The Layabouts Blog

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Quick Words and News Ahead

Howdy folks, and good evening.

Got a lot of updates for you on the horizon, but since E3 is (more-or-less) underway, I figured maybe it’d be better to just pop in and do a quick bit of housekeeping & catch-ups until the onslaught of news has passed. You’ll probably even miss this because of E3, probably, but that’s okay! There will be much more soon enough.

We seem to have been on a bit of an arcadey “space” kick lately, with Panic on Party Planet releasing back in February, and Star Phantom at the tail-end of last month. We’ve got at least one more space-faring-adventure cooking up for you on the horizon, so, I wouldn’t anticipate a return-trip to earth any time soon. We also can’t go and forget about Block Dude X and The Amazing Launchman celebrating their birthdays last month! It’s hard to believe that these puzzle-pals have been boppin’ around for as long as they have, turning 6 and 7 respectively, but what can you do? It’d be a bit belated, but perhaps we might just go ahead and do something small to celebrate. Stay tuned for those. Maybe. Beyond that, I’m also looking to do a little bit of rejiggering on the website front, primarily on the games page. I’d expect more games and more patches to start coming with an increased regularity, so, I want to make changes to reflect a more-frequently updated release schedule. Nothing toooooo major, just a more flexible presentation. I feel like some of our current categories are a bit arbitrary, and I’d like to surface some of our personal favorite works a bit better. But now i’m just talking out loud! (Or, is it typing out loud?)

I’ve also been working very hard behind the scenes to bring you a formal update on the “large terrifying elephants in the room”. You know what I’m talking about; The Legend of Doodle and Collectems. I’m preparing a big video to breakdown all the specifics (with an accompanying blog post for those that’d rather read than watch), but for now, let me at least tell you what to expect:

Status of The Legend Of Doodle.

What’s going on with Collectems.

Other projects in the works.

Our output going forward.

These are all things you will be updated on soon. How soon? Next week soon. There’s way too much to cover here, but rest assured that I will be getting into specifics. Some specifics more specific than others, but specifics nonetheless. But, I’m afraid that’s it for today’s housekeeping. Looking forward to sharing more with you very, very soon. Until then!

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To celebrate 7 years of The Layabouts (Plus ten days), let's take a look at some of the oddest of oddities as we dredge up a few of Nate's prototypes from over the years. Releasing alongside this new video is an “incredible” GameMaker Studio 2 port for Ghost - so go on down and give it a go if you’ve got absolutely zero taste. Enjoy - and we’ll see you around the bend.

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Celebrating 15+ years of PuzzPack (and over 5 years since our release of Block Dude X) - join Joe and Hinchy in this new postmortem as they crate their way through the world of yesterday.

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Block Dude: Herald of Updates

Hello there! I come bearing news and the gift of crates.

So, we recently published an update for Block Dude X. In addition to adding a small bit of new content, this update bumps the game’s frame-rate to 60 fps (up from 30) and also includes a few other minor technical improvements. But Block Dude X is a fairly old game, one of our oldest in fact. So you might be asking yourself “why Block Dude, and why now?” Well, to be honest, this is actually an update we’ve (mostly) been sitting on for a while and just weren’t ready to publish until now. But... that’s not even the main justification for this most untimely of enhancements.

No no no, for you see, YoYo Games just recently announced the long anticipated GameMaker Studio 2. As you may know, most of our projects have been developed in GameMaker (going as far back as GameMaker 4 or 5, in some cases). While there have been a few notable exceptions, GameMaker is like a lingering spirit that never ceases to haunt our dreams (and our hard drives). Studio 2 promises a fully reworked development environment, which sounds wonderful! Working with Studio 1 has been one of our major hangups when it comes to getting Doodle finished; the game is just too damn big for the poor girl. Now, while it remains to be seen, I wouldn’t count on porting the project up to Studio 2 to fix all of our problems. It would be nice for sure, but, these things have a way of keeping themselves complicated.

But, even in the face of that possibility, this is still good news. This announcement on YoYo’s part has gotten my brain a-tickin’. What about? Well, I’ve been thinking about the slippery slope that is GAME PRESERVATION! Back when we ported the original Cylor up to GameMaker Studio in 2013, we did so out of necessity. The GameMaker 8 version of the game was having conflicts on newer operating systems (it had to do with older GameMaker games playing multiple sounds at once). This was causing consistent and irritating crashes, making it impossible for anyone on Windows 8 to play through the game. Let me tell you, few things are more depressing than someone not being able to play through your game, especially when it’s due to no fault of your own. But, we persevered. It wasn’t easy, but we made the port, and we made the game better, and all was right with the world. But... what about our other games?

Most of our older work hasn’t gotten that same treatment. We’ve been so busy with work on Doodle and Collectems and who knows what else that we haven’t really taken the time to go back and really look at the state of our work in 2016. Sure, most of it is old - very old. Approaching-ten-years-old, old, in some cases. Many of them made in feverish sprints during game jams, giving them a unique sort of jank that you can’t find anywhere else. But it’s our history, and it’s important, to me at least. And I hate that much of the work from our “formative years” has been left to languish like this. So what’s a developer to do?

That Cylor port was not easy. Far from. GameMaker has a tendency to antiquate and replace commands/functions with major updates, so in a lot of cases porting something up to a newer version can be a huge hassle. They’ve even done this between versions of GameMaker: Studio 1, which, you would think would at least maintain compatibility with itself, but no. I dread to think how far gone some of our older titles would be. Like I said earlier; these things have a way of keeping themselves complicated. I don’t know what the right solution is. Worst-case-scenario, this is a workload so significant that it just wouldn’t be worth it. Not for everything, and especially not when there’s so much else that needs our attention. Better to face the future than the past, and all that. But nevertheless, I still keep thinking about it. It persists in my mind.

That’s the why to “Why Block Dude, and why now?” If it’s probably not feasible to bring everything up-to-date (at least not right now), maybe there’s still merit in doing work to a subset of our library. Some of these titles could be a lot better - there are problems beyond them being on an outdated engine - and I’m confident that it wouldn’t take more than a few edits to elevate them beyond their current status. There’s no better way to start than by doing, and so we did. Block Dude X was the first in line, and now it’s primed and ready for a Studio 2 port sometime down the road. So who’s next?

The new Cylor, of course! Even before my existential adventure through the valley of preservation, we always wanted to do a post-release update for this guy. As is typical, we couldn’t quite cram in everything we wanted into the initial Halloween release, so it only seems natural to move onto this game next. Better balancing, controller support, more robust score saving, and additional options (like a left-handed mode) are just a few of the features I’d like to add. Get the major features in now so that when the time comes, the porting up to Studio 2 can happen without much extra baggage. Easy-peasy (I hope).

Looking even further into the future, I have a short list of other titles I’d like to give a similar treatment. That list includes:

I Died

Robo[R]Evolution

My Little Planet

Here Comes Launchman (while not a GM game, it’s in a similar boat).

Assuming things go well, I’m also debating looking into at least porting most of our older Ludum Dare project up to Game Maker: Studio. Nothing too fancy, no additional bells or whistles, just some fairly straightforward port jobs in anticipation of Studio 2. As for our other games; I personally think Cylor 1 is fine where it’s at, and of course Block Dude X has already gotten the treatment. So, I suppose that just leaves ViViD. Why not do anything with ViViD, you ask? Well... we have other plans for that game. I’ll just leave it at that for now.

Moving on; I know this Blog post has gotten rather long, but there’s still one more issue to discuss here. You see, these same concerns regarding preservation have lead me back to the well - the well of forgotten games. Specifically; older projects of ours that never made it past the pre-alpha phase. Forget released games that are languishing; how many unknown wonders have been left to rot away in the forgotten corners of our desktops?! How many whimpering executables have been zipped and caged and left alone? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

We’ve released several prototypes in the past, but there are almost as many (if not more) that have remained buried. Some of these, unfortunately, may be lost for good. Children and teens aren’t the best at preserving the past, you see (neither are faulty hard drives), but we’re doing our best to allocate what we can. Most of these prototypes are for ideas that probably will never see the light of day. If they do, it will be so much farther down the road as to render these unrecognizable, so no harm either way. Some of them have even informed projects that have released, unsurprisingly, so from that angle I find them especially fascinating.

With a lot of these older prototypes, though, I don’t think we can just dump them onto the web and leave it at that. Part of gathering everything up and looking at it all in context is debating the best way to go about releasing and discussing them. I think that context is key. Perhaps we need to take a closer look at many of them with a video of some fashion once we’ve got it all sorted? Who knows. But that’s where my head is at right now, and for the foreseeable future. We’ll take a dive into the past with these updates and prototypes until the release of GameMaker Studio 2 - and from there, we’ll see what’s next for The Legend of Doodle and beyond. At the very least, I think these eventual ports should prove to be a fruitful exercise.

But, until then, I better get back to it. Thanks for your time everyone, and I’ll see you on the other side of the hard drive. Stay gold!

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Cylor Vs. The Bullets From Hell

After a years-long sabbatical, Cylor returns in another action-packed struggle against an all-too-familiar antagonist. WELCOME TO HELL!!

That’s right; to celebrate Halloween this year, we’re releasing a brand new game for some super spooky times. I’m a big fan of the holiday, so I’ve always wanted try and do more things in the spirit of the season (hence our previous post featuring the bizarre “Halloween In May” theme), so thankfully things lined up in such a way this year that we were able to make it happen. And I must say I’m glad it did, because this project is one of my proudest, personally. This wouldn’t have been possible without the help and support of both Hinchy and Nate, the later of whom actually started this project as a prototype for school back in February. It was surprisingly far along back then, even if it did lack the presence of the now titular hero, but we spent the better part of these last few weeks pushing it even further. It’s polished up, fully featured, and ready to drag you kicking-and-screaming into the shadowy unknown! Please note that this initial release is only for Windows operating systems, but we plan to produce an updated build for Mac (and more?) in the near future. So, without further ado: please enjoy this most wonderful of nightmares. We’ll see you in Hell! (Also who, what? Doodle?! Collectems?!? Shh!! You’ll hear about those soon! Sit down and eat your candy.)

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From The Grave - Let Me Die

Greetings immortals! Today is May 31st, 2016. You know what that means, don’t you? That’s right! It’s the often overlooked not-really-a-holiday holiday I like to call, Halloween in May. To celebrate this most spooky of summertime events, I’d like to present to you all, for the first time ever, a public release of one of our canceled game prototypes.

Let Me Die (not to be confused with Suda51′s later announced Let It Die) was our attempt to build upon the foundation of our then-most recent Ludum Dare project, I Died. Back in 2013, we spent the better part of a few months toying around with this surreal little maze game. Originally we had considered simply adding some items and polish to the original LD48 project, and leaving it at that. But inspiration struck, as did perhaps a case of hubris on my part, and so off we went into the great unknown that was gory Pac-Man.

If only we’d know how things would go. It wasn’t long before Let Me Die became a textbook example of feature creep. We got far too caught up in the idea of applying rogue-like elements to this genre, and ended up bloating the project with an excess of everything. Far too many enemies, items with an abundance of minor, useless, and often barely-noticeable (or intuitive) effects, and loads of annoying trap-door events. Seriously, I don’t know what the hell we were thinking when we put in a random-chance for turrets to spawn in the middle of every stage. All of this, in addition to us hopping engines a handful of times, proved too much. Tired, beaten, and bloodied in much the same way as our skeletal protagonist, we put the project to bed, and moved on to other things. Even so, there’s something about the base ideas at work here that I still enjoy to this day. Maybe we’ll return to this project down the road, but if that day ever comes, that game won’t resemble the cacophony of ideas that is this prototype. At least, I’d certainly hope not. And with that, I suppose there’s little else for you to do but play the prototype for yourself. You can find the download for your platform of choice on the other side of this handy little link. Please be sure to read the included manual first before playing, as there’s quite a lot to parse. Enjoy yourselves, and I’ll see you on the other side of the boneyard. Happy spooks!

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In what will be our last musical preview for a while (been a lot of those, lately!) here’s a look at another wonderful tune from the Shotgun Sammy Original Soundtrack. For next week’s Monday Method, we’ll change things up with a brand new feature! See you then.

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For this week’s Monday Method, we’ve got another musical preview from The Legend Of Doodle. This track’s a real oldie. Just how old? Well, maybe this additional video will give you some idea:

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The Monday Method marches on with a musical preview from our latest Ludum Dare lovechild - a retro FPS by the name of “Shotgun Sammy and the Transmogrifiers from mars”. Assume the role of the legendary shotgun wizard and battle an army of rival martian magi. More info soon!

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The Monday Method returns with a new musical preview for The Legend Of Doodle!  (For those not in the know, the Monday Method is where we share WIP development snippets from our current projects, sometimes exploring the changes or thought process behind the items in question.)

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New Ludum Dare Game - Tamám Shud

Hey there everyone, just a quick little update for you all today. Back in December I participated in the Ludum Dare 48 hour game competition. The theme ended up being a tie between “Two Button Controls” and “Growing”, and I mostly ended up leaning towards the former with my entry. Anyway, that entry turned into the short narrative game Tamám Shud - which I have since updated and released on our various channels. This was my first time participating in Ludum Dare solo, and while the game isn’t much, I’m fairly happy with what I was able to accomplish by myself. It’s fairly short, ten minutes at the absolute most, so if you’ve got some time to spare I’s say check it out!

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Interview with The Vita Lounge

Hello all! it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Just a quick update today - some months back I spoke with The Vita Lounge about both The Legend Of Doodle and Collectems, and you can now go read the full 3-page interview in the latest issue of their magazine (for free!). It was a lovely chat, and I hope you find the discussion entertaining and enlightening. I’m afraid that’s all for now, but we’ll be back soon with more to share. Stay gold, everyone.

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Checking in, and checking out.

Hey all, how are you? I hope you’re doing well.

It’s been a while, so I thought I’d go ahead and poke my head out from the muck to let everyone know we’re still breathing. It’s been a tumultuous few months here for us. We’re in the midst of a lot of changes and, to be honest, it’s been kind of scary - but also kind of exciting. We’ve had to make a lot of big, difficult decisions. It may take some time, but I know that these changes will be for the best, for us and for our work.

We’ll have more to share with you soon, but until then, it’s back into the muck for this old Joe. Wish me luck!

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The Legend Of Doodle - Music To My Ears

Heya folks!

We’re not quite ready to provide a look at how the game’s level design has changed throughout development, so I figured we’d switch gears and explore a different area instead. We've shared a decent selection of Doodle’s soundtrack already, but we haven't really gone much further than that. So, this week, I’d like to take a brief look at the evolutionary process for the game’s music.

The vast majority of Doodle’s soundtrack was actually created before the game was even started, and even predates The Layabouts. We’ll probably get into the general history of The Legend Of Doodle at a later date, but to make a long story short: our friend Fidget created a large collection of MIDI tracks back in the day for a number of other projects that never quite got off the ground. We couldn't be more thankful to have access to those tracks, especially in the early stages of production, and his music has gone a long way in helping us find the overall mood and texture of the game. We've taken great care to preserve the feeling of these original midi tracks in our ‘higher quality’ updates, and will be including a MIDI soundtrack option for those interested in hearing the originals.

Usually, the updating process goes fairly smoothly. Sometimes it can take a few tweaks to get right. Sometimes, well, take the music from World 3 for example. The updated version of this track has been set for quite some time, but a few months ago we actually unearthed a much older attempt Zach made at updating the track that none of us even remember existing! Here, take a listen: 

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) most of our updates don’t result in multiple distinct takes like this, so I’m glad this didn't stay lost forever. Who knows, maybe there’s something else out there, waiting to be rediscovered?

Anyway, that’s enough out of me for now. I hope you've enjoyed this brief musical excursion, and I’ll see you folks next time. 

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The Legend Of Doodle - An April Update

Hello all! Joe here once again with your semi-monthly Layabouts check in!

Man, If 2015 has taught me anything so far, it’s that I should expect bad and expect bad often. Without going into detail, I've been dealing with a lot of issues in my personal life that have left me anywhere from distracted to horribly, thoroughly, exhausted. It’s prevented me from talking about work as openly as I would have liked, and for that I apologize. Despite this, work has been going very well, if quietly, and with the worst (hopefully) behind me, I fully intend on opening up the proverbial Pandora’s box.

So. 

Let’s go ahead and open that thing!

It’s been over a year now since we originally announced the The Legend Of Doodle for PlayStation Vita. To celebrate, we released a video of the game’s full opening cutscene. Hidden in there at the end was the announcement (one which I’d like to now make formally), that we’re also bringing the title to PlayStation 4! We’re very excited to share this news with everyone, and fully intend on supporting features like Cross-Buy and Cross-Save. 

But the completed in-game intro is also a huge milestone for us personally. Everything’s really starting to come together on all sides, and while we’ve taken much longer than we intended to get the game finished and out the door, I can say with confidence that it's been worth the time and effort. To illustrate what I mean, we've gone ahead and made a new comparison video for the game’s first boss battle.

Hopefully you can see how much good another year can do for something like this. And it’s not just Bobby boy either - over the past several months we've been making smart changes to pretty much every boss fight in the game. Cutting down on needless complexity, building on the strengths of each fight, and trying our best to to do something unique with each new encounter. Next week I’d like to showcase how the game’s level design has been similarly improved thanks to this extra time.

For now though, I must bid you farewell. There’s still plenty to do, so I should quit jawing and get back to it. Until we meet aggaaaaaaiiiiinnnn!~

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It's been at least fifty years since we've done one of these Developer Postmortem things. So it's about time for a new one! Here's a little Postmortem vid for My Little Planet, one of our many Ludum Dare games, made in 2012 for the theme Tiny Worlds.

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In case you missed it buried down in our birthday post, we released a brand new trailer for The Legend Of Doodle on Monday!