Fishy Game Dev

[Student Blog Project] 19B8080 Azizul Hakiem

[fishiousdev]

End of the Blog

And that's a wrap for now!

Thanks for following me on this journey of my game development centered blog! I hope you will continue following my ventures into gamedev elsewhere. Here's to a bright future for the indie gamedev scene!

Until next time!

[fishiousdev]

The Game Jam Experience 2 : Treble Death

So in earlier blogs, I talked about game jams, right?

Well, to continue where I left off, in only a couple months ago, me and a couple of friends decided to band together and join in on Brunei's first community game jam.

Screenshot of the game jam on Itch.io

With the concept of being ultra and being beginner friendly, we, as a team, clearly did not show that at all and in the single week were given, we managed to create Treble Death.

It's a unique game the three of us have never attempted before. A fast-paced rhythm beat-em-up game. Isn't that a wild concept?

This was my first time forming a legitimate team when working on a project, so it was an exciting experience. While all three of us contributed in the game's concept, gameplay ideas and character designs, we each had our focused roles. I was mostly in charge of the animations of the player character, Treble.

She's a demon girl living in the underworld and beating up skeletons because they were being too loud.

I had the chance to flex my animation muscle a bit with quick hits more suited to a rhythm game, where actions go quickly by, unlike Fish Sword animations where I needed to provide follow up and recovery animations after every action swing the player character did there.

One of the team's member, Arc, as we will call him, was the main programmer, handling the heavy lifting of coding the game. And our other member, AluriSnow, as we will call her, handled enemy animations and the background, and was most influential in coming up with the character designs. With out powers combined, we managed to create a truly unique game that has the potential to become something really great if we were to build up on it more in the future.

How the game plays is that every input only happens if you press the button in according to the beat. If you're off rhythm to the music, your action doesn't happen. It sounds difficult and it really can get hard as the game increasingly gets more drastic. But when you hit that sweet spot of being constantly in sync with the game, it is extremely satisfying and fun to play. Dare I say, it is a very hype game.

In the end, it was a great experience for the trio, and in the future, we hope to be able to work each other again on more great projects.

You can play Treble Death here! :

https://aka-works.itch.io/treble-death

We also named the combination of the three of us as a team as "AKA Works", based on the first letter of our usernames. Hope that's a name to remember.

[fishiousdev]

Falling Block Puzzle Games

Everyone knows what Tetris is right? Right.

Falling block game, clear the lines you make and so on.

I'm a huge fan of falling block puzzle games including Tetris. While most people know Tetris simply as a simple line clearing game, you build a stack and then clear with a straight line piece, the game is surprisingly incredibly in-depth. To elaborate, when you turn Tetris from a single player block clearing game, it's quite normal looking. However, when you shift into a Versus game, where players compete against each other and send lines of garbage to their opponent's screen by clearing lines on their own, things take quite a turn, or perhaps, a 'spin'.

Tetris has many unique ways to score, especially in a Versus environment. Most commonly, players will just clear lines in succession to create a combo, increasing their damage output with each line cleared in a row, or simply creating 4 stacks of line and clearing it with the iconic straight line block, earning them a "Tetris" and doing massive damage to their foes. Another technique that is not commonly known that I am quite fond of is the T-Spin. Using modern Tetris' rotation system, it's possible to spin blocks into gaps in unnatural ways, which lets player get creative with their builds. This means people are able to build empty T-shaped gaps and through certain means, force the T-block into there and score a unique combo that's more devastating than a Tetris.

Learning to make such builds in a singleplayer mode is also considerably relaxing, as you try to think up of different ways to put yourself in a situation where T-spins are possible, when not to go for one and how you safely build one. Without the threat of your opponents flooding your board at every possible moment, it's an enjoyable past time that hardly gets old, with new tech being discover and being combined with others to create optimal game plans in the Vs mode.

Another favorite puzzle game of mine in the same genre is Puyo Puyo, a puzzle game series originating from 1991, where you stack blob creatures called "puyos" together on a board similar to Tetris. When 4 or more puyos of the same color are in contact with each other, they pop, and any puyo above them are affected by gravity and drop down. See where I'm getting at?

While the concept is simple and looks easy to get into, it's almost instantly that a player will realize how much depth there is to the game when it comes to making combos. If I had to explain it, imagine if 3 red puyos it in a horizontal row and 3 green ones sit directly above it, neither groups would pop. And then you place a single red puyo on top of the green group, to which later, you pop the green puyos, causing the single red one to drop down and make contact with the red group you left earlier, causing a chain combo, an essential part of the game. In Puyo Puyo, it's all about making these huge chain combos to do as much damage as possible while prevent your opponent from flooding your board with garbage puyos. The game, just like Tetris, is very capable of being back and forth, creating intense situations where both players are creating combo builds after combo builds to beat each other, but it is never enough. Eventually, someone makes the breakthrough and out combos the opposing player, taking the game by flooding their board.

Recorded footage of me playing Puyo Puyo Tetris 2 (2021)

Speaking of, there exists a crossover game between Puyo Puyo and Tetris, where it mixes the gameplay of both and pits them against each other. A wonderful opportunity for players of both to get into the other series or to attempt mastering both at the same time.

Something that the Puyo Puyo series has, though, are added visuals and sound bites for when you commit a big chain combo. The character you play as begin chanting increasingly stronger spells as your combo continues to rack up, and it results in being inherently satisfying to do, and being incredibly intimidating for your opponent to hear on their end. And vice versa of course. Can't win them all.

Aside from intense Vs puzzle games, there's one that recently caught my attention again.

Irisu Syndrome, a freeware game released in 2008. It's a bit of a spooky game, it could almost qualify as psychological horror. But aside from that, its a physics based puzzle game that I find really enjoyable to play.

To explain how it works, different colored shapes will begin falling down onto the playfield. By clicking on the screen, you shoot out a square that collides with said shapes, and thus, they will collide with one another, causing each other to be destroyed if they match in color, awarding the player points. If they hit the bottom without exploding, the player's hp depletes and if it empties, it's game over. While relatively simple, the patterns Irisu Syndrome provide can get intense and difficult to manage around, but it's gameplay ends up being really addictive that I find myself coming back to it for a quick game every now and then.

That paired with its uniquely told story, and beautifully composed soundtrack, the game is weirdly calming to play, even if there is a creepy girl always staring at you in the screen as you play, who may or may not be a potential serial killer. Even if the game is strangely creating files in your computer's file directory and also detecting whether or not you've tabbed out.

Yeah. The game is a bit wild.

So where does this lead into?

Well, it took a while and a bit of trial and error. But I managed to recreate Irisu Syndrome's gameplay. It's a tad buggy, but it sure works. In the future, I hope to be able to turn this into its own things, creating a truly unique puzzle game with interesting mechanics. Maybe I'll take a page from Puyo Puyo. Who knows what the future will bring.

'TIll next time.

[fishiousdev]

Introducing : Electric Wind God Fish

I added a new move that plays a big part in the player's general game plan in Fish Sword with its own unique effects.

eIt is triggered by doing a normal attack and holding the attack button, to which the player must press dash and then press attack, triggering the move during the unique dashing state. It can also be triggered from a dash when the player does a perfect dodge.

It has a catch though. During the unique dashing state, the player must press attack in the first few frames. To be more simple, pressing attack as soon as you press dash will trigger the move.

The attack is very powerful and is capable of bypassing enemy defenses while rendering the player character invincible during the entirety of it.

Breaking a Samurai Frog's guard with the attack

Gameplay of Tekken 7 (2015), Kazuya performing Electric Wind God Fist

The attack is based on a move from the fighting game series, Tekken. It's a move used by one of the main characters, Kazuya Mishima, and it's called the "Electric Wind God Fist", which is only able to done by doing his unique dash and then pressing punch the exact same frame as doing his dash. Therefore, it's a difficult to do input, especially if needed done consecutively, but the power of the move is so great, every Kazuya player in Tekken needs to learn and master it.

Since the move in Fish Sword is heavily inspired by it and has a similar tight input window, along with the fact that the player uses a fish to do it instead of a fist, I have dubbed the move "Electric Wind God Fish".

[fishiousdev]

Fish Sword's First Online Demo

Recently, I put out a demo for Fish Sword available online that tests the combat and movement for the game.

You can check it out here :

https://kindvirus.itch.io/fish-sword-demo

The password is "Fsh" without quotations.

This demo was created for the purpose of getting feedback from players who've tried it out as well as sniff out any potential bugs. To no surprise, it's riddled with them. Thankfully, the more people trying it out, the faster I was able to recreate the bug on my end and figure out what the causes were.

Overall feedback on how the game played was mostly neutral. There were mixed views on the combat, with some players really liking it and others feeling on the fence on how it flows.

After many consideration, I will be rehauling the moveset of Fish Sword more and will also rewrite how movement works to be more smoother.

[fishiousdev]

Enemy Design

What's an action game without enemies?

Enemy design is something I care deeply about in Fish Sword's development. I want to create enemies that leave an impression, weather it be due to their appearance or the way they fight.

A variety of different enemy types help keep the game feel fresh as the player progresses. In the Dark Souls series, you will meet multitudes of different unknown foes and as you traverse its lands, you must figure how each of these enemies work in most often, high pressure situations, where any action you take could be the difference between life and death. One moment, you take down normal mobs, and the next second, you are bitten by a giant rat that poisons you, leading to your inevitable death. Several levels later, you meet an even bigger rat that skips the poison and just kills you instantly.

Screenshot of Dark Souls (2011)

Every enemy encounter is meaningful in the game, to the point that most are discussed online, with players complaining their frustration against it, sharing their methods of dealing with the enemy placements and more so. When you place an enemy archer in an open field, dealing with them is a no brainer for most players. When two powerful archers are place at the top of a narrow walkway leading upwards, where getting hit once or slipping leads to falling off to your demise, it becomes a more complicated and thought-provoking dilemma. Players must change their approach according to the situation due to design choices like this and thus, it prevents the levels from feeling repetitive.

In Fish Sword, I attempted to create unique enemies with different patterns and attacks. One of the main challenges is that designing more complex enemies is more complicated than it seems, due to the many actions they are capable of, there is more room for error in the coding. Nonetheless, I've gotten several enemy types working so far.

A samurai frog reacts based on player's distance from them and their actions. If the player is far away when they are aggro'd (game lingo for triggering an enemy's aggressiveness), the frog will begin sprinting with their sword in hand, and doing a dashing slash once they get close enough. When the player is close before the samurai decides its next attack, it takes several short steps away to space itself from the player before doing a quick slash to defend itself from the approaching player. When attacked during these states, it will block the players attacks and then perform a counterattack by quickly charging at the player and attempting to cut them with their sword. All of this is react-able by player action of course.

There are more enemies I plan to work on, however they will need more time in the oven before being ready, in terms of functionality and animations. Until next time!

[fishiousdev]

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

When you're developing a game, you'll encounter many unintentional events. Bugs, to be precise, or glitches. An mistake in the coding, something doesn't work when reacting to this or maybe even just a single typo. It's annoying to deal with, yet it can be amusing.

Nothing leave me head scratching more than trying to figure out what causes these bugs to persist in game dev, except for my eczema and cat allergy.

Back then, frogs would get stuck in walls often when being grabbed near one, and this not only puts them in there, away from player reach and immobilizing them, but it also creates an infinite sound glitch that kills your ears. Truly horrible. This was due to a how the command grab move was implemented and how enemies getting grabbed work. With many hours of rewriting everything and testing, eventually, the way an enemy was grabbed and thrown was rehauled in order to prevent this type of glitch.

Other times, I'm left confused as even simpler bugs only to find out I wrote a simple typo or wrote a wrong value somewhere along the line.

Other times, I simply cannot put up with dealing with these and just create temporary fixes that will clearly backfire on me in the future. Such is the game dev life.

If there's one video I could describe the process of it as an analogy of sorts, it would be this.

That's it. That's game development in a nutshell.

[fishiousdev]

Game Jam Experience : Touhou Edition

A few months ago, I took part in an annual event, being the Touhou game jam.

The game jam I partook in was from the western fan community and I used it as an opportunity to

Touhou is a game series by solo developer, ZUN, which has spawned an incredibly large fanbase that has been around for a long time and still going strong today, with multitudes of fan content being made every day.

The game jam I partook in was from the western fan community and I used it as an opportunity to force myself to learn several things I wanted to do in game development as well as take the chance to finish something and make myself more known in the community.

One of the few things I've learned in this two week game jam was making a textbox/dialogue system, which from the surface, looks really simple, but ended up being more complex than expected, taking hours alone of trial and error trying to get a textbox system to work. And even more to make it my ideal one, with character portraits turning dark and moving when not speaking and proper text spacing.

And of course, Fish Sword inherited the text box from this game afterwards.

The fangame was also taught me a lot about designing character movesets more and designing boss battles.

And I've gotten the chance to design my own take on the character of Touhou, putting them in an alternate street setting and putting them in modern streetwear clothes.

The Touhou game jam was overall, an invaluable experience in the long run.

You can actually try it out here!

https://kindvirus.itch.io/grassroots-rescue-squad

[fishiousdev]

The Game Jam experience

Game development can feel like a slog sometimes. You get up, an idea in mind, and then you attempt to make the idea a reality. Cue accidentally making a game breaking bug that dislocates your characters left leg and sucks all the enemies into the earth. Instantly, you become tired and give up for the day. Motivating yourself to do it can be rough. Making a game is rough and the existence of its scope is just so daunting. You have to make art assets, plan how everything works, and worse, making it all work in tandem. Absolutely dreadful. This will take forever.

Enter game jams. Oh no.

Now to explain, a game jam is an event where people of different skillsets band together to make a game within a certain timespan, usually in accordance to a theme provided by the jam's host.

Screenshot of a local game jam hosted on Itch.io

Occasionally, these game jams come with incentives, be it through competing and whatnot. Often though, they simply exist to create a gathering for different people in the field to create something together (or alone, life is hard sometimes) in a short span of time. The themes of a game jam can also potentially spark ideas into the developers when it comes to coming up with the kind of game they want to make. It's an opportunity to get to work with different people and see what ideas they can come up with, while also being a chance to widen your network and visibility online. It's one way of improving your reputation as a game dev.

For me, however, the most important aspect of a game jam is the existence of a deadline. Just like how students get sudden bursts of productivity in the last stretch of their assignment deadlines, a game jam creates this sudden feeling of urgency to create, to make something, and learning how to do them. You learn the importance of creating the scope of a project, how to manage your tasks and form discipline for yourself when it comes to game development.

They're truly an experience that comes with the great reward of actually finishing something.

[fishiousdev]

A Dive into Inspiration : Game Feel

One of the most valuable things that is often overlooked in game development is "Game Feel". To put it simply, it is the feeling of the interaction between the player and the game. When they press a button and the character performs an action; that is an example of game feel. When the screen shakes when something in the game world makes an impact; that is an example of game feel. The post will focus on various examples of game feel in videogames, a few of my favorites as well as my own incorporation of it into my own project.

Gameplay of Super Mario Bros. (1983)

It's obvious that Mario games are the easiest to look to when it comes to game feel. Even in the original widely-known Super Mario Bros., there is a satisfaction in controlling Mario, you can 'feel' the friction in the way Mario moves when you go left and right, and you, as the player, are able to understand the movement system in the game and adjust accordingly to make sure you make every jump as accurately as possible, be it to stomp on a Goomba, to cut through a section of a level or to reach the top of the flag at the end of every area to get the highest score possible. The player actively feels more powerful when they get a powerup when they get a grow-up mushroom or a fire flower through the animation that plays that also freezes the world as it plays. There's an inherent satisfaction that a player gets when they takedown an enemy as well. When Mario jumps on a Goomba, there is visual and audio feedback, the goomba is visually squished, there is a sound that represents the Goomba being squished and Mario is visibly sent flying up as he bounces off the enemy. All this creates a satisfying feedback loop that is retained throughout the entire game with other situations.

Gameplay of Monster Hunter World (2018)

One of my favorite game series, Monster Hunter, is a prime example of top-notch game feel in the industry. As its name implies, it is a series of games where you control a hunter character and hunt down and fight large monsters of various different kinds. The player character is extremely responsive to player inputs and there is heavy emphasis on the feedback from the world, environment and the entities within it. When you run up a slope, your character changes their running animation, and when they run down one, they slowly enter a state where they slide down and slowly build up speed, to which they are able to use the momentum to jump distances or do a unique leaping attack; for example, when using a hammer when sliding down, the player is able to perform a spinning attack when leaping into the air from the momentum they get from a sliding jump and perform multiple powerful attacks in quick succession.

Every hit landed by the player causes multiple visual and audio feedback, with the impact of a hammer creating large hit sparks flying from the point of contact along with other visual effects, the screen shaking from the sheer force of this attack, the game freezing for mere milliseconds just to emphasize how powerful the hit is, along with diegetic sounds that deliver the satisfying sound of the blow and the monster reacting to the attacks, reeling back from shock, parts of them breaking off and becoming visually telling of the player's progress on the fight between them.

There is more to Monster Hunter's game feel as well aside from the attacking. The player rolling through attacks, jumping over ledges, grappling onto vines and maneuvering across the land and even collecting materials such as plants or carving the defeated monster all created an extremely well-rounded feedback loop through use of masterful animation and sound effects. The Monster Hunter series is one of the most impactful games to me when it comes to game feel design.

As I delve into game design, it's apparent that creating good game feel is harder than it looks. From creating powerful hit effects to even the movement system requires a bit more depth than the expected solution.

From the early beginnings of Fish Sword, it can be seen that the idea for game feel was there, however it was missing a lot of notable things. For instance, the player character in the .gif above moves left and right at an instantaneous pace, there is no friction to their movement whatsoever, creating difficulty in accurate movement and all around ends up not very satisfying to control. The impact of the attack hitting is also notable here, as during the time, I merely wrote for the game to slow down during the moment of impact with a few hit sparks and slight screen shake. The base of all the needed ideas are there, but it wasn't quite up to snuff yet.

Fast forward to a year later, I've rewritten the movement code, screen shake, written a system for handling the individual slow down for each entity and overall, got better at animating. The result can be seen, as Jun, the player character, now moves with visible friction, and the new slow down system creates a more visible hit lag for the enemy getting hit and the player landing the hit, while keeping the rest of the in-game world moving at normal pace. The new visual hit effects now create more impactful feelings when landing attacks, with more flashy sparks and creating craters in the ground. The game feel now is more satisfying than before and emphasizes the power of the player character even better.

From understanding the examples of other games and trying to imitate and reverse engineer their various function, I've been able to improve the quality of Fish Sword to a greater degree with the changes of a few features, which goes to show how important these features were.

[fishiousdev]

The Lore & Arsenal of Fish Sword

It’s important to make the world of Fish Sword an interesting one. The kind that's fun to explore and experience as you play through the game and learn about it. Creating cohesion between lore and gameplay is important in the factor of enjoyment for the player. This includes the varying locales the player will traverse, the friends and foes they meet and the character they control.

The two protagonists visiting a denizen of the secluded land.

The game takes place in the modern time period but in a land secluded from the rest of the world through a magic barrier, creating an untouched area with its own inhabitants and visited by only a select few individuals who are able to bypass the gateway.

One of these people includes the main character, Jun, a seemingly normal human girl with a peculiar demeanor. Despite being an average person with no special magical traits, she managed to infiltrate the barrier through chance, and it was in the secluded world where she first met her would-be closest friend, Kv, a giant green talking fish. The events of the game takes place a while after they've already met and formed a friendship with each other. When confronted with the presence of giant magical frog minions, Jun, by instinct, picks Kv up by the tail and starts swinging him around like a weapon. This experience quickly leads to them forming a symbiotic bond to fight together against the frog army and defeat the source of it, travelling across the separated world and exploring varying locales including a forest, high altitude mountains, ancient ruins, underwater caves and more to be found.

Jun and Kv character sheets.

Jun's character design was made to be simplistic but also flashy at the same time, having many flowing parts that complement her athletic movement in animations, that being her hair braids, her waist tail ribbon, her hair bun ribbons and most prominently, her cape, which all use contrasting colors to emphasize their visibility and movement.

Kv is drawn in a cartoonish fashion, resembling a sock puppet with googly eyes to give off a more comedic and friendly look. His vibrant green color scheme contrasts and compliments Jun's outfit and makes both their visibility when moving together in animation easily seen. He is based on the real life fish, the Giant Snakehead or 'Toman' as locally known in Brunei, which are large fish with, as the name mentions, resemble snakes in appearance and are also known to be able to survive on land for a surmountable time due to their ability to breathe air. Kv exaggerates this by being a large magical fish, being allowed to live out of the water indefinitely.

Basic 3-hit combo

The symbiotic relationship translates to gameplay as the player character's main method of attack is through offensively swinging the fish. That aside, the fish is able to shoot out a powerful blast of water out of its mouth with enough force to propel both of them forward, which allows the player to be able to do quick dashes to maneuver around platforms and enemies. Jun herself is able to deliver kicks with powerful force, using Kv to move herself into position.

Over the shoulder throw

She's also able to command the fish to grab enemies with his mouth and execute punishing moves on them or counter enemy attacks. The grab move has unique interactions based on context, meaning what happens is depending on which type of enemy is grabbed and when. For example, a normal giant frog gets thrown over the shoulder into the ground, but a samurai frog will be german suplexed instead.

Case in point, the player has a wide variety of tools in their arsenal which follows in line with the in-game lore. All the attacks and animations are made with emphasis on impact and conveying the characters personality.

Demonstration video

That's all for the introduction to the world and characters. See you next time.

[fishiousdev]

First Post : An Introduction

Ahoy, reader! Welcome to the first post of my blog!

Throughout the coming weeks, I will try to regularly write about my current journey as a video game developer. My posts will include progress on my game development, the thought processes and concepts towards the creation, and various other game dev related topics including inspirations, research and the indie game dev scene.

To properly introduce myself and what I am, allow me to talk briefly about my ongoing large game dev project, Fish Sword.

Fish Sword is a 2D side-scrolling action game currently solo developed by me. The game’s code is written in Game Maker Studio 2, the latest and current version of the long running series of Game Maker game engines by YoYo Games. In Fish Sword, you play as a human girl named Jun and her green fish friend, Kv, as they take on an army of nasty frog minions. As the title implies, Jun takes on her foes by swinging the fish around like a sword. The concept sounds like it makes for a relatively simple game doesn’t it? A good old 2d platformer where you occasionally whack away at enemies? Though, simple as it may seem, Fish Sword strives to be a more complex game focused on mastery of its mechanics and tools given to the player. A term more fitting of the genre this game aims to become would be “character action”, a sub-genre of hack-n-slash action games where the gameplay is more centric to the main player character who is given a large variety of actions to be played with by the player, creating high potential for intense combo-driven gameplay and creative expression through the player’s actions in-game.

The player is given a wide range of actions. Here, they are able to perform an attack, jump, an aerial attack, dash and attempt a grab. At the surface, it’s a simple kit of moves, though as you delve deeper, multiple branches of actions open up from singular inputs. By pressing the attack button, you can follow up with another attack, or by holding up before pressing attack again, the character will throw out a launching attack that sends enemies upwards, which creates a potential for juggling enemies in an air combo.

When a foe is sent into the air, it becomes up to the player to dictate their next course of action on how to continue attacking. Do they jump and attempt to continue their barrage of attacks in the air? Or do they continue the onslaught on the ground? The game forces the player to make quick decisions based on their understanding of how the game plays and as a result, creates intense, exciting moments with satisfying game feedback.

The game’s visuals are done in a pixel art style hand drawn and animated by me. Using pixel art, I aim to deliver a cute simplistic art style to the game while still being able to do snappy action animations that emphasize the overall game feel.

I think that makes enough for a brief introduction to Fish Sword. Are you hooked yet? If you’ve been snagged, then I’ll see you in my next post.