Weekly update I guess.

Well the world sure is taking it's sweet time ending. Video!



Drats, I found another targeting bugger with the Lad. It only rears it's head when fighting something larger than 1 48x48 square, origin point related. I whiteboard that sumbitch, easily fixed, sometime next week.

Thanks for stopping by.

Midweek artwork plus more.

Hoyooooo! Yeah, so I've got some pieces of art for The Great White Destroyer up on the Facebook.

Hellhol!

I've got the little girl unit(Lass) functional. She can give enemy units(male only) cooties, which puts a damper on sp(super points!) recharge and gives them one additional random malady. It only lasts for a turn or two. She can also scarf down chocolate to refill 1/2 of her max hp.

I also toyed around with one high level unit versus low levels, fun stuff! A level 50 Gorky vs level 1 monsters. I went about surrounding it and keeping it distracted until I could drop something bigger on top. If you can damage it and have the unit survive, you get your own guys to level up. I think a level one just hitting him gave it 5 levels of advancement. Status effects help too, good old blind might keep him inactive for a round or two.

Random name generation. I've got it working for Gobbys and Trollgees. It selects a name from list A and adds another part from list B. Here's a few examples for each monster...
Gobby - Stikkreddy, Antfud, Greenyget, Gorgik, Gopgem, Rumppussgox
Trollgee - Trokbush, Mendtras, Wulktrix, Mabranch, Tusktrig, Mendhungr

I think I'll work on the Gorky names tonight, it's silly fun.

Also, a friend of mine(Ian) is venturing out into indie game territory and has begun to blog about it. He's much better at it than I, here's a link to it.
Game.Dev.Life

Thanks for stopping by.

Irrelevancy abounds!

Here's the video, in all it's glory.



I forgot to mention that some other work did get done for Hellhol. I made some more tweaks to the target finding code, and had some random name generation working for the Gobbys and Trollgees.

Thanks for stopping by.

Hellhol visuals, more units, art for sale.

Behold the video and all will be revealed!



Thanks for stopping by.

Website Redesign + Shark Demo

After being down for a week due to a damned ear infection, I began work on changing the look of the Backyard Ninja Design site. It's pretty much done and I'm pretty happy about how it looks. Thanks to Jason Campana, he simply suggested I go with a white background after looking at it in progress, and the end result started trickling in.

Now I want to talk a little about The Great White Destroyer demo.

As some of you may know, it constitutes half the game content. This originally sprang from my own experience with demos, my knee jerk "Only a few stages, come on!" reaction. I fear this was a mistake, as the player may be satisfied with the experience due to consuming so much of the content.

Half a meal versus a little taste. What would excite you more?

So I'm reworking the demo to make it shorter. The player will have access to 3 stages from destroyer mode, 3 from manatee. They can't post scores to the online table, and achievements are locked out. You can still get them but they won't show up unlocked. Most of me loathes this change, but I need to develop a business side for this to work right.

So next week I'll be testing this new demo build to make sure it's less bugs, then I'll be making some changes to The Great White Destroyer site. I can't wait until this is all wrapped so I can get back to developing Snowball!

Bullcrap 2-26-2011

Video action!



Here in the next week I'll be working on updating my website! It's been the same for a long while. I'll also be making some changes to The Great White Destroyer Demo, I'll discuss that in more detail at a later date.

Thanks for stopping by!

The Great White Destroyer B-Day Sale/Giveaway Finale

This is the final stretch of February, and your last chance to win free copies of The Great White Destroyer! This week I've asked 5 questions about various stages in the demo, send me the answers and you could win one of 10 available copies.



Act fast, this promotion ends February 28th. For a more detailed look at the rules, visit http://www.dumbmanex.com/TheGreatWhiteDestroyerHome.html

Questions? Comments? Contact Brent Anderson at backyardninja@dumbmanex.com .

Bullcrap 2-5-2011

Video action!


Week 1 of the Shark birthday was a bust. I was expecting people to at least try for a free version, I hope it's not because it would require a minor effort on their part, haha. Oh well, week 2 coming up anyway!

Next week I may begin working on roughing out the first enemy or one of the solid obstacles, most likely both. Hopefully more that that.

Thanks for stopping by! Until next time.

Bullcrap 1-29-2011

First off, video...


Let's see, next month will be The Great White Destroyer's first birthday! To celebrate, the game will be half off, plus I'll be having a quiz on the demo version, the prize being free copies to the winners, 10 a week.

Also got some more free games from the PixelProspector big video contest(round 2 is around the corner) so a big thanks to these guys for laying some good games on me!

PiEyeGames
GURUY Entertainment
BlitWise Productions
Wolfire Games

Ok, that's it for now.

Achievement success, plus extras.

That's right, they all work just fine and are do-able! I also added some ">>><<<" to the combo text, they tick down as combo time nears it's end.


When a combo's time would run out, it would flash up the total points earned, there is now an extra effect to help those stand out in the form of a frame.


My main man tester Jay suggested having the achievements visible on the pause screen, which is an excellent idea. I have it functioning, and it only shows what you can get in the stage you are on. Simply move the mouse down and to the right or left to scroll them around to take a look.


I most likely won't be posting anything until after new years, so everyone have a safe merry Christmas, and a happy holidays, and an excellent new years!

Achievements:They fuction for the most part.

There's still some that need tested, and a few that need fixed so they actually work. I did a lot of work on combo timing, to make some of these easier and let the player try to build up extra points if they like. Jetskis don't blow up as fast either.

Examples of what hasn't worked out...
Drown Their Sorrows(3x drown combo) is being changed to just drowning one person, it's hard for me to even come close to drowning two let alone three!
Push Me, Pull You's(snagged by 2 hooks) code just didn't work period, so I missed something.

I had my doubts about Squid-Kebob(big squidy and little squidy hit with same spear), but I came within 2 pixels of pulling it off the other day. It's possible, you just need to find the right enemy placement and timing.

This last Friday I toyed with the idea to upsize You Got The Shaft for 1024x768. I would make the tiles 48x48 instead of 16x16, so all my numbers would just need multiplied by 3. I also did a few Monsta animations at the new size.

I wouldn't use near as many frames as the smaller ones due to memory. I'm also thinking of ditching the falling block thing and replacing it with combat related challenges. I dunno, what do you guys think of all this.

Just Bullcrap, 12-4-2010

I forgot to show off the barriers in that last video segment, durp! Next time I guess.

Achievement art continued.

MOAR!


I've got 24 more to go, 9 of those are just the same images with higher numbers in front so they don't really count. Maybe another day and a half of work. Then it's onto coding the stuff and testing, which I'm looking forward to.

!!!I AM FUELED BY TURKEY AND PUMPKIN PIE!!!

That's my way of saying Thanksgiving was awesome as usual, good family and good food. Now the toilet will feast on my holiday dumps from now 'til mid January!

Also, The Great White Destroyer is on sale at GamersGate now, until the first week of January. The discount will vary, right now it's 40% off.

ALSO also, if you happen to have some commercial indie games and would like to contribute to a fatass compilation video of commercial indie games, check out Pixel Prospector for the dealio. I have to get in gear and submit some myself. The deadline is Dec. 12th, so get movin'!

That's it for now.

Achievement Art

That's what I've been working on, and will be working on for the next 3 to 4 days most likely. Examples you say? Surely.

This one is "Sharkburned Again!", you get it for eating the good Admiral.
"Faster Food", gotta get a 10x combo meal while non-frenzy.
"Feather Sniper", get it with a 3x bird shot combo.
"Man Fisher", knock some poor swimmer onto a fishing hook.

All the originals are 512x512, but these here are the ingame 64x64 versions. Now, just a few screenshots.

Here's the new addition on the title screen.

And this is what the actual achievement screen looks like.

Sounds sorted, now achievements.

Right, got The Great White Destroyer sounds sorted out. All the music has been converted to mp3, except for the frenzy tracks, left them wav for fading purposes. I think this led to the game running much smoother in some areas, even when testing in debug mode it's faster than before. The ram needed to run the game has also decreased to around .6gig instead of 1.5gig. Also got the game displaying for 1024x768, by using the view port settings. Everything is still 800x600, it just get's blown up.
[EDIT] Forgot to mention that the game loads up in around 30 seconds now, holy cow! It used to be anywhere from 1:30 to 3 for some people.

On to the achievements! I've never been a big fan of these but they are a central part of gaming now. I have a list of them with quasi-clever names and descriptions. A few examples would be...

-Right back at ya! = Destroy L. Sharkburn's boat with his own dynamite.
-Manfisher = Knock a swimmer onto a fishing hook.
-5Cent Bulletproof? = Get shot by Lil' Snips 5 times before killing Big Snips.

Stuff like that, I think there's 72 listed at the moment. So I have to come up with a place in game to scope these out, make some art, get it coded. That's what's up for next week.

Crapmunch movement and more.

I didn't get all the animations finished this week, had a few busy days. But these three are done.


There's a poo scoop, where he flings dung and sometimes oozes at the player. Then there's a shovel swat. Last is his walk cycle, which works well in reverse also, probably due to him being so large and round.

YoYoGames released their spec info for developing iPhone/iPad games, so I'll be converting The Great White Destroyer(TGWD) and Snowball's Chance over for those platforms starting next week.

For TGWD, I'll be downsampling my sound effects, hopefully without them sounding too bad, to save on file size. Having the music be .MP3s will be a huge help, they're .WAV currently. Also I'll be working on screen size related issues, a control scheme suited to portable touchscreens, achievements, improving performance, all kinds of crap. I'll try to do it in a smart way so there will be a new PC version as well. The same goes for Snowball's Chance, I'll probably add even more stuff too, content wise.

Trick or Treat Sale! The Great White Destroyer

Let's play a game. The Great White Destroyer(TGWD) will be on sale all next week, a special sale, one of choices.

On Monday, TGWD will be $4. If someone chooses to buy a copy, I want you to look on the order form under where you enter your name, there will be a "Company" field. I'd like you to enter "Trick" or "Treat".

Why you ask?

At the end of the day, I'll be counting up all the Tricks and all the Treats. You see, a Trick will increase the game's price by $.10, and a Treat will lower the price by $.10. So after it's all added up, we get the new price for the following day. If a purchase is made and the "Company" field is left blank or something off the wall is put there, a coin toss will decide the outcome, heads will count as Trick and tails as Treat. There are limits. The price will never drop below $2 or go higher than $5.90. Will the price go higher or lower? Time will tell.

I'll list the results the following day.

So there it is, the game is on.

Friday(Saturday really) Bullcrap 9-10(11 really)-2010

Friday Bullcrap, Saturday, whatever.

Friday Bullcrap 8-13-2010