Creature Profile – The Buffalpug

The Buffalpug is a gentle beast. It’s basically meat for the grinder as every creature that can attack them will. Hey there has to be food somewhere right? They are your standard cattle variety creature. Plenty of them planet side just roaming around, so there shouldn’t be any issue gather resources from them. Their hides make some decent armor, but when they stampede it can spell disaster. So choose your shot carefully so you do get trampled.

If you enjoyed this article please follow us over at Violent Sol World on Indie DB.

And if you want to help support our progress we have a little side scrolling shooter for sale that is kind of fun on Itch.io called Cornflower Corbin. Check it out.

As always, follow me @Viedt_EL on Twitter.

Creature Profile – The Stalker

The stalker is your classic brainless, relentless, stone cold killing machine. An Insect at its core, It will attack anything it sees and take it out to feed off. Weather that’s a Bufflepug or you, it doesn’t really care. It will strike out as it chases you while you run away. Taking out one isn’t bad, but even with a turret to assist you, a couple of them can easily overwhelm you and make for a bad day.

If you enjoyed this article please follow us over at Violent Sol World on Indie DB.

And if you want to help support our progress we have a little side scrolling shooter for sale that is kind of fun on Itch.io called Cornflower Corbin. Check it out.

As always, follow me @Viedt_EL on Twitter.

The Chase is On!

So we are chasing something fun here.  There’s a site called IndieDB where a ton of Indie games go to publish articles and show off what they are doing.  Essentially a place to promote the creation of the thing you are working on.  There are many like it, but this is the one we focus on.  Our little game is ranked 58 of 38481 games right now.  It varies all the time and we have been as high as 6th on this site.  So I feel like we are doing a good job promoting it.  We can always do more of course, but for a game that is about 70% done, those are good stats.

So, what is the game?  It’s a top down tactical shooter open world survival game.  It has some RPG like feels to it too.  It’s a procedural generated world that is 6 times the size of the earth.  So it will have plenty of room for a lot of crazy content.  There may be aliens, there may be an evil corporation that takes advantage of you, and there may be some other fun stuff to see.

We still have a little ways to go, but we are trying really hard to get voted for the “Unreleased Game of the Year” award which could only lead to good things when we do release it down the road.  So if you have a minute, head over there and give us your support.

http://www.indiedb.com/games/violent-sol-worlds

You can follow me on Twitter @Viedt_EL

And our studio can be found here: http://afterthoughtgames.com/

Latest Alpha Release Coming Soon!

Violent Sol World has been getting a lot of work done to it the past few months. We got a little behind our regularly scheduled rollouts because we took on a little more than we normally do for an Alpha release. So, we are excited to share what we have been working on with all of you.

We added a box just outside of the starting crate and updated the look of both. Why? One is for sending stuff up to the space station, and the other is for the station to send your orders to you. Both of those will have a drone come down from the station to deliver or pick up the stuff. It’s the start of everything we need for our purchasing system to be in place. You send your resources up to the station, go to the store, and order what you want. If the station has enough resources, it’ll be printed and sent down to you. Fun, right?

We built the entire system for armor, damage, and all the other fun stuff that equipment can do. We wrote an article about a little while ago that explains a lot of it. You can find that here.

LET’S TALK MODS

The final big thing we did was completely gut the physics and start over. We have learned so much over the time we have been developing Violent Sol that we could get things running so much better. There used to be a bounce and pop when the player ran into anything, now, nothing. Just a stop, like you would expect to see. Cleaner crisper physics and now with the new effects system, physics handles all damage allowing us to have everything in our world get hit in some way.

We still have a way to go, and we will find more bugs we are sure, but this release is leaps and bounds over what we have done in the past. The bulk of the “systems” are in place with only a few more to go and things are working well. In one the next releases we will be adding a heavy amount of content to work these systems like they should be worked.

Hope you like what you see.

If you like what you are reading about us, follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook for more updates.

Also, check out our Steam Greenlight page.

Interested in helping our budget? We have a fun little shoot ‘em up for sale on itch.io that we are trying to get greenlit on Steam too. You can find out more information on that here on IndieDB

Playing Games

I’m a developer by day, and a game developer by night, so I don’t have a lot of free time to play video games.  I want to, and when I do I enjoy doing it.  So I am blessed to be part of a great fundraising program called Extra Life.  Extra Life, if you don’t know, is part of the Children’s Miracle Network and uses gaming to help raise money for local children’s hospitals.  They do this by having a nationwide 24 hour gaming marathon every year.  This year that marathon was on November 5th.  The day of the time change, so it was actually a 25 hour marathon.  As the president of my cities guild I wanted to expand what we did a little bit more so I put together a spot at that hospital were gamers could come and enjoy the marathon together.  We got to play a bunch of retro games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Arcade on the old NES and Halo 2 on the original XBox.  We spent a decent part of the marathon playing the Jack in the Box games as a large group, laughing at each other and joking around.  It was great experience.  I already have ideas of things we will do differently to make it even better next year.

So no matter how little I get to play games throughout the year, I will always have my 24 hour marathon every year where I get kick back and play and forget out my developing responsibilities.  Now since I am talking about it, I am going to go play some Skyrim for a little while.

As always

If you enjoyed this article please follow us over at Violent Sol World on Indie DB.

And if you want to help support our progress we have a little side scrolling shooter for sale that is kind of fun on Itch.io called Cornflower Corbin. Check it out.

As always, follow me @Viedt_EL on Twitter.

Social Media

It doesn’t take a genius to know that you will have very little success if you don’t utilize social media these days.  This blog goes to my Facebook page, Twitter account, and a few other spots no matter what I write about.  Why?  Because of branding.  I work hard on developing our game, and running the studio, but I have to spend a fair amount of time branding too.  Not branding the game, but branding myself.  In order to be successful, I have to try to reach an audience, and hopefully engage them in some intellectual discussion.  Or at least talk real good about whatever it is I am writing about.  Which sometimes is just a dumb joke that only I find funny.

Sometimes I have nothing to say, sometimes I have too much to say.  But either way, I want to get myself out there, and then by proxy that will hopefully get my product(s) out there.  Did I mention I am developing a game.  We also have a few new project on the horizon.  So stay tuned and I will have something more interesting to say next time around.

If I can leave with any advice, it’s look for the correct tools to aid you in your social media journey, and have fun with it.

Make sure to check us out on IndieDB

Violent Sol Worlds and Cornflower Corbin

Or on Steam: Violent Sol Worlds and Cornflower Corbin

And if you want to hear my daily thoughts and stuff you can follow me @Viedt_EL

More on modding

The Violent Sol team discusses modding in our up and coming game.  We always wanted to have everything be moddable and moreover, we wanted it to be simple enough that someone that is not a programmer could do it.  In this short video our developers discuss that stuff just a little bit.

You can check us out on Steam: Steamcommunity.com

Find us on Twitter
Larry @magicrat_larry
Phillip @Viedt_EL
Aaron @TheRealF1tZy

Film created by Lisboncreative.com Youtube.com

Also check out Violent Sol World and Cornflower Corbin

Let’s talk mods

Violent Sol World continues to ask the question, “Can we mod this?” We started out this project with every intention of making all things, from creatures to items to biomes, modable. So this week I spent a lot of time working out our system for items. We wanted to make sure that any average Joe could create their own items, or change the items that we have in game in a really simple way. So what we came up with is effects. Every item and every entity can have effects. So what is an effect?

  <Effects>
    <VSEffect>
      <Duration>0</Duration>
      <AttributeEffected>Damage</AttributeEffected>
      <Amount>5</Amount>
      <PercentageChance>100</PercentageChance>
    </VSEffect>
  </Effects>

It is a combination of duration of the effect, attribute that is affected, amount of the effect, and percentage chance for it to hit. Using this simple layout, we can have these effects hit the defenders hit points, speed, accuracy, damage, armor, and fire rate. So in the example above with duration of zero and a percentage chance of 100 this is an instant effect, so the pistol that it is on increases the player’s damage by five.

In the following example though, the same damage has duration of two and a percentage chance to hit of 50. So this is your run of the mill damage over time, hitting for two hit points, every seconds, for two seconds, 50% of the time.

  <Effects>
    <VSEffect>
      <Duration>2</Duration>
      <AttributeEffected>HitPoints</AttributeEffected>
      <Amount>2</Amount>
      <PercentageChance>50</PercentageChance>
    </VSEffect>
  </Effects>

So with these simple xml nodes you can create an item that does practically anything you want. So when our player only has an accuracy of 10 he can barely hit anything in front of him.

As a modder, you might feel the need to create a set of sleeves that increase his accuracy.

  <Effects>
    <VSEffect>
      <Duration>0</Duration>
      <AttributeEffected>Accuracy</AttributeEffected>
      <Amount>90</Amount>
      <PercentageChance>100</PercentageChance>
    </VSEffect>
  </Effects>

See, simple right?

Of course there is a little bit more to it than that, but it is easy to put the effect on it right?  Get ready to do a bunch of modding in Violent Sol World.

If you enjoyed this article please follow us over at Violent Sol World here on Indie DB.

And if you want to help support our progress we have a little side scrolling shooter for sale that is kind of fun on Itch.io called Cornflower Corbin. Check it out.

As always, follow me @Viedt_EL on Twitter.

Adding Damage Over Time

I have been working hard the past few days to get things like damage over time and debuffs into the game.  I struggled on this because I spent too much time staring at the same code and refused to get a new perspective.  Sometimes the best thing you can do when you are stuck while coding is to take a step back and clear your head of the issue.  Then when you sit back down, try to come at it from a fresh angle.  In my case I couldn’t see the tree through the forest as it were.  I was seeing results that pointed to one thing, but I just couldn’t get out of my own way to see it.  Finally after too much time on my own, I asked for help, and even after my friend told me it had to be this, I still looked at that.  Eventually when I walked away and came back, I did a really quick search on what he said and it turned out to be the issue.  What relief and shame I feel right now.  I could have probably saved myself a few hours and a headache or two had I stopped and walked away sooner, oh, and maybe asked for help sooner too.  Damn my pride.  It’s ok to ask for help.  I have to remind myself of that a lot.  And most of the time when I do, it triggers something in my head and I end up answering my own question, so that should be my motivation.  Well like I always say, next time I will ask sooner.  I won’t, because I am stubborn and bullheaded which makes me pretty good at my job, but tough to deal with sometimes too.

If you were wondering.  The damage over time works great now, and effects laid onto another entity hit and stay there just like I wanted them to.  After that one small issue was cleared up the logic worked like a charm.

Make sure to check us out on IndieDB

Violent Sol Worlds and Cornflower Corbin

Or on Steam: Violent Sol Worlds and Cornflower Corbin

And if you want to hear my daily thoughts and stuff you can follow me @Viedt_EL

Mod the speed

Now that I have effects in place I have to get them to do something.  The first thing I tackled is the speed of the character.  So when the speed attribute increases, the character needs to move faster.  Pretty straight forward right?  Not so much.  Movement is easy but matching the animation frame rate to the speed is where it gets tricky.  There is a frame delay that essentially doesn’t allow the next frame to show if not enough time has past.  We are talking milliseconds here too, so the difference seems minimal, but you can see here, it’s noticeable when the player runs 3 times faster than the animation does.  His arms and legs are barely moving in comparison to his overall velocity.  So now I have to do a ton of math to figure out how our speed multiplier needs to affect the frame rate.  The other issue I ran into is that the animation class for our game doesn’t actually have any awareness of the entity that it is using.  It is generic enough that it just returns the next frame when it is time then the entity is drawn with everything else on the screen.  So, what do we do when we have something that is unaware of the one thing it needs?  We add it as a parameter and send it all the way in to the method that needs it.  In this case the speed multiplier works like a charm in reverse of the movement speed.  If we divide it into the frame rate it speeds it up so it matches the walking speed.  The one issue I ran into with this though is I only want that animation to happen like that when I am walking.  Thanks to a little planning ahead of time though I can use the animation state we set up to determine if the entity is walking or not.  Overall the speed increase boosts with the effects seem to be working well now.  So it is on to one of the other effects on the list.

By the way, I was able to triple the players speed with a simple XML value change.  That is how simple we are trying to make modding in Violent Sol World.

Our games: Violent Sol Worlds and Cornflower Corbin

Or on Steam: Violent Sol Worlds and Cornflower Corbin