Flea Sounds

Hello there,

I've been so busy working on my latest game Flix The Flea, that I've completely neglected to write a blog on any of the processes involved since I found my rough little demo backed up on an old hard drive and decided to make something more of it.

If you caught the last post, you'll notice that I'd just started a Kickstarter Campaign in the hopes of funding the software I was using to make Flix, and something like four months later, thanks to the help of my backers, I seem to have all but finished (er, a few persistent flippin' bugs aside).

While I take this momentary breather before delving back in to tidy the game up, it seems only right that I share a bit of my production process with you here... So d'you know, I think I will.

Something I never really covered while making Power-Up (although arguably, I really should have), was its sound and music.

While initially making the demo that was to become Flix, I kept a lot of the sound effects simple, leaving little programmatic prompts all over the place for future reference. This meant that sound and music kinda arrived in the game together, and quite late in production, which also meant that they had a sense of consistency in their style. I thought I'd explore that in a little more detail today.

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A Bit About The Sound Effects Then...

I was a student at Bradford University until 2001, just before the advent of the specialist 3D Modelling or Games Programming degrees we see today. Instead, we had a more general Media Technology and Production approach which fed into the film, TV and games industries along with web design, animation, and loads of other creative lines of work too. One skill set which I became increasingly enamoured with through the creation of various sound scape projects and mock radio programmes was the whole area of creating and manipulating sound effects.

Making a listener believe in a shootout in a railway tunnel or a song composed with the harrowing samples of the world's first homicidal musician was a lot easier than accompanying said concepts with anything visual. Looking back, it was also a lot more fun and freeing to be able to produce this sort of thing individually or in small groups as opposed to doing it in cumbersome production teams lugging heavy kit and reams of storyboard under hot lights, battling with our destructive egos while keeping 50 extras from getting bored and restless on a set for hours on end. (Shudder).

A little taster of some of the nonsense that me and my friends got up to back in our university days.

In hindsight, I rather enjoyed making narratives happen in sound, though I never really saw my career in it. While creating all that narrative audio proved to be much more complicated than the relatively small demands of a little game like Flix The Flea, concocting those story driven pieces back in the day did provide some useful faculties for thinking in terms of what kinds of objects are hanging about in a scene and how to use those objects bring that scene to life. I think the term I'm clumsily reaching around for is "mise-en-scene" or something in that region. Anyway, the meaning of the term is tricky to pin down but French are said to do it very well in film, adding hidden depth all over the place.

My focus with those old audio and film projects was really only on the simple task of making the viewer accept that we were in a certain location. You know, to make it all a bit immersive. Given its peripheral nature sound tends to be particularly powerful for that sort of thing... and I had this in mind when I set out to make the sound in Flix.

Flix was based on the 8-Bit game Bugaboo The Flea. I go on and on about this, but Google it and you'll see the similarities. In fact, Flix was originally a little remake of Bugaboo. Just a hobby project from the days before Power-Up, which I made just for me. Just to see if I could.

Flix The Flea - Four months to make it sparkle.

As a child, I loved Bugaboo because despite its simple audio/visual approach, there was something about the depth of that cavern which had me so immersed that I almost didn't want to escape it (and in fact, I never did. The game was agonisingly difficult). As I recall, the dark vastness of this single, lonely cavern made the game particularly fun to play at night, and regardless of the game's outward simplicity, it oozed atmosphere.

The Bugaboo soundtrack comprised of just four in game sounds. A "beep" for jumping, a "blip" for inevitably hitting your head on a rock, a soily "squiggle" for landing arkwardly and slipping off an edge and a final "boop" for landing (in my case, usually frustratingly back at the bottom of the pit). There was also an inexplicably sickening little musical arrangement for when  you were caught by the bird, but I'll not even try to describe that, choosing instead to relegate it back to its proper place in my childhood nightmares!

Harsh and simplistic as these sounds were, I felt that the developers, Paco and Paco had covered the key event-driven sound requirements of the game nicely and anything else would have been gravy (ie. Atmospheric garnish... which was often devoid from even the finest 8-bit games, so I wasn't complaining about its absence here).

I literally sampled and used these sounds in my original version of my game. Remember, at this point it was a simple straight modern remake of Bugaboo for the sake of my own entertainment. Later, the code for these simple sounds became the cornerstone of a much richer sound scape in Flix The Flea.

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Software and Hardware

Back at university, playing with all the new software was a really fun part of creating for me and an audio-minded friend of mine introduced me to Cool-Edit Pro, a great audio package which was used by the course leaders and the local student radio station alike for both teaching students and creating broadcastable content. Many was the evening I stole in RAM Air's quiet radio booth with their top-of-the-range microphones and state-of-the-art PCs, experimenting with Cool Edit Pro. (Not to mention listening to the station's vast selection of CDs).

Cool-Edit Pro was an absolute pleasure to use and incorporated loads of easy to grasp tools for delay/echo, EQ (low/high end), and modulation too. Effects like chorus, phaser and flange could be applied for quite a variety of cool effects. Not to mention easy manipulation of amplitude, pitch/speed, etc. Throughout our days as students my peers and I enjoyed free use of the package, and after graduation I always kept my own dodgy copy nearby for whenever the urge to make my own little hobby games or animations got the better of me. Quite simply, it was brilliant! and I got a lot more use out of my own £2 desktop microphone than an impoverished cheapskate like me probably should have!

 

Ah, the £2 microphone. For years, I made my game sounds with something like this.

When it became apparent that I'd just have to release Power-Up I ran that first kickstarter for it... remember that? Well, that was basically so I could buy all my licences for 2D/3D software along with the software for sound and music. This way I could release my games without legal licencing worries... and included on that wishlist was my trusty old Cool Edit Pro. However, when I came to do my research I was gutted to find that the program no longer existed... at least, not under the same name. In fact, like a lot of good software, the package had been bought up by Adobe, and re-fashioned into the slightly more sanitised Adobe Audition. I was a little reluctant at first, but needs must and all that. I added it to the list of software I required, and when I finally purchased I was relieved to find that Cool Edit Pro and Audition were basically the same thing.

Adobe Audition: The modern incarnation of Cool Edit Pro and my sound app of choice these days.

Incidentally, I should also mention that there is a free alternative out there if you're willing to suss it out. It's a bit more bare bones but I'm told that a program called Audacity does a good job with sound effects. Take a peek if you're on an even tighter budget than me or just want to have a go at getting started with sound effects.

Your sound effects are only really as good as your sound acquisition, and my cheap desktop microphone wasn't going to cut the mustard for a game which was broadly to be made up of sounds I created myself. I kinda got away with it on Power-Up by using instrument samples as the basis of a lot of the sounds along with the half decent microphone on my iPhone when recording anything unique but the process was convoluted and messy. Realistically I'd need a decent USB Microphone.

Luckily, these days you can get a good one off the shelf in most major computer retailers for around a hundred quid. As purchases go, this wasn't a no brainer as I don't generally have that sort of money to spare, but I reasoned the purchase with my hopes of one day recouping it through sales of the game and I took the plunge. I got myself a Spark Blue condenser microphone, and so far I'm pretty happy with it.

A decent microphone of my very own. It's been a long time coming.

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Making Noises

Well, it really is about as complicated as "making noises" really.

In more detail though, I find that the best way to get the sounds for my games (especially something cute and cartoony like Flix) is to identify what it is I need, then make it by whatever means necessary... which in my case, usually means with my mouth. When it comes to sound effects you can't be coy, and that's probably why it helps to do these things alone without a big group standing by.

Working at home as I do, I do sometimes wonder what my neighbours make of the crazy noises coming from my office when I'm in the middle of a recording session, but hey-ho. My local reputation as an eccentric nutter is a small price to pay if it means I get to make my little games!

So, with the curtain of mytique firmly torn from the whole affair, let's take a look at a few of the sound effects from Flix The Flea, and a bit of the thinking and process behind them.

While initially re-making Bugaboo, I really hadn't given a thought to sound. I simply took those key sounds from the original and that was that... but when I returned to the project with a view to turning it into Flix I already knew that I wanted to elaborate on those sounds. For example, the sound of Flix hitting his head over and over quickly became pretty infuriating in game (it happens a lot). It was negative feedback on the most potent, repetitive level: Player frustratingly hits head - frustration compounded by the same dull "blip" noise over and over. I was just getting angry playing it.

Luckily, over years of making my little games, I've learned that a good way to reduce that frustration and lower the blood pressure is with a little bit of variety. First off, I was going to replace the "blip" with a fist-in-palm contact sound which nicely represents a little bald head slapping into a rock with the force of my knuckle behind it quite effectively simulating the rather harsh but necessary force of the character's skull behind the collision. This would be at the core of the impact sound (not to mention quite subtle and already much less abrasive than that "blip"). Now for the variety.Well, no probs. I decided that I'd basically do a selection of "oof"s, "ow"s and "ouch"es to accompany the impact.

But hang on! This isn't as simple as just grabbing the microphone and recording it. Let's just stop and think for a moment.

The first question is: How many variants of Flix's voice will we need? This sort of thing needs to be quantized... especially considering that later on there's going to be more vocal sounds than just "ouch"es. Again, drawing from past experience, here's how I see the quantizing of variable sounds chosen and played randomly on a cue.
Three is the absolute minimum when it comes to varying the sounds and having them sound fairly natural to a player whose attention is really on their progress through the game, and even then you're pushing it. Provided you're not firing off an "ouch" every couple of seconds, you might just get away with three. Any less and Flix definitely will sound like he's playing a recording. And that'll jar on the player.
Somewhere in the region of seven variations is pretty much the maximum for a small game like Flix. Any more than that and you risk wasting file size space while not actually really benefiting from all that variety. After all, sound is by far the largest part of a game's file size. It's all a bit of a balancing act.
My happy medium for a game like Flix was to be 5 variations of "ouch" played over the head-hit sound.

Secondly, Flix is going to say more than just this selection of "ouch"es. At the very least, he's going to need to celebrate the picking up of an item or the completion of a level, to die and possibly even to respond to the proximity of a nearby predator (as this bit of colour was a feature I REALLY wanted). The trouble is, Flix was clearly going to have an affected voice. My natural voice was hardly going to suit him. If I went in half-cocked and blasted out a load of "ouches", coming back to do the rest later... well it stands to reason that I'd be in a different mindset later and produce a totally different set of vocalisations... not to mention that I'd completely forget the processes I put them through to make them sound like Flix. That's no good at all. I'd need to be consistent, and to do that I'd need to set up a recording and editing session so that I could do all of Flix's vocal comments in one fell swoop.

The raw vocalisations for Flix... Yes, I am aware that at this point it just sounds like me acting like a bit of a moron. But bear with me on this...

When making your own sound in a consistently stylised way, this rule of thumb pretty much applies to any set of sounds in any game. Sure, make a bunch of random placeholder sounds as and when you need if you like, but reserve the creation of the game's REAL sounds for one good day/week/month-long session in which you can focus all of your attention on getting it right, in a nice consistent environment and mindset.

Basically, for me it was time to start a "List of Sounds for Flix The Flea" and "hit head x5" was going on it!

The voice of Flix, all nice and consistently stylised with a few extra bits of foley. (AKA - me eating crisps noisily).

The same would apply to the bird's squawks from a distance (to add an element of foreboding along with a vicinity warning), a selection of those same squawks close up, the celebratory outbursts, the squeaks and protestations of fluttering bugs and bats, and pretty much every other character's utterance in the game. 5 was the magic number.

Five was also to be the number of variations on Flix's jump sound... although this time for different reasons. The whole game mechanic rests on Flix's jump height. I basically broke flix's jump height into 5 sound categories. When the player releases and the height is at the bottom of the scale in category 1, we get the quiet, low spring, in category 2 the spring gets higher and louder with more of a travelling rise in its pitch, and so on. Basically, the higher the player makes Flix jump, the higher, louder and generally brighter the little accompanying springy sound becomes (by the way, that's the sound of me twanging a plastic ruler on my desk in a myriad of different ways). Sure, I could've just stuck with the one sound, but where's the subtle charm in that?!

Sometimes a seemingly simple sound would turn out to require a little more work. for example, later in the game's story, there's the sound of Flix smiling which required the creative manipulation of an instrumental violin sound I'd purchased for music composition... in fact I reckon that musical instrument samples are the next best thing after your voice for getting that Hanna Barbera/Ren & Stimpy brand of expressive sounds that you don't hear in real life.

These are the 5 squawks I made for the bird, followed by the modified versions for nearby and the further modified versions for far away.

Finally comes the issue of pitch and key. Something I've mentioned before. With my games, I try to use key where I can in the sound effects to subconsciously please the player. In Power-Up I actually created the whole sountrack in one key (in a nutshell, this means based around the same dominant bass note). It gives each song in the game a sense of coming from the same place and allows me to pitch sound effects with the music for seamless juxtaposition. If you're wondering what I mean by this, have a play of the first level of Sonic The Hedgehog. Pick up a few rings and you'll find that the sound of those pick-ups is perfectly in key with the music. A very pleasing effect. Sure, the later levels change the key of the music, but the way that the all important first level is nicely tied together really makes for an inexplicably positive and memorable experience for the player. It's those kinds of experiences I look for when gaming, and its those experiences I attempt to emulate, elaborate on and experiment with when I make my little games.

I could dissect my Flix sound processes further but I'd probably be treading the fine line between informative and downright self indulgent, so I'll leave Flix sound there, suffice to say that the whole process of sound recording for the game happened properly in the last few days of the game's production when I knew what I wanted. A large percentage of the work was in prepping a list of the sounds I'd need while working on the game and just messing around with whatever items came to hand in the hopes of getting a nice audio effect.

Examples of sounds from Flix The Flea that are in tune with the music. Very effective for tying it all together.

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The Music

The music in Flix shared one common characteristic with the game's sound effects. It was all prepared in advance then actually added in toward the end of the project. But while I'd be prepping the game's sound effects in the form of a list,  the music was all prepared in the form of little recordings of me humming melodies, bass lines and generally trying to commit easily recognizeable vocal licks and riffs to my iPhone's voice recorder app (other phones and voice recording apps are available).

This was a trick I picked up back in my band days. Basically, I wrote songs. Lots of songs... I'd have probably done that whether I was in a band or not. I just liked doing it. I'd come up with a little melody and a few phonetic sounds which might eventually evolve themselves into lyrics depending on what I was in the mood to write them about later, then I'd grab my acoustic guitar and my trusty little tape recorder, both of which were always on hand in my bedroom at my mum's house, and later in my student bedroom. Once I had that little bit of tune recorded, I'd consider it safe and I was able to concentrate on other things, coming back to my tape when the urge to write a song came along.

An example of how my ridiculous howlings in note format eventually became a half-decent song, courtesy of my old band.

Again, you first have to get over yourself enough to recognise that in your initial rough recording you're going to sound downright stupid. It's worth it for the finished result though. With a bit of imagination, your idiotic babbling into your tape deck/phone will eventually come out sounding like a good song.

The technique I developed back then for capturing a good melody before it slipped my mind is as useful as ever for my little games, and having a voice recording app in my pocket at all times makes that even easier than it was then. While making Flix I knew that at some point I was going to need music, so throughout the development of the game's art, design and code, I was constantly humming, recording, then refining little riffs to fit into the game's overriding melody. Sure, to anybody else it sounds idiotic, but placed in the context of the finished product, it all makes sense.

Where it all began: This is the sound of me playing with pleasing Flix-style melodies while doing a spot of housework.

In some ways, this aspect of the music was made easier by the fact that I'd decided to attempt the whole game's soundtrack in a single song. While this meant that the ten-level game's soundtrack was to be reduced from a potential ten tracks to just a single one, it also meant that I'd have to layer this one song in such a way that the player would feel a sense of the story unfolding as they progressed through it. A sense that with each level of the game, they also got another level of detail to the music... not just a token channel switched on. To achieve this, the addition of a new instrument, and in a lot of cases a whole new sub-melody in the song would have to have a noticeably profound effect on the game's music with each progression. This was the experimental element of the Flix soundtrack, and the real challenge too.

Here's s peek at the arrangement for Flix The Flea. I've been making my music in Cubase since my days in the band. It's great fun to use. Note the different colour schemes for the groups of tracks. Each of these groups has been painstakingly arranged to get the best out of the music with each itteration and corresponds to each level of the game.

I wanted to see if this approach would add to the immersion, starting with an almost completely diegetic sound of wind rushing through the vast tunnels of the underground caverns while lonely percussive instruments hinted at creepy and lingering presences in the not-so-distant darkness. A reversed triangle hit here. An echoing castanet there. Altogether, it starts off pretty spooky. (incidentally, if you're a Kickstarter backer and you've played an early build of the game, that rather good wind sound in it is actually nothing more complex than me blowing whooshy noises into my microphone... I know, right?! I never thought for a moment that it'd work either! Came out pretty convincing eh?! But if you listen closely and you'll hear a little pop of the microphone that I couldn't quite get rid of... Note to self. Must get a good pop shield).

Here's the Flix soundtrack from an early point in the game when I'm trying to make it feel all lonely and spooky. (Imagine the wind in the cave howling in the background and you'll get the idea).

As the player progresses through the levels of the game, the percussion would give way to a gentle, dark rolling cello, which would later be joined by a bass guitar line with a mild suggestion of some bounce to it. The first of many instrumental additions intended to turn the sound scape from a lonely alien environment into something more representative, and downright celebratory of the cheeky, hop-along character of Flix himself as he gets that bit more cocky, self assured and nearer to his goal at the top of the cavern.

It would also become more busily populated with instruments and variants on the game's core melodies as the levels became more densely populated with creatures, reflecting the game's increasing complexity.

...and here's the Flix soundtrack when its really opened up and there's loads going on.

...at least, this was my intention when I set out, though I generally don't put it in so many words to myself when I'm getting creative. I just lie awake at night, sleeplessly visualising it all as best as I can in a much more abstract, less explanatory way, then I go about prepping to do it the next day.

By the time I have all of my samples together for the big recording/composing session, (three days in the case of Flix) I generally have a comprehensive library of hummed tune bits and a fairly clear idea of what's going to come out the other end.

Only you can be the judge of whether or not I actually managed to achieve all that pretentious bobbins I just laid out above. I'm far to close to it all to decide that myself. I only know that I really enjoy making this stuff. Sure, it doesn't yet make me a living, but it makes me feel like I am living... and that's good too.

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So!

I'm keeping this one short and sweet. I think my last post went on over three parts and well, that can be a bit of a drag. Instead of a big text based finish, how about I show off the final cover art for Flix while shamelessly plugging the game's soundtrack?! Yeah!!

 

I reckon the Flix The Flea Soundtrack should be coming out on the likes of Bandcamp (and maybe even the mighty iTunes if I can suss it out) around the same time as the game arrives on PC. That should be late September-ish.

I hope you enjoyed this post. If you liked it do let me know. Maybe even come say hello on Twitter. You can always get in touch with me @psypsoft, or just drop me a comment below.

See you next time!

m

Meet Flix!!

Hello,

...So now that Power-Up is wrapping up (at least the Xbox and PC versions that were solely made by me are), I thought I'd take a moment to talk about some of my other projects.

As you might have noticed, I'm currently helping 2-bit Games to get the iOS version of Power-Up as close to my versions as the devices will allow, and that's going well. It's taking a bit longer than I anticipated and it's pushing back my next major project Diz by a month or so, but hey, this is how it goes. I suppose there's not a lot I can do about that short of cloning myself... I'll just have to muddle through.

In the meantime, something else occurred to me...

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If you're familiar with my blog you know that my professionally, I'm an artist, not a designer, sound engineer, coder, musician or marketeer. Outside of my work, all of that other stuff was really just something of a hobby for me. A bit of an outlet.

Prior to making Power-Up I'd never coded for anything but small Windows.exes and I'd never done that with anything more complex than Adobe Director. It was the less popular, less cool cousin of Flash (back when Flash was cool) but because of its intuitive, simplistic lingo-code, it was on the curriculum back when I was in university. As a result, it was the Programming Interface I stumbled across when I was trying to make my first games.

Director was a visual environment, complete with a timeline and the ability to publish games as Windows execute-ables, and as a non-programmer, I was head-over-heels in love with it.

It's fair to say that this love affair lasted until present day. I've been making little prototypes and pretty much finished games with it (not to mention getting better at the design, music, etc, sides of things) for over a decade now, and using Director to help me to do my own thing in my free time has definitely helped to keep me sane during the more stressful parts of my professional career.

Yeah, it has its limitations, I haven't yet sussed how to do game pad controls or save data with it, but I have been able to create a considerable number of small but potently fun games, again, based on the ideals of the retro game-saturated upbringing that I had.

Which got me thinking...

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Major Vs Mini

I called Power-Up one of my "major" projects. Here's what I mean by that: When I was in full time employment, I was doing 8 hour days. When I came home, some nights I'd have a play with Director andwork on one of my prototypes as a way to unwind.

Currently I'm working part-time as an artist. This job takes up my mornings while I dedicate my afternoons to my Psychotic Psoftware work. In those week-day afternoons I work on Power-Up, Diz, and those bigger games that I'd like to really focus on for a year-or-two at a time in the hopes of figuring out how to bring it to a number of devices. Those are my "major" projects.

In my free time though, I still like to play with my little Director prototypes, coming up with ideas for good games and generally having fun with it. The innitial concepts for both Power-Up and my upcoming game Diz came about this way back in the day and I'd like to keep that up.

"Mike's Flea Game" - Day one...

Every now and then I find myself having so much fun with a concept, that I pretty much finish the job there and then. These are my mini projects.

One such project is Flix...

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How Flix Came About

So there I was in 2011, about 6 months before I got underway with Power-Up, having a play on my faithful ZX Spectrum emulator. It was a weekday evening snuggled up on the couch with my partner, Jo and our dogs. TV on, laptop on my knee. I was having a bash at Bugaboo the Flea.

I was boring Jo with my usual retro-appreciation tirade about how great this game was, while picking apart where I felt it could have been improved. Smoother scrolling was an obvious one, though I put a lot of that down to the device limitations. There was an unnecesarry abillity to slowly scroll the screen and look around for signs of danger, which really slowed the gameplay and didn't actually particularly help you to avoid the monster on the cave, but there was something really alluring about the idea of being lost at the bottom of a pit of platforms and being tasked with the job of escaping from it while avoiding said monsters. I liked that.

I was pondering out loud about possible alternatives to the game's weaker points when Jo finally snapped. In an attempt to shut me up, she suggested that I put my money where my mouth is and program it myself to see if it works. That way I might stop talking at her about it and she might get a bit of peace from my geeky meanderings. Fair enough I thought, and had a go...

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I drew myself a quick cave complete with platforms, gaping chasms, nooks, crannies and hideyholes galore.

A cave: Simple, functional, and quick to make.

Then I drew myself a flea with simple stand, jump and hit-head-on-a-rock-above animations...

A flea: 'Nuff said.

I kept my flea at screen centre at all times so as to ensure a nice big area of looking room on all sides, then I set about working out how to make his jump movements actually function.

It kept me quiet for a few evenings, but I pretty much discovered that the best way to keep this fun was to keep it simple. There would be just two keys: left and right. by holding down one of those keys, my flea would charge up a jump. When  that charge hit full power, it would loop back around to empty and charge again with a nice clear bar for reference. When the player released the key, my flea would jump at a height relative to the power-bar. Brilliant.

What was next?

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Well, collision was my next hurdle. This was pre-Power-Up, so it wasn't something I was quite so versed in doing effectively in such a fine-tuned way. Admittedly, there were a few glitches and limitations here, but the technique I came up with, while basic and not perfect, was a good solid starting point from which to improve later if I found myself a bit more clued up. I was very much learning to do what I could with what I knew and trust my future-self to know more later down the line.

Because Director is such a visual environment, I was able to take a fairly visual approach to the collision detection in my little flea game. I drew a number of rectangles, sized up to the character sprite and placed them around my flea. I then simply hid them behind the scenes of the game, prioritizing them literally behind the furthermost background layer of the game.

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A Predator!

No challenging game experience is complete without the antagonist, and as Flix is set in such a large and open vertically focused environment I decided to stick with the flying enemy of my game's main inspiration. Back in the day, the likes of Buggles on the Amiga had introduced smaller room-like levels to the flea mechanic, pitting their flea against flying ghost enemies, always homing in on your position and effectively acting as a sort of time limit, but I wasn't feeling that. For all its faults, Bugaboo had it right... a great big wandering predatory AI which took swoops at you whenever you got close enough to make your presence known.

I had the great reptilian bird spawn moving with one of its eight random directional variables active and a load of hidden sensors in eight positions around it. Then, whenever one of those invisible sensors hit a collide-able area of the map, the bird would simply turn, and go the other way. Certainly, it was going to get stuck every now and then, but that was a quirk I was happy to go with. Lets face it, any sort of glitch like that which cuts the player a break and inadvertently helps them out is not necessarily a bad thing. Glitches that hinder the player are another story, but happily, this isn't one of those.

A look behind the fourth wall: Some starter sprites with their collision all akimbo.

Wandering around aimlessly is all well and good. It actually makes for a decent passive enemy, but lets be honest, even the most basic of AI needs some level of intelligence, especially if it's a predatory monster.

So I added one more feature to the bird, a big invisible circular detector which followed the bird around, locked to the centre of the sprite. If this detector came into contact with the flea, the bird would become aware of the flea's presence and immediately move in the direction of the flea.

I quickly realized that to have the bird update its search for the flea's position throughout its attack was simply fatal to game play, making it close to impossible to escape from in most situations... but by having the bird check for the player's position just once, at the beginning of its attack made for a kind of halfhearted swoop attack. Sure, the bird would make a dart for you, but if you were quick enough to spring away or find a cozy little nook to sit out the attack in, soon the bird would lose interest and wander off, only making another attempt the next time you leap into its range of detection. Smart!

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Hooked!

What I had at this early stage was really just a re-imagining of Bugaboo. An homage, if you like. Not something I'd consider releasing, and I was all set to leave it there... But the urge to keep chipping away at the little project kept coming back.

I picked it up again!

Prettying it up: It's getting harder and harder to see the seams now.

---

It was at this point that I began to understand why the original creators of Bugaboo added camera controls. My flea's massive jumping height made for some pretty serious design flaws. Mainly, it was quite easy to make a great leap across the cavern, only to land dangerously close to the bird... in some cases, you'd find yourself kindly popping directly into its mouth!

This was no good. Clearly some kind of early warning of the bird's position was needed, but I felt that the cumbersome method of taking your fingers away from the handy left/right controls and using say, the number pad for camera movement just wasnt the way to do it.

I had simple, single hand controls and I wanted to keep it that way!

I also wanted to avoid making the player take their eyes off the screen to look at their keyboard, which would put them in danger while they're not paying attention but most importantly, breaking their immersion in the world of the game. Nothing pulls you away from a game like having to look down at your controls. No! I won't have it!!

Instead, I opted for a kind of spider-sense, represented by a reference to the bird and an arrow pointing in one of the eight directions it was in. This worked in a very similar way to the bird's own detector circle. When the bird was within the flea's much bigger detector circle, the alert would come, telling the player roughly where the bird is in relation to the flea.

Certainly, big leaps of faith could still occasionally end in an easy meal for the bird, but as this was down to an element of recklessness and bad luck on the player's part, this little quirk of play seemed much more acceptible.

Again, by paying attention, the player could survive the cave. Ultimately, the game was fair.

---

These little HUD additions were starting to invade my thoughts now. A heads-up bird-warning had me thinking "What else might the player find useful in the cave?".

The answer was simple. With all this bouncing around, it would often become hard to figure out where you were in the cave. Ok, so you would get to know certain landmarks, shapes of the rock face, a specific useful hideyhole, etc, and that was nice, but particularly, if I was having trouble getting out of a cave, I quickly became a bit disorientated as to exactly where I was. I needed some sense of progression. Was I near the top, middle or bottom of the cave?

I set myself to the task of figuring out how to transpose the player's position in relation to the cave to a little bar at the side of the screen, indicating how high in the level the player had progressed... and after a few days work, I'd managed it. It's amazing what a big difference this made. The effect of not knowing was something akin to not looking out of the window when you're a passenger in a car and feeling motion sick as a result... Adding the bar just helped me as a player to feel more spacially aware, and as a result, more in control. I was able to make progression decisions based on how high up I was and to plan my route to the exit.

Fleshing it out: With armour, levels, a basic HUD, and a pause menu, my flea game was taking shape.

---

This extra sense of control soon had me fighting back the urge to add little extras to the level. You know, points bonuses in difficult-to-get-to places as an incentive for completionists to take risks for greater reward.

It was a small addition but these, combined with the occasionally unpredictable location of the bird during long jumps led to another addition of this kind. I still needed to offset surprise appearances of that bird during long jumps, as once in the air, no ammount of early warning is going to help the player to turn that flea around. What if a one-hit shield spawned in a random position around the level? Surely that would give the player the resources for the odd reckless leap of faith while on balance, providing a psychological reason for them to be extra careful when not equipped with it, right?

The effect I had in mind was something similar in to when Arthur lost his armour in the classic Ghosts N' Goblins (and later, Ghouls N' Ghosts)... and in practice, I was happy to find that it worked rather well!

---

Further Down The Rabbit Hole

All of these little additions had actually made my cave all too easily escapeable. Darn it! I would just have to add more caves!

I had the basic game model all done. All it would take was another few background images of ever increasing complexity and dificulty... so why not? Everything I needed to make a decent game was there. I just needed to build on it.

...and within a couple of week's I'd done just that. One cave was pretty easy to beat, but five caves was trickier. It demanded equal measures of luck, skill and memory for the various exit routes available.

TEN caves was downright devlish, but I created them anyway!

---

I wrapped the whole thing up with an intro animation which payed homage to my original inspiration, then with an ending which made for a really nice twist in the tale (You'll have to get there to find out).

Cinematics: scribbled up very quickly, I started to love these simple little animations for their Cartoon Network-ish charms.

Starting out as a little remake, I'd come to realise that what I'd actually created was a genre game, much in the same way that Power-Up is within the SHMUP genre. My flea game was in the flea genre of platformers that seems to have started with the likes of Bugaboo back in the early 80s and has been pretty well populated by non-mainstream games of its type ever since.

My game had expanded a great deal on the original concept, but while others in the genre had opted for means of shrinking down play areas to bite sized "rooms", I had retained that deep-cave feel which I felt was most important in getting across the tiny scale of our hero and the overwhelming scale of his environment.

Speaking of our hero, this was now his game. My flea needed a name. Something catch, something alliterative, something as monosyllabic as it was representative of the game's mechanics and character's movement style... something like Flix!

At a pinch it sounds a bit like an abbreviation of Felix, while implying something that's being flicked around the screen. It also belts off the tongue as well as any of the great game characters of the 80s and 90s.

I was in... Flix it was!

The icing on the cake: Finally, a title that I'm happy with!

---

Quite a Journey, That!

In just a couple of months I'd gone from a little experiment in remaking and improving on a classic, but almost forgotten game mechanic to having a close-to-finished product of my own!

That said, I was constantly aware that once I'd completed it, I'd invariably have to effectively shelf it for the same reasons that Power-Up almost never happened... licences. While I learned to do basic coding on an educational copy of Director, I didn't have an official copy.

This was just pre-Power-Up. At this point I hadn't even begun to engage with the online community, let alone make friends and build up a following on Twitter. I had no concept of starting a Kickstarter.

Obviously, since then a lot has happened. Power-Up not only got Kickstarted, but it also got released on XBLIG and PC, and featured everywhere from Retro Gamer magazine to the Humble grid! At the time of writing, Power-Up just hit 60% of it's Steam greenlight target!

I've come a long way in a couple of short years, and I've learned a lot about the process of releasing a game for PC... but that's not to say I've forgotten my roots..... and that's definitely not to say that I've forgotten my little Director games.

Sure, I'm going to be trying a few of them out in other formats. My next game Diz, for example, will be my first Unity experiment starting in a few weeks time, but I have a whole batch of other little games from my Director era that I'd like to tune up and release for your playing pleasure.

And Flix is but the first!

Almost done: Flix is all but there in all his bouncing, bounding glory! 

---

...So I've decided to run a Kickstarter this April.

It's a relatively little thing. Just enough to make me the £1100 I'll need to buy my own licenced copy of Director. The campaign has been given the go-ahead from the good people at Kickstarter. As with Power-Up I'm doing all the design, code, art, sound, music, etc, on Flix myself and as with Power-Up there are a load of top award tiers.

I'm hoping to release Flix accross PC portals in late Summer 2014 so between now and then I'll be turning a pretty-much finished PC game into a nicely finished PC game with a cherry on top...

But this is the bottom line:

EVERYONE who puts £1 into the Flix Kickstarter will get a copy of the game.

...Then as with Power-Up, if there's demand, I'll start looking into the technicalities of porting Flix to other devices in the not-too-distant. I can't say fairer then that eh.

Work In Progress: A sneak-peek at the upcoming Kickstarter page for Flix The Flea.

---

Finally

Thanks for reading this post!

If you like the look of  Flix, and if my work sounds like your cup of tea, do come and say hello on twitter (@psypsoft) and follow the fun. I'm constantly messing round with this Game Development lark and learning loads all the time, which I regularly bang on about there, and I'm always chuffed to meet likeminded people.

Hope to see you there,

m

 

A "Dark Intelligence" - Part Three.

Hi Guys,

Welcome back to my three parter on the evolution of my Power-Up baddies (the hyphen appeared in the game's title when I submitted the game to XBLIG. Appologies for the inconsistency there. Hey, generic sounding titles: we live and learn).

By the end of the last part of this somewhat prolonged insight into Power-Up's enemy creation, I had basically hit the end of the game where it concerns standard enemies. I'd picked up a heck of a lot of tricks and was pretty much ready to pool my resources and apply them to five of the coolest, most visually enticing and distinctive level bosses you ever did see.

It was also a bit of a new chapter in the Power-Up production process on a number of levels. We were hitting December 2012 and having been made redundant from my Artist job of six and a half years (Lead Artist for the last three or so) I was finding it hard to get re-employed. An experience that's increasingly common in the games industry as even the biggest players are forced to make redundancies and re-think their strategies.

---

A Change In My Mindset...

...For some, long-term redundancy means re-training, for others, giving up on their dream career and stacking shelves once more. I didn't have the money to re-educate myself and I honestly don't think I'd have made it stacking shelves again. I decided to get pro-active... To move out of the back bedroom, and into the bigger, more suitable office room at the back of my house, surrounding myself with some of the more fitting office adhornments that my old employer happened to be getting rid of in the light of a much smaller workforce. This replaced the debris of house moving that had previously surrounded me in the back bedroom and gave me the sense that I was embarking on a career changing move.

I dedicated my mornings to the games industry job-hunt and in the afternoons I switched my attention to finishing Power-Up in the hopes of making a career out of that. I was living on what was left of my savings coupled up with the mortgage protection we'd thankfully had the foresight to take when we bought the house.

On one hand, time was ticking and there was a fire under my backside to get things done before Jo and I found ourselves on the street! ...but on the other hand my allotted time on Power-up had effectively risen from 8 hours a week to 20 and oddly, the overwhelmingly predominant sensation was that of freedom. A fresh start. I felt, for the first time since childhood like the master of my own fate.

...and it was a very good time to face up to the challenge of Power-up's final bosses!
I attacked it with gusto!!

(SPOILER ALERT!! - Want to keep these bosses a mystery? Then stop right there! ...Only venture on if you can't resist a peek).

---

Guardian 1: The Cleaner - Dreaming in Bosses!

I was on garden-leave over december 2011 which gave me time to get my studio in up and running. It was an arduous process which involved a lot of cleaning out and trips to the tip... and the whole time I was chomping at the bit to get on with Power-Up. It would be a fair understatement to say that I was obsessing over Power-up's bosses.

I'd go to bed at night considering how my first screen filling guardian would need a weakspot and a means of getting you wherever you hid on the screen, and I'd wake up in the morning from a haze of dreams in which a giant spaceship was squeezing me into abstract corners. I'd race to my office at 5AM and start scribbling the sketchy remnants of my dreams and became convinced that as much as I loathed the RAYCraft of previous posts, this was in fact at the core of what was going to become the Chapter 1 boss: The Cleaner.

In lore, The Cleaner was to be a huge garbage disposal unit which fired out a formiddable disintigrating ray, intended to wipe out the debris of a vanquished foe and cover the traces of the battle that took place.

Innitially making one slow forward progression, the Cleaner was to move everso slowly from right to left, giving the player a limited time to defeat it. The boss would charge up a monster white ray at its centre, a great white glow and charging sound effect, building in pitch to act as audio/visual signifiers, warning of the blast to come.

It would be up to the player to navigate up or down in order to dodge that blast, and while both directions offered refuge on the fringes of the great ray, that refuge was a tight space, and dogged by the cleaner's additional aimed-bullet firing cannons. Once the ray was discharged the coast was clear for another volley of shots at the Cleaner's weak spot. This, of course, was the barrel of its deadly ray cannon.

Soon, I realised that the cleaner's constant frontal movement was actually to the detriment of the battle, limiting the duration of the fight and raising minor issues when the great hulk was on screen left and no longer fighting. If it's ploughing relentlessly onward, having filled the screen and taken you out, why would it now reverse back to give you another go. Doesn't sound like much of a big deal here in print but in practice it actually seemed a bit silly.

This grated for a while, until I caved and improved the sequence. After adding the obviously required floaty-wobble (see previous posts), I then had the Cleaner crawl forward while its ray charged. on releasing the shot, I put extra emphasis on the weapon's destructive power by having it actually push the whole titanic Cleaner craft backward and toward screen right. This whole sequence of movements really brought the boss to life and gave it weight, substance and an organic, piloted quality, as though someone was carefully balancing the Cleaner's controls with its firepower.

Getting up close and personal with The Cleaner.

The Cleaner would sink toward the bottom-right of the screen on its defeat, while regular small explosions occurred all over its outer shell as it went, there was no need for multiple parts or multiple instances a-la RAYCraft.

Coupled with the fact that I was a good eight to nine months more experienced, the Cleaner looped its simple, but visually striking attack sequence nicely and went off relatively without a hitch.

---

Guardian 2: Orbital Defence 01 - The Humanoid Touch.

Since I'd committed to make my own space shooter, One thing I'd noticed was that unlike my own, a lot of these games were developed by shooter/SHMUP enthusiasts. Yes, these guys were developing other stuff, but for the most part, this was their genre and the thing they loved the most. I can relate to that. I sorta felt like that about classic brawlers since I was little.

Also though, I found that the majority of good enthusiast-developed shooters, especially on my chosen format of XBLIG were in the top-down, vertical scrolling sub-genre. What's more, while these games looked GREAT, in my view there was something a little generic in the traditionally Japanese-styled visuals. It's hard to put my finger on why but broadly, I was seeing those subdued metallic colour schemes, with future-computer UIs along with those big, synthesised over the top soundtracks. Don't get me wrong, all of this is brilliant, but it wasn't what I was trying to achieve. I needed to make something that came from my formative experiences as a gamer and developer.

The biggest generic element I noted while taking on bosses on a lot of these games was that each boss seemed to be a gorgeous, but admittedly nondescript spaceship, each with a different arrangement of beautifully complex attack patterns that any purist lover of the genre would truly appreciate. ...But again, this wasn't me, and by my second level boss, I was able to formulate the beginnings of a mission statement:

"Yeah, I've made a boss that would be best described as a massive nondescript spaceship. I'm calling that "The Cleaner"... but from now on, every boss I do is going to have a visual theme all of its own, and the Chapter Two guardian is going to beeeeeeeee......... A GIANT MECH!!"

As the game's story was taking us to the enemy planet's orbit, it seemed fitting that I call the mech Orbital Defence 01... but other than fly onto the screen, I had no idea what OD1 was going to do. I grabbed a sketch book and drew that bad boy.

OD1s attack patterns really came from my innitial scribbles. Instead of hands, I'd given him two very different types of guns. His far hand was some kind of cannon, suitable for firing something large, dangerous and at a slow rate..... ooooh, say, a homing glow-ball mine kind of thing. You know, like the ones I've already made work, while the near hand seemed to be some sort of spinning chain gun end, clearly suited for smaller close bursts of bullets or... hang on, clouds of the aimed bullets that I'd also already sussed out.

Man, this game was writing itself!

That said, just having this guy floating around on screen right and blasting bursts of aimed bullets coupled with the occasional homing glow-ball just didn't seem to cut it. I mean, The Cleaner had pretty much done the same thing but with the added strategic complexity of its charging ray. If anything, this was a slight step back from The Cleaner, and i wasn't having that!

I solved this with the addition of my first "mode" condition. While mode equalled 1, OD1 would indeed alternate its butsts of aimed bullets with the occasional homing glow-ball, forcing the player to dodge and swerve constantly, but when its mode-counter hit a certain duration, OD1's mode would switch to 2.

In mode 2, OD1 would sweep backwards, off screen right, and upon hitting a point off screen, the boss would switch to a flight pose, place itself at a random vertical position, then come screaming, forcefield on, accross the screen. Once off screen left, OD1 would repeat the move in reverse, sweeping from screen left to screen right at a pace that made the movement believeable while not taking so long as to slow down the fight.

Of course, due to the random vertical positioning of OD1 in this mode there was a small chance that the player would simply not have time to swerve to safety and a swift activation of the player's forcefield would be the order of the day, but this understanding took some skill from the player, and that comes with practice. Add to this the probabillity that when OD2 starts sweeping, it'll also leave behind a few rather durable homing glow-balls, and you've got yourself a boss who the experienced player can run circles around but who will probably wipe the floor with you on your first few goes. Oh look. A bit of replay value!

Dodging aimed bullet clouds from Orbital Defense 01.

I was happy with how OD1 had turned out, though it wasn't lost on me that visually, the darned thing had come out as Japanese-influenced as the games I was trying to distinguish myself from. It was basically a dog-legged humanoid Gundam, Guyver kinda thing, and I'd just have to accept it.


...But somewhere in the actual execution of the character, whether in the modelling, the coding, or the extreme use of its image in the indie press, who knows, ironically, the image of Orbital Defence 01 really helped Power-Up to stand out as rather a unique looking shooter experience when placed next to similar games. ...and I'm very proud of that.

---

Guardian 3: The Worm - Vomiting For My Art

Some peoople can do that thing where they suck air in while making a high pitched screaming monster noise. You know the one. Back in my day, kids in the playground would impersonate Tie-Fighters with alarming accuracy when making that noise. I always wanted to be able to do that. In fact, realising the value of such a sound for the voice of a particularly unpleasant screaming monster-vehicle-robot boss, I almost forgot what happens when I try.

That's right, the Worm started as a sound! I didn't know what I was going to do with it but I knew that the sound of me screeching inwardly would make a great voice for something ugly and monstrous... and so determined was I to have it that I disregarded what was likely to happen if I tried excessively to make that sound.

In a nutshell, I made myself sick! .....but it was worth it!!

Armed with a recording of me making some of the nastiest inward breathing noises on record (not to mention the accompanying bawking and spluttering noises that really, nobody needs to hear), I put my mind to designing some kind of ground dwelling metal monster. Co-incidentally, it was about this time that once again I came accross my old original pixel-popped Power-Up tests from what, 2002? - 2003? Anyway, it seems I'd pixel popped this wierd, coiled up, screen filler of a boss over a desert. It was all angular parts and was curled into some sort of a protective ball, a myriad of guns pointing across at the player.

I had to have it! What's more, I began to imagine what this thing would look like uncloiled... Why, a big, nasty WORM of course! I was inspired! The chapter was the aliens' desert planet, there was even a floor plane to exploit. This thing was perfect!

The next few days were a flurry of creative activity. Working my way around the confines of the chapter's environment and my own coding limitations, I came up with a mountain of possibillities. scrapped some of the less practical ones (though the repeated tail-stabbing up from the floor in random horizontal locations would have been cool in hindsight), and whitteld my way to a sequence that not only worked, but added another level of complexity when compared to the previous boss.

The Worm first appears as an invincible, rumbling hill of churned up dirt, rolling slowly from left to right. It pauses in front of the player, then kicks into its first fight mode, bursting from the ground in an explosion of dirt particles.

As it reaches for the sky, a huge metallic, towering pillar of level guardian, its attention (head) turns to the player. The bullet nodes all along its body kick into action and one long cluster of slow moving aimed bullets becomes its first wave of attack. There are a few techniques for easily dealing with this, but again, it takes a bit of experience to figure them out.

It's worth noting here that my biggest challenge was one of believeabillity, and the element most in the way at this point was this... the screen is scrolling, yet that worm is standing upright, half way out of the hard cracked surface of the planet. It makes no sense! ...until I put a bit of time to giving the impression that the hardened exterior of the worm is actually churning up the ground beneath it with ease. A little adjustment and the rumbling churning earth particles at the Worm's base seemed to sell it nicely, while emphasising the machine's power and purabillity... On to the next attack mode.

Here's where I borrowed from my early pixel-popped design mockup. Turning its attention (head) back up to the sky above it, the Worm now digs slightly downward into the floor before taking off at great speed. It's at this point that the first-time player spots the enormous rattle-like gun tower that is its tail-end, offering an unnerving hint of what's in store... and then its gone, into the sky.

I'd learned by now to give abscent, state-changing guardians a beat to believeably change state, after which, in this case the Worm heaves back down from screen left or screen right (randomly), but slowly enough to give the player time to react to its presence and to position themselves accordingly.

Each of these movements is punctuated by horrible, heavily post-produced monster screams and screeches (the aforementioned me making myself sick), again, this is to inform the player as to what they can expect next as much as it is for ambience.

If the Worm comes down in front, you've a selection of generally frontal-firing weapons at your disposal, if it comes down behind, you can whip out your backshot (provided you've powered it up suitably).

Then comes a barrage of aimed bullets and vertically homing missiles from the Worm's rattle-tail. a particularly potent mix I might add, and a combination that with practice, seriously levels-up a player's natural abillity to use their peripheral vision and to cope with vast numbers of incoming projectiles... essential for the chapters to come.

With a parting volley of tough homing globes, the worm boosts itself up and off to screen left. The player is left with just enough time to despach the homing globes, when the earth starts to rumble and the cycle begins once more.

The Worm tears through the terrain.

Again, this is simply a cyclic approach to a level boss, but this time around, there's definitely something about the left/right randomness in the Worm's flight mode that adds to the tension.

---

Guardian 4: The Walker - Finally Mastering The Multi-Faceted Baddie.

I suppose it's a bit sad in its way that I only sussed out how to successfully break an enemy up into functioning parts just two baddies away from the end of developing Power-Up. The upshot of that is that this discovery makes the Walker a real stand-out enemy in the game.

I was DETERMINED to draw from the wonderful ED-209, AT-ST armed pod on legs heritage at some point in Power-Up. But let's face it, it was always a given that this guy couldn't be animated as straight frames. As a screen-filling walking enemy, he's just too big, and any reduction in frame count to accommodate his sheer size was always going to result in jerky, unbelieveable rubbish.

I bit another bullet (of many, admittedly) and broke the process down. The first task, even before working out an attack pattern, was to work out which parts needed to be seperated for dare-I-say-it, programmed movement. Again, I started with a drawing of my ideal in action, working out that I'd need x1 body element, x2 legs, an overlay strip to appear to hold the legs on, a front bolt, plus a peek at the back holding strip and perhaps some between legs inner workings.

Once I had all the parts drawing to screen in the right order, I surged The Walker in from behind the player. It was about time a boss attacked from behind and in my mock-up this boss seemed well suited to it.

I treated the main body as the main controller for the Walker's physical movement around the screen. Once it was comfortably on screen, I had the entry mode stop there so that I could work on getting the finer details into its movement.

first, I added the bob of the body. When each leg took a step, the body would need to bob. Then I alternated between two metallic stamping noises at the end of each bob (the sound was me dropping a few pans on the floor in a variety of ways, then messing around with the sound in Adobe Audition). I was now also able to start the Walker off -screen and have it bob its way on, into its start position, fading in the sound of the slamming metal steps as it came. Nice!

Next, I added an extra bob to the near leg, making it arc higher than the body and moving it forward in a trial and error fashion so that it stayed within the confines of the supporting strip in front, then with every alternate bob of the body, the leg would cease to do any bob arc, but instead, slide horizontally back to its starting position in relation to the body.

I had the far leg to the same thing, but moving forward with its extra upward bob while the near leg slid back, giving the impression that the Walker was taking steps.

Then the finer details. The cog followed the front leg's horizontal values, so as to appear vertically static within the front strip, shunting left and right in a piston-like manner.
 Meanwhile, all the extra inner and back parts followed the movement of the body, but sat at their respective draw order in relation to the moving legs. The illusion was complete!

Finally, I had the Walker cycle two modes. Quite simply, it moved to the right of the screen, paused for a bit, then it moved to the left of the screen, paused for a bit... and looped that sequence. This allowed me to get an idea of how well grounded the feet were with the floor... they weren't.

Obviously, in relation to the scrolling of the floor, the Walker's feet were sliding about all over the place. for a few moments I was at a loss as to what I should do about it, but soon I realised that through a combination of adjustments to the Walker's physical movement speed accross the screen and the left/right speed of its legs, I was eventually able to get the Walker grounded. With an appropriate speeding up and slowing down of these variables at the right points, the Walker's  movement had become believeable... Now it was just a case of working out a fight pattern.

Something I noticed with the walker was that in a strictly 2D sense, the machine filled the screen. When it moved from left to right and back again, surely there would be no way to avoid it. However when looked at in the context of the game world, that big chunky body is sat in between two legs. Those legs are situated at the sides of the monster and it doesn't take too much latteral thinking to discover that the player can fly directly between the Walker's legs unharmed. Initially this was something of a happy accident which turned out to be a really effective latteral touch. When I initially demoed the Walker for my Kickstarter audience I got a very positive response from that between-the-legs touch and knew I was onto a winner.

The Walker - A multi-faceted monster.

The Walker's armory was comparitively simple. In my designs, I'd provided it with a huge aimed bullet module that pretty much permanently dispensed aimed bullets. Additionally, when the Walker was stationary on the left or right of the player, it would blast out homing red glow-balls in short bursts, giving the player just enough time to get through the destructible weapons and have a bit of a blast at the Walker itself before the guardian swung into action, shifting again to the player's other side. Throughout this shift, the homing glow-balls would stop, to be replaced with comparitively fast moving, fast repeating, but on balance, highly visible new, larger aimed bullets to shake things up a bit and keep the player on their toes.

While the Walker offers little in complex attack cycles when compared with previous bosses, it does boast some seriously smart little flourishes and plenty of seat-of-the-pants challenge. It was also a bit of a technical victory for me personally and really represents a big step forward in my baddie-coding confidence.

---

Guardian 5: The Mastermind - Putting A Bit of Yourself Into Your Work.

During production, I'd gradually formed this vision of what the last boss was going to be. As I developed more and more little skills within the confines of coding my game, the possibillities opened up. Recollections of influencial games from my past came-a-calling and one particularly weird and wonderful final boss that sprung to mind was the crazy floating head that came grinning at you in the popular early 90s platform shooter, Midnight Resistance... Well I loved that game and after taking down a host of tanks, planes and generally millitary based opponents, I recall being initially a bit taken aback by the appearance of this surreal and abstract final boss offering. It had just the right level of uncanny to put me off my guard and has stuck with me ever since.

Looking at Power-up, so far I'd bossed-up with a giant ray-ship, a humanoid mech, a monster worm and a big stomping walker. I wanted to complete my collection of distinctive and memorable bosses with my very own angry-face-type final boss! What's more, I wanted it to animate!!

I mocked up a series of sharp toothed giant lizzard/human faces on paper and started painting the monster up in Photoshop. I'd decided to give the boss four waves of attack, each increasing in difficulty, each with its own key facial expression to act as something of a quick reference for the player to monitor their progress with. However, with the size of the sprite and the timescale I'd given myself for the task, I realised I'd need to do something akin to modelling, rendering and post producing spaceship frames. Sure, I could make it in 3D... or I could just play the dude myself.

My fevered little ego liked this idea. It was like facing off against the game's creator on one level... on a more practical level it was a quick way of getting the exact frames I needed so that I could stop wasting days on unecessary art and concentrate on making the boss work! I took out my camera-phone, got myself side on to it, and took the pictures I needed, making the facial expressions myself, then consistently post producing them in Photoshop, I added the lizard skin, sharp teeth and sideways blinking eyes I'd envisaged him with.

It worked a treat, not to mention that it only took a day to do!

I built the rest of the boss' surrounding structure in 3DS max, opting for a closing wall from the rear, combined with a closing top/bottom wall as secondary and tertiary attack modes. This combination would make the use of full powered back and side shots an absolute must in order to get through the fight, and after each cycle of these closing walls, the Mastermind himself would come back at you, stronger, faster and more desperate as you piled the damage onto him.

This really made for edge of the seat stuff. On the harder difficulties those bullet streams became fast and erratic, some coming directly for you while others targeted invisible moving reference points to create some intense and beautifully symetrical patterns... deadly all the same, and a last minute little innovation I was particularly pleased with.

Taking it to the man with the Mastermind.

The Mastermind demands dry palms, 20/20 peripheral vision and a practiced focus that none of its predecessors could compare with. I really threw all of my acquired coding skills at this one. Vertically homing missiles, all-round goming globes, several variations on the aimed bullet, multiple moving parts, forcefields, patterned projectiles and more besides.

Sometimes, to this day, I fight the Mastermind and ponder to myself "How on earth did an unemployed, novice developer like me do THAT??"

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And there you have it.

As I said earlier, this piece wasnt about alienating you with my badly written code. It wasn't about showing off, and it wasn't about giving the impression that there's some kind of black art to what I achieved with Power-Up. Compared to most industry professionals, I'm really just a novice, bedroom coder. When it comes to programming games, I'm untrained, unemployed and just doing my level best with the skills I've gleaned from the internet.

Sure, I've got a good sense for how things look and sound, how they're paced and how to generally get them from my head onto the screen, but all of this comes from my love of the medium, and all of it was hard earned by trying and failing, then getting up and trying again. These are all practiced skills, and with practice and a bit of grit when things get tough, anyone can do it.

You might ask why would anyone want to learn to be multi-skilled and independent when they could just get educated and employed?...

It seems we're coming off the back of a time of safe-bet mediocre AAA console titles and safe-bet freemium/pay-to-play mobile experiences designed to accumilate money, often with a disregard for the quality of the gaming experience. People aren't stupid. As players we've become wise to this sort of simplistic manipulation. It's a real turn-off  and end-user faith in my industry is dwindling.

Companies big and small are seeing revenues falling. Redundancies are being made everywhere. Talented people are being lost to other industries and it's been a very bad time for creatives overall, but I for one believe that the old way of doing things isn't the only way.

With my ongoing blog, my hope is that by giving you a quick, brainstormed insight into some of the thought processes, the organisational coping mechanisms, the fun design ideas and the overall gradual improvement in my understanding of how to actually implement this stuff while developing my games, I can help other aspiring game developers who also love games and have an underlying desire to make something good to realise that with a bit of work and yes, plenty of headaches, you can do this stuff too.

Over the next few years, I'd love nothing more than to see a great wave of inspired and inspirational indie games coming from independent, self-empowered people who's first motivation is the love of the games they discovered in their formative years, reviving and evolving video games into something with the magic and electricity of the industry I remember growing up on. What a golden age that would be.

Anyway. That's quite enough of that. Better put that soapbox away before I fall off and hurt myself.

Thanks again for sharing in my development experiences. If you have any thoughts or questions about my work, do drop me a comment or a tweet @psypsoft. Community is quite important to me and I'd love to hear from you about you and your projects too.

See you next time.

m