splinter-zone

[splinter-zone]

Hi!

Splinter Zone now has a Steampage and a Releasdate! The page is linked in the last sentence and the officiall releasedate will (hopefully) be June 1st. 

If you don’t want to wait that long, you can get the game already on itch.io. It’s slightly outdated right now, but you will get the full release (as well as a Steam key), once it’s done!

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Devlog: Permission to cheat

First of all, before you start to read my aimless rambling about the topic of cheating in videogames, please go and read Amr Al-Aaser's and Kate R's pieces about the same subject. Because unlike me, those people are actually good writers and they're much more adept at getting to the root of what cheating in games can be.

Now if you've finished reading those pieces (and if you haven't, what is wrong with you?), please feel free to hear a little bit about my past as a videogame cheater and why I decided to let you cheat as much as you want in my own videogame.

As many kids in the late 80s and early 90s in Europe, my first experience with videogames didn't came via a classic gaming console, it came through playing games on a home computer. For me it was the Amiga 500. We had a lot of games for the Amiga, though only a very few of them were actually bought. Most of the games we had, we got through "other sources"(meaning they were all pirated).

Probably one of my favourite games on the Amiga was Rick Dangerous 2. A game that, as I later found out was generally considered to be quite awful. However I never really encountered said awfulness, mostly because our copy of Rick Dangerous 2 came with a build-in trainer. In that trainer, which was put in by the nice people who originally cracked the game, you had the option to switch on things like unlimited lives and ammunition. This way the game was still incredibly unfair and hard, but it took away enough of said unfairness, to make it enjoyable.

With the years, I started playing games on different platforms, but I kept cheating where I could. To this day, I never finished a playthrough of Baldur's Gate 2, without extensive cheating. Yet I still consider it to be among my favourite games of all time. Cheating in Baldur's Gate didn't take away any of the enjoyment I had out of the game. All I did was remove some of the tedium, by giving myself good equipment and boosting my levels.

If you cheat in a (singleplayer) videogame, you're not really hurting anyone, aren't you? You're confronted with a goal (finish the game), but the regular means to achieve that goal involve an investment that you're currently not willing to take. So your options are either to stop pursuing that goal, or find an alternative route.

(One recent game that does an incredible job of letting you customize your experience is Even The Ocean, you should check it out!)

Obviously I can only speak for myself here, but when I'm working on Splinter Zone, I'm constantly concerned about the players actually being able to enjoy the game the way I would like them to. I'm always thinking "maybe it's too short? I should build more levels that are harder, because what I currently have is too easy! What if people get through it within ten minutes and everything falls apart?" These concerns lead to the game being way too hard, especially at the beginning.

In my worry that people would plow through the game too quickly, I made it alienating for those, who are not me.

So I tried to make it easier, I gave people more opportunities to heal, I reduced some of the damage they take and instead of adding a set of ultra-hard levels, I'll probably make a set of one's that are really easy. The game will still get hard, but I try to build it in such a way, that you'll actually have to be familiar with it, before you encounter those elements.

But it still might not be easy enough for everyone. After all, part of the enjoyment in this game is learning to overcome its challenges. However not everyone starts out at the same level. So how can I make the game more accessible, without having to re-build most of what I already made?

By allowing them to cheat, of course.

I added a menu to Splinter Zone, where you can adjust not only the damage you take from enemies (up to the point, where you don't take any damage at all), you can also adjust the damage you deal, enable autofire (which means you don't have to button mash anymore) and give yourself unlimited ammunition.

These options don't remove all of the challenges, for example you can still die by falling into a pit. However, it should now be possible for way more people to play this game, than it was before. I also tried to make sure, that they are granular enough so that people can customize their experience. Not everyone wants to be invincible, but maybe the default damage is too high? Just set the enemy damage to 50% and you're good to go!

To be honest, there is no real downside to including cheats in your singleplayer game. Stuff like Achievements and Leaderboards don't really count. You can still come up with challenges that work, even though people use cheats. Leaderboards tend to be populated with cheaters fairly quickly anyway (not mentioning the fact that you can also try and come up with a different approach to score attack games than just a simple leaderboard). And also: Who cares? What's so terrible about someone getting a virtual badge through slightly different means than you? It doesn't take anything away from you, but not letting this other person find ways to enjoy the same game, takes something away from them.

So give your players the permission to cheat and be it only to give you an excuse to make a silly menu with wavy text and floating gradients.

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Cracktro (work in progress)

The final version of Splinter Zone will have a handful of cheats, to help people play the game, that usually aren’t that into action games.  The main reason why I decided go down that route, is because I remembered how many games I played with cheats, when I was much younger. I grew up playing Amiga games, which oftentimes were incredibly unforgiving. However since most of the games we had were pirated copies, a lot of them had built-in trainers that made them actually playable. So instead of putting Splinter Zone’s cheats into a boring menu, I decided to aknowledge my past and put them into a screen that looks reminiscent of the cracktros that I grew up on. The screen will the first thing you’ll see when you start the game, it will have custom music (which is amazing by the way) and wavy scrolling text with shoutouts and dumb jokes. It will be amazing and probably a bit confusing to people who don’t know what those things are, but I don’t care. Anyway, this thing up there is a work in progress of the cracktro. Next up will be the scrolling text and then I’ll do the actual cheat menu and implementation.

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Giftrailer

I did a handful of giftrailers for press/outreach purposes. This is one I like the most, because it has some sort of progression in it. I’ll try and see, if I can post the other one’s as well, though they’re probably to big for tumblr...

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BETAAAA!!!!

Sorry I’m a week late with posting this announcement, because I’m completely unorganised. Anyway Splinter Zone is now in Beta and also available for purchase on itch.io.

Go take a look at the game’s itch.io-page and if you really want, you can also buy a copy and make me feel good about the work that I’ve done.

Aside from that, keep your eyes open. I’ll promise to get back into updating this thing more often.

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BETA!

Oh hey! Haven’t been here in a while, right? You can see that I’m a total professional by not updating this game’s website in almost six months, even though I’ve been working on it pretty much constantly. There will be a longer post soon, but right now I just want to inform all of you that Splinter Zone is now in “””beta”””, whatever that may mean.

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Part of a boss that’s currently in the making. Learned a bunch of new stuff while coming up with the design, which hopefully makes designing the last one much easier than the one’s before.

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Devlog#22 Finding a Direction

So I finally managed to get back to work this week, after spending most of the past six weeks dealing with adult-people stuff (filling out forms and renovating my apartment mostly).

Anyway, before my break I was about to start working on all those boss fights that are still missing in Splinter Zone. Taking this break actually helped me quite a lot in figuring out how to actually merge Splinter Zone’s story with its gameplay and the boss fights are part of this. It all started while I was thinking about an interesting design for the Ice-Zone boss.

It all started with me thinking “maybe you should get inspired by something you learned at University”. I studies Anthropology, and most of the things I learned dealt with long dead human beings, and apes. Sure, I could’ve gone down the Neanderthal route, but that’s been done before. Same goes with any other Ice-Age themed enemy, like a Mammoth. Than I remembered ‘Ötzi’.

‘Ötzi’ is a rather famous mummified corpse that’s somewhere between seven and ten thousand years old. For some reason, some people think he’s an archaic human (maybe a Neanderthal), when in fact he was living during a time when Neanderthals were already extinct for way over 20,000 years.

So I wanted to use him as template for a boss, because I thought it would be funny to have an incredibly strange reference to my (almost) academic past in this silly shooting game.

He was supposed to be psychic. He would float around, create a magic ice barrier that protects him from damage, until you destroy it and throw ice blocks at you.

Last week I finally sat down to make the sprite and couldn’t draw a good looking Ice crystal to save my life. 

This is what I ended up with:

Doesn’t really look like Ice right? Maybe, but I had something else in mind. However, as I was staring at this thing and asked myself whether or not to keep it, I suddenly realized something:

Why not have a person trapped inside that crystal? And why not have this person involuntarly controlling this crystal? And the players can only see this person, when the crystal is vulnerable (=drops its shield)?

And then it hit me: Why not use a similar motif for all the other bosses as well? 

This gives me not only a nice hook, when I sit down to design all those other bossfights, it also ties in nicely with some story elements, that previously have been dangling around without any real attachement to the game itself.

So I trapped an old man in that crystal, that’s also attached to some weird wires, because bio-mechanical reasons:

A thing that still surprises me (and probably will for quite some time), is how one small idea can lead to a whole cascade of problems being solved at once, without much extra work on your end. Sure, I still have to make all those extra bosses and other things that came to my mind after I did the sprite above, but it’s all so much clearer in my head, than it was last week.

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GREENLIT!

Hi!

Sorry for not updating this thing in so long, but "being an adult" happened and I had to take care of a lot of boring things that have nothing to do with flashy lights or explosions.

Thankfully, I'm sort of done with being an adult for at least the next couple of months, so things should get back to normal in the next few days. However that's not what I want to talk about today.

 This evening I was informed that Splinter Zone got through Steam Greenlight.

 You can't imagine how important this is to me right now. My game just got from "next to no chance of earning me enough money to get out of wellfare" to" incredibly low chance of earning me enough money". I can't say how grateful and humbled I am for all the support I got in the past months. I'm used to doing things on my own and have the tendency to think that everyone is against me. I'm still baffled that there are people out there who genuinely care about my work and I probably never get used to it. I would not have been able to get through Greenlight that quickly (only four months!), if it weren't for all those people who have either voted directly, or just shared the link.

So let me say it again: Thank you very much. Your support makes this crazy idea I had last year actually possible.

At some point I may sit down I write something more substantial about my thoughts on Greenlight itself (spoiler: It's not good), but for now, just a few things.

 The statistics you get are completely useless

There's no indication how long it takes for your game to be considered/greenlit

Statistics are useless

If you're stuck on greenlight, don't panic, you'll get through eventually

Seriously, the statistics are incredibly useless

Do not throw your game into the bargain bin (=bundle) just to get more votes on greenlight

Same goes to predatory publishers, whose only PR strategy consists of email/twitter spam

Don't believe anyone who says that the statistics on greenlight are useful, they are lying!

Value your work and value yourself. Just because your game is stuck in this weird popularity contest, doesn't mean that it's bad or that you are a bad person. You're probably quite nice and I want you to feel good about yourself.

Don't read greenlight postmortems. They're just a waste of time, because nobody outside of Valve really knows how Greenlight actually works.

  That's it, thanks again for all your support.

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I got distracted a bit today and kept working on this image instead of finishing of the tileset for the new area.

I wanted to test how it looks, if I add some rain and clouds to it. Spend a lot of time trying to have the clouds move from right to left, but didn’t manage to make it look nice. Instead I just drew a different set of clouds for each frame and it sort of looks okay.

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Worked on the backgrounds for the new area and thought to merge one of them with my Mega Man 2 tribute piece I did about two weeks ago.

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Even more sprites

Just finished animating the remaining enemy sprites for Splinter Zone’s new Area. Now to put them in the game.

Really looking forward to show this new area, once it’s done.

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More new enemies

Almost done with the new enemies. I should be done with asset creation for the new area by the end of the week.

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Cwow

Working on the next (sort of city themed) area. The game was also missing a bird-like enemy.  So I made a Crow, that’s going to throw nuts at you.  

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Devlog#21 Onwards!

Been a while, hasn't it?

I can assure you that I wasn't lazy in the last two months. In fact a lot has changed, or at least I got a better perspective on certain things.

Anyway, I'm about to take the next step in the development of this game and I thought I take the time to write a bit about the current state of things, as well as how I intend to move on.

1. State of the Game

It's good! I added a bunch of extra animations and did some changes to the character sprite and in addition to the new weapon system (modifications instead of subweapons) the game is incredibly close to what I had in mind, when I initially set out to make it.

I have to be careful, because I'm the dude who's responsible for this whole thing, but I can't stress enough how good the controls feel. It's just a joy for me to run around in this game. There are certain stages where the game just flows beautifully, once you know what you're doing and it's that kind of experience I'm looking for.

It does still have issues when it comes to letting people actually experience this type of flow, because it's apparently quite hard. I did change some things that should've made the game a bit easier, for example I extended the invincibility period after you get hit and also changed up some enemy placements. However I still think that I can do more to ease people into the game and this is something I need to take care of, before I release the full game.

I don't know how it's with other game developers out there, but I catch myself playing my own game quite often. Not for testing purposes, but because I want to play it. Don't know if this is any indication for its quality, but at least it sort of shows me that I really like what I'm doing, which is a nice change.

 2. State of Greenlight Campaign, overall PR stuff

It's tough. Right now the game sits a whopping 36% approval rating. Meaning that of the total number of votes, 36% have voted "yes" on greenlight. This isn't an indicator for anything, really and Valve does a lot to de-emphasize downvotes on your stats page, but it's still annoying. As of today, it's looking like the game may spend almost a year on Greenlight, which wouldn't be ideal.

One thing I quickly learned is how hard it is to direct people from outside of Steam to your greenlight page. For example, Splinter Zone got featured on Gamejolt's front page in early July, which brought in about 1500 downloads and about 4500 page views on Gamejolt, but only about 5-8 votes on greenlight.

The Gamejolt feature also brought in a small number of let's play's, but I haven't watched any, because I just can't. It's not that I don't like watching Let's play's, I just can't watch people play my game without being able to give advice. In that regard, showing the game in Vienna was pure torture, because it would've been rude for me to constantly peer over people's shoulders (which I still did way too much I think).

There also was an article on Alpha Beta Gamer way back when the greenlight campaign launched, but that was it. I have to admit that I didn't really do that much press stuff in the meantime, since I'm not really sure about how to approach it best.

So what was left was doing the occasional tweet about it, hoping that it may get retweeted by someone with a bigger audience than I, and I managed to get some votes out of it.

As of right now, I'm pretty sure that current approach won't work and probably will never work, at least for this game. My reach is pretty small, nobody in the press knows who I am and cares about what I do and twitter exposure is nice and good, but it's mostly empty and doesn't really help you with anything. There are so many Accounts out there that seem to like every tweet that has a particular hashtag in it, without actually interacting with it. So you'll get a bunch of likes, but you're not really finding people that actually care about your work, or about you as a human being.

 Even if I would get more press coverage, I somehow doubt that'll make that much of a difference, because there's still this problem with getting people to vote on Steam greenlight.

What I also don't like and which might be another reason why this is all going rather slowly, is the fact that all these efforts are meant to drive a number up, not really to find and interact with people who might be interested in my work. Sure, I can say "being featured on Gamejolt only brought five people to my greenlight page", but I can also say "over 1000 people played my game and most of them seemed to like it!". Both sort of describe the same event, but one focuses on what I didn't get (lots of greenlight votes), whereas the other looks at what I did achieve (not every game gets featured).

 3. What’s next?

So what to learn from all of this? First of all, it's seems to be clear that my approach isn't really working. I don't think that my game is bad. I think my problem lies more in my current inability to get it in front of people that might care about it. What I did so far was doing pretty general press stuff, but the general press tends to not care that much about random arcadey pixel platformers. They care about them sometimes, but I wouldn't bet my house on it. Still, games like mine wouldn't exist, if there wouldn't be an Audience for it and I do think that there's one. I just need to look in more specific places.

I also need to do a better job at interacting with people that do care about my work. I always was a bit shy about doing development streams, because I'm quite incompetent at what I do and I can't deal that well with live criticism, but I think I have a way where I can make it work. Still pondering, if I should make a twitch account for it, or if should keep using hitbox. To be honest, I don't like the twitch community that much and being on a smaller platform makes it less likely for weird random people to pop up and destroy my mood.

I'm going to do some tests in the next few weeks and see how it goes.

 Other things that are definitely happening are a mailing list, where people can get weekly updates, about my progress and also maybe get access to some secret stuff.

I'm also going to set up a forum on Splinter Zone's itch.io page that can used as a hub for people to interact with me and other players. With forum I'm also going to establish something like and official leaderboard system, for the time until I manage to add leaderboards to the actual game.

The leaderboards are mostly to challenge people to play the game longer than just a few minutes. I also really want to know, if there's someone out there who's actually able to beat me at my own game.

I could sound like a technocrat that doesn't care about people and maybe say that, these things will help me to create more engagement in my audience or something like that, but I honestly just want create a space where people can hang out and talk about the game. I really want to get away from always chasing things and people that aren't interested about my stuff and instead care about those that already do.

I will also keep trying the traditional press stuff in the meantime, but I think having a way to create and foster a community is something that I should also take care of and thankfully, there already nice tools in place to do this.

 As for the game itself, I won't be updating the prototype any further. I did start working on new things for the eventual full release last week. First thing I did was sort of, solve a strange resolution/scaling problem that I had since way back when I first started working on it. I wrote "sort of solve", because the game currently crashes on my Windows 8 laptop, but I think it's more related to the DirectX version of said laptop and not as much to the thing that I put in to solve the problem itself. I need to check this at some point, but it's not a very high priority right now.

The next step for me is to add the next area of the game, which of course means adding at least four more levels and a bunch of enemies. I also want to add one or two bossfights, a bunch of additional weapon upgrades, two additional animations and re-do the powerup/combo system that's currently in the game.

All this ideally should be done until mid-October (spoiler alert: It probably won't). After that I will be doing a sort-of early access release on itch.io. For once to earn at least a little bit of money, but also to gather more feedback towards the game's full release. Right now my plan is to have the full game ready by the end of this year and release it within the first few weeks of 2017.

There's still a lot to be done until then, but I'm confident that I can make it work.

Still can't believe that I'm actually doing this for real now.

As always, if you haven’t played the Prototype yet, please go and give it a try.

If you’re interested in hearing more about my game or even about myself, you can follow me on twitter, or if you only want updates on the game, it also has its own account .  

Also please consider voting for Splinter Zone on Greenlight. I try to not care as much about number going up, but it would still mean a lot to me!

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Splinter Zone is now on Steam Greenlight!

There isn’t really much else to say, aside from the fact that I’m not very organized when it comes to doing effective PR.

Either way, the game is now on Greenlight and I would really appreciate it, if you could go over there and vote for it. I expect this campaign to take a while, so any kind support, be it either a vote, or if you sharing campaign itself is tremendously appreciated

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Devlog#20 Permanence and expression based storytelling

(I decided to move the devlog from my own website to this one, the older posts are still avaialble over there, if you’re interested)

What is this title supposed to even mean, right? To be honest, I'm not so sure myself; it's just that I tend to use those words a lot when I talk about the things that make Splinter Zone unique.

How about instead of using these fluffy, non-descript terms, I tell you what I'm doing with this game?

Sounds good? Then let's get started!

Splinter Zone, at its core is a very straight forward score attack game. Each run, your goal is to get as far as you can, without taking too much damage, while at the same time trying to destroy as many enemies as you can.

But unlike most other arcade games, Splinter Zone will change over time. You can already see parts of this in the Prototype. The more runs you complete, the more writing will appear on the wall of the "lobby". If you go and read what's on there, you see a recollection of each of your previous runs in form of a "generative poem" (don't take this term too literally, I have no idea how to better describe it). I got this idea from listening to Lana Polansky who at one point during last year's ADAF mentioned, that games should look take some ideas from Poetry. I have no idea if this is what she had in mind, but I like the system I came up with.

Splinter Zone isn't really procedurally generated. It has a pool of pre-created levels it randomly draws from. To break the monotony a bit, you get to fight a boss every five levels. This breaks the game up into nice little sets, each consisting of five levels and one boss.

Each pre created level has a line of text associated with it. Lines for normal levels consist of five words, whereas boss levels only have one word associated with them. Why this distinction? Because normal levels in Splinter Zone consist of five screens, whereas a boss level is only one screen large.

Over time, each player accumulates a set of unique poems that document their history in the game. Since the length and structure of each poem is based upon a player's performance, it's directly tied to their expression within the game.

This is one half of what I mean when I talk about permanence and expression based storytelling.

 The other half is a bit fuzzier, because it's not really in the prototype. There are some hints to it, but it's too little to really get the full idea.

Basically the final version of Splinter Zone won't be endless. It will have endings, at least four at the moment. However unlike most games that feature multiple endings, they aren't tied to singular decisions you either do during one run, or over the course of the game. Instead the way the players will progress through the game, will depend on the way they play it.

 There's something inherently nihilistic about Arcade games that fascinates me. They usually end in failure and even if you win at them, it's all back to the beginning the next time you start them up.

What carries them is their commitment to spectacle. They flash so many lights at you, that you forget about the fact that all you're doing is essentially without consequence.

At the same time, they are expressive games. The spectacle they're producing is all due to the player's actions. The game doesn't decide the outcome of a run. It's all up to my ability and my decisions. They let me play anxiously and timid, but they also give me space to be angry and violent.

I want to use these expressive elements of arcade games while at the same time; I want to explore their more nihilistic ones. How well this is going to work out for me, I don't know. I also don't know if anyone else will even find value in these things. But it's those elements that interest me the most and that make me want to keep working on this project, until it's done.

 If I fail with that, I hope at least people can find some enjoyment in the explosions.

Explosions are also important.

As always, if you haven’t played the Prototype yet, please go and give it a try.

If you’re interested in hearing more about my game or even about myself, you can follow me on twitter, or if you only want updates on the game, it also has its own account .