RhineQueen Makes Games

Games and game adjacent projects from RhineQueen.

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Tapping Out, Not Giving Up

So this might be a bit less structured than my usual fare here, but I've been doing some work on some jams recently. One of them went really well, one of them I bit off more than I could chew by a fair margin.

JAM #1: 3D Modelling

Most of the jams I did these last few weeks were focused on brushing up on my Blender skills and getting more familiar with the rendering pipeline. To that end, this jam was a great success! Both of them were for that metric. But this jam was also a lot shorter and my project was better scoped for the time I had. It was just a modelling jam, no game part, and I'm pretty happy with the results that I got! I decided to see how many pokemon I could model during the time frame, and I think 4 was a modest success, especially since I ended up with less free time than I expected.

The theme of the jam was monochrome and that set me right to doing a different colour for the pokemon's type. I'm especially happy with Oddish, but maybe I have a bit of a bias towards that particular mons. Bewear did make me regret not rigging them when it came to posing, but it probably would have taken me a lot longer if I had done that since I'm not as familiar with the rigging and animation side of blender. It's still on my todo list at some point, though maybe I should move it further up the list.

JAM #2: Spycraft

Coming hot off the heels of the first jam, I was filled with all the confidence in the world; which was retrospectively misplaced given the scope of a game jam vs a pure modelling jam.

I went in planning what I thought was simple enough. Taking inspiration from a few games that I've played recently by Dark Dome and Rusty Lake, as well as a childhood of flash classics, I figured that a single room "escape the room" style point and click puzzle would be a recipe for success. Honestly, I still don't feel too badly about the scope being too large in that respect. However, the part where I definitely overscoped was figuring that I could easily and quickly model and prerender the room's graphics and still have enough time to put everything into Adventure Game Studio.

I did not.

I do feel some pride in what I've gotten done, but with the deadline about a day away as writing this, I know that I'm not going to be able to finish for the deadline, even after cutting a handful of puzzles and items. I managed to get damn close though! I did, in fact, finish all the renders for the room and I think I did an alright job of it, all things being equal. The lighting needs work. But the models and shaders themselves are solid for my money and, most importantly, I learned a hell of a lot about how to use blender better and demystified some of the shader graph functions. In that light, it was a grand success, even if I didn't manage my time well enough to actually finish the game part.

A few of the environment shots for the game. I'm most happy with how the painting texture came out.

Another thing that I think contributed to not being able to finish this was that I had bitten off more than I could chew. Not even just with respect to the scope of the jam, but in regards to how many jams I had signed myself up for. The Spycraft jam began only 3 days after the 3D Modelling jam ended and during those three days I didn't actually take much time off between two days of streaming and a day of meal prep. During the first week of the jam, partially fuelled by hubris after the last jam, I pushed myself far too hard. And I still thought I'd have time to stream for a couple of days last week...

So come last weekend, as I'm finishing up the modelling and sweating a bit about the deadline, I ended up burning out a bit. I didn't really catch that I was so low on energy though since I was too focused on getting as much done in the little time I had left. I ended up pushing myself too hard without giving myself enough time off over the last month. A tale as old as time, I'm aware, but alas, it's easy to get caught up in the hype sometimes and it can be hard for me to identify when I'm pushing myself too hard. That's always been something that I've struggled with.

Now, all that being said, I've been taking a proper break this week. I've taken a few days off when I would usually stream, focusing on some other hobbies, and tried to sleep a bit more. I've been feeling better now, and leaving the jam did take a bit of unnecessary stress off my shoulders. However, now I've got a nearly done game. Mostly all the assets are done, the puzzles are all planned out, and I still think the idea I have is pretty cool. Even if I don't finish it for the jam, I think I do still want to finish this game. If I pace myself better and work at a better pace, I'm hopeful that it should only take me another week or so to finish it, but if I do move forward with this game, it won't be with a specific deadline in mind, so I'm not promising anything yet.

For now, I'm going to keep resting for another day or two, then see how I feel about this game. If I do end up coming back to it, you'll hear about it here for sure. And if not, then I'm still super confident that what I've learned here has given me a lot of useful techniques and notes to put towards future projects.

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Proximity Alert is Here!

Proximity Alert by RhineQueen

An alien trucker makes an emergancy pitstop.

Proximity Aert is a short, comedic, point and click adventure that I made to get familiar with this kind of game and Adventure Game Studio. You take the reigns of Gorp, an interstellar trucker when he encounters a dangerous swarm of meteors and must help him ret his ship in working order. I hope that you enjoy this as much as I liked making it! Next year I'll be getting stuck into what I hope will be my first commercial release, so keep your eyes peeled for more updates in the near future!

[bookwyrminspiration]

hey. hey. tell me something good that happened today. doesn’t matter how small

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Proximity Alert Soon and the Road Ahead

Work on Proximity Alert has been trucking along quite smoothly recently. The AGS rebuild has proven to be a real boon, even moreso than I had initially expected. Despite it's quirks, the engine has proven to be robust and has let me really focus on the art and writing. That has helped speed along progress and I've now got a game that looks and feels much more complete.

I've got a basic set of animations implemented, the core gameplay progression is there, and I'm fairly confident that I've accounted for any obvious bugs. Next on the docket is putting in a basic title and end screen so the game doesn't just abruptly quit when you finish.

At that point, I intend to open up the Itch page for playtesting and while I'm gathering feedback and bugs, I'll be going through my polish backlog and see what I have time to spit shine. My plan is that one way or another, I'm going to finish and release this fully by the end of October. At that point I'm gonna stop developing any new features and any updates will purely be bug fixes. I've decided this since I want to wrap this project up soon so that I have a month or two before the end of the year to mess around with some hobby projects and plan for 2026.

What am I planning for? My first commercial release! I wanted to prepare for this properly by doing games like Proximity Alert, AGBAS, and Project Marl to sample a handful of engines and try to find one that had a good balance of ease of use, speed of production, and good documentation. As promising as Godot has been, the steeper investment in programming backend has been the part I keep bouncing off. I may still practise with it in the background, but if I'm being honest I'm more interested in storytelling and making art than figuring out how to implement a robust and optimized save/load system or figuring out how to optimize culling.

So after some deliberation, I am likely going to commit to at least a demo to guage interest and scope in a point and click mystery game. I think it's a good balance between something I'm interested in, a genre that isn't too over saturated these days, and ability to tell an engaging interactive story. If I'm gonna be honest, the biggest hurdle in my mind is gonna be promotion. Ideally I want this to eventually be something that earns me some proper income and unfortunately that means promotion, advertising and marketing. And if programming is out of my wheelhouse, marketing is something that is even less familiar and comfortable for me.

Especially recently, I've been trying to avoid most social medias. TikTok was like turbocrack for my ADD, I only use Facebook for logins these days, and never really had much interest in twitter or insta or other social media. Self promotion doesn't really come naturally to me so it's probably something that I should look into and work on during the next few months. Aside from my youtube channel I haven't really tried to maintain much of a public presence since I was in college. Even then I wasn't particularly good at maintaining that presence on youtube. My hope is that being medicated will make that easier to focus on, but who knows.

Regardless, I'm really hoping that the future is bright and if I'm gonna be making games (hopefully) professionally, I get to give myself a studio name as if I have a studio. Like all good indie devs do. So look forward to the future of Cowgod Games. It will be bright and spooky!

[demilypyro]

hey if a game says "-33%" then the price should not still be in the 50s that is some absolute bullcrap

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Discounted to full price.

[safetynotguaranteedx]

[dittography-direwolf]

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Give Me Documentation or Give Me Death

So this is a little less development focused and a bit for of a vent, but the update part regarding Proximity Alert is that I have made a decision to switch from Popochiu, the Godot plugin that I was using, to Adventure Game Studio. In a lot of ways that is a downgrade I'll admit. The software is older, clunkier, slower, and more limited. However, I'm pretty used to that kind of thing having made AGBAS in RPGMaker XP. Old software isn't that hard to use, especially when it has strong documentation.

Despite how promising and straightforward Popochiu is, the documentation is really lacking. There is a basic tutorial in the docs, but it doesn't go over a lot of relatively basic fuctions, and the coding documentation is incomplete and the search doesn't seem to work. The docs don't even include reference on how to change rooms anywhere that I could easily find. The fallback is something that I see more frequently recently, especially with indie projects and it's quickly becoming a bugbear of mine.

A Discord server =/= Documentation.

It's not even close. It's rather frustrating to have to try and search through months of old discord posts to maybe find something like what you're trying to achieve. Or failing that, posting in the troubleshooting channel(if they even have one) and hoping that someone replies sometime. Meanwhile, the Discord is the only place that update logs are posted. If you're lucky, that server will have a dedicated channel for updates and announcements, but more often it's just posted in the General channel with an @ everyone and then left buried under other messages.

Anyways, all that is to say that I'm more than willing to put up with clunky old software and proprietary code that's a bastard of C++ and Python or something, if that bastard codebase has thorough documentation. Being able to solve my own problems with a well organized set of detailed instructions and references is far too crucial for how I work for me to find the chaos of a chatroom anything close to a substitute. So for now, I'm moving forward with AGS since it lets me work more effectively on my own without having to search through a dozenish discord pages and scour an unrealted video in a language that I don't speak(common monolingual L) to find code that isn't even the point of the video so that I know how to change rooms.

In AGS I've been able to rebuild what I had built in Popo in less time and with less frustration, confusion and searching. Everything I need is pretty much right there and the bonus is that I don't even have to learn how to fill gaps that Popo doesn't cover, like title screens, much more easily. This has put me back a bit on this hobby project, so I'm not really gonna dedicate as much time as I initially thought on beautifying or small environmental animations. So in light of that I'm probably gonna steam ahead with some more simple animations and fewer of them so that this doesn't take more than another month hopefully.

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Not-so-Awesome Possum

Well, it seems like Mawfeeders is on somewhat of a hiatus for the indeterminate future. My friend who I've been working on this with is currently out of power at their home due to a possum killing itself by eating through a cable. As far fetched as that sounds, given where they live, I trust that it's real. But, wow, truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes.

So while that gets sorted out, I've been refocusing my efforts towards Proximity Alert. I've finished all the art for it and gotten the Popochiu project set up in the bare bones. Hopefully it should only be a few days to set up the rest and once I have the basic functionality working, then I get to plan and script out the various interactions. Maybe plan some fun animations. I always loved Humongous Entertainment games for how many off the wall animation bits that were scattered throughout the background. Even if it ends up being a lot of animation work, it'll be good practice and I really like how interactive it makes everything feel.

If all goes well, I should have something alpha-playable in a few weeks and hopefully have it finished in a month, maybe two depending on how much animation I decide to add. This isn't gonna be a crazy extensive project and the last thing I want is for this little hobby project to bloat out into months on months, especially now that I'll be dedicating much more of my work time on it.

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Refactor and Roster

So, to what I expect is little surprise, a multiplayer wave based team shooter was probably a little ambitious for a team of three amateurs. So Mawfeeders has been going a shift in focus to a singleplayer, more linear experience in the vein of some of the classic shooters like Quake and Doom that we were already taking inspo from visually. I feel a lot better about the scope of the project now too and it's greatly cut back the workload for everyone involved.

Most relevantly to me, the modeller, is that the enemy roster has been cut down from like 20-something to only like tenish. And with a more manageable scope I feel a lot more optimistic about the prospects of finishing the project and more energized in what I've been doing since. I feel like the project has a good size and scope for our team's skills and also for getting it done in a reasonable amount of time.

I won't share much too early, but I am proud of the work I've done on the enemies and felt that I wanted to show that off a bit. I still haven't bothered to go through and change any of the surface material settings so forgive the plasticy default principled bsdf. So in no particular order, and to quote an old article on the Quake 2 enemies from PCPowerPlay, here's the Beastie Boys! (names pending)

The Mawfrog - This small, squat foe waddles slowly through the underbrush, hopping ever closer until it can launch out of the underbrush and forcefully introduce your face to it's beartrap like jaws.

The Cyberzerker - A cybernetically enhanced human driven into a digital frenzy. This barbarous assailant will charge you with their vicious cyber-blades, ignoring any threat to launch a reckless full frontal assault.

The Civilian - None are free from the touch of the Maw and even regular people are warped into mindless, shambling killing machines. Their arms have mutated into hooked bone spurs that they use to gouge their quarry.

The Soldier (Boom Guy) - A corporate soldier, now lost to madness and mutation. They have become one with their company provided firearm and now turn it's corporate fury on anyone and anything.

The Mawlamute - Not even man's best friend can escape the mutative effects of the Maw. Dogs and wolves alike find themselves warped into howling, drool slathering, mindless eating machines. (So not much has changed...)

Civic Defense Drone - This machine once kept the corporation approved level of peace on the colony, but now, threats are everywhere and it's overloaded targeting AI has identified YOU as the greatest threat to civic order.

The Killipede - The ground trembles as this once humble detrivore breaches the surface, hungry now for more than leaf matter. Watch your step when this awful arthropod is about, lest you become it's next meal.

And that's all for now! I'm expecting that the next bit of work will be mostly focused on level design and iterating a vertical slice for testing, though I'm not sure how long that'll take since I'm not doing the level building myself. My next bit of work is level assets which is less exciting to post about so I may not have much to about it.

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

A Brief Lifelog | Are We So Back? | RIP MARL(for now)

I don't intend to do a lot of these real life things. I'm not the most public person, but I did want to give a little update since I've been developing again and maybe I'll even be updating this blog a bit more frequently.

So why do I keep ghosting y'all?

The long and short of it, about a month ago I got diagnosed with ADD, finally and to no one's surprise, and started Vivance to help. I dare say that it has helped quite a lot. The last month has been much better for focus, mood, and productivity and I've actually been applying that to game development more. It's felt really good to be making things more earnestly than I've been able to before.

Have I been working on MARL?

No. I was making MARL in Easy FPS Editor, but the dev has announced that there is no more serious work being done on EFPSE, instead they're working on a more robust engine in a similar vein. I'll likely return to MARL at some point once Easy Game Builder is out and a bit more polished, but for now, MARL is on hiatus.

If not MARL then what?

My attention over the past month or two has been twofold, but I've been trying to keep myself focused on Godot for the time being. To celebrate getting on my new meds I made a game for the Neurodiversity Pride Canada Jam about ADD and old timey prospectors. A friend of mine did some voice work for that game and while I should have put some of the voice lines on a cooldown, I'm still really happy with Denrite Trail. It's unironically the best jam game I've ever made and I've really proud of the work I did, even if I'm not much of a programmer.

More currently though, I have two things in the pipes. One has been a hobby project I've started to hone in my spritework a bit more. It's a fairly lighthearted and lightweight point and click game using a plugin called Popochiu. It's mostly for practise, to familiarize myself with Popochiu, and to get some more practice in for a future supernatural mystery game that I've been wanting to make for a while. I really like point and clicks(I've been playing and loving Sam and Max Save the World recently) and I'm pretty excited to make some. The future mystery game, not this little goof, may also be my first commercial project, or at least my first personal commercial project.

The second game I've been working on I've been working on with a couple of friends is a bit more ambitious, but also not strictly my project. I've been doing visual design and modelling for a scifi multiplayer FPS that my friend is heading. I'm not sure exactly how much I should talk about it given the still fairly early stage of development, but I'm still really happy with the work I've been doing there. This project is intended to be a commercial project and it's got a more specific timeline than my hobby project. If all goes well, I may be posting about it's release in a few months.

Regardless of which one comes out first or comes out at all, I have not been as idle and distracted as I used to be. It feels good to have some creative energy back and it feels better to be able to sit and focus more regularly. I'm expecting that I'll be more active here at least for updates, but I'm still figuring out what kind of devlog works best for my new, medicated, work schedule. I honestly don't know if I'll be returning to Youtube. I did like making videos, but they're a time consuming process that takes a lot of time and energy off of my actual development. However, I have been meaning to get back to streaming again. I don't know when exactly, but likely I'll reassess my schedule, energy and ability to stream once I've wrapped up the group FPS project I'm working on since that is taking most of my work hours these days.

Whenever I'm back, and whether I'm back at all in the public sense, this is a new era for me. New meds are working, my brain is working, and the game juice is flowing.

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Marl Devlog 2

Hello again, buds!

Since last update, I've gotten a more clear idea and iteration of the core gameplay loops for the game plus some visual basics and more interesting enemies. As well, I've gotten a much better idea for what the game I might call Corpse Crew is going to look like from a big picture planning perspective.

So, what is a day in the life of a Corpse Crewmember like? First off, you talk to your Quartermaster to get your assignment, enter a quarantined location, dispatch the hordes of skeleton monsters and then return back to clock out. Seems simple enough, right? That's where the past few weeks of my work comes in!

The moment to moment fighting skeletons is intended to be supported by some resource management, mild puzzle solving, and navigating the environment to form a strong trio of secondary mechanics.

To the first end, resource management, your lantern is taking the starring role in that department for now. The city is choked by a vision limiting smog that your lantern can help cut through. Mechanically, the lantern moves back the fog distance, allowing you to see further and catch enemies coming from a distance, though it slowly drains oil while lit and without it your vision and reaction window is limited.

The way that the lantern actually interacts with the fog and enemies is a bit of a bodge right now though and has some awkward side effects. I'm currently brainstorming a different approach that's a bit less rinky dink and more reactive, but time will tell how that works out. I may not even keep it as a held weapon in the long run...

Backing up the lantern oil in resources to manage are healing cacti called dune buds and weapon ammo, though those are less fleshed out for now.

The second pillar is puzzle solving and boy howdy is this a case where I ran face first into the brick wall at the edges of EFPSE's limitations. Given the early industrial, steampunkish vibes of the game, I had initially started drafting puzzle mechanics where you direct and move steam through pipes in a level to power and control various puzzle elements, level obstacles, or machines. It was a pretty sick system and theoretically easy.

Theoretically being the killer word here, as most solutions that I could come up with ended up hitting the same wall that woudl require me to make a whole bunch of visually identical, but unique game objects with individual scripts for each game object in each puzzle on each level in a way that was unwieldy and unfeasible.

So, failing that and suitably humbled by the limits before me, I reassessed and figured out first what I COULD do, not what I WANTED to do. But every new obstacle is an opportunity to reapproach and redesign and learning to work inside of occasionally frustrating limitations is part of the game dev industry.

Ultimately what I ended up with is an old, but reliable selection of keys and locks, buttons to open doors, and passwords hidden in the environment. I feel like retrospectively that's for the best in a way. The original steam puzzle was sick as hell, but it would have meant designing a lot of relatively unique environmental puzzles. Which is outside of the scope I set for myself early on.

This is about learning 3D modelling and such, though I am going to pocket that concept to try it out in an environment that's either more versatile and or that I'm more familiar with.

Anyway, on to the third pillar, which is so far the earliest in iteration. Navigating the environment. Your main goal in each level is to kill everything so that the living dead can't spread, and that requires you to be thorough in your exploration. Ideally I'd like to have a system that could tell you about where the last few enemies that you're looking for are, but I have a slight suspicion that might be another steam puzzle situation. For now, I'm relying on my level design to guide the player to areas that need attention, though I'm going to be hoping that I can find a way to locate enemies if it's needed.

This first level that I've made is fairly straightforward and is based off of my ideas for a tutorial level for the final game/eventual demo/vertical slice. Exploration and level design are going to be my next main focus, and one thing on my mind in that respect is secrets. Everyone loves a good hidden room with a stash of loot, some health, or a bit of lore and while I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do for secrets specifically, developing them is pretty high on my list.

I have also begun giving the enemies themselves some attention in their brain. The current system that I have makes the enemies enter a staggered state if they take enough hits. I'm not sure if I'm one hundred percent on that idea yet though and it is a little bit janky. I've been thinking over a few different things and I am definitely going to be revisiting the enemy AI much more, but for now, they should be a bit more interesting than the default behaviour.

This newest playtest prototype is meant to lay the groundwork for all three pillars coming together to form the first frame that I can build off of. There's a whole playable, not just testable, level here. My plans for the longer term future have also started to solidify a bit. Initially I wasn't exactly sure how far I was going to take this beyond learning a fun new engine and getting more familiar with 3D, though I've put some more thought in and have the bones (HAH) of a production plan.

The primary goal of Project Marl is going to be to create a vertical slice demo to release publicly. It will be probably one, maybe two levels long and feature a limited selection of enemies and weapons to showcase the intended early game and keep scope creep in check. Depending how I'm feeling and what, if any larger reaction I get to the demo, I may take this project further or do something else. I've got other ideas, but if Marl is worth taking further than a demo, that could be sick.

But for now, I plan to get this nice small and manageable package to a relatively polished state and see what people think of it. For the time being, you can play this newest prototype by joining my game dev discord server. Follow here for more updates as I've got them hot and fresh. I'm also live on twitch almost every Tuesday and Thursday, playing whatever the wheel tortures me with, so follow me on twitch for Spookie live in technicolour.

Thank you so much for reading, but I need to get to work pushing this game as far as I can within EFPSE's limits. Stay spooky, buds! Peace out! - Spookie

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Here's the previous devlog I made on Marl. Still happy with it from a personal perspective, but it's a lot of work for not much reception.

Maybe taking a break from video production will help me get over the post Widefort dieoff of my channel.

[rhinequeenmakesgames]

Getting Started(again)

I've been having a hard wall of creative block when it comes to making videos lately so I'm starting up this blog to try doing text devlogs.

Devlogs are nice because they give me milestones to pause and organize my thoughts on a project into something presentable and reminisce on what I've done already. Though I've found I've had some struggles getting videos recorded and done. Part of it is dysphoria and not really loving how my voice sounds, but more so videos take a longer time than I would really like. That kind of time I would rather focus on the actual game dev itself. If I think it's helpful, I'll likely do smaller clips to embed in these posts for the purposes of showing off things that need it. For now though, It's easier, faster and more searchable for me to organize my thoughts in text.

I'll be updating this with Project Marl/Corpse Crew devlogs soon, starting with the video that I did for Prototype 1 and then a devlog post for Proto 2, which was going to be a video, but I've been spinning wheels on that for like 2 weeks and I haven't been updating the game in that time. So, I'm pivoting my approach and getting back to dev sooner.

My big thanks go out to you if you are still following me here. Especially since I know that most of buds are from the old Widefort videos. but the Widefort videos started out with Tumblr posts first so as far as I'm concerned, this is getting back to roots.

Peaceout - Spookie