch of other stuff planned for the other project.

So right now the only idea I have running into it is creating a system for generating randomized chambers into random positions, similar to the non-open world levels of Warframe. These chambers will then be populated by AI, and you will quite simply just go from chamber to chamber and survive for as long as possible. I could make other objectives, a story, purpose, etc, but that goes against the whole point.

This project exists to be a smaller project for myself. It is there so that I can push a game all on my own. Other target goals include 3D animation and 3D modeling. Any unique gameplay, mechanics, etc, those can come later.

untitled multiplayer arena game

This project was meant to span at least a full year. I wanted to make a multiplayer arena game of some kind. I also wanted to cram as many crazy mechanics as possible, something akin to GunZ: The Duel, or Smash Bros Melee. There's a lot of franchises that have removed tech or glitches/exploits for being unfair, or for being unfriendly to casual players. Rest in peace, Bunnyhopping. I'm interested in seeing what a game built with these mechanics in mind would look like, with a developer who isn't concerned about balance. I won't talk too much about that stuff until it's being developed.

The project has got me on a little study of movement controllers, the different kinds that exist in Unity. I'm not entirely sure what is best for what I'm working on yet, but I might end up having to rework what currently exists. I'm not sure.

As far as actual development goes, I've used this project to get myself familiar with ProBuilder. I remade most of Dust2's A site (from Counter-Strike), and then added some elements of other maps here and there to create a very unique, but entirely stolen, layout that itches some weird part of my brain the right way.

I also have worked on a rudimentary Replay System, but that's going to need some reworks. I might discuss more about it in another post down the line once I touch it up, but most of what I would talk about now can be found inside of this youtube video down below.

As far as multiplayer solutions go, I think it would be smart of me to make a smaller scale project, purely focused on networking first, before attempting to make something for this game. There's a lot that I don't quite understand yet, but the idea of working on those things I dont know is actually really exciting.

Anyways, thats about it as far as currently active projects go. So I'll likely be posting about some of these as time goes on, but it's also equally likely that some get dropped, put on hiatus, or disappear into the void or something.