Erto Pena's blogging gallery

Tap on the pictures to check out my comics on panelopticon.com

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Exciting New Challenge!

So here it is: itch.io issued their WAG Challenge at the start of the month, and my brothers and I are doing it! Basically, we have the month of June to come up with a 10-20 minute playable version of a game that we will submit to a jury of professional video game writers. Our game has to emphasize narrative and somehow be related to the theme they announced, which is "Down the Rabbit Hole". Optional themes are "Birth", "Mistaken Idenity", and "Empathy". Our game is a phone-based (though we have to submit a PC copy for the contest) adventure game that takes place entirely on a lost phone that you, the player, find at a park. You get to discover a stranger's identity through their phone, and as the game progresses, you delve deeper into this person's story. We're pumped about this project! We'll be posting updates here, talking about our experiences and showcasing our progress, and at the end, we hope we have a fun and unique experience that we can share with people. It's gonna be tight.

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Yes, I had already named another stage Mycerinos, but given the way that the list of levels has evolved, the name now makes more sense for this one.

The list of levels has evolved, and continues to evolve. Between S-panto spicing up some old levels and the new stuff I’ve been working on as the skill check run before the final boss run, this game is looking more and more like it’s got a good progression with good challenge.

I also came up with an idea for a boss that I think would be glorious if it weren’t so clearly taken from a certain other arcade game. I don’t even think I’d be able to swing it as a reference. Maybe I would! I will probably try it anyway, even though it will take a solid day of coding at least.

But first, levels. And level selection. Lately I’ve been leaning more toward just having a barebones list of levels, a la Monaco or EDGE. Compared with the current world selection screen, with its cutesy doors and secret passages, it would allow me not to worry too much about which things unlock which and so on. It would also be faster to use, which will be critical when people inevitably speedrun the game at AGDQ 2016 thru AGDQ 2046.

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Great day today: I improved the design of a few levels, made the code for the black holes massively more efficient and also improved the enemies, and in an unexpected turn of events put the current build up on the web.

That’s right. There is now a site where you can go play SmallBall (or the current dev version) if you want.

If you do visit the website, excuse the construction. We are racing to get it up to snuff, as with the game.

Oh, I also made a different design for a SmallBall poster, ’cause things are at a point where I do want to have it printed and put on the wall. The only thing to do now is register an LLC and make a logo for it so that I can start putting it everywhere.

Incidentally, the new website means that PanelOpticon.com will return to its roots as an art practice blog, while all the game dev stuff moves over there. It will mean I’ll be writing more stuff, but then the upside is that I’ll also be drawing way more stuff, as well as working on the game. So basically you’ll be seeing way less of me until October, except of course online.

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The pause screen now consists of the screen getting dimmed and the controls being revealed along the edges of the screen. The shift key may need some work, ’cause early testing reveals that you can’t tell what it is. Otherwise, it’s looking good. I am currently not convinced that it needs anything else, but we’ll see what testing reveals.

By the way, I pushed out a new build today. Let me know if you want to play it!

Steam Left, a nifty new webapp, estimates that playing through my current Steam library would take upwards of 1800 hours. That’s about 76 days of uninterrupted play. If most people are on the same boat, I look forward to the uptick of people finally getting to SmallBall in 2019.

Also, the business cards I ordered to hand out at PAX arrived today. The website is totally illegible, which at this point is good ’cause it is not close to done yet. Ha!

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New buttons and symbols for SmallBall.

I’ve been working on the controls (not the game mechanics, the code of making sure that it works with gamepads and stuff), which has meant also finding lots of nifty little gotchas Unity had in store waiting for me. It caused stuff I thought I’d finished months ago (specifically the pause functionality) to suddenly go haywire and get all methicillin-resistant on me. I finally sorted that out, but then I have run out of time and steam to get out a build tonight as I intended.

It’s all right, though, because this week I pretty much killed it. I made substantial progress on a number of visual elements in the game, and I got most of the World Select screen all set up. Now the process of the game is guiding me back to level design. Of course, for PAX I need to be focusing on the promotional materials (website, video), but afterward the path is clear. I need to put together a level selection screen, then get back to the level design and finish the collections that are going to be the worlds, add whatever bosses I’m missing, put in the extra functionality like extras and options, add the music, and that’s pretty much it.

The way from here to done is now starting to come into full view.

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I believe I have finally figured out the world and level selection business in SmallBall. At the very least, it’s a definite way forward. I don’t feel that happiness of achievement yet, though. Hopefully that will come when I finish the draft of it all, i.e. tomorrow.

Today at AGDQ there was a fantastic relay race where two teams of three people each tried to finish Ninja Gaiden 1, 2, and 3 for NES as quickly as possible. It is as good as these races get. If you’re curious about this sort of thing, or if you’d just like to watch what the buzz is about so that you can get it and either talk hype or talk smack about it, then this is the clip to watch.

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I used to have a full 3 slides explaining the controls, and everyone just clicked through them without reading them, and then they never discovered how to play.

Instead, now when someone clicks anywhere on the title screen, an image of the arrow keys appears, then fades away slowly. The rest of the commands are in level. You guys cannot dodge learning to play now. It is not possible.

Actually, I hope I come up with an elegant way to go over even the remaining controls without words (e.g. retry, next level, back one level, pause, slow motion). Then it will really come through how much thought has gone into showing all the mechanics through the gameplay.

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This is the scheduled reminder that these comics are not autobiographical. We didn’t even have a Christmas tree this year, so ergo QED.

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Today I tried adding an explosion effect where the ball appears when a level starts, and it’s not looking great. Maybe I need to go with more of a cloud effect.

I also gave the ball and the enemies a new death animation, and that I like a lot better. It’s a bunch of concentric rings in random orientations that expands from the center of the ball that died.

Of course I also coded some. I wrote the part of the title screen that I could make without having the game save system hooked up and ready to go, and I also have that done but I don’t want to put it in place (which would also involve putting in the level progression) without a solid list of levels.

I guess I ought to work on a solid list of levels next! But no… The mind resists… It’s much easier to write lots of pieces of code I have to make eventually…

Oh! I also got a great piece of music from my brother, which gave me back hope that I’m going to pull this off (this being a sweet demo) in time for PAX.

And a promo video. And a website! And there it goes! Goodbye, hope! How you flutter as you fly into the sun!

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This weekend I worked on boring bug fixes and code optimization, so for today I decided to tackle something flashy and make a new title screen.

Since it’s best appreciated with video, I also fired up QuickTime and After Effects and edited it just a little bit, so now here it is in HIGH DEFINITION. Also, rest assured that the choppiness is due to my bad video capture situation, but the game itself runs at hundreds of frames a second. I also forgot to set the correct aspect ratio on After Effects, but you’ll get the picture.

Unfortunately there is no sound for the moment. I’ll figure out why some other day.

Out of curiosity, after the animation plays, what would you try first in order to get things started?

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As I said yesterday, today I was going to arrive at a final (for now) version of the exit, and then move on. Of course nothing is truly final in the game, and I frequently go back and swap in new things that dazzle in place of earlier things that merely excited.

This version has particles change color from blue to purple as they fall to the center and shrink to nothing. The exit also spins slowly. It looks pretty rad.

Unfortunately, a potential problem arises in the Supermassive Black Hole boss encounter:

The colors are very close together, which makes it hard to tell that the exit is different, and it’s also hard to make the case that the colors indicate a bad thing when it comes to the boss, but a good one when it comes to the exit. What I might do is change the color of the boss, because I’m pretty sure the exit is the way it’s going to be.

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Today I made lots of improvements to the sprites, some subtle, some less so. Particularly, I’ve been playing with lots of different versions of the exit, and I think I’m getting closer to something I can use, but I’ll have to test it. So far, trying to get a certain effect with particles has been a bit of a waste of time.

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Again, I can’t post gifs but here is the new (animated) model for the exit next to the old one (the one that looks like a fried egg). I have a gut feeling, but I’d love to hear y’all’s thoughts.

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It’s holiday sale time on a number of video game retailer websites, so I’ve been watching some trailers for games I’d missed. The one for MIND: Path to Thalamus in particular is wonder-sparking. Hard to believe it’s all one guy’s vision (with an artist, a voice actor, and a writer). I mean, dang. Maybe my next game ought to be some sparse 3D emotionscape.

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It’s getting unwieldy keeping track of which levels I’ve already shown here and which ones are still available. Also, the real problem is that I can’t grab gifs on this computer (too old) and Unity no longer exports to Flash, so it’s unlikely that I’ll put up a build for web here. Luckily, my goal this month is to finish the art for the game, so the next 3 weeks should yield plenty of pretty pictures to look at.

Today I continued my work on shaders. It’s slow going because the guy who made the tutorials, while very kind and helpful, left several conceptual errors in his videos, so I constantly have to stop and make sure that everything he just said is consistent with everything else he’d said before, as well as with reality. But that’s a good habit anyway.

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If you’ve never been sure what the number e was about, but have been curious about it, check out this lecture by a phenomenal professor who I wish taught math everywhere, all the time. I suppose that’s what YouTube is for.

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Thus begins my plunge into the world of shaders. It is a seedy world, full of unsavory characters. Characters of many colors.

Characters like these:

This code is actually supposed to be for something else, something useful. However, if you lay it on top of some 3D shapes in this half finished state, it showers you with vibrant color. Wow! Computers truly are a wonder of the artistic world.