I made a game about ramen bc everybody loves ramen OF COURSE YOU DO
SO, I am super excited to announce that my first and only solo developed game Ramen Rush is finally published and available to play for free on the Google Play Store!
I started learning game dev in July from scratch and began working on this title in Dec and it's been WILD.
THANK YOU all you wonderful people who have been following along, I hope you enjoy my little pixel game <3
I've learned an incredible amount of stuff and I'm stoked to make more games and see what I can turn Bowfish into. If you're interested in making games or wanna know how I made stuff in Ramen Rush, don't be shy I'd love to chat!
I am actually one (1) WHOLE Game Developer(TM) now guys, this is i n s a n i t y
I’m almost ready for my next round of game testing, please let me know if you’re interested in helping out! This is a mini game I am currently solo developing for Android only.
Super proud to share my very first prototype of a game!!
It’s missing tons of things but it’s actually 100% playable which is just wild to me
I am developing this game for Android and if any kind souls are interested in game testing and leaving feedback, please DM me!
edit: Thank you so much to those who reached out to test my little game! I currently have plenty of feedback and I am working on patching things up for 0.0.2. I am really warmed by the kindness and support of this little community c:
- Added 2D lighting (day/night/weather system now possible)
- Made this campfire and a bunch of other art
- Added collectible plants
- Updated item pickup system + UI
- Attempted and failed to create RPG style inventory system multiple times
01/29/21 Edit:
Bowfish has been on hiatus as I focus on my ramen android game to ship in early 2021. Things are definitely going very well and I am feeling on track :)
My learning experience with the ramen game so far has helped me truly understand what will be required of me to complete Bowfish. I have some ideas that could be viable for a high quality solo developed game but I’m not 100% sure. I plan to work on small mobile games that take <6 months to solo develop for now to keep learning and adjusting my expectations and understanding my capabilties.
In other words, we’ll just have to see.
Poor laptop cannot handle recording gameplay at non-toaster quality anymore, so videos will just be stills for now. For reasons unknown to my newbie little self, the game runs at 100-200fps in the editor when not recording (using OBS studio) but then goes down to 50-60fps with major stutter when recording.
*shrug*
Technical issues aside, after fighting with myself for a few weeks I’m beginning to come to a consensus on how to design my inventory system. I originally intended for it to be pretty complex, but figuring out the details has kept me in a state of analysis paralysis, which is pretty much the worst place the be. The pressure to make this the absolute best game that I could ever possibly make is really crippling some days (or weeks), and it’s been tough to remind myself to be realistic, focus on simplifying, and make sure I still have enough momentum to finish.
To get a better idea of what “realistic” is, I’ve been playing through a bunch of indie games this past month. Honestly, it’s been pretty shocking. When I finish the game and get to the credits, I’ve always severely underestimated the number of people that worked on the game. A one hour long game that supposedly was “solo developed” over the course of 6 months... actually ends up listing 5+ people under art, writing, sound, etc. in the credits. A four hour long game that supposedly was developed by a “two-person team” actually has 30+ people listed in the credits. I might just be real dumb, but I was under the impression that “solo developed” really did mean that the credits would only list one person. At least, that’s what I had planned for Bowfish :l
- First enemy! I call them fishy blobs or sometimes jellies
- Jellies is probably what people will end up calling them
- Ripples have a 50/50 chance of spawning either 1-3 fish or 1-3 jellies
- Discovered that scripting enemy AI is quite painful
- Am proud of my jellies nonetheless
- Still in game design jail
I’ve been focusing on game design since the last update, so less to showcase, but still a pretty big milestone!
For game design, the progress is slow. A couple of things I’ve been doing:
- Getting involved with the online game dev community. The community is really thriving and people have been incredibly generous with their feedback! As nice as it is to get feedback from non-game devs, most of the time I’m not able to work with the advice because the effort to payoff ratio is way too high. I’ve quickly learned that videogames are very deceiving in that some of the most common or seemingly simple mechanics can actually require a lot of work. Conversely, sometimes all it takes to create something totally unique and cool is a single line of code. It's extremely unintuitive how games are made, but slowly I’ve been developing a sense of how much work it takes to make a game of various sizes/types, which has been helping me shape up my game.
- Watching videos. I’ve already been watching video tutorials for Unity, but I’ve began watching tons and tons of game trailer videos + game design videos to absorb as many ideas as I can and see how other games are designed, especially for modern mixed genre games. I’m shooting for a mixed genre game since my controls are pretty atypical and I want to build the game around them.
- Reading game reviews. What seems fun in concept does not necessarily translate to fun in experience. It’s much easier to create a frustrating experience than one that is both fun and challenging, and I’ve been building a list of “don’t”s and “do”s based off of negative and positive game reviews.
- Playing more games! I’ve been paying more attention to how games have created their beginning/tutorial and how the game introduces its mechanics. I’ve also been keeping note of things like pacing, how certain levels/areas feel and why, and of course design. Level design, sound design, art design, and progression design.
So far, I feel like I’m at a point where I’m beginning to truly understand the amount of work it takes to finish each of the designs I come up with for Bowfish. Unfortunately, my conclusion is that I’ve been far too ambitious for my just-me team, so I’ve been working on downscaling/changing my overall scope and thinking hard about my mechanics to really be creative and maximize the amount of fun and interesting gameplay I can get out of them. I’m currently hoping for something that is going to be snappy, quick, but also peaceful when you want it to be.
- Attempt to catch feesh with bare hands and be juked by feesh
- Bamboo tree is no longer imaginary
- Dust
So after creating the boat in my last update, I realized I wanted a couple of things:
1. For the player to sometimes travel by boat
2. To enforce boat travel by punishing players if they fall into deep water
3. To visualize a way for players to see what is deep water
4. To create lilypad platforms that sink into the water if stood on too long, resulting in the player falling into deep water
Although my original design was based on only being able to see above the water’s surface (because fishing), I felt like these gameplay mechanics were fun enough to compromise and put in an underwater cross section. I also decided that if I was going to let you see underwater, then I was going to let you see little fishies that react to you and things that fall into the water :)
The trade-off was getting rid of my original plan to use the water’s reflection to see objects placed high up in the trees (like birds nests or fruits) that would be off-camera if you were just walking around on the ground. In the end, I think this is a nice mechanic for bonus items but is probably too subtle to be used as a main mechanic.
I’m really happy with the way the underwater area has turned out so far and I do plan on adding it to my parallax effect as well as creating an animated waterline (...once I figure out how to).
As for overall game design, I feel like I have a new game layout and plot every other week as I create new assets that reveal new gameplay mechanics that inspire new assets to create. I understand that the recommendation is to keep your first game simple, but adding new mechanics has been a lot of fun and I view Bowfish more as a personal learning exercise than a software product.
- Created fish spawn with rippling effects + collision
- Created fish sprite with skeletal animations + collision
- Temporarily adjusted background color in Unity to help particle systems look more visible, will need to re-color background asset in Photoshop
- (not shown) Made a fish ragdoll using the sprite skin skeleton, am hoping to utilize this in the cooking portion of the game
- Moved project from Unity 2019 to Unity 2020 (hooray for dark theme)
Feels great to finally add in the fish! This gif is exactly what I’ve been envisioning from Day 1 (although there are still plenty of art assets and particle systems I plan to add).
- Imported asesprite animations and fit them to controls
- Made bow equip animation play at start before player controls enable
- Blend tree for pulling animation based on pull vector magnitude
- Arrow release animation if pull vector magnitude > 1
- No release animation if pull vector magnitude < 1 (and no arrow gets shot)
- Created head tilt rotation based on 1/3 of bow rotation
Nothin’ better than clean, responsive controls and animations.
So I spent a lot of time thinking about the overall game design and made the bittersweet decision to remove the movement controls to pursue a more arcade style layout. Although I really like the idea of an open world sidescroller game, it doesn’t mesh well with drag/release controls + made implementing animations extremely difficult. Hopefully, there will be a place in another part of the game for my walk animations.
Having to undo my movement work was a big hit to momentum but totally worth it. I was stumped for nearly the whole week trying to figure out how to import my animations to fit both control schemes. It wasn’t until after I scrapped the movement controls that I started making progress again and got back on track.
Even with the movement controls gone, implementing the animations ended up being pretty complicated. The sprite had to be broken down into 5 different layers and I ended up creating 2 animators (one for the front arm, one for the torso) and 3 different scripts to get everything working and looking smooth.
All said and done, I’m pretty happy with the final result and consider this the final draft of my “first pass” for the basic player controls and animations.
So I started making a 2D pixel art game. Welcome to my new Dev blog!
No official name, but the unofficial name is Bowfish.
(TLDR and Dev log with pretty gifs at bottom)
Hello internet, friends, and 2020 -- those of you that have been following me all this time know that I’ve been doing art for a loooong time. Even before I got into digital art in 2010, I’ve been drawing with paper and pencil for as long as I can remember and probably started playing video games right at the same time. For reference, my earliest memories of video games consist of Lemmings 3D on PS1, followed shortly by Rayman and Spyro the Dragon.
I’m still a big Spyro fan, also pretty sure this is how I became obsessed with dragons in general.
Science based dragon MMO girl, wherever you are -- I feel you, I am you.
Basically, I’ve been playing video games all my life (to the detriment of my parents) and I owe it to gaming for igniting my early artistic ambitions. In fact, I remember learning how to draw by copying the character art of Neopets and Sonic Advance before one day stumbling upon one of my dad’s Game Informer magazines and being blown away by the art that I saw in there (particularly the WoW art). I’m pretty sure that was when I was first introduced to Big Boy™ game art and instantly thought, “Whoa, I want to be able to draw like that”.
Later, when I got my first drawing tablet and started making digital art, it became “I want to draw for a video game”.
Even later, when I learned that being a video game artist was not a very realistic career path and opted to pursue a bachelors degree in biology instead of art, it became “I want to draw for a video game... on the side”.
Even later-er, when I got my degree in 2017 and started working full-time and realized that work saps you of all energy and motivation to work on projects at home, it became “I want to draw for a video game... some day”.
Well, today here we are in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, I got furloughed from my biology job due to the quarantine. I spent four months passing time, thinking that I’d go back to work soon. But by the end of July, I was at wit’s end of what to do with myself after getting burnt out on a number of hobbies, games, shows, books, etc. without spiraling into some very expensive hobbies (hello aquariums) with the money I wasn’t making. I badly needed to find something productive to do that I thought would also benefit me in the long run i.e. post-quarantine, and unfortunately I couldn’t work on wet lab techniques at home.
“Learn to code” is what my parents have said to me about a thousand times for the past 5 years. “Learn to code” is what I did try for about two weeks with Code Academy a few years ago before realizing that none of what I was learning was going to stick because I wasn’t programming in any part of my daily life. As a biologist, in evolution we like to call this “if you don’t use it, you lose it”.
I know all too well about how coding is one of the best skills you can learn. However, I also know myself all too well to know that learning code for the sake of learning code wasn’t going to work for me. I wanted to wait to learn when the right situation presented itself, ideally when I would have an opportunity to use it almost every day at like a job or something.
Well, one of my good fellow artist (and biology) friends had recently taken the plunge into creating his first video game Meganura earlier in the year. I was (and still am) seriously -- and I cannot emphasize this enough -- impressed by his progress, dedication, and ability to learn coding for this game. Or more frankly, I was seriously impressed by his dedication and progress in to learning how to code for this game.
Meganura in all it’s crispy pixel-y goodness. Man, my friends are talented.
I dwelled on this for a while.
I always considered making a game to be out-of-reach because I absolutely could not muster up the motivation to learn a single drop of code without being paid to do so after 1) being beaten over the head by “learn how to code” for so long and 2) having already tried and given up in the past.
But as it got harder to sleep well, eat well, and feel happy during the quarantine, I feel like I hit a rock bottom where I felt like if I didn’t make a big effort to find a new purpose, then I was probably going to become depressed. To preface this, I have experienced depression before, and ever since I got out it has been my goal in life to never experience it again.
The only way I was going to survive this quarantine was to give myself a new “job”.
I already had a creative mind and the skills to create art and animations for a game. I already had a lifetime of game playing experience that had formed a detailed list of specific mechanics and visual details that I knew I wanted or didn’t want in a game. I already had an analytical and detail-oriented mind (thanks biology... or thanks videogames?) that liked to plan and build things.
All it would take is just a little bit of code...
If you’ve read this far, thanks for listening and I hope some of you hear yourselves in my story.
TLDR;
I am just a daytime biologist and hobby digital artist with zero coding experience.
I’m extremely proud to say that since 07/29/20, I have been successfully developing and coding my own 2D pixel art video game in Unity and am in full swing!
This is the start of my dev blog, where I’ll be logging my progress and thoughts throughout this journey for like-minded and aspiring individuals.
My Goals:
- To create everything from scratch -- art, scripts, etc.
- To create a game about bow hunting with intuitive drag/release controls
- To create a game that has cooking and campfires
- To create a game with pretty water graphics
- To create a game that has sushi and cats
- To have a playable demo by mid 2021 (my guess for the end of quarantine)
How I’ve been learning C#:
I have been following along with YouTube tutorials to create a base script and then looking up things in Unity’s scripting documentation to expand and modify my code to achieve exactly what I want. I’ve been learning C# and how to read documentation through almost entirely pattern recognition (e.g. mimicking and experimenting with code I’ve copied from tutorials and recognizing keywords in documentation) and turning to Google or my Tech Career Peers™ for help when I get stuck or to clarify things.
The key thing is that even after copying some code, I read the documentation and figure out how every line of code in my script works before moving on.
This is because after spending a few days of looking up YouTube tutorials, I realized there were no tutorials for the exact bow controls that I wanted. Instead, I ended up watching multiple tutorials and learned how all of their scripts worked before combining and modifying pieces together. Then, I started relying entirely on documentation to write lines of code.
I don’t know how many original lines of code I’ve written so far, but there are so many now and I am so proud of all of them.
So anyway, here’s what’s happened over the past 2-3 weeks.
Dev Log:
7/29/20
- Came up with an idea for a game
7/30/20
- Installed Unity and started watching Unity tutorial videos
7/31/20
- Created water shader via shader graph (no coding required!)
- Created a basic background, player sprite, bow sprite, and arrow sprite in Photoshop
08/03/20
- First time coding in C#
- Struggle to code in Notepad++, switched to Visual Studio Code
08/06/20
- Created physics based slingshot controls for the bow and arrow with a line renderer bowstring
- Colliders!
08/09/20
- Unable to find a way to pull arrow back horizontally (-X) regardless of mouse Y movement (OnMouseDown)
- Decided that slingshot controls are for slingshots, not bows and arrows
- Scrapped physics based slingshot controls due to overcomplication (rip)
08/10/20
- Created new projectile based controls that still include drag/shoot physics
08/11/20
- Limited rotation of the bow while aiming to max 45° and min -45°
- Developed distaste for vector algebra
- Made it so that if you don’t drag far enough, you won’t release an arrow
08/12/20
- Created a trajectory line coming off the bow
- Made arrows fade away after colliding
- Created git repository to keep all project files backed up on github (Don’t wait to do this! Should’ve been done on day 1)
08/14/20
- Added physics and collider to player
- Allow you to face and move left/right with the A and D keys + updated bow controls to match
- Created left/right movement while aiming + updated bow controls to match
- Created mouse drag line for development use
- Created waterline
- Made it so the bow resets to it’s default position if you haven’t used the bow for over 2 seconds
08/15/20
- Updated Player sprite in Photoshop
- Obtained Asesprite
- Created walk animation
08/16/20
- Created bow walk, bow equip, and bow unequip animations
