My week in game dev #23
It's been so long...
I know, I know. But I’m back. To be fair, I was about to write one of these and then went down with some weird-ass virus that laid me low for nearly three weeks. I did and ate nothing for a week, then slowly returned to life, but it’s only the last few days I’ve been able to concentrate long enough to code properly. Nightmare! Especially for someone who’s basically never ill. But anyway…
A year or so ago I wrote about how I’d tracked down Revolution pixel artist, Steve Oades. He is properly ill with MS, unfortunately. I had dreamt of asking him to draw a few sprites for Wormhole Dungeon but his situation is that he can’t really even hold a pen anymore, never mind create pixel art. Steve animated Foster, and George. The delicate weighting in those animations was all Steve who was, of course, self-taught, as we all were back in Rev’s creative 90’s period. I mentioned to Charles Cecil that I’d finally found him and he requested that I take him along to see Stevea gain. This of course took some organising! Six months to be precise, but in the end a date was set and we went along. Everyone enjoyed talking about the old days and it was a great few hours for all. Steve was pretty impressed with Reforged, which breathes new life into his work of 1995.
Charles also had a play of UrbX which got the thumbs up - at least as close as you can get with Cecil! I know him so well that what he says is kinda irrelevant - it's how he says it.
A week later and Brazen Games (North) headed off to Wakefield for WX. What a great venue and event! Organised in part by Jamie and Jackie Sefton of Game Republic, it was a an opportunity to get the game in the hands of random game playing public. Unlike Crash Live, where we first showed the game, this would be a tougher audience, as they had no particular allegiance to the Spectrum Next, or retro in general. Nonetheless, the response was largely the same. Folks would pick up the joystick and keep playing until they ran out of demo. Perfect!
So, where are we now? The idea is to have a public playable demo alongside the Kickstarter and that is more or less ready. But I suddenly realised the game would need to have much better front end menus so I think those are my focus over the next week or so. They are surprisingly tricky to make, too. So custom! Nothing is based on anything else. We are making them in the style of an 80s arcade machine so they are pretty cool and worth the effort.
As well as that stuff I reckon I’m going to redesign the weapon inventory. There’s kinda of two different inventory designs at the moment - one for weapons and one for other stuff like keys and whatnot. I’m not sure how it got like that, but two things when one would suffice breaks all my own principles! Besides, this game is meant to be coin-op simple, and so it shall be!
Coding aside, we’re really really heading into the Kickstarter now, and that itself just needs the finishing touches - nice illustrations for the rewards, and so on. We have half a video which is a lot more than no video! We need to do our talking bits which is always painful. Coders and pixel artists are meant to cower in the dark, tapping keys, knowing that it is the work, not ourselves, that will be judged. At least it used to be that way, now we are exposed and forced to say things :) Life is tough!
Okay, back to work for me!
Pleeease sign up here if you haven’t already :)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tonywarriner/urbx-warriors-an-original-game-for-the-spectrum-next