Today is the Finnish Veterans Day

 

With Respect, Honor and Gratitude. Thank You Veterans! Today is National Veterans Day. Finnish Troops raise the flag for the border of the three Nations after the end of the Lapland War on April 27, 1945.

For Celebration Grab Yourself 'YOD: War Of Finland' Mobile Game from the Google Play Store.
Click here to get it for free.

This game is based on the true story of Winter War.

Story begins before Soviet invasion to Finland on 30 November 1939, and Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940. Game includes play modes like infantry missions and skiing, and vehicles like the motorcycle, car, plane and tank. Fight through 11 missions with historical maps and unique atmospheric music. 

Friday Dev Diaries: Kalaban & Area 51 Defense on sale and more

Howdy folks!

This week we do not only have updates on the Kalaban sequel, but also announcement that Kalaban and Area 51 Defense are now on sale on Steam. And we also have an ongoing sale on the Humble Bundle store!





As for the game currently in progress, there's been a lot of recent updates, which I'd like to share with you. I've been updating ALL the particle effects in the game; the explosions, blood, muzzle flashes and projectiles. Now the game has a slightly less cartoony look to it, but I think that's only a good thing.

After all, we're creating a horror action game from a topdown perspective! It's supposed to look suitably grimy where it counts. As you can see from the screenshot above, I've also added some slasher, B-movie style effects into the game. These include the torn-out corpses of farmers and farm animals.


 


A lot of the monsters in original Kalaban followed an animal theme. A lot of the male population of the little town were turned into "dog zombies", resembling werewolf monsters, and some of the female victims of the Kalaban virus were turned into snake-like beasts.

I decided to continue this same trend, and created a 'Moo Fiend' enemy into the game. A montrous cow-human hybrid with a milking unit in its back. It's definitely in line with the other B-movie elements, and something that's been brewing in my disturbed mind for quite some time.

Besides new enemy characters, I've been designing, modeling and programming new weapons into the game. For example, one of the new weapons is the Homing Missile, which has a completely unpredictable projectile that seeks out the nearest enemy and aims at it. It definitely has drawn some inspiration from the great nineties classic Rise of the Triad with its multiple rocket and missile launcher weapons.





The night is full of surprises in this game, and I'm excited to create more of them. I've finally coded some level transitions into the game, and gone through the scenes to give them a more unified look and feel. This includes making sure all the code is standard, and for example that all the gameplay elements are uniform throughout the game.

One thing still missing from the game is the random loot, which was also added into the original game after its release. Wooden boxes, barrels and containers full of random loot will be seen in the finished game. I will admit that there is a fair bit of Diablo's influence present in this game.





In other news: we've been experimenting with hosting our own HTML5 games and embedding them on our blog. First one in line for public testing is Neurotron, which was developed back in 2015 - 2016, and has now been added to our site.

Neurotron is a topdown action RPG, where you control the whole party of cyberpunk heroes in a realtime environment. During the missions you will gain experience and credits for your characters, and discover random loot from the rooms. You will have to navigate all your surviving characters to the exit after the mission objective has been met. Neurotron is heavily influenced by its board game counterpart.

OBS! Please use a desktop / laptop computer and browser to play the game. Its features, gameplay and user-interface has been designed for desktop use in mind, and NOT intended for mobile browsers.

> Play Neurotron

(Note that if game doesn't start working, check that the website url is HTTP not HTTPS -Oneak)

That's it for this week, hope you all have a really nice weekend. Stay safe out there!

- Harri J.

Birthday Sale 2020

​

Howdy everyone!

We hope everyone is okay out there on the other side of the screen. We here at GameRealmMadness are celebrating the birthday of our gamedev team and its founding members. Click the links below to check out the Steam sale for our PC games.

And remember: if you enjoy our games, please leave a review. It really helps, and we love to read your feedback!

- Harri J.​

Area 51 Defense - FREE WEEK!

We here at GameRealmMadness like to do our part in helping people fight the boredom. If you have to stay home, or are in self isolation from your own will, you can now get our game Area 51 Defense FOR FREE during the next week!

Please note that this is the current version of the game on Itchio, and the old early access version has already been free to download.


Head on over to Itchio to claim this special offer:
> AREA 51 DEFENSE ON ITCHIO


-Harri J.

Friday Dev Diaries: Purification plant in progress

Hello there!

Since our last update, I have created at least three new playable scenes. They're all work in progress however, and we will continue work on them until the whole Act 1 is ready. Me and our environmental artist Dalton Costa have been busy churning out new assets and map pieces.

The biggest new area is going to be the water purification plant, which will consist of multiple different maps in the game. We're in the progress of building the first map of it now, and seeing how the assets will look in the engine.





I've also been updating the enemy AI code, its animations and attacks. There will be some specialist code needed for the boss enemies in the game, and that's what I'm going to tackle next. In Kalaban there was only a couple enemies with firearms, but in the sequel there will be more.

You don't want the enemies to feel robotic killing machines in the game, but instead make them fun and challenging foes. No matter how hard, there must be a strategy for beating them. This of course is a matter of gameplay balance, level design, enemy placement and the attack style of the enemies (fire rate, animations, etc).

It's a lot to take into consideration when you're not simply making a game full of mindless foes. Even the mindless foes must have strength in numbers, and special enemies among them to spice things up. For example, I have always enjoyed the Fallen minions in Diablo II, where there are shamans sprinkled among them. The shaman will resurrect fallen foes, until you take him out.

I haven't gotten into the special scripting part of the maps yet; secret areas, story triggers, traps - but I'm looking forward to it. I enjoy creating new fictional words, be it on paper, in text or in video games. During the last three years I've gotten pretty familiar with Unity, and there are a number of incremental steps which needed to be taken in order for a project like "Kalaban II" to be possible.

One of the biggest has been the rigging and animation of the human / humanoid characters. It used to be such a challenge for me, and when I made prerendered graphics in the past I had to use all kinds of workarounds to do simple animations. The finished sprites usually looked fine, but they took a number of hand-crafting and polish which just wasn't optimal in the long run.

 


One thing that you can be pretty comfortable with modern engines and tools is the fact that the visual fidelity will just be there. With the right lighting, tweaking of post-processing effects and just generally acceptable or above level assets you can create really impressive scenery.

People who on the internet are constantly fighting and bickering about "what's the best engine for 3D games and game development in general", but I think it's a matter of getting intimate with the tools that you're using. When you know the basic "do's and do not's" you can be pretty comfortable with content creation.

Of course there is room for improvement and optimization, but that's something you should really do constantly. We'll continue with our work, and hope that everybody's having a great weekend!


- Harri J.