Snow deformation is a cool effect where as you walk in snow, it deforms it in a trail along where you walk. There's a handful of different ways this can be done. Here I cover a way using particle effects, an orthogonal camera and a Shader on the deformed surface.
In my brief gamedev career, I've become known for short, brutally difficult arcade games. When you're developing a game like that, it adds a certain amount of high stress once you're ready to release. You want the player to like it. You want the game to be difficult. Both of these things align very narrowly on stars when someone is really good at game design. So with the new game, that pressure is something I wanted to take out.
I'm officially in my cozy gamedev era with this new prototype.
It's been called a surrealist masterpiece by a real person.
A playable feedback request version is AVAILABLE TODAY.
Back in December I started a platformer prototype. In February I entered it into a marathon game jam, which is an exercise where participants enter an existing project that they'd like to push themselves to finish and everyone presents their work a month later.
What became of this project is Super Shirtless Guy World, which I consider to be a massive failure despite the game working and being relatively bug free. Basically no one understands it or likes it. In this post I'm going to try to cope but also figure out how I might avoid several pitfalls in the future.
Defold is great, but when it comes to designing levels, integrating an external tool like Tiled can significantly enhance your workflow. Tiled is a free, open-source map editor that supports a wide range of formats and allows you to create tile-based game worlds with ease. It's snappy, fast, highly extendable, and its been around for as long as I can remember.
What's even better is that out of the box, it supports exporting Defold tilemaps and collections. What's slightly disappointing is that after getting Tiled-pilled, you realize there's a lot of things it would be nice to specify in the level editor that you can't because Defold tilemaps do not support those features.
I'm going to show you how I set object spawn positions in Tiled, export them as JSON, and load them with Defold.
It's been over a half month since I released Fester's Torment and went dark on this blog. But I haven't been idle. I already have a new prototype.
It's a fast paced, momentum based platformer that is a cross between Super Mario World and something like Megaman.
The influence is pretty apparent from the gameplay. Something similar to P-speed affects the height of your jumps. You fall fast when you let go of the button and you're floaty when you hold it down. You can get consecutively higher jumps by chaining jumps together without dropping momentum. It's a lot of stuff like that, where knowing the physics allows you to get that really crazy jump.
This game started as a clone of Halls of Torment but transmogrified into a Shoot 'Em Up style hybrid. It features a day and night cycle, in which waves of enemies are more aggressive during the day, and at night you have time to prepare for the next wave. The goal is to survive for 5 minutes.
Or try it here if your screen is big enough. I'll talk more about the release below.
If you're planning to modify the render script yourself, expect to find only partial examples online. You’ll need to combine techniques from various scripts and spend time with the render pipeline manual and the render API. This process involves a lot of trial and error, so be prepared to dig into the code and make sense of it.
Here’s my consolidated Defold render script—a mix between the example script from this light map tutorial by UnfoldingGamedev and the default render script.
While I didn’t write most of this code, I’ll indicate the parts that I did, and otherwise how I got here.
Working on the game has been pretty frustrating lately. It's one of the reasons I started writing in this blog: I was looking for something more relaxing to do as a diversion. But of course eventually I got back to the game, and while I have made some progress, I've spent a lot of time fighting to make progress.
In this post, I'm going to run through latest features and then I'm throwing this POS in the trash for the rest of the day. And possibly tomorrow.
I tried various approaches to managing sounds in Defold and learned what works. Here’s the distilled version.
Wow. You really clicked on this didn't you? Welcome to my gamedev blog I guess.
This project was intended to be a cross between Halls of Torment -- a Vampire Survivors clone featuring an infinite, wrapping map that spawns hordes of enemies -- and Fester's Quest, the infamous NES game based on the Addam's Family character. I say was because the direction of the game changed halfway through making it.
And I'm honestly not sure if the end result has any connection to Fester's Quest at all.