I’ve made some steady progress since the last post a little over a week ago, but I still feel as though I am a little behind where I should be if I want to get this out by the end of October. Pretty much all the systems are functional and I’m spending most of my time additional enemies and random features to increase replayability.

Stuff Added

• Leveling Up
• Bosses every 10 levels
• Time Remaining Progress bar
• Labyrinth Levels (Floors 10 – 20)
• Several new enemies

Stuff to work on

• Adding more enemies
• Adding more bosses
• Come up with a level type for Floors 20-30 and 30-40
• Adding cool stuff for the player to randomly encounter
• Audio

Here a couple screen shots:

The UI is a little busy right now (There are 3 progress bars), but I’m having a hard time coming up with a layout that I like. I’ll probably end up sticking with something similar to what it is now.

2 weeks ago I presented my project for the October Challenge: selling the first copy of my “multiplayer game making tool” CraftStudio, by the end of the month.

CraftStudio is built in C# using XNA and Lidgren. The client runs on Windows only (for now!). The server runs on pretty much any platform with Mono support.

People have been building & painting some dragon models to try and see if the modeling tools are good enough to build a complex model. And to see if we could do better than Notch . Here’s one of them:

A dragon model by @schouillette

So, what have I been up to code-wise?

• Spent a lot of time improving model editing. There are now transform handles which allow editing models by dragging stuff around. I had to go through lots of matrix & projection stuff, but it was worth it .
• There’s now an integrated news system in the client. It pulls news from the master server (which itself gets them from a SQLite database).
• Lots of improvements to the UI framework: smooth scrolling, text layout performance improvements, splitters to allow resizing panes, etc. The whole framework is available on Codeplex under the MIT license. Feel free to use it for your own projects!
• Mostly importantly, I’ve been working on map editing support for the better part of the last two weeks, and I just made a new release available. See for yourself:

An alien space ship map

Since I’m now working full time as an indie, I’ve also started working on setting up a company, but it looks like it will take some more time.

I have looked at payment processing platforms too. I’d love to go with Stripe.com which has awesome developer support and, it seems, a great team behind it. Sadly they won’t be available in my country (France) by the end of the month. I could go with PayPal but I’ve read multiple indie horror stories with selling unfinished products (Minecraft and Project Zomboid, to name a couple). If anyone has advice on this, I’d love to hear it!

I’m not sure when exactly I decided that I was going to attempt the October Challenge, but I had just started working on a new project a couple weeks ago and it seems like something that could be completed in a relatively short amount of time so I’m going to give it a shot. My game is tentatively titled ‘Frantic Dungeon’ and is a real time roguelike that forces the player to move at a frantic pace. The idea is that on each floor of the dungeon the player will only have a very limited amount of time, probably 20 – 30 seconds, possibly less. With this limited time the player is going to have find the exit,  collect stat bonus, and kill enemies for some experience. So far that’s the basic idea and I’m trying my best to keep it as simple as possible and not fall victim to feature creep.

Here is a quick video I made to show off my current progress. I have a lot of the basic systems complete, but I still have a whole lot of work adding content.

Distribution

The game is written in C#/XNA and I am planning for a PC only release. I would really like to get on Desura, but I’m not sure if I can meet the quality and polish necessary for that to happen within the specified time. Does anyone have any experience publishing through Desura? It would be interesting to hear some advice about that. If Desura doesn’t work out then I will probably try to distribute myself through fastspring or BMT Micro.

So I thought I’d finally get involved with Ludum Dare on the next gamejam but this October Challenge is great and I’m working on my game/tool already so why not start now!

I’ll be working on a game tool named CraftStudio which someone called “the Minecraft of game engines“. It’s a multiplayer tool for making games, in real-time. Instead of just terraforming maps à la Minecraft, you can also build your own cubic 3d models collaboratively, paint them and (will be able to) setup your own behaviors, scripts and stuff. You could call it a “multiplayer low-end Unity” and you wouldn’t be far off! It’s for all of us people who like to craft games (& movies) just because we can, and I’m building it with newbies in mind! (you can tell I’m excited by the number of exclamation marks I’m putting in this post!!!)

A Super Meat Boy model built in CraftStudio!

Right now I’ve already pushed out a free pre-alpha build (that you can grab at http://craftstud.io/). The basics for modeling are in but it’s pretty limited. I’ll push (automatic) updates about once a week.

So, my self-devised goal for this October Challenge will be to get CraftStudio out of pre-alpha into alpha land, and start selling it at the same time!

You can follow me at @elisee (more general stuff) or at @craftstudiodev (exclusively CraftStudio-related!)

Today, after much faffing around I officially kick off my October Challenge game. After a long and heated debate between myself and an empty page in a notebook, I’ve decided to lower my sights considerably. I had intended to make a non-traditional tower defense game, I had two interesting aesthetics for this. One had the working title “In the Loop” and was centred around espionage networks intercepting information to stay relevant. The second was a hacker-orientated TD, where the towers are the various applications deployed in an effort to usurp control of the system.

Upon thinking about it, I realised that even though I have one of these ideas quite well fleshed out in design, to make it fun and interesting will take a hell of a lot of playtesting and iteration. So for this month I’m going to stick to tried and tested mechanics and make a traditional TD. The working title for this is “21 Days” since that is exactly how long I have to finish it and set it free.

My goals today are to get stand in creeps running around a tile-based map with quick and hacky A* directing them. Then get some grid-control and be able to plant towers (that do nothing yet). If I get this game polished up enough in the 21 days I might add a bit of meta-research, between levels you task scientists with researching technology dropped by creeps during the last mission, in order to develop more effective towers to help as the levels and creeps escalate. However, I’m going to focus on having a playable TD first.

Feature creep begone.

I’m developing in Flex/AS3 with Flashpunk. This is counter to my plans, as I had spent the better part of last week messing around in flixel. Flashpunk just seems that much more sensible, I can work far more quickly in it as I find its structure and usage much more intuitive, seems to me it was written more for programmers than flixel is.

Now, if I can resist the urge to play more Civilization I might actually achieve today’s targets….

So, here’s what it does/you can do:

• Procedurally generated dungeons
• Enemies with some AI and pathfinding
• Item collecting, storing, using, dropping and crafting
• save and load (not all data saved right now)
• Chests with items
• If you are killed, you lose your items, and must return to get them back

Kill enemies till you find the keyspell, that lets you get to the next level, and so on. also the only useful item you can get from crafting is a rare goop (combine goop and a keyspell) otherwise you get… something else

> this sentence is totally a link to the latest playable build <

This image included because I thought it was funny, so there

So, I’m going for a roguelike arena shooter RPG with both witches, and crafting

to be honest, the ‘sell one copy’ target might not be suitable for me, I need to raise money for moving costs as well as living and other stuff, so hopefully this can be a decent game and not just a ‘made a game solda game’ novelty.

anyway, put a lot of thought into this whilst working on my Indie Kombat game, so Ima get to it!