Friday Diaries: Fresh recruits

Hello there!

It's been a couple weeks since our last devdiary update. We here at GameRealmMadness have been busy developing new stuff for all of you to see.





First off, we've had some new blood join our team. We have a new musician and a sound effects artist working on Hybrid Children. We are still in talks of getting a 3D character artist to handle the monster and enemy models in the game.

Because we had so many good applications, we took the IndieDB job listing off, but you can still send us email to grmgamedev(at)gmail.com - Especially if you have talent in Unity3D level design or programming with C#! If you only know JavaScript, then unfortunately you are not a match for our team. We're currently not looking for any new audio artists or musicians, as those places have already been filled.

In other news; we also have put an older test build of Hybrid Children on download at Itch.io and IndieDB! This is just meant to showcase how the graphics look in the game, and how well it runs on your computer.

Please note that this is not the current test version, and that can now only be accessed by joining our Patreon. We recently updated the Patreon build with brand new music track and updated sound effects for weapons and damage hit.

We have been building our Patreon profile slowly, and giving more incentives to join. In October we're planning on giving out Kalaban for free to all our 5$ tier members. Be sure to track our progress to stay updated on such deals and more.

We also have a surprise update for this blog entry! During the last few weeks we've been working on a simple arcade shooter called Area 51 Defense, which puts the player into the boots of a US Army soldier. Your task is to defend the air force base against 2 million invading dweebs! The game is going to be a comedic "meme game" made for fun, and it will be released on Steam before September 20th.

The game is already playable, and by joining our Patreon, you can get full access to the current demo. There is already player movement, shooting, enemy spawning and score systems in place. There's also going to be more than one enemy type in the final game.





That's it for this week's update, thanks for stopping by!

Head on over to Itch.io or IndieDB to test out Hybrid Children, and join our Patreon to play the current version of the game, and the demo of Area 51 Defense.






Become a Patron!


- Harri J. 

Friday Diaries: First version of survival mode

Hello!

I just added several things to the current build to make the first version of survival mode completed. The game now has weapon pickups, spawning enemies, health pickups, and death screen when both players are dead.

I've tested the game with one player, and tried it out in two-player mode briefly. I still need to run through with both players to see that there are no bugs left in. The game is now also available for Mac and Linux too, so go grab it!





If you have either Mac or Linux, I would love to hear your feedback on how the game runs on your computer. Every bit of feedback helps! I have tested the game on Windows 7 and Windows 10, and it ran well on both systems, but it's always tricky to create a game for multi-platform release.

The game has two monsters at the moment, the first one being the placeholder wolf monster borrowed from Kalaban, and the second is the new frog man "Mangler". I'm not planning on bringing the wolf monsters back as a stardard enemy in Hybrid Children. They might be included as an easter egg, or some special NPC like "Puppe" was in Kalaban.





One of the things I would still like to add to the survival mode, currently, is making it even more fast-paced. I did up the monster speeds as I got all the essential code running. You generally want to make it easy and relaxed when you're first adding all the stuff in. Some even make the enemies disabled when they're building the basic block of a game.

The effects could run by faster, player could be faster and bullets could fly faster, etc. That's my take on creating a good survival mode like this. The game does get exponentially harder now, as it counts the number of enemies that have been spawned overall, and now tries to top that number by spawning more enemies constantly.





The pickup spawns required some extra work that had not thought of before. In Kalaban the random items drop from monsters, and that is much easier to code. And maybe I should've used that method for this too, but now the items spawn to specific locations. I've always been intrigued by deathmatch maps, and that's the sort of feeling I was going for, just in a really contained arena.

Next up I think I'm going to start developing the actual map design. This first survival map is just a test run for the visuals, so it doesn't give you full picture of what the game is going to look like. Not to mention important things like scripted events are completely missing from the game now.

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That's it for this week! Stay tuned for future updates, and go our game at Itch.io or Patreon and support our development.

Have a nice weekend, everybody!



Become a Patron!






-Harri J.

Tutorials Offer

This is a game / editor that Harri Jokinen worked on in early 2018. It's really rough, shaky and has an unreliable save / load function. I wanted to keep it available for archiving purposes. The game part is pretty undeveloped, just a techdemo really. You can just shoot the enemies and roam around the map.  

There is a Debugging.txt included in the package, which you should read before using the editor. The file explains the basic controls and debugging tools that are implemented in the editor.

Like Kalaban and Speeder Challenge, this game was also developed with Fusion 2.5. If you own the Clickteam software, you can purchase Hordelands022.mfa and have a look under the hood!

OBS! The MFA source code also needs Looki's Mega Shader Pack 2.0 to function. 

Get access to the following files:

Hordelands - Free editor / game executable 16 MB

If you pay $5 USD or more:

Hordelands - Full source code & Editor 32 MB

Check out the new page on our blog here.

Friday Diaries: Making progress

Hello there!

It's been a few weeks since the last update on Hybrid Children. I've been making lots of improvements to the game recently, so I decided it was time to make a new blog post.

Firstly, I've been adding new weapons into the game; shotgun, submachine gun and grenade launcher. The full game will have an arsenal consisting of at least ten different weapons. I don't want to reveal the full list before we have implemented them in the game.

I have also released the first playable build of the game on Patreon, so you can go and support the game, and participate in its active development.





The game currently is shaping up to be a more action-oriented experience than what I originally designed it to be. I applied for a grant to create a story game, but now that I didn't get the money, I'm planning on making the design simpler and more streamlined.

Only possibility to fund the game successfully would be to launch an Indiegogo campaign during the fall. That's the earliest possible time that I could have a really impressive demo of the game ready. I'm developing this game by myself so the progress is slow. Extra funding would definitely help to bring the game together faster.





One especially helpful thing would be to get a developer dedicated to 3D character art and animation. I'm happy with doing the game design and programming, but generating the art for a realtime 3D game is quite tasking.

I've usually been in charge of making the game design and art, so it's refreshing in a way to be brushing up my programming skills for a change. Medlab Terror was the first Unity game that I releassed to the public, and in that game I basically did everything except music.

Creating a good-looking first person shooter with just one active developer was a bit too tasking though, so I ended up with the concept of a topdown horror shooter.

We've recently been adding Hybrid Children to game sites to gain some attraction. There is now a page for it at IndieDB and Itch.io. There is also a job posting for a hobbyist 3D character artist.

If you feel that you have a passion for indie development and can create characters that would fit our game, please see the job posting and contact us at grmgamedev [at] gmail [dot] com

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That's all for this week, thanks for tuning in! Go follow us on social medias, maybe join the discussion on our Discord, and show your support by participating in early testing at Itch.io or Patreon. See ya!

- Harri J.