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Hello there! Gen here! I'm a student making games, art and other mess :P Currently working on Skate & Date which got funded on Kickstarter! NYU 2022 

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The girlies are back in the rink!!

If you don't know, Skate & Date is a roller derby, rhythm game about two girls falling in love and the new demo will be out this September!

(Sorry for the delay! Life happened U-U)

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hihi all it's gonna be a bit till i post on here consistently bc of really bad, prolonged burn out but I'm more active here @gensideblog c:

EDIT: changed my actual tumblr to be @gensuta and this is now my dev blog

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Skate & Date Devlog #1 (2020 edition)

It's been a long time since I did a devlog for Skate & Date especially because of school, but I'm back in order to reflect. These devlogs are gonna be moreso for me instead of for sharing cool game stuff just so I can actually get this game out. This week I was just touching up art because funnily enough, this time last year I was overworking myself to try and get the game out for March (in 2019), but a lot of the art was messy and bad and distracting. I was fortunate enough to showcase Skate & Date in several places last year where I was given feedback on the initial looping background and was told it was a bit nauseating/distracting.

I'm a little too lazy to save the gif version of it with derby folks, but here's how it looks redone.

Here's an older version of the background! ( ignore the old layout. It’s from 2018)

I was given advice to check what's the main focus in Black and White and that really helped make it better! Really excited to show more stuff next week I hope.

A different derby rink! Now that I'm looking at it, I may edit the back cause it looks plain compared to the others...

Third type of rink! Looks kinda sad doesn't it?

Besides redo-ing the rinks, I also touched up the VN style sprites because somehow the sizes got all funky?? Especially with each character's canon heights. What a mess. Anyway, I just made sure EVERY character in the game was lined up in one file so that they look ok together. ( It’s not done btw.)

Next week, I'm hoping to fix more story mode bugs, because the thing I have been chipping away at are those. It wasn't this week, but I found a better way to save data in a way I understand, I fixed the little bug where the player was on beat and still get a bad, annnnnd I'm using yarn to handle narrative stuff which is making things go smoother! Only problem is I'm just doing lots of testing, checking for anything going awry and finishing the last bit of assets that are killing me ( like the credits song and what not hahaha)

So if I'm being specific and not rambling, next week I'd like to:

Sweep through the yarn file again

Finish touching up VN Sprites

Oh! And implement the new settings screen because I keep forgetting about it!

I'm sorry things have been so slow and such a mess. My health is honestly the main thing that's been holding things up the past several months, but I hope for 2020 things will be better! I'll at least try to be nicer to myself about my little progress. Class does start up next week, so I am worried I won't have another devlog, but fingers crossed I can balance school, work, and Skate & Date this semester.

- Gensuta

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ITGDevlog#15: The Last One

This is it y’all! The last Intro to Game Development Devlog with my final group project DONE  (and available to play HERE!) There’s no web build right now because unity wont let me build a web build for some reason :((((

Our game is called Brick by Brick, inspired by Mother Mother’s song Bit by Bit! As some of you saw in the previous devlogs, you’re trying to survive in the forest and also build a new home before night time comes!

You cut trees with your mouse! If you don’t move too far away from the tree though, you won’t be able to ACTUALLY chop the tree. There’s weak and strong trees so you can’t go wild on the trees. I worked on this mini game and it’s a little buggy because of the mouse detection and my mac isn’t the best when it comes to speed etc.

You also gotta stack some bricks!! You have to press random keys along with a mouse button to slam those bricks down!! I didn’t work on this one, but I can def tell ya the lerping my teammate used is vvvvv nice touch!

The last minigame is to collect apples and avoid pine cones that stun you! I added a cute lil’ particle effect for when you get an apple and one of our artists made an animation for when you don’t catch the apple ( which is pretty juicy looking if you ask me!) The main stuff we did this final week was put everything together! Like we needed to: - Put in art & sound assets - Sprinkle in some ‘juice’ - Make the apple game a lil harder - Make sure the game has an end state and it can be replayed

Gensuta​ is the Sound Designer and one of the main programmers. VNotGames​ is another main programmer. Drew​ and Isaac​ are the artists of the game. ( But everyone did a bit of code at some point of development!) They’re all wonderful people so I suggest following them on Itch.io/other social media C: And that’s it! I’ll probably try to do more devlogs and like...maybe research how to actually write a devlog because I still...don’t know how... But it’s fine! Until next time! Have a wonderful day and stay hydrated!!!! - Gensuta

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ITGDevlog#14: Short, Sweet and Almost Complete

So all three minigames that we wanted as the bare minimum are done (for the most part) but they just need tweaking and art assets in/functioning fine!

(The trees here get moved a lot when cut so I’ll need to fix that >o> ) Besides fixing/adding in art, I want to add screen shake and what other little “juice-y” things that’ll make these minigames feel even better to play!

The minigames don’t switch yet when the time runs out so that’s what I’m gonna work on tomorrow along with some sound assets!! I’m not sure if I should go 8bit or more acoustic-y to fit the game since we’re doing pixel art but like...using that Mother Mother song as inspiration. Maybe I’ll do an 8bit cover and like add more to it ( or a bit of a mashup >:D ) Actually, I’m definitely going to do an 8bit mashup, but who knows what it’ll be. Moving on to the other minigames!

The catching fruit game is simple and complete! The more apples you catch, the quicker they fall down until your combo causes a teeny little bonus time (where a bajillion apples fall!) It was initially a bug because of what the combo system did to the spawning time, but we decided to keep it with some minor edits of course! And the last game we have together is a stacking bricks game

It’s pretty dang simple as you can see. Press the right buttons to slather bricks  and also *slam* down those bricks!

Another thing that needs to be done is the scoring system. It’s sort of obvious how it’s gonna work since it depends on score so that I might mess with tomorrow as well. We have about a week and a half left ‘til this is due so the stretch goals I can definitely see getting chopped. While it can be easu to program it’s a lOT to animate and like...more sound assets would need to be made so. These three minigames might be it.

We’re going to be doing beta testing in class on Monday so hopefully that goes all well and dandy. I think that’s all I have to report for now. ‘Til next time! Be kinder to yourself! -Gensuta

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ITGDevlog #13: Our House

This week in Intro to Game Dev..

We’re starting Final (Group) Projects!! It’s run in a game jam sort of way as in like we all have a theme to work off of but really we all have a song.  My team of 4 has to make a game inspired by the song Bit by Bit by Mother Mother 

My team and I were all thinking about building like a house/cabin and having it to do with something in the woods after listening to this song. To make the load not to heavy, we decided to go with a warioware-esque game where you’re doing minigames and depending on how well you do them it affects how well your house is built! We did some brainstorming (and a few mockups that I need to go find) for each minigame and the minimum amount to be in the final (due May 15th) would be 3 while the maximum would be 6. The mini games(which I’m excited about) are about: - Cutting wood - Stacking bricks - Catching Fruit - Befriend Wolves - Forging Swords - Fishing ;) The prototypes for cutting wood, stacking bricks, and catching fruit might actually be done by tomorrow, but we’ll see!

Currently the cutting wood minigame works but is laggy as heck!! My computer isn’t even lagging its just the editor so I’m really confused :l ( See below)

How this is working right now is that there’s this treeManager script that creates whatever number of trees you give it and adds the trees and the treeScripts into a list so that you can actually focus on the tree at the very front! Oddly enough in the gif it seems like the dimmed color the trees in the back are suppose to have isn’t changing when they become the current tree so i gotta fix that :/ Not only that, the collision detection isn’t happening enough.  There’s two types of trees. One that is cut with one swipe and another with two swipes bUT the lag is stopping that! Each tree has HP and a box collider that the mouse can collide with ( by using ~raycasting~) and yet it’s just acting funny

Ignore my typos for the debug “heyhey” and also the distance2tree stuff. We as a team planned on having the cursor be a certain distance away from the tree before it to be cuttable and I did make work sort of!! The lag broke it! Like all the trees would go at once and a bool I had was equaling true and false at the same time?? Really weird stuff bc thats not possible, so I need to really get that lag issue fixed...

Anyway. That’s it for this week! There will be a lot more nice stuff ( and a lot less lag) by next week ;v; Remember to be kind to yourself! -Gensuta

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ITGDevlog#12: Pebbles

This is Pebbles.

They like collecting pebbles.

This is a puzzle game, but it’s a GRID puzzle game so that it still sticks to the assignment. I was wrestling with taking the easy way out versus trying to solve an annoying issue all week and I ended up taking the easy way out :( I wanted the grid creation to be controlled via the script but because of the tile png size, it would keep getting smooshed together and even when I used an offset to fix that it still came out weird like this!!

I didn’t know it was a sprite problem until I messed with my code a bit and instantiated the pebbles in a grid. THAT worked fine! And gosh that was frustrating to realize, but I was too tired to keep at it. Building the levels in the inspector is more efficient for me right now in my constantly sleepy state. ( My classes are kicking my butt!)

But in other news, while noodling around I learned how to use Unity’s tile system a little bit (VERY LITTLE) and I started commenting my code. It’s no where near perfect and actually, one thing that always bothers me is how I just don’t know how professionals code like...am i doing it wrong? Is there a right way?

I at least got camelCase down for the most part lol

That’s all I have to say tonight. Not feeling the best emotionally right now, so I’m gonna finish fixing up some last few things and knock tf out u_u

-Gensuta

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Skate & Date Trailer

Skate & Date is a roller derby rhythm ga(y)me where you play as Maggie, the lead jammer of the Rockin Rollergirls! She has a bit of a crush on Patricia – one...

The trailer for Skate & Date, a roller derby rhythm ga(y)me, is OUT! Not only is the trailer our but you can...

Play the demo HERE

Pre-order the OST

And wishlist the game on STEAM

Game Pre-orders SHOULD be dropping this weekend so stay tuned!

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ITGDevlog#11: A CATastrophe!

For today’s devlog I’m going to talk briefly about what I did for my Match 3 replica ( because it’s due tomorrow and I was fortunate to finish it early!) I was absent the day the project was gone over in class and I missed out on the explanation of 2D arrays!! But it was fine because I just needed to replicate a match three game. Couldn’t be that hard right?

This is the messy little note I made for myself while trying to help my friends with their projects. Just about everyone I knew was struggling with this project >_>;;  But anyway, I wanted to write everything I needed to remember to create for this game and take notes on the example project done in class the day I was absent.

This is the game we had to replicate. It’s not really pretty, the player is that grey circle with the number and you need to swap objects with the arrow keys. You have 6 moves and every time you make a match the moves goes back up. The moves goes down one each time an arrow key is pressed.

Also the game can break because the player object is actually a tile object with a different sprite it seems :0 Either way I just don’t like it, especially the fact that you have to use the array keys for a match three game instead of a mouse.

So I re-skinned it and kind of went the easy way to make this game work. Instead of using an array of gameobjects to detect stuff I just used  ~ tiny box colliders ~ 

These box colliders check if there’s other GameObjects with the catTile script nearby and checks what type they are! If a cat has a top and bottom match they clear. The same applies to right and left matches. I also made it so that if there’s a match that’s more than 3 it’ll clear all of the matches instead of just 3/4 matches. The finishing touch I added was just the prefab of my cat everytime amatch happens

This is a picture of when he was super small! He’s bigger now but still cute and fluffy ;v; And that’s pretty much it for this week’s devlog. I have no clue what I’m doing for my elaboration besides wanting to theme it towards one of my older characters, but meh. Maybe I’ll do something entire new that’s short and sweet. Take care of yourself and stay hydrated! -Gensuta

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ITGDevlog #10: Balance and Scope

Guess who’s still sick and miserable? ://// And it’s because I haven’t actually rested! I’ve been thinking a lot about balancing everything and how I messed myself up with the narrative game project. I definitely overscoped just because I thought  “Oh! If I can make a battle system in Twine + a whole story in a week, I can totally do it in Unity using a visual novel format!”

I wanted to challenge myself because to be entirely honest, I was really bored. I don’t like being bored and more than anything I wanted to learn *something* during this narrative project - and I did learn more about TextMeshPro - but that’s it Unity wise.

I did learn that because of this AWFUL cold I was making a mess of my code and having to fix a lot of bugs. ( Like the one above) It’s not even like I was stuck and needed help with this project. I just needed more time. A hard part of being a developer and a student who lacks stability in a lotta places is finding balance. I gotta juggle papers, games, work, my own health and what not on the daily and it’s hard. Probably harder than any coding problem I’ll ever have to face. So many people tell me to take my time and that no game is worth an all nighter and of course I believe them! But its still difficult to break the old habits in my mind that’s screaming *IM NOT DOING ENOUGH* causing me to over-do things when I shouldn’t. I want to let myself get work done, but also let myself take care of myself AND let myself hang out every so often because just having some fun is a part of taking care of yourself, y’know? Balancing these three things has never been perfect for me, but one day I hope to just get to a balance that works/is healthy for me instead of something that’s *perfect* I was very lucky to get this extension and yet my game is still very broken and unfinished due to everything else that’s been going on in my life. The first part is finished at the least.

I feel like going forward there’s two things I want to start doing more. Asking for feedback about ideas to stop myself from over-scoping and commenting my code because lemme tell ya,

I can definitely handle this better. But I’m rushing and tired and burnt out and I’m just doing what works.  I need to push myself to be more organized and wise about programming instead of just doing what works so I can avoid bugs and etc.

Anyway, the next project in class is a match three game. To be honest the application we were given is kinda gross so I made my replica use the mouse instead of the keyboard and have cats. It’s not fully functional but I’m getting there.

Ok enough rambling for this week;;; Hopefully I’ll do better at healing next week!! -Gensuta

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ITGDevlog#9: I have a cold :)

Yup you read that right. I have a cold and DIDN’T completely finish Saturday Fright 2 like I wanted to!! 

I only finished a small portion of what I outlined in twine, but it’ll be good enough to submit for class tomorrow. When it’s completely done(on Friday hopefully) I’ll release it on itch.io and submit it to nanoreno!!

If it wasn’t for this pesky cold my hw/Nanoreno game would’ve been done on time! But alas, things happen and also I was super busy at work all week preparing for a showcase that happened yesterday. It went well and I let myself rest yesterday afterwards. So, I ended up doing all the writing today because I had no time before then. I’m super proud of all the sprites I made though!!! Like they look pretty cute.

I also had to make music for this...And I haven’t yet, because a one minute little loop shouldn’t be too hard to make. In other news I learned out to make rich text work without glitching out in an Ieunumerator! Bc I was being silly and having it type out words instead of changing the characters that are visible(thx textmeshpro lol) I also messed with the textjitter stuff thats in it’s examples, but I was too tired to incorporate it in the version for class because turning off the textjitter script doesn’t stop the text from shaking. I’m sure there’s an easy way to make it stop but I have a cold and I’m tired so I only foccused on the following. A) Making a text system that switches the character sprites correctly B)Making the battle system work correctly C)Adding some extra stuff to the battle system that’s not in the first game

So look forward to it! Later in the week...

-Gensuta

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ITGDevlog#8: No more cats I guess?

It’s Spring break! And I’ve had a pretty emotional rollercoaster of a break that I won’t delve into. What I will say is that in order to put my health and my schoolwork first, I’m gonna delay Skate & Date’s release. I haven’t made an official announcement yet, but I will by tomorrow because I am *burnt out* yall. Anyway on to what I worked on that’s related to class. ( that I did literally all of today LMAO) I didn’t prototype the typing rpg from the first game yet into Unity but I DID sketch out all the characters that’s gonna be in the game! Really excited about this actually! ( Mainly because it’s the sequel to Saturday Fright and like, I’ve never done a sequel before and writing the first one was pretty enjoyable!)

From left to right there’s: Serafina(the protagonist), Adeline, Fiona, ~Mysterious~ new character that wasn’t in the first game, Misti, Noelani, and Harlow I don’t know if I mentioned this before or not, but Saturday Fright 2: Morning Routine is gonna center around Serafina going to the gym where Harlow works at. I’m going to replay all of Saturday Fright later today to plan out how all of them will act in this sequel annnd yeah. 

Think that’s all I have to say this week. I’ll talk waaay more next week since the game will be done AND I’ll submit it to nanoreno >:) ( And then I’ll have TWO nanoreno entires! Mwahaha!) If I feel like it I’ll finally fix my tumblr blog so it looks nice and organized and the ITGDevlogs can be accessed all in one place but, we shall see. But anyway, stay safe, stay hyrdrated and don’t overwork yourself. -Gensuta

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ITGDevlog #7: Cats

This is gonna be another short n sweet devlog because I have other games to be working on right now ;w; 

Our assignment in class was to recreate this game called cat roomate. It’s a short little visual novel with choices where a cat decides if they’ll room with you or not based on your answers. It’s super simple and because of that I finished it in like two hours >->;; The more I make games, the more I get accustomed to using arrays, functions and etc. so that I can speedrun projects.

I should’ve photoshoped cowboy hats on all the cats...

But anyway, It’s not due till March 25th and while I could start on Saturday Fright 2, I’m literally releasing a game on Steam in the next two weeks! It’s a bit frightening!(and exciting).

Oh! The other game I’m working on that’s not like having a big commercial release is a Nanoreno game I’m doing with my friends! I’ll probably take the system I’m creating from that to use in Saturday Fright since there’s a save system, dialogue system, and etc. 

Trying to create what renpy already has but in Unity with being able to move the text forwards, backwards, saving/loading, and also viewing the history of the text.  It keeps missing the very first line of text which is weird so I’m gonna have to do something about that >->

This is obviously just a prototype and the battle system in the first Saturday Fright hasn’t been implemented in Unity yet but it will soon! Til’ next time

-Gensuta

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It’s screenshot Saturday and there’s a special announcement to be made! Skate & Date has a release date! March 30th, 2019! The game also has a Steam Page now so you can go wishlist it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1033380/Skate__Date There will be a new devlog and demo out this upcoming week ( with a lengthy explanation about the gameplay change) but I’ll also try to post other cool things inbetween then! Thanks again for all the support <3

- Gensuta

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ITGDevlog #6: Thinking about a sequel

This devlog is going to be quick because I have an essay to finish writing for tomorrow!! We received our new assignment in class to make replicate a very simple visual novel, so I’m going to probably complete it in one go tomorrow in class. There’s only two endings and it’s called cat roommate ( which I think is really cute cuz like, cats!!!!) It’s really weird though because the game can break and you only use arrow keys to choose an answer and not like the cursor, so I’m probably going to change that.

ANYWAY! For my elaboration I’m going to make it a sequel to my game Saturday Fright except it’s a VN and not a twine because I wanna draw monster girls Let’s Go Lesbians!!! Here’s some doodles of all my mythical creature OCs I have ( because I was just thinking about them in class). They’re not all gonna be in the game but they’re possibly all in the same universe(?) Need to fix some of their stories and stuff because bleh my writing was pretty bad in Sophomore year when some of them were created

Below is a more unfinished sketch of what I’m hoping to maybe do with the sequel. Basically a slime girl named Serafina ( the protag of the first Saturday Fright) wants to ask a centaur named Harlow on a date >:3 Harlow works at the gym and Serafina has been going to said gym ever since the two met in Saturday Fright. So the sequel is going to be called, Saturday Fright 2: Morning Routine. ( Clever, right?)

Gameplay is gonna be the same as a twine except it’s a visual novel and probably has endings(?) We’ll have to see because I’m POSSIBLY releasing Skate & Date this month and dying from that. And Nanoreno. And other things that are school/work related soo... We’ll see how far this goes!! I’ll upload all my elaborated hw projects once I’m not so stressed out! Till next time. Have a good night. -Gensuta

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Intro to GameDevLog #5: Original Action Game ft. Me Screaming

This past week I did a LOT of things for my game, aka create literally all of the assets. Working on three games at once is difficult though so I don’t think I’ll be able to finish everything I’d like to.

I did ACTUALLY record something for the game, but you’ll have to hear it in the actual game ( because I’m not done yet >->) If it weren’t for my wonderful coworkers helping me figure out how to use the recording studio that happened to be in the office I probably would’ve gave up on it too because I’m really self conscious about my voice, but if the main characters are going to a rock concert!! There’s gotta be rock music!! I also need to make the sound effects still...ugh...

Here’s the gals with their idle animations. Aseprite was really fun to use.

The Gameplay is pretty wacky because I’m kinda burnt out, but it’s at least almost done and doing what I want!(minus the slippery controls. I was literally just using stuff from alpine skiing for movement)

I’m really tired so this devlog is probably the most informal mess thing ever but anyway I’ll explain controls for singleplayer and multiplayer modes. You shoot enemies with Morgan ( the one with wings) and you can only move left and right with her. She has small bullets she can shoot but also bullets that grow an act as like a bomb i guess?? to the enemies?? With Liliane, you use claws and legit walk close to the enemies to attack. Lilianne’s attacks etc. are what’s being a bit wack in terms of gameplay. it doesn’t feel good aT ALL ://// so i might figure something out tonight or something but I don’t know. Will have another devlog when the game is officially out on itch.io tomorrow. Stay safe and warm everyone!

-Gensuta

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Intro to GameDevlog #4: Brainstorming/Prototyping

This week for Intro to GameDev, I finished up my alpine skiing replica and jumped right into working on my original game! 

I started to program the basic things I wanted into the game like the attacks, different enemies, and the cooldown times for attacks and for when the player gets hit. I don’t have a health bar nor ticks for the player, but the player gets stunned //similarly// to alpine skiing so that you can’t move. I also created all the scenes needed for the game and realized how to select buttons using the arrow keys through the event system! In most of the games I have there’s small moments where the player has to click something and I feel that usually makes it awkward when the rest of the gameplay is using the keyboard >-> So I’ll need to remember to use this for now on.

Besides protoyping that stuff in I was trying to come up with lyrics to a song in the background ( which I wasn’t successful in doing) BUT I did mess with aseprite!

It’s Morgan! 1/2 of the protags! I don’t know if I’ll stick with this pixel style or not, but since there’s only a week we’re giving to working on this project it might stay. Nanoreno is coming up and I’m still working on Skate & Date, so I’m going to be *really* stressed this week, but hopefully all will be well by next week! ( And I’ll actually post the devlog on Friday instead of Sunday!)

Until then! Remember to take breaks!

- Gensuta