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K. A. Laherty

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A member registered Oct 27, 2014 · View creator page →

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Ah; I'm not American, so maybe that's part of my confusion.

I'm aware of Darkest Dungeon, but my interest isn't in a specific countries rating code (I might of muddied the water by mentioning the Australian ratings code "R18+"), I'm interested in a developers ability to use their own discretion when labeling their own work.

Maybe part of the solution is a more robust way of content filtering.

I think that I would like the option of trying to remove results via negative tags.
Maybe just switching the settings option would help with removing the clutter of lewd games, but I think that it's unfortunate that "adult" seems to be considered to just mean "pornographic".

Though I currently haven't made anything that I'd tag "adult", I could easily imagine doing this for a game I'd consider "R18+", where due to subject matter and themes; I'd feel more comfortable making sure people are aware that I'd really prefer that the game isn't played by children and is intended for adults. I'd like to imagine that I'm not the only one with this thought process.

I think I'll just switch off "adult games" for now, but I wish there was a better solution to this.

I think the negative tagging suggestion that is often suggested would be helpful for this. I like looking up 2D horror, but I can hardly find what I'm after since I can't also include "-visual novel" and "-erotic".
I'm glad that itch allows lewd stuff... It seems like a good "freedom of speech"-stance, but *gosh*, it does get in the way when trying to search for something specific.

I just wanted to say that I'm glad you're in the community. You gave me a little support once, which might not be viewed as much, but it meant a lot to me and really gave me the confidence boost I needed in a not-so-good time.
I'm not after a feature; I just wanted to speak of your character.
I hope that you know what you're appreciated and please keep up the good work :)

I've had a look at both your youtube page and Itch page. I've never been good with popularity, so feel free to disregard my advice, but if the age on your itch profile is correct; don't stress so much.

You've got a playable public alpha/beta for a new game, as well as one finished and public game. You're doing really well.
I'd say that you should focus on finishing projects and refining skills. Don't get down on yourself for not getting thousands of downloads and views, just try and figure out what you enjoy doing.

If you want to to do more youtube videos; that might really help you with presentation and over-coming the "talking to no one"-thing (That still weirds me out), and the many hours you could get from talking over and discussing other peoples games might help (and really help lesser known developers), but please don't dismiss your own skills.
How about a Scratch tutorial? How about a tutorial on how you do music and SFX?
Little things like that can really help out an early developer.

 I just added an instagram link to my Itch profile page. I don't use it much, but since I like offering advice to developers; I figured it would make messaging better. Having a large conversation like this in my game page is probably "unprofessional".
Feel free to hit me up for playtesting, advice and so on. I might reply quite late, but I'll always try to answer.

Keep up the good work :)

Yeah; I remember having to do an update once, because an old API was considered to have something like "unsafe security features"-or something... but my app never actually touched any of those features. Then over time; I received two more emails claiming that I should update the apps and I couldn't be bothered... I can't remember how many downloads I was getting, but it wasn't much at all, so it just didn't seem worth it.
I'm hoping the other store fronts are a bit more indie-game-developer-friendly.

Ah; it totally makes sense for a top down dungeon crawler game, I think I was just confused because I was looking at the background of the app page, where the characters are standing on platforms. (I might be a bit simple :/ )
I also just only noticed that the basic license info is in the "Tool buttons Info Guide".
Very cool little application, I'll definitely keep an eye on it.

Oh! Silly me; I misunderstood. I was probably trying to multi-task when I read your comment, sorry about that. Don't worry about making a video on my game; just keep working on your project. I hope the dev-log videos go well; I was never very good at making them... I always felt they were more stressful to make than the actual game development... it's probably a skill I should work on.

That's very kind of you. If I helped out in any way; I'd say that's reward enough, but I'm not going to turn down a video of someone playing my game. Just don't stress over it if you're too busy. Keep up the great work :)

Just to answer the "clutter" thing that I mentioned; I mainly meant how the stacked items and other HUD elements follow the player, but are more bright than the actual slug, so I'd often find it hard to keep track the slugs center position if I glanced away. I think it's probably just one of those things you'll need to play around with, but I'm sure you'll figure out a better design.

I had a quick playthrough, just a few levels, so I can't give much feedback but something that stuck out to me is the use of terms like "torque" and "impulse"... These terms make total sense if you've ever worked with a physics engine or tried coding a kinetic physics systems, but I imagine might be a little confusing for the average user (I mean; I assume), so changing "torque" to "rotation" and "impulse" to "push" might be more accessible.
Best of luck :)

I'm probably not the best person to critique this since I do my own visual assets, but I thought it was quite neat. I liked the overall simplicity and range of possible outcomes. I was thinking about coding something like this for a roguelike to create interesting interactions, so it was very cool seeing something based off similar theories.

I only tried the "sprite"-export, since I usually use a *.png sprite sheet for my 2D work, but I was quite pleased that it exported the way I like it.

To answer your overall queries:
I thought that it was simple enough... Maybe labeling the top "body", "item" & "hair" under "presets" or "random" would help the user understand that this is just another way of manipulating the bars for the same variables, but it makes sense pretty quick, if you keep tapping.
I think that both navigating the scrolling through of animations and zooming should also have either a dropdown menu or way for going the opposite direction.

Other than that; I think I'd add a "jump" animation. I think the exported sprite sheets would work great for something like "Pixel Dungeon", but your page seems to suggest platformers, so it seems odd that there isn't a jump animation.

If I was you; I'd also give some sort of copyright license information about the exported data. It seems like a neat tool to at least create some placeholder art, but maybe people might be a bit skiddish to use it if they're not sure about the licensing. I'm assuming it's free, maybe with accreditation, but I actually can't say for sure. I know a lot of game devs avoid things if they don't see the license agreement first.

Best of luck, like I said; it's quite neat. I hope some people use it. I could really see it helping coders trying to get a 2D project started.

Thanks! Yeah; I always found the update requirements over-the-top with Google... I've just let all my current apps get automatically removed.
I'll definitely go research the other stores that you mentioned. You've helped a lot :)

I just played the two versions and submitted the survey. Sorry if I babbled too much... I clicked "yes" for the first question, but still elaborated.

I liked the game overall and I'm interested to see where it goes. It reminded me of Robotron, but modernized. Really enjoyed the music.

I'm interested in how other developers feel about the updated requirements to keep your Googleplay developers account...

I just completed my verification form and truthfully; I was considering not doing this over the last two months. My biggest reason for considering not keeping my account is the requirement that if I wish to sell a game; I would need to publicly display my home address.

I think this may be understandable for an organization, where the address might be a small office space, but as a solo developer; I'm not interested in doxxing myself.

The reason I reluctantly filled in my verification is that I do actually enjoy porting code to Android and unfortunately; most people don't trust downloading games if they are not from the official store. Many Android forums will remove your posts if they contain *.apk links from external sources.

I'm interested in hearing other developers thoughts on this... Do you use a Googleplay developer account? Do you sell games on there, or do you just avoid the whole thing and try to sell on Itch or another site? Do you just avoid selling for Android and only release free games?

I also just made it to three circles. I tried it a few times, but didn't get very far.

What kind of intersection test is being checked? I noticed that a collision often occurred when the circles where near each other, instead of touching or overlapping. You might be doing the calculation before updating the frame, but it seemed a bit odd at times.

For this kind of quick reflex based game, I'd probably go with simple bounding box collisions (AABB vs AABB), but I'd make the box for the player much smaller than the circle that's displayed. This is a common trick used in bullet hell games. It does make it a little easier, but it also helps with the flow state. I'd definitely advise looking up hit boxes in bullet hell games to do some quick research on why they use smaller hit boxes.

I also think that the interpolation used to make the player circle follow the mouse seems oddly sluggish, so maybe speeding that up slightly will make the controls feel tighter?

Another thing I noticed is that there seems to be times when the acceleration of the enemy circles speed up to a ridiculous speed, making almost impassable barriers. I've never used GDevelop, so I'm not sure how to perform mathematical operations in it, but I think there should be a maximum acceleration, possibly based on how long the game has been played for.

Best of luck with your project :)

KeeperRL is just the gift that keeps on giving. Keep up the great work; your dedication to the project is inspirational and makes me want to be a better developer.
Happy Halloween :)

I guess I do something that's a bit mixed. I wouldn't say that I write anything like a professional game design document, but since I just work by myself, I just need to order things in a way that I can refer to later and don't really have to present it in a way that anyone else has to decipher.

I know I'm quite visual, so I'll often make sketches, draw flow charts and make a lot of notes. I'll keep my loose notes mostly separate from the more considered guide-lines, but I'll also write my current focus on a white board to keep myself on track.

If I've come up with some guidelines that I've decided to use for some 2D artwork, I might have rules on resolution, frames-per-second for animations, colour usage and forms to focus on, but I'll also jot down my thoughts on the work in my loose notes, little things like feelings, associations or currently unanswered questions that I get from the work, which might help with additional visual ideas, maybe how I want to compose the music or even make small programming changes.

Sometimes it takes a while, but once the pieces start to work together; it feels like the overall project is going in a specific direction and things start to feel like they logically flow and fit together, so it's more like slotting puzzle pieces into a half completed jigsaw puzzle instead of staring at a blank page.

I just played through your game and finished it.

Overall, I liked the idea, but found that since you can focus on one resource at a time, you can use multiple snails to string together telekinetic paths to make a track right to their destination, then delete all the snails and do the next resource. Once I realized that a telekinetic field didn't have to be near the snail projecting it, I rushed through the levels.

Maybe include a difficulty option, which limits the distance a telekinetic field can be from the snail?

Another idea could be to include a rating system, where if you complete a level like I described above; you pass, but to get gold; you need to keep your snails on the board without removing them and maybe do it under a certain amount of time?

I also think it would be a good idea to introduce different concepts every few levels, just to spice things up. Maybe snails that can only manipulate specific resources? Maybe a snail that shifts the levels default gravity direction? I'm not sure, but I think more variety in snails can only be a good thing.

When I was playing the game, I just happened to be listening to some "calm piano" on youtube and I think it actually suits the game. You probably already have an idea for the music, but I figured I'd mention it just in case you haven't settled on a style and need some ideas.

Hopefully this isn't rude, but I like snails and saw that the shells had dark outlines, as did some of the tiles and the map tiles also had slight shading to them, so I quickly touched up the snails to see what they'd look like with additional dark outlines and a small amount of shading. I think they looked nice in-game, so you can have them if you want.


Unfortunately I don't know much about selling games, so I can't really help with that. I guess that if I was in your position, I'd start researching other puzzle games that are for sale and compare what they offer for what price.

Best of luck :)

I think polish is probably quite tricky due to its subjective nature and while you are working on a project; you'll probably get better at refining your visuals, audio and so on, but this can lead to odd shifts in quality or constant refinement of older assets.

I think it's important to sit down and figure out something like a "style guide" that help all the pieces remain cohesive.

When starting a project, I'll usually make enough assets for a small enough section to see how it might go together. These are usually just enough to keep me focused on the direction I'm trying to go, but there's a chance that I might start to like the assets, in which case; I might want to keep them or use them as a style template, so I try to document the process I used to make them.

I might play around with the assets for a bit, usually when I feel like I need a break from coding or when I'm stumped on an algorithm, but I'll always try to keep notes on the process.

At some point, I'll usually find that I think the look, feel and sound somewhat come together, so I'll start trying to turn the notes that I made into general rules, hopefully figuring out a balance of time, efficiency and a quality that I'm comfortable with.

I try to keep the rules just flexible enough to still have some creative fun, but hopefully not allow for sections to feel out of place. Simple and well documented enough to allow for switching between assets and hopefully easy enough to follow that if I take a months break from working on them, I can still make something that doesn't stick out in an obvious way.

I figure everyone is different, but I always feel best when I get to do a little coding, some visual stuff and some audio. Switching between them can be a nice break and sometimes help me relax enough to figure out bits I get stuck on. I think that if I completed all the coding and just had all the visual artwork or music to do, I might get burnt out, but who knows? Maybe that's the smarter way of doing it?

I'm interested in hearing how other people deal with this.

Thank you for checking out my game and commenting :)

When it comes to learning things, everyone is slightly different, so maybe a tutor site might work for you, or maybe not.

I'd say that when it comes to learning something creative, like drawing, animation, music or programming, it's beneficial to try and find the fastest path to being able to have a little fun and play around with the medium. If you can find yourself having fun and playing; you'll become more interested in learning more.

I'd usually recommend finding a basic tutorial on something, just to get you started, then trying to play around with what you've learnt. This will be your starting point. It sounds like you've already started playing around with drawing, so maybe you can skip to the next step.

After making a few things with your current level of knowledge, pick one thing that you want to improve. Since you're just starting, you might want to improve many things at once, but try to pick just one thing. With drawing; you might be able to pick up certain things by just looking at works that you like, or maybe you need to research the topic. Once you're confident enough to play around with the additional thing that you've learnt; you pick another thing to improve on and repeat.

I know this sounds terribly slow, but it will speed up over time. Try to keep it fun and experimental. I think that if you're using your own artwork in your games, you'll become even more motivated once you can see a finished game that's made up of your drawings, irrelevant of your current skill level. There's something special about seeing the pieces come together.

I had a similar issue when I was learning to compose music and the above is sort of the system I used to teach myself to compose. I'm still not great at it, but I now happily compose my own music for the games I make.

I hope this helps a bit. I'm sure that you'll figure it all out if you keep trying.

Thank you :) All of these are composed and mixed in LMMS, then the final touch ups and loop is done in Audacity.

I try to make everything I do in free and open source software, so if anyone likes what I do and wants to give making their own a go; I can suggest something they can just download and start playing around with.

Well, it's been quite a while, but since I'm a little bit in-between projects and I'm very sure that I'll have to do a lot of composing for my next project; I figured that I should get some practice in, so I might as well try making some more free loops.

Here is "The path forward":

The track actually started out as a KatzenKlein Redux track, but since I concluded that I wasn't going to expand the game to a full commercial release; it was never used. I ended up liking the odd little guitar riff and wrote some piano for it... eventually it turned into this. It's very different to the original attempt, but I kinda like it.

Not really sure what kinda game it would suit, but feel free to use it.

The slightly jarring video is just two of my old ball-point pen sketches with too many filters applied. I like abstract visualizers for music :/

I've got two more WIP tracks that I'm playing around with, but I'm hoping to put together 10 tracks for the full free pack, so feel free to suggest different styles and so on.

I had a quick look and here on itch; I found WhiteNightStudios, who has a few free and paid 8 directional assets. There's also some assets on OpenGameArt.org, but I'm guessing that you'll have to read through what licensing each asset uses (I dunno; never used the site).

It's interesting that there aren't many asset packs... I'm guessing it might be because when you make a retro FPS and mix asset packs; they can easily clash since changes in the pixel art style, colour usage and resolution become very obvious in this kind of game.

Just out of interest, what kind of style, theme, resolution and so on, are you looking for?

Thank you for playing my game and especially for recording it and posting it on your channel :) It really does mean a lot to me.

Really nice pixel art and it does capture something nostalgic about the older phone games, but with less frustrating controls... I vaguely remember the mix of the squishy phone keys and a one or two frame delay for input making many games very annoying at times.

I also played "Tropiko". Also very fun, with clear visuals.

Have you considered porting these games to Android? I haven't ever used Unity, so I don't have a clue what making a port to a touch device is like, but since both games have a nice and simple control setup and both games seem to have a square display; I think that if you set them up to be played in portrait mode, the top half could contain the game screen, while the bottom could contain the buttons. Since there are only a few buttons; they could be quite big, which would make it less of a hassle to play on a touch screen. I think that if you add a highscore display, both would be quite fun to play on a long train trip.

Neat stuff. Very interested in what other games you will make in the future :)

I think the question in the post's heading and the question inside the post are quite different.

"Is it offensive to use 9/11 to market my game?"
I would assume so. There's still people living who directly lost loved ones. I can't predict whether or not people would actually be offended, but it does seem somewhat crass to use 9/11 as a marketing tool.

"Will I get into trouble, or could the game be taken down for being offensive?"
I actually don't know, but I figured one way of checking if it's okay with itch to do this kind of thing would be searching "9/11" in the games section.
I did so and found that there seems to be a few "9/11 simulators", including one that is sold for $1. It is possible that other games may have been taken down for being insensitive, but since these specific games were never popular; they were skipped over.... so maybe itch does take them down if reported? Hopefully an itch member of staff replies to you for a more clear answer.

What sort of does become clear from searching, is that though it is known that 9/11 is considered a sensitive subject, trying to use it as shock content doesn't actually interest people; so I don't think it's worth using it to advertise your game. It might actually work against you since it might come across as "try-hard edgy", so people might be more likely to skip over it.

I tried the your games browser version, and though the mobile controls didn't seem to work very well with a mouse, I did play a bit of it.
I think that finding the right kind of soundtrack could really help. I'm assuming that the game is really intended to be played on a phone or tablet, but I think it's a good idea to do a browser version since it's quite hard to get people to download an Android game from Itch, so a little playable browser teaser might get people interested.
Though it means a little extra development; I would suggest considering working on a mouse option with a more streamlined control system for the desktop browser version, since if you can get people to actually enjoy themselves for five minutes or so and get into a good flow-state in the browser version, they'll probably be more keen to download the mobile version.

I think if you clean up the game a bit, and you really consider what is fun about the game; you'll have a better understanding of how to advertise the game.

Hopefully that's helpful. I actually don't know much about advertising games. Best of luck with your project.

Gosh, thank you. I hope you don't think that I was trying to get a follow back (though I'm flattered), I just paint and like trying to make music, so I'm very genuinely intrigued. If I like something; I think it's best to reach out and tell the creator. I know an honest "oi! I like that" can be a good pick-me-up for hours of work.

You've been very kind, but either way; I hope you keep at it. I think you're only going to get better on the visual and audio side. I'm going to keep watching :)

Nice work. I can't say that I remember what Minecrafts music sounds like, but I enjoyed your compositions. Sort of calm, but inquisitive.

I was surprised that you are also the person who made the painting asset pack I saw a few days ago. Very neat.

I gave you a follow on soundcloud and on itch. Interested to see where your artwork goes.

Keep up the good work :)

I'd also say Blender is a good option (I'm all about free and open source software).

I can't say I've tried tried any of the AI generation tools for 3D models, but I'd assume that if you were to use them; gaining some knowledge in something like Blender would help you modify them and fix them up for your specific needs. 

If you want to learn how to make 3D models, I'd recommend starting with "Box modeling"-tutorials, where you start with a box, slice into it, extrude shapes and reshape it. If you mix that with "mirroring" (only making half of a symmetrical model, then generating the other half, like it's placed next to a mirror); I think you'll have a pretty good starting point to learn the more complicated stuff in whatever 3d modeling software you choose.

I think you should try and set up a simple way of testing a few methods of building maps and then viewing or playing through them. I've never released a procedurally generated dungeon game, but I've played around with making a few generators (I love old-school roguelikes).

Depending on the scale of the game, you might want more than one way of generating dungeons and also try to see if you can mix them, like doing one pass with "hooks" that the second pass (a different method) can use, or having "refinement methods" after doing an initial generation.

I know that there are tons of ways of generating dungeons, but I think they mostly come down to a set of functions with rules, refinement methods and a potential fail state, like if not enough rooms are generated; discard and try again (though once again; I haven't made a full game like this, so I could be wrong).

I'm not sure if this is helpful at all, but I made a quick animation to help describe one of the methods I've tried, which is terribly simple, but might help with some ideas?

This method starts with plotting a "room". Each room has a minimum and maximum size, with red pixels representing "open positions". Each time a room is successfully built, it is added to the room counter.
The map is scanned to find "open positions", then selects one randomly.
A path will be made. Paths have a minimum and maximum travel distance, as well as a minimum for when they can turn.
While the path travels, it will place down "open positions" on its sides (keeping a minimum spacing variable in mind) and end with an open position.
A path can intersect with another path or room, but only if it hits on a 90 degree angle, avoiding making paths and doorways over a pixel wide.
From here, we go back to scanning for open positions, but will also attempt to build rooms (if there is enough space). Loop until a condition is met.
A clean up occurs. This locates the ends of paths, then erases them until they hit a connected path or room, leaving a single open position where the last cleaned tile was erased.
Repeat the "find open position and build room or path"-step, with a clean afterwards, keeping a minimum and maximum amount for these steps to loop.
Check if the generation has made at least the minimum amount of rooms... I think I set it as 5 when I was actually playing around with my last demo... You want a number that is at least interesting, but small enough that the generator will succeed most of the time.

Though this is really simple, I think it's enough to start building a dungeon. After this, you can use it to build the fun details. In my quick animation, I then placed walls around the paths and filled open positions with wall tiles, then selected a room as the starting position, marking the room and connected paths as "1", then selecting a connected room as "2"... unfortunately all the path tiles were connected to room 1 (whoops), but I would of repeated. The idea is that you will have a logical ordering of rooms, as long as a room "6" (for example) is not blocking room "5", you can now place keys for rooms on any tile lower than the required door.

Maybe this could also be used to logically place monster and loot with higher levels.

Sorry for the rant there... I'm probably not telling you anything new, but maybe it helps with some ideas or someone else who is thinking about building some dungeons (but wants a simple place to start) might see this.

best of luck.

Thanks tons for that, I really enjoyed the video. Great notes. I just emailed you back. Keep up the great work :)

Very happy to get a credit in the devlog :D
Will check the new version soon.

I just checked again, and it seems easy to replicate. Fail the first attempt, then after the first "No! It won't work!"-message, pick slower and just let the screams spawn. There won't be another message, the screams stop spawning, the music keeps playing and you can walk around still, but it doesn't progress. I'm guessing it's probably just a typo in a conditional check or something simple like that (I do that kinda thing all the time), but I figure if you can find it, you'll be more aware of it and be less likely to make the same kind of typo when putting together the full version.

I hear you about the multiple inputs for single actions thing... I sat around for ages just testing with my last game. I thought adding touch controls was going to be the biggest hassle, but it was actually allowing the player to unpause using the mouse without shooting as soon as the game starts again.

I think your games perfectly playable without using the mouse for dialog progression, just thought I'd mention it.

This was a really interesting teaser. I really enjoyed the mix of classic gameboy, gameboy color and gameboy advanced graphical styles, the mix of chip tunes and more standard orchestral, all without over complicating each other and not mixing them in a jarring way.
I found the humor fun and not over-bearing and enough suggestions of a moderately surreal mystery interesting enough to want to see where the final project goes.

With the positives out of the way, I believe I found a soft-lock…
When accessing the memory and playing the flower-pot mini game, I found that if you fail after choosing “slower”, it doesn’t seem to go to a fail state, but the big, medium and small entities stop spawning and you can still walk around.
If this is a glitch, it just seems like a small over-site and there is a lot going on in the demo, so I don’t think it’s a big down-side, just thought I’d bring it to your attention.

One other thing I thought that I might suggest; at times it felt a bit odd when switching from using the mouse to space bar when progressing text. Once again; not a big thing and this most probably felt odd to me since I automatically used the arrow keys instead of WASD to move around, due to playing too many RPG maker horror games, so I’d assume if I play again using WASD and space with my left hand; it would probably be less jarring, but I thought I’d mention it so you can check if allowing text to progress with the mouse flows better, since sometimes small things like that can really increase enjoyment for the player.

Hope that’s helpful. Great work :)

Thank you very much :) Really liking your games too, really interesting stuff, so you should also keep it up!

Thank you :) When I started making the port for Android, I didn't actually think that I'd get it to a playable state, it originally ran really slow, so I had to do a lot of tinkering and rewriting, so I'm glad that you had a good time.

I really enjoyed the Grass elemental Demo. I accidently downloaded the older version first, so I've played it twice, but it was enjoyable either way. It's a really good teaser and I'm interested to see where it goes, so I'm following the project now. I've got to go do some artwork for a friends band, but I'll play around with it again later and leave a comment on your game page. I'm also interested in Violet Well. Loving the artwork. Keep up the great work!

Ah, it all makes sense now. It was a clipping glitch and you fell through the floor. I've seen it once before, oddly enough on the same level, but haven't been able to replicate it myself (I spent much time running at walls). It's going to be hard for me to fix it, but I'm relieved that the game didn't hard crash (phew!) and I now know that the glitch is in my collision code.
Thanks tons! I've downloaded the video, it was fun to watch, but also might help with a good place to find a possible collision error.