Following On From What I Said Yesterday, I’ll Be Posting Daily On Tumblr (here), Mastadon (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@RoyMakes),

Let’s start with what I’m actually working on. Stardust Survivors is a “Survivors” game, a sub-genre made popular by 2022’s Vampire Survivors. If you don’t know what that is, it’s like a twin-stick shooter, except you only have the one stick. The goal of the game is to outlast an infinitely-spawning series of enemy waves by destroying them to level up, gaining new abilities and attacks, most of which auto-fire without your direct input.

At this point, we’d barely touched Armoured Engines in over a year, and we figured a new project would be just the thing to get us out of our rut. Stardust Survivors takes that original concept and puts it into a magical space setting reminiscent of Moon Dreamers and Sailor Moon. The Stardust Survivors are a group of magical girls and boys who protect the energy of planets from the insatiable and unending tide of Constellar creatures.

It’s still early days; we’re mostly working on adding playable characters and abilities. However, we intend to streamline the survivors gameplay with short, 5-minute runs that extend down a rogue-like track. You can try out an early demo that we prepared for a local games showcase on our itch.io page here: https://boundergames.itch.io/stardust-survivors. Can YOU beat the boss!??

Hey friendly reminder that I made not one but two games in which you've got a grappling gun that's a frog! They're lowpoly platformers and you go up against Beelzebub himself <3

I don't really play Hearthstone anymore, but I've always loved it for the different ways it portrays the World of Warcraft. I love Mean Streets of Gadgetzan so much that I wish it was a part of WoW (I'd love to make a Starcraft 2 mod inspired by it, but I'll talk about that later).

The most recent Hearthstone trailer had two great parts. The first is this Tortollan volcano city, which looks rad as hell and has a bunch of cute turtle people. The Tortollan are fine in WoW, but they look a lot livelier in their Hearthstone art.

Chromie pulling alternate-timeline versions of heroic characters has a vast amount of fan-theory potential. There were certain character skins in Heroes of the Storm that had different backstories, such as Thrall's "Ashwolf Chieftain" story. From what we saw in the trailer of pre-banshee Sylvanas and Lo'Gosh Varian, I'm certain they won't take that particularly wild direction, but who knows? There may be a mighty surprise.

Here's a weird optical illusion I found while modelling: the two black lines in the center are completely straight, yet there's this bulge in the middle. :'V

I’m 34 now! Depression is striking, but we can’t let that stop us from Making (for long)! Bounder Games has been active for a good 10 years, and we’ve still yet to release a fully-featured game (beyond a simple puzzler, Combo Carts). I have to admit, this is a constant blow to my self-confidence. In 2017, we were jetting all across Europe to show off Armoured Engines. But that steam seemed to run out of our indie dream. Honestly, it’s a struggle somedays to even sit at the computer.

Throughout social media I see developers working whole-hog on their games, so many amazing projects that I want to be excited for. Yet that excitement hurts, poisoned by my own inability to do the same. A toxicity of my own making, something I need to work hard to clear out of my system.

We thought switching to a new project would re-light the fire, and it did for a time. But even that stalled out half-way down the track. The development curve is steep, and I’m somewhat at a loss as to how to surmount it.

That’s not entirely true, I do know what the solution is: "elbow grease". Nothing gets done unless you do it. So I’m gonna keep working through my checklists, one step at a time. That’s the only way anything gets made. I’ll make Version 34 of myself better than the last iterations, if only by the merest of margins. That’s enough.

I've been called into college to fill in for an animation class. Looks like they're using Illustrator to make art and After Effects to animate. It's pretty early on in the term, so I'll start from the basics to see what they know already. I use Inkscape for Armoured Engines (main art) and Stardust Survivors (icons).

I'm not that familiar with Illustrator; Inkscape is my vector art program of choice. I'm going to be helping out the students with their work, so I've got to familiarise myself with it. There's a few oddities; you have to use a different tool to add nodes instead of just double clicking. But it's functional so far, once I looked up a few shortcuts.

A little snowman should be easy for them to make, simple shapes for a simple character.

Rediscovered this treasure. My bible circa 2009; discovered I still use most of the tricks I learned from this book today. Animating waves using masks, proper gradients, animation principles, etc. Its advice is still relevant even after Flash's demise.

I had a lot of game ideas I wanted to make in Flash, most of which never escaped their notepad concept. Had a few successes, a Tetris-blackjack combo called DiceJack, and Rawrysaurus, a kaiju game where you escaped from a tidal wave. My first forays into game dev.

Thanks Chris Georgenes.

Happy Valentines day! A good excuse for chocolate (for any relationship), and for me to talk about my partner, Coding Dino https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@codingdino. Not to gush, but she’s the smartest person I know, full of passion for her craft, and keeps pushing herself to improve.

I’ve learned a lot from her over the 11 or so years we’ve been together, and I’d be a far worse person without her. <3

She's been obsessed with Ascendance of a Bookworm for the last couple weeks, so here's some Rozemyne.

Talking about the level design in ‘Jak & Daxter’ on the PlayStation 2. Source: Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine Demo Disc 51. Support us on Patreon

Listening to the Sonic Hysteria soundtrack by NicoCW while I work on Stardust Survivors! Some of the best music from the Sonic fandom. I'm a particular fan of the various Launch Base Zone tracks, especially the underwater variant that builds on the PC marching-band version. The Hill Top / Mystic Cave mashup is also *chef's kiss*.