Personal improvements on graphics

Currently my body is fighting fever, so suitably I painted a burning sky tile since that's the way I feel at the moment.

It is a strange feeling that 3 months ago I had no idea how to draw a line and make it look like...a line...

Now I can actually make stuff which looks like...stuff! I am by no means a professional and its a long road left until I really feel that I can draw in the same way as other great persons in the industry.

But it goes faster and faster with each month and it becomes better and better, which at the start was so frustrating since you had this picture in your head but you could not actually put it into the picture.

Happy to see that practice goes somewhere.

//Feverish Viktor

The tile

How free will Rookeys be?

Me and Viktor have been discussing how we're gonna monetize Rookeys. First of all, we know that a lot of people's ears start bleeding as soon as you mention monetization, but second of all, no money = no future games from us.

At the same time, we are two student's with little to brag about. Sure, we have done some games in the past but nothing we can point at and say: "Look, we did <insertnameofawesomegame>, so you should play Rookeys now". Basically we need to build some hype first.

Our solution is to make the up coming release completely free of charge, as well as empty of ads. The release consists of 24 levels and we're gonna update with more content as soon as possible, but until the first update we won't put any ads in there. We believe this is a fair way of doing it, kind of like a test period to see if there's any interest in Rookeys.

Yay!

The game has been saved!

If yesterday was a horrible day, development wise, then today it all leveled out again. The graphics have been fixed, we have a revamped reward system in place and pretty much all of the sound assets have been implemented.

We still need to do some more level design (10 more levels to make it 24 in total for the release version), but that should speed up now since we can devote it more time. There are some important graphic assets left to draw and polish, but the main ones are done and are looking good.

Otherwise, there's really "only" bug hunting left. Since it's a relatively small game, I'm feeling fairly confident that we're gonna pull this of in time for the Swedish Game Awards hand in at the end of this month.

That's all for today, time to get some sleepy time. Ha de' gött!

Happy Kitten Day!

A very much Monday

One basic rule when developing games and getting close to the release: Don't update your development tools!

We now have a broken game. It is my job to fix it, and I'm already swamped with work so I'll be brief: I hate developing games sometimes.

Sad Panda Day

Games and Psychology

We've been busy with Easter and all the things that come with it so few updates lately, but here's the more interesting new updates concerning development:

• Three different worlds are in the game, but only two will be available for release. Why? To be honest, there isn't a practical reason for this, it is more based around psychology. Having two worlds with 12 levels in each makes the player perceive the game as being bigger than if we only had 1 world with 24 levels in it. The third world that can't be access at the release works as a tease or a semi-promise that more content will be added, so you shouldn't delete the game after finishing it! :)
• Moar graphics! The NPC robots and their animations are shaping up nicely, and as I'm writing this, the main character is getting its final polishing done. Also, later today the graphics for the second world will start. Once again, the reason for more worlds in the game is based on psychology, but you can only (nicely) fool the player so far. We think that more worlds at least demand some different graphics, even if it means some sprites only getting a different colour.
• We're aiming to have the game ready to compete in the Swedish Game Awards later this May. This means that we want the game to be released shortly afterwards. We can't give an exat release date but now you know around which time it'll happen.

Ha de gött!

//Blazing Bedroom Squadron

Psychology apparently

DevDiarySunday (Monday)

We forgot the update yesterday. We're blaming this mistake on over eating of Easter candy (påskgodis as we say in Sweden).

This week we've tried to get as much work done as possible, despite being busy with courses at university.
New stuff include:

• Working rotating laser turrets (took a day longer than necessary because I (Eric) am an idiot)
• The theme has been slightly changed to involve maintenance droids. A longer update will explain this further at a later point.
• The new droids have been drawn and uploaded to twitter for #screenshotsaturday. You can take a peak at it here.
• New bugs of course. They are more friendly this week though.

We've also tried to structure our work a bit more. We're getting to the point where even smaller changes to the game can affect the overall game design a bit too much. We now have strict limits on what we must and may add to the game. The release of Rookeys is close but we are both guilty of wanting to add new things all the time..

Have a great week!

Lasers are cool. And we have a lot of them.

Update Sunday!

We've been working hard on several projects this week. Since there are only two of us it can be hard to be in the exact same place in the development at all times. There are many different ways of solving this, but what we're doing is having two main projects going at the same time (plus our university game projects but that's something completely different).

For example, I've already managed to implement all of the main mechanic and one enemy type in our bigger platform game Spear of Odin (wt). It didn't take much more than a week which is nice of course, but Viktor also has to draw all of the animations, backgrounds and so on. That takes much longer in the beginning of a project, not only because drawing is very time consuming, but also since things such as theme and art style might undergo several changes.

To avoid frustration and the killing of each other, I (Eric) can then temporarily work on our other game, Rookeys. Now, Rookeys is the result of having to change scope with a game. It used to be called Moonkeys but we realized that it would take waay too long time to finish the game with that particular theme (monkeys throwing crap at each other), so we changed the theme to robots shooting lasers. Explaining exactly why this is more time effective would require quite a long text and I'll spare you this, but in short, the animation work will be much easier now.

After a long Saturday full of work (bye bye social life), ten levels have been designed and implemented, a lot of graphics are alive, most game objects are bug free (ha!) and thoughts about teleports have been raised.

The state of Bedroom Squadron today

Screenshot Saturday

Short update for now, this is our contribution to #screenshotsaturday. Tomorrow or this evening we'll write more about how the development is going and other stuff. Cheers!

Oh, and the name is now called Rookeys instead of Moonkeys. Explanation will follow in a later update

Let's do this!

OK, here's the thing. We're two guys currently studying Game Design in Skövde, Sweden, but we've also doing some programming and graphics for a while now. So we thought, why not start something up together? Can't be that hard to have some small side project right?

After failing immensely with our first "game", the dungeon exploration and drilling mech platformer (also known as "Drill Project"), we decided to try something simpler.

Learning from our mistakes, so far we've only done some smaller projects to get some experience and learn to work together. We participated in this year's Global Game Jam. We made the top down puzzle shooter Blazing Bedroom Squadron, and it turned out quite alright. Since we also liked the name very much we decided to "steal" it, hence the name of our little team.

The GGJ game went on to become Moonkeys, and even though we've had to pause the project to better understand the limitations of the platform, we're hoping to release it some time this year.

At the moment we're working on a PC platformer inspired by older games in the same genre, and we're hoping to release it early this fall. We cannot offer any screens from it yet since it's still in very early development, but we will leave you with a screen from Moonkeys before we put it on pause (and yes, it's full of temporary open source assets).