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Tags: rogue, rogue rush, roguelike, schizokoa

Somehow progressing !

Tags: rogue, rogue rush, roguelike, schizokoa

Published !!!!

So now, let’s go to bed…

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=31786

Tags: rogue, rogue rush, roguelike, schizokoa

So we did it. For our very first participation, that’s quite a success. 72 hours (a bit less because we had to attend school on Monday) was shorter than expected and, as any newbie I think, we did a lot of poor choices.
Yet the game is out, it’s kind of fun to play and it was a very nice experience overall.

Common! Play with us!

What went right?

• The timed roguelike concept turned out to be funnier than expected. It was our only valid idea when we ran out of time to choose a game design. We had thought of “you can only get one true love” where you’d be in a room with a lot of people and you’d have to reduce your choice to one; stuff like that, but nothing seemed really fun to play… Turns out that adding a time pressure on the classic genre makes it all new again, and most people we’ve seen play were screaming when they had only a few seconds left to the counter.
• The hall of fame/Score system has started a new competition inside our classroom, with amazing scores! If we had an online leaderboard (we had enough time to add it to the game), the emulation would have been even more active.
• The stuff system with no inventory and the fast-choice system is great, and totally in line with the rest of the fast-paced experience.
• No major game breaking bug that we know of, at least. And that is some sort of miracle given the fact that 30 minutes before release, the game crashed on an 8th of the equipment.
• The monster variety was really a big worry during the development, we had only 3 sprites for the enemies… Turns out that displaying their equipment was enough to forget about this limitation.

What went wrong?

• Coding. Before we started, we had settled on GameMaker Studio. It should have allowed us 3 to work on the game together in a perfect world filled with unicorns… The harsh reality made us go back: we lacked of experience with GM:S and during the first night we switched to Pure Basic. The bad part is only one member of our 3 men crew had any experience with programming (and none with game), and a lot of poor code design choices were made: we ended up with the worst code ever. But at least the game was done.
• The shield mechanic does not work, and the reason is obvious: you’ve got to wait in a time limited situation. Pretty rubbish.
• A huge lack of feedback, that is mainly a time issue, but most of our feedbacks couldn’t make it to the release; you don’t know when you are short on life or on time, and death is especially surprising.
• Our workflow is pretty much non-existent : we had nothing prepared, no file sharing system and not even a complete development pipeline…
• Balancing SUCKS. We couldn’t do any testing till the game started to be a bit playable (in the very last 4 hours), and most of our formulas were not even remotely working. We settled on too-easy and almost game breaking ones by default, but we now know how to think them. Next time we’ll do better, for sure.
• Level generation is boring. This fact is counterbalanced by the fact that no-one in our team had any idea of how to make a level generator when ours was coded, but we should have done some in-depth studies on existing generators before rushing to code.
• The controls, especially on windows with a keyboard are not working. We should have tested it to avoid using alt as default button (you can use wasd and q/e/space as an alternate and much better solution).

Aaaand that’s all for us. We are amazed that you guys played our little game. Many, many thanks for that; and our next participation will be much better, I swear.

Till then, we are going to redo rogue rush with all the cut-out features ;3

Cya next time

The SchizoKoa Team

This entry was posted on Friday, December 20th, 2013 at 11:40 am and is filed under LD #28. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

We did #95 overall on the last LD Jam with Rogue Rush (thanks, thanks, thanks), so I feel compelled to write a bit of code for the mini LD…

Murika fuck yeah!

So, yeah, Rogue Rush did #95 overall and we were really proud of it (especially for a first game). Guess beginners’ luck ran out, because this one is really not as good.

Well, I was pretty much alone, so it’s a given I could not produce as much as a 3 persons team, but I’m really not satisfied with myself, especially for the windows version which is plagued of bugs (and even an almost game breaking one, depending of your mouse)…

If you can find time to test it, please give me your feeling on what went wrong (beside my poor English).

Going 3D?

So, in December, I (with a 3 rookies team) did my very first game, it was Rogue Rush and we finished #95 overall (many, many thanks!). Last month, I tried doing something alone, it was Grab, Check, Inprison -Extra Invasive Edition- which was inspired by Papers, Please and (obviously) Cook, Serv, Delicious! Extra Crispy Edition, but it turned out pretty bad.

In order to learn a few tricks, for my third game (and also third participation to Ludum Dare in a row :D) I wanted to try something new… So I tried to use some 3D (as you can see, my modelling skills need quite an upgrade) and local multiplayer…

From the look of thing, my game should be ready in time, and I can already announce that it’s both stupid and fun :3

Here we are, Gaming Cockroach is out!

This is my third game and third entry to the Ludum Dare in a row :3

Gaming Cockroach is a serious game depicting how hard it is for cockroach to find adapted gamepad…  a stupid game where a cockroach plays Tetris on NES…

Actually, the theme wasn’t inspiring me at all, I thought about all those 16 bits games with animals and couldn’t feel anything but that I would make a clone… Trying to do something new, I tried a few idea with my cat, to see if I could make her play with my tablet, but nothing good there either… Then I’ve got my idea: what if  you where playing an animal (so… non human player) playing (literally non human player!) Tetris (again, non human)… This is solid theme following!

The game is REALLY hard, never been able to go beyond level 5, but it’s also fun enough to play not to get frustrated.

Also, I thought it would be better to try some features now than during a classic Ludum Dare, so I added:

• Local multiplayer (you need at least one gamepad though)
• Online scoreboard.
• A Konami Code (try it to have even more fun!)

You should try it, cause I’m proud of it :3

A few bugs got squished! But I made sure not to hurt our cute little gaming cockroach <3

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-49/?action=preview&uid=31786

This entry was posted on Monday, February 24th, 2014 at 6:22 am and is filed under MiniLD #49. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Time to write a post mortem for Gaming Cockroach.

The theme

“Non human player” did not click with me. I grew up with the genesis and the super nes, and quite a lot of my favorite games are staring animals or at least anthropomorphic animals: non human player is not a constraint but a given in my mind. I guess I could have done a puzzle game, but the truth is, I don’t think I could pull out a working puzzle game over a weekend… So the last idea was doing a game that was not intended to be played by a human; I thought of different things, like making my cat play with my tablet or doing some video analysis from a webcam (poor man kinect) to make you play with a plush… And it was terrible till I get an idea : I was looking to add an interface outside the game (a cat, a plush, whatever), but it could easily be done inside the game. So I started doing some 3D model of a nes gamepad.

What went wrong?

Well, I got lucky with this one: the development went right and I only got a few quacks on the road:

• Tetris is harder to clone than I thought and the result is kind of cpu demanding. Of course any modern CPU will make it run smoothly, but still, its heavy for a simple tetris.
• A real 3D approach would have been better that this pre-render thingy: took me a lot of time for pretty much nothing.
• I should have taken the time to make my own graphics for Tetris instead of using the classic Nes version. It’s not hard and I might even have learned a thing or two.
• At last but not least: don’t suppose everybody thinks like you do. To my surprise, some people did not understood that the cockroach could jump or fly, but it’s true that it’s not written anywhere. I should have done a small, one page, tutorial consisting only of a few drawings.

What went right?

• Since I saw small, I could put everything I wanted in the game (or almost, cause at the very start, the idea was to play a mouse and to have a cat wandering around randomly…)
• The result: I wanted to do some playable yet unplayable game, just to see people raging. This goal was perfectly  achieved and I’ve had some fun watching my friends loosing.
• Balance. For the very first time, I’ve had time to tweaks value so they achieved some kind of balance. The fly is timed so you’ll drop on the start button, the speed is timed so you can only do 3 action time (move, rotate and then re – move)… And overall, it seems to do what I want :3
• The konami code and the flappy bird clone made people laugh ^^;

For my third game, I’m quite satisfied with the result, and I can’t wait for the next jam ^_^.

I’d also like to thanks everybody who played it!

Infinite thanks to John Gavin Polson who was nice enough to post about my little Gaming Cockroach on IndieGames.com 😀

The article : http://indiegames.com/2014/02/freeware_pick_play_tetris_as_a.html

Download the game : http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-49/?action=preview&uid=31786

Thanks to r2d2upgrade (play his game guys, it might very well be the best of Mini LD49!) I saw there was a Youtube video of Gaming Cockroach 😀

Those reactions was pretty much exactly what I was looking for with this game :3

Gaming Cockroach can be downloaded here.

This will be our fourth Ludum Dare (mini included) since December 2013 😀

And we just opened our site : http://schizokoa.com/ our blog and all our games are there, come and say hi!

Very Release, Much Fun

We needed a break from our ‪#‎LD48‬ game… So we did another mini #LD48 game… Also, intelligent people should stay away because they could be offended.

Play it there.

… and there rages the war between God and the Devil!

We are doing a two players tablet game, and it is coming along nicely :3

Cya at release time!

So, we started some playtest of Warmaggeddon, our two players RTS on tablet/mobile, it works fine and I’m amazed by our pixel artist work for this Ludum Dare :3

And still more than 24 hours left 😀

Yup, we did it!
Common and play Warmageddon, the most colorful apocalypse game yet!

Warmageddon is a two players RTS for tablets and smartphone :

Come and play with a friend!

And right now, I just need a lot of sleep; but I can’t wait to try all those games 😀

Has it developed self awareness? Well, maybe… But before worrying about whether or not a game jam entry could become the next Skynet, you should try playing it : it’s a fun and colorful RTS in HTML 5

Project page
And tomorrow, I shall write the Post Mortem of this great adventure!

Warmageddon is a simple RTS with two camps: God or the Devil; the way the game was made I expected most of the victory to be on the Devil side (if you are to try the game alone, you are going to play the devil). To get a bit of data back, I implemented some basic google analytics and the results are surprising me :

• Devil Victory : 67.31%
• God Victory : 32.69%

Yup, God is winning one third of a time, even though he is much less played! That means that there is more people playing it 2 players than I hoped, and I wish to thank you all for that!
Now, why not try it and rate it?

Project page

Images that moves!

Well, you could since I post almost everyday about our 2 players RTS, but in case you didn’t, look at that colorful gif and if you feel like it, go try and rate it

Booom, waaah, oh no an Imp! Flooosh… No sound on a gif? No problem!