Christmas Wallpaper!

Happy Holidays from us here at Califer Games!  Peter's whipped up a nice wallpaper of Miranda from Siphon Spirit fighting off a festive demon.

Krampus?

There's a bunch of different sizes for it at the media page, so head on over and get the size you want!  Other wallpapers are also available for those not in a holiday mood.

You're not important

I was reading an article the other day by Indie Gamer Chick, where she talked about doing a kickstarter correctly.  Well, mainly it was a list of what not to do.  One in particular was to not set a really high reward for people to come out and meet you.  After seeing some ridiculous high costs for being able to meet the developer, she had the following to say.

You would be lucky to have someone eat lunch with you and pick up the check, let alone get $10,000, or $1,000, or even $100.  If the reward involves anyone flying out to meet you, save it.  I don’t know who you are, but I assure you, you’re not worth it.

This made me remember something that happened at Indie Game Night a while back.  I was walking down the halls when I met up with a large group all heading to Indie Game Night, but weren't quite sure which room it was in.  I offered to guide them and asked if they all happened to take the same bus or something.  They chuckled and said it was something like that.  Then they told me they were Triple Slash Studios.  I wracked my brain, but couldn't think of who they were.  When we got into the room I googled them and realized that they were the group that made Magnetic by Nature.  I'd read a positive review about that in the last week and was somewhat familiar with the game.  If they had introduced themselves as the team that made Magnetic by Nature, I would have had some idea of who they were, and had something more to talk about.

I'll admit that I made a similar mistake on March to the Moon.  One of the testers mentioned that they didn't like it when a company put the company name first in the installer, but since I was allowing them to set their own path it was probably okay.  But really, me setting the default installation path to be "Califer Games/March to the Moon" was a BAD idea.  Say someone bought March to the Moon and left it at the default install path.  Later on they want to mod it, but they can't find March to the Moon anywhere.  I know that I'll look around in my folders and wonder what on earth they're holding.  Gaslamp Games?  Who's that?  Oh, this is the Dungeons of Dredmore folder.  NIGORO?  I don't think I have a game called NIGORO.  Oh, it's La-Mulana.

Gaming news outlets have it figured out.  If they do mention the company name, they'll usually clarify it by adding in a "makers of _____".  Again, it's not the developers that are really important.  If you're doing things right, many more people will play the game and have a good experience with it than will ever meet you and have any real experience with you.  Put the game first.  If it does well, you can make things easier by declaring that you are the developer that made "Awesome Game 1".

Spirits of Elduurn

Peter's been working hard on Spirits of Elduurn, and I've been hard at work making a simple game to test on multiple development methods.  Peter's work has the advantage of being nice to look at, so here's some art for you.

He hasn't told me what it's all about, but I do know that Spirits of Elduurn covers the tale of the creation of Elduurn, the world that Siphon Spirit takes place in.  The large creature is also the color of the spirits in Siphon Spirit.  What do you guys think is happening?

XNA Alternatives - Time to start looking

I've pretty much wrapped up on the editor for Siphon Spirit.  This puts me in an interesting position.  See, I could get back to work on Japanese Arena: Kana, but frankly, I'm rather nervous about it.  XNA is what I've been using for making the games so far, and the future doesn't look to bright for it.  I'd really like to get Japanese Arena on tablets and phones as well.  XNA just doesn't do that.  XNA will make games for XBox LIVE Indie Games and Windows.  Windows 8 gives it problems since they only work in desktop mode and not metro mode.  The new XBox One is coming out soon, so maybe there won't be too much use in putting games in an older console.


It's time to move on.

But what to?  Whatever I choose, we're going to want to port Siphon Spirit over to it since it would be great on a tablet.  There are a lot of options out there.  GameMaker, MonoGame, Unity3D, SharpDX, SlimDX, SFML, etc.  I'm going to list out all of them, and start weeding them out.  Starting with what platforms they cover, and how much it costs for each platform.  After that, I'm going to make a simple game in XNA.  I'm going to port that game to each of the survivors and see which is the easiest to use.  Now to get a simple game going in XNA.  Wish me luck!

A new orb appears

Now that the massive level editor is fully functional, I decided to take it for a test spin.  I started making a few levels and fixing little bugs when I realized there was something I always wanted in Siphon Spirit but never realized it.  As it is right now, when you get close to an orb absorbing will happen.  If you're bigger than the enemy orb, you'll absorb from it.  If you're smaller, it will absorb from you.  Spells and Demonic Voids will always absorb from you.  Everything absorbs.

I decided to go a little crazy and add an orb that doesn't absorb from you.  Touching enemies is a bad idea, since you permanently lose energy.  Touching these new orbs is even worse, since they remove even more energy from you.  On the bright side, you can get really close to them without losing any energy.  I'm calling them Thorns for now.  Maybe Peter will change that later.  Just make sure you don't touch them, or ...

Owww!!!

Not much to report

Peter didn't get much done this week since his computer died.  I didn't get much done this week because Pokemon came out.  Sorry.  We have high hopes for next week.

Editor: Making things nice and user-friendly

Working on the editor has been a long task.  A few times I felt burned out and decided I needed to work on something else for a while.  Each time, I was back to it after a single day or working on something else.  I need to get this thing done.

Fortunately, I'm getting awfully close. Right now I'm tweaking the level loading and saving to be a little more useful, and after that I'm putting in some developer only stuff, like which map to place it on and where it goes.  How to unlock it, whether it's hidden or not.  That kind of thing.

There's still one major thing that I need to add for the general public.  And for Peter, really.  I haven't told him too much about how to actually use it, so my plan is to just give it to him and see what he has questions about.  The next big thing is adding in a help subscreen for each screen.  So if you're not sure about something, you can press Shift+F1 and it will bring up a screen to help explain things even more than the description boxes for each input.

On an unrelated note, I've been practicing vector art so that the next time that I make a solo game it will look way better than March to the Moon did.  Below is an example of what I've been working on.

This is what happens when my wife makes suggestions.

Indie Game Sneak Peek Report

We recently had an event where we could go and show the public games that we've been working on.  We had a great time there and found that the time passed all to quickly.  We saw a lot of interest in our games and we're happy that we got to go.  Usually when there is an indie get-together, either Jay Barnson or Greg Squire will do write-ups.  I didn't see either of them, so I figured I might as well do the write-up this time.  Here we go!

Magnetic by Nature

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TripleSlash Studios

Magnetic by Nature is a game about magnets.  You play as a robot and aside from basic movement and a jump button, you have a attract button and a repulse button.  I had a lot of fun with this one, as there was a good sense of movement and momentum.  If I saw this on Steam's Greenlight I'd totally vote for it.  The screenshot above doesn't really do it justice because it's from the older XBox LIVE Indie Game version.  The current one looks better but I can't seem to find any screenshots of it!  They recently had a successful Kickstarter campaign and are working on the PC, Mac and Linux builds.  They are the ones that set up the event, so a big thanks to them!  

Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Company Site  |  Company Facebook  |  Kickstarter (Funded)  |  Buy on XBLIG

Siphon Spirit

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Califer Games

Hopefully it should be no surprise that we were showing Siphon Spirit.  For those of you new to this blog, Siphon Spirit is an action-puzzler where you use a holy orb to absorb and purify energy from smaller demonic orbs.  You need to be careful with your energy.  Getting hit by blasts or running into enemies will permanently decrease your energy.  You'll need that energy to defeat larger demonic orbs as well as cast spells.  Plenty of people enjoyed it, so we're excited.  We're hoping to have a Kickstarter set up soon so we can pay for music, voice acting, and porting to different systems.

Game Site  |  Company Site  |  Twitter  |  Blog  |  Windows Demo  |  Facebook

Spirits of Elduurn

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Califer Games

This was fun for me, as I hadn't played a version of it in a while and Peter's made some big changes and cleaned it up a lot.  This is a puzzle game where you control a light and dark spirit to destroy demons and create a world.  Spirits of Elduurn is going to be a free flash game which we will be using to promote Siphon Spirit.

Game Site  |  Company Site  |  Twitter  |  Blog  |  Facebook

March to the Moon

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Califer Games

March to the Moon is a fairly silly top-down shooter/RPG.  You stoically march forward, killing everything in your path as you try to solve the quest of rats in a cellar which gets out of hand quickly.  Soon after stopping the rat infestation you are fighting goblins, then aliens, then end up in a massive battle on the moon.  There are twelve different skillsets you can choose from, and you can learn two skillsets per character.  Want to be a Necromancer/Paladin?  Sure thing.

I didn't think that I'd be showing this one too much since it has already been out for a year, but a lot of people wanted to play it and really enjoyed it.  I may just dive back into the March to the Moon universe after our current projects are done.

Game Site  |  Company Site  |  Twitter  |  Blog  |  Buy on XBLIG  |  Facebook

Japanese Arena: Kana

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Califer Games

Japanese Arena: Kana is a game for learning how to write the two basic Japanese character sets.  It also has a few hundred words so that you have a reason to remember the characters.  It also has battles where you fight traditional Japanese monsters with traditional Japanese weapons and armor.  This got some good reception as well and I was able to figure out a few things I can do to make it better.  It's still really early on so there were some crashes but no one seemed to mind, thankfully.

                                                     Company Site  |  Twitter  |  Blog  |  Facebook

Momentum

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Projectile Entertainment

Momentum is a game where you use the controls to twist and rotate the path so that the ball can travel along it.  It looks great, but I didn't actually get a chance to play this one.  From what I did see, it's pretty hard.  Seems like half the time I looked over the ball was falling from the path.  Maybe it just takes some time to get used to (which is something that you don't really get at a show like this).

Company Site  |  Blog  |  Facebook

Halfling Wars

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Chondrostrike

Unfortunately, they'd already left by the time I got it into my head to do this.  I didn't get a chance to play it.  From talking around, it sounds like it's a fairly complicated game.  Stuff like RPGs or strategy games have a hard time at these kind of things where people want to just walk up and play something.  It's apparently pretty good since it was either a winner or a finalist for the Utah Game Wars.  I'll just have to let their pages do the talking for them.

Game Site  |  Twitter  |  Facebook  |  Kickstarter (Funded)

Disaster Mage

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Disaster Mage Team

Disaster Mage is a phone game where you need to use your wizard to shoot fireballs at the rocks falling towards the village.  It's fairly early still, and the screenshot above does not have final art.  They're planning on adding more enemy types as well as more spells to fight off the upcoming disaster.  Planned for Android and iOS.

Flame Warrior

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Eidolon Games

Flame Warrior is a space-faring combat and trading game.  I didn't see the trading, but the combat works mainly by momentum.  If you are in range of the enemy the ship will fire it's laser, and the opponents will do likewise.  Your job is to steer the ship by basically setting a waypoint and making sure that you don't send your ship into a bunch of other ships or an asteroid.  Peter played it a bit and I watched (we just kinda hoped all our stuff would still be at the table when we got back).

Blog

Equalize Math   

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Rainblade Studios

The best way to think of Equalize Math is to think of math Tetris.  Each row has a goal you need to hit and you can change whether the falling number is positive or negative.  To keep it from being too darn confusing there is a 'total' column as well so you know how far off you are from finishing the row.  It's been recently released on both iOS and Android.

Game Site  |  Buy on iTunes  |  Buy on Google Play

Untitled Co-Op

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Mount Olympus

First off, sorry if there are any artifacts in the image.  The file he sent me was massive so I rescaled it. As the missing title may have led you to believe, this is a co-op game.  One player plays as the girl, and the other plays as the boy.  They must get through a series of traps by helping each other to get all the coins and then get inside the tree.  The game doesn't look like the image above yet, but that's the plan.  I just want to know what's inside the tree to make it WORTH fighting through net guns, tenacious fireballs and who knows what else!

Twitter  |  Blog

Draw Space

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Alex Johnstone

I totally missed this one.  Their table was right across from ours, but by the time that I had gone through the other games in the U shape they had packed up and left.  I heard that it was more of a toy than a game.  If you want to know more, stop by their Facebook page and ask them what it's all about.

Facebook

Zen Boat & Side Effect

by

RegionSyx

I would have done these separately, but I can't find any images anywhere.  Zen Boat is a game where you draw a current on the screen with your finger to move the boat along.  It's pretty early still and I ran out of water, so I used the current to fling the poor boat off the screen.  Side Effect was a simple game where you tap a square and it changes the color of the surrounding squares.  Eric Hurst (the developer) correctly deduced that I had played a number of games with the exact same mechanics.

Twitter

Firefighter & A Game for Two

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Vince Betteridge

Darn it, another set of games that I can't find any images for. (Edit: Vince commented with a link to some screenshots)  Firefighter is a game where you are a firefighter and you need to go and save people.  There is also a cat that you can save as a bonus, but I had a hard time not getting the bonus because KITTY.  He's working on making the tutorial a little easier to understand and adding in challenges.  It was fun, but what I really enjoyed was his other game.

A Game for Two really threw me off.  When I saw that it was multiplayer, and that the controls were both on the keyboard I was kinda okay with that.  Then I saw that the movement keys were right next to each other (Player 1: A,D; Player 2: Z,C) and the jump keys were also right next to each other (Player 1: J; Player 2: U).  Vince told me I should get a stranger to play with me.  I'm actually pretty shy so I said I'd just write some notes for this post.  As I was scratching it out, he brought someone to team up with me.  After figuring out how we could both use the keys without cuddling, we got going.  And we had a BLAST.  This was probably my favorite game (that I didn't make) at the Sneak Peek.  If you've ever played Thomas Was Alone (Vince hadn't, to my surprise), this game was Thomas Wasn't Alone.  It played nearly identically, but with a multiplayer element that allowed you to get through puzzles faster than if you were playing single player and just switching between blocks.  It was only 3 levels long, but I really enjoyed it.

Company Page  |  Blog  |  Newgrounds

P.S. To the developers who attended: Sorry for getting this up so late.  Things were pretty crazy for me the last few days.  This took a lot longer than I thought, trying to find screenshots and company info.  If I do this again in the future I will ask participants to send me info.  Also, I went home with more pens than I came in with.  If you are missing a pen please email me the description and I will send you a hostage photo.

Spirits of Elduurn

We're proud to announce Spirits of Elduurn, coming soon to a browser near you! It's a puzzle game that Peter is making to be a free game to help promote Siphon Spirit.  Check out more about it in its webpage!

Indie Game Sneak Peek

Hey everyone!  I just wanted to tell you that we're going to be taking part in the Indie Game Sneak Peek tomorrow where we show off the games that we're working on.  Of course, we're not going to be the only ones!  There are going to be at least 6 teams showing up, and they're all going to be showing games.  We're going to be showing Siphon Spirit, an as-yet-unrevealed game, and while we're at it I might also show some March to the Moon and Japanese Arena.

All the details can be found right here.  Hope to see you there!

How to make a Siphon Spirit orb

When we first started working on Siphon Spirit we needed a way to show how much energy an orb had.  We decided to make it as a bunch of particles that would circle the core of the orb.  This led me to my first problem.  How was I going to modify the particles' position so that they went in a circle?  The answer was Trigonometry.

Pictured: Trig in action

Trigonometry?  Isn't that the thing that they made me learn in school for some reason but never showed me how it could actually be useful?  Yeah, that thing.  Since I never saw a use for it and it was just something I had to do for a required class I just remembered it long enough to take the test.

When I needed to modify the position of the orb I needed to change it's X and Y values.  In order to get a circle, I had to use both sin and cos.  

X = cos(t); Y = sin(t)

That's the (extremely) basic formula for a circle.  We need something to be the t variable.  We need something that will constantly and smoothly increase in size so that it continues along the Sine Wave.  Without an increasing number, the orb would just stay in the same place.  Time is a great tool for that, since it's always progressing. 

X = cos(time); Y = sin(time)

This is a step in the right direction, but it still needs work.  Not only is it going in little tiny circles, it's circling the 0,0 position on the screen instead of where the orb is!  Let's handle it not being in the correct position first.  When I make the particle, I can tell it what the position of its parent orb is.  Since X and Y are already being taken for the position of the specific particle, I'm using J and K for the X and Y of the parent orb.  We add those positions to the formula so that the particle will rotate around the center of the parent orb.

X = cos(time) + J; Y = sin(time) + K

That's better, but the more particles we add to an orb we see that they are all focused at the very center.  We need it to spread out so the whole thing is filled with particles.  For doing this, I decided to use the radius of the parent orb.  This helps make sure that the particles never go flying out of where the boundaries of the orb are, and that as the orb gets bigger the particles don't keep filling up at the center.  I do randomize it a bit so that the particles aren't all completely uniform.

X = radius * cos(time) + J; Y = radius * sin(time) + K

This gives us our final formula for updating the particles as they move around.  Mostly.  I also give each particle a randomized velocity (movement speed) based on the radius so that that's also not moving uniformly.  The velocity modifies the time to either make it faster or slower than other particles.  I also randomize how big each particle will be.  The effect that I want is that it's a flowing, living piece of magical energy.  Controlled entirely by trigonometry and a little bit of randomness.

So for all those like me who just couldn't see why anyone would care to learn trig, take another look at the orb below.  I couldn't have made it without trig.

Thanks, math!

Want to see the orbs in action?  Give the alpha demo of Siphon Spirit a try!  (Currently only for Windows.)

Re-Designing Combat

Last week, my two best friends told me that they wanted to learn Japanese.  On the same day.  Within 10 minutes of each other.  They know of each other but I don't think they've ever met.  My first thought was annoyance that I didn't have Japanese Arena: Kana far enough along to be really useful to them.  Instead I spent some time answering questions and giving some advice.  A few days later I found myself outside staining the porch.  For some reason I decided not to listen to music, but to just do it all quietly.  Drove me nuts after a little while so I started thinking about Japanese Arena.

Suddenly I had an epiphany.  The combat was no good.  I had already been thinking about that when I watched my cousin play it a few weeks ago and saw that the fight was over after a few questions.  It didn't make for much of a review.  So I started to think about how to make it better.  After a bit of thought I went back to my two main goals for the game.

1. Make it so that the user will learn how to read and write Hiragana and Katakana.
2. Keep the users interest to help them complete the game and accomplish point 1.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the current battle system wasn't really fitting that.  As it is, you can level up your character and boost their stats so you do more damage.  Aside from me liking RPGs, why was this even here?  Just so that I could take on harder monsters which really aren't that much harder because I've boosted some numbers?  That just seemed wrong.  Then I remembered the excuse I give in the game for the player to be fighting monsters in an arena.

"Knowledge is Power"

That was it.  I don't need to level them up.  I don't need any stats at all.  All damage is based off of how quickly and correctly they answer questions.  If you don't know the stuff covered in the lesson, you're going to lose.  If you have a grasp on it, you're going to have a chance.  If you know it really well, you'll take the enemy down in no time.  The smarter you are, the more powerful you are.

This required a change for the weapons and armor.  Before they would just boost your stats.  Now there aren't any stats for them to boost!  All of the questions are split into Attack questions (where you attack the enemy) and Defense questions (where the enemy is attacking you).  Different weapons will give boosts to Attack questions, while different armor will give boosts to Defense questions.  Some of the boosts I'm thinking of are: bonus to available time to answer the question, chance for a critical hit, chance for a wrong answer to be shown as wrong, etc.

Looking forward to when I can get back to work on this!

-Califer

Level Editor Update

I've finally got the editor where I can add and edit everything.  I'm currently working on usability issues, such as making sure all the fields fill in with default values, and adding the ability to ctrl+click to set positions instead of typing them in.

At one point I got excited about trimming out all the old stuff that wasn't ever going to be used again.  After trimming out mots of it I realized that I actually do need it so I can do the level converter correctly.  Without the level converter, all of the levels we did before would be completely useless.  So I ended up using two different builds, one for my laptop where I worked on the level editor, and another one on my desktop where I worked on the level converter.  I don't recommend doing something like this because each time I switched I'd have to boot my mind back into the right mindset and remember where I left off.  Yesterday I got both of them finished and merged the code together.  This morning I got ready to get things done and realized that I couldn't compile.  I had forgotten to add a new file I made on the desktop computer.

I ended up playing games instead.  I'm sorry.

What is this creature?

Before I talk about what I've been up to, Peter's got something to show.

What is this creature?  Peter's told me that it definitely has something to do with the Siphon Spirit world.  Is it a friend of the Spirit from the demo?  A trickster demon?  An ancient sage?  Only time, (and maybe Peter) can tell.

I was sick today, so I had a little extra gaming time.  But mostly a lot of lying down time.  While I was playing Recettear (enjoying it so far), I started thinking about the blacksmith shop for one of the game ideas rattling in my head.  Usually I just keep playing, certain that I'll remember.  I rarely do.  Today I actually got up and grabbed the design notebook for the game in question.  I got all the ideas down, which lead me to a few more ideas.  After that, I was in an interesting state of mind, as I really started noticing the little things that make a big difference.  That led me to make more design notes.

While this is great for design, it's not that great for actually playing games.

Serializing levels for the win

I've decided it's high time that I rebuild the triggers in the code.  I've made so many changes to how I think they should work that it now requires a major rewrite, just like what I'm going to have to do for the levels pretty soon here.

So I dig into it.  Since I'm serializing the levels through the editor instead of writing a line in a text file for the level, I can just pull grab the object.  I recreated the code that creates a trigger and took a look at it.  9 lines total.  Curious, I looked at the original code.  105 lines with a helper function that is another 20 lines.  This makes the code much easier to use, and much easier to modify.  In the future, I'm just going to use xml serialization instead of trying to read in the text and determining what goes where and what changes have been made that breaks other things.

Currently the LoadLevel code is 555 lines long.  Excited to see how much smaller I can make that!

Putting it all together

Siphon Spirit was originally a game-in-a-day project.  Since it turned out alright and we didn't like where Darkened Dreams 2 was going, we decided to just continue on with it.  As time went on we would add new things, polish other things, and it slowly turned into the game that we have today.  This is all sorts of problematic on the code side of things.  For instance, Peter wanted to have some images in the background.  Then he wanted to be able to have it vanish if it was connected to an orb.  Then he wanted cutscenes.  Then he wanted to have images that would appear and vanish based on things that were happening in the level.

Now that I'm taking a hard look at how the levels are put together, I noticed that I had several ways to display images, and they were mostly the exact same.  I took about a week to merge them all into a single object in code and make the screen for images in the editor.  I'm pretty happy with it.  Just a few more things before the editor is fully usable!

Pulling the Trigger

A stage in Siphon Spirit is broken up mainly by casting reveal spells.  When you cast a reveal spell more gameplay elements are introduced and some might even be removed.  Through a series of reveal spell casting you can craft a level with a lot of different things going on.

But sometimes, that's not enough.  Say you're building a frantic level where you need to dodge blasts and you just can't afford to lose any energy.  If the reveal spell is around then you need to not only dodge the blasts from the demon hearts, you also need to make sure you never get close enough to put energy into the reveal spell or else you'll be too small to finish off the hearts.

In order to handle things like that, we've added triggers.  Each part of a level can have a trigger to tell it when to get activated. We can tell it to happen a certain amount of time after the reveal is cast, to happen when there are only a certain number of a certain type of orb left (like 0 hearts on the screen), or even how much energy a certain orb has.  This can be really helpful for stuff like giving some extra free energy when the player's orb gets too small.

I think I'm about halfway through with getting the editor all working now.  There's another Indie Game Night coming up on the 30th, so I'm really going to have to push it in order to get it working in time.  Wish me luck!

Someone set us up the bomb.

While I'm working on the level editor I spent some time reworking how some of the gameplay elements worked.  What I'm working on now is the Bomb.  It's an orb that you cannot absorb from, and it cannot absorb your energy either.  But it is getting smaller all the time.  Smaller.... Smaller.... Boom!  If you don't get shielded in time or manage to get rid of it with a Reveal spell it will explode and take half your energy when it goes.

As I rode to work today on the train I kept thinking how nice it was that I don't speak out loud what I'm thinking.  "Okay now, I've gotta get this bomb working before my stop."  "Crap, the timer's not working correctly. Don't want it to blow up at the wrong time."  My commute could have become a little too interesting.

I'm a professional gamer now!

As I mentioned in a previous post, I like to play games on the computer.  Steam is my system of choice, followed by Desura.  Recently, Steam started putting out trading cards for playing games.  Basically, if you play a participating game you will get cards put in your inventory.  You can use the cards to craft badges and level up your account.  When you craft a badge the cards vanish and you can get coupons and emotes and other little things for your account.

So I thought I'd do that.  I got into the beta and started to get some cards.  Now, each game drops a limited amount of cards.  If there are 8 total cards in the set you can only get four cards.  You have to get cards from another game and trade with other people to get a total set.  I decided that was a little much for me.  Trying to find people who have the cards I want and finding a time that we can both trade didn't seem worth it.

So then what?  I could just give the cards away, but then I realized that I could sell them on the marketplace.  Figured I'd see if I could get a few pennies for them.  Then I saw that they were being sold for around 50 cents each.  I can't sell my real trading cards for that much.  Sold off everything and ended up with a little more than $19 steam credit.

I got paid for playing games.  That means that I'm pro now.  I'm also totally set for the next big Steam sale that should be showing up in a week or so.

-Califer

Siphon Spirit Design - Player Types

 I wanted to share a little bit about game design in our blog. I've thought long and hard about how to make a game based on a linear story as replayable as possible. It's not just a game you can enjoy endlessly, but it's also designed to be rewarding for different types of people with different levels of interest.

For those that just want to play through it once and be done:
Siphon Spirit's story is reasonably sized. I'm aiming for a 3-4 hour game initially. A player that just wants to play the game and get on with playing other games can feel satisfied that they've saved the world and had a full experience. For me, having a bunch of games I never finish sitting on my shelf actually makes me feel guilty. I often wish my games didn't last so long.

For the Completionist:
The game goes well beyond the initial story. By going back and perfecting your scores on every stage, you can free spirits that will open up access to new challenges. These new levels are not just harder, they will also include additional story sequences. Many games I've played give hefty challenges and offer no substantial reward for them. In Siphon Spirit, expect to see some of the most exciting things happen only after seeking perfection.

For the Competitive:
If you really have something to prove, try to see just how high a score you can get. An update in the final release will raise your level score by finishing a fraction of a second faster. The game displays your cumulative score across all 150+ levels in the File Select screen. We hope to provide a place for the community to display their high scores with pride.

For the Creative Player:
We have explored the game's mechanics to a great extent, but there will always be new things to try. The Level Editor included with the game will allow you to spend as much time as you want, endlessly designing new challenges using all the game's Orbs. Design the most wicked level you ever imagined, or see how big you can make the Spirit Orb get.

For the Bored:
Custom-made levels will be shareable online, and we'll make sure there's a way for you to pass yours around. If you haven't had your fill of Siphon Spirit, download community-made levels and master every last one. There will be endless levels to play!

We hope it's a game everyone will come out of feeling like they've had the level of experience they were hoping to get out of it. What kind of player are you?

Editor is coming along.

The public editor is making big strides.  I've got it so we can place all the orbs, voids, spells, bombs, and other things, move them around, resize them, save the level, load the level, and, best of all, play the darn level.  There have been some major changes to how the levels are saved off, so I'm going to have to write a converter to go through and make all of our old levels compatible with the new system.

Looking at the new level code and comparing it to the new level code makes me feel good.  It's much faster to load levels now (art loading time hasn't changed) and it requires much less code.  Plus, I get to add more options without completely making a mess of how the levels get loaded.


On a more bitter note, the forums are going down.  We only got one person to post there, and we both know him so he could have just emailed us.  The spam bots came along and the phpbb captcha system couldn't stop them at all.  It just hasn't been useful enough to justify putting more work into not making it completely terrible.  R.I.P.

Why I'm a PC gamer

With the new round of consoles coming up (or recently released) I've been thinking about what happened to me.  I used to be big into console gaming.  I never really played computer games with a few exceptions, like Daggerfall.

Backwards Compatibility

Hearing that the PS4 and the XBox One aren't going to be backwards compatible, well, that didn't bother me.  I don't have a PS3, and I don't have any games for my 360.  Backwards compatibility did affect me years ago though.  When the PS2 and XBox and Gamecube were fighting it out I had a hard time deciding what I was going to do.  I had a N64 and a PS1, got a lot of usage from those systems.  So when I heard that I could still play my PS1 games on the PS2, that made my decision.

Used Game Sales

Used game sales on the PC never were pretty big.  Most places wouldn't take used PC games because most of the time people could just copy the game to another disc and play that.  It's become even more accepted to not sell your PC games back with content providers like Steam.  Now we hear that the XBox One won't accept used games.  That actually bothers me.  And it bothers me that it bothers me.  I don't have a ton of money, so I will usually get used console games.  Since they start out at $60 I feel I don't have too much of a choice.  They're just too expensive.  So I want to be cheap.  But that bothers me.  I know that my purchase is only going towards Gamestop and isn't being used to help out the people that originally made the game.  That's one of the reasons that I really like digital games, I know that my money is going to the people that it should.

Sales

But even with that said, I don't see a lot of sales on console games.  At least, no where near the scale of sales that I see on Steam, Amazon, Humble Bundle, etc.  Popping by CheapShark.com shows that there are always sales going on for PC games.  I'm talking deals around 75-90% off.  And the games usually go down in price after they've been released.  Skyrim started at $60, but now it's $30.  You know what the result of all these sales are?  I have a TON of PC games.  Most of which I haven't even tried yet.  While on the other hand, I would only get one console game at a time.  And that money for console games didn't go back to the developers or anyone.  I love my Vita, but the sales aren't worth talking about.  Once a week they update the store, and one single game for the Vita goes on sale, usually 50% off but never more than that.  So that makes me think, 'Okay, I'll just hold out until next week.  Maybe one of the games I actually want will go on sale.  If there were sales more often, I would buy more games.  If they were good deals I would buy them even if I didn't have time to play them right away (Steam is proof of that).  It's not like they need to worry about running out of things to sell.

Little Time

When I was younger, the thought of a 80 hour RPG would have me very very excited.  Now, the thought of an 80 hour RPG just makes me put off actually playing it.  I've had Rogue Galaxy for about a year and a half and just started playing it last week.  Last night I spent all my gaming time watching a series of cutscenes.  I actually pulled out my laptop to read some articles.  The point is, I don't have a lot of time to sit down and play games anymore.  Spending hundreds of dollars on a system just to play games, then spending $60 per game just seems like a dumb idea to me when I already have a PC for work and internet and Netflix and all those other things that Microsoft wants me to pay a fee to be able to use on their box.  I already own a Netflix membership.  I can watch it on my laptop and my Vita.  Why would I pay an extra subscription just so I could use it on my XBox?


Sorry if I went off on a little rant or blathered for a bit.  Just had been thinking about the console situation and wanted to get this all off my chest.


-Califer

Demo Update

I KNEW it was a good idea to have it email me when the game crashed.  See, it crashed when someone played it on a computer with a culture that uses Portuguese as the main language (I'm guessing Brazil).  It ran into this problem because they do their numbers differently, and the number converter looked at the numbers in the cutscenes and levels and would find something that it didn't recognize as a real number, so it would crash.  I basically ended up telling it to always assume an English culture so that it would read the levels correctly.

Thing is, I would have never known about this error if I hadn't made it report to me.

On that topic, new demo is out now on IndieDB and CaliferGames.com.  Give it a try if you haven't yet and let us know what you think!



-Califer

The Alpha Demo is Live!

Sorry for the wait!  It's now live and ready to be played.  Currently it's only a Windows build.  Pop by the forums to let us know what you liked and what you didn't.

I've been pushing hard to get another version of the demo out.  It will still be a while, since it's going to include the level editor.  It's also going to have a redesign in how the levels are saved out, so that's going to be a big change.  Hopefully I'll have something to post about it soon.

-Califer

New Forum Style

Before sharing our Siphon Spirit demo, we need a place to talk about it. I didn't expect it to take so long, but I spent the last week figuring out how to tweak color settings on our new phpBB forum. This will go up with the demo. It isn't a big change from the default (mostly color changes) but it was a good chunk of work anyways.

My other plan is to have a game trailer made to release with it. Sorry to say these things have pushed back the demo release, but we promise, we are working hard to get everything ready.

The forum is not live yet, will be soon. It will be accessed from www.califergames.com under the forum tab.

I expect we will have the demo and forum up early next week.

-Peter

Little More Testing

Well, we got some good feedback from the private demo.  I've been pretty busy cleaning up things and making a number of changes to make the current demo better.  For instance, I've added Alt+Enter functionality so that you can change whether you're using fullscreen or windowed mode at any time.  I've fixed a few bugs associated with clicking a different window when you were playing, and I've added an option to take screenshots by pressing the PrtSc button.  I've got those being saved in your documents folder along with the save files.  I think those are the major changes that I've done, but there are a few more incoming before we make the alpha demo public.  Hoping to get it out there in the next few days.

Thank you for your patience!

-Califer

Private Testing

Okay, I have the demo.  And I'm keeping it all to myself!  Bwahahaha!  We're just giving it a play-through to make sure that it all looks and plays right.  After we're both satisfied that I didn't miss any of the art or cutscenes or level changes we're going to hand it out to a few friends to make sure that it works on more machines.  After that we'll make it public.

I've had a little time to work on the level editor, but don't expect it to be in the demo.

-Califer

Level Editor

A while back I mentioned that there was one last big screen that I needed to make for Siphon Spirit.  Well, I've gotten started on it.  It's a public level editor, so that users can create their own levels and share them with others.  I've basically just gotten started on it, but I can place all the orb types and have a detail bar that shows what it going to be placed and will have lots of other little details.

We actually already have a level editor.  It's very rough though.  It will just crash if you don't do things right.  You still need to know a lot of how to edit the level in the text file.  Plus it looks like crap since it's just the two of us using it.  I'm hoping that the new editor will be very user friendly and encourage people to make new levels.

-Califer

1 Week to Demo, and New Wallpaper Art

Get ready for a playable demo of Siphon Spirit, coming next week!

 

I finally finished scripting in audio for the 10 levels of the demo.
We are taking a week-long testing period for potential bugs before we put it on our site.

Follow us so that you will know as soon as it's available. On our blog, twitter, facebook, or any other social site we have listed in this blog's right margin ---->

Also, enjoy the new wallpaper. More sizes and dimensions have been uploaded at the game's page.

Cheers!
-Peter

Playstation Vita

In the future, I plan on either using Monogame or Unity to make games.  They both have their good points, and I'll really have to dig in to figure out which one I'm going to use.  Both of them, however, can export games to Playstation Mobile.  Well, Unity has announced that they are going to work on it.

So I got a Vita.  Didn't get any games when I bought the system since most of what I'm interested in is on the Playstation store.  I spent the first day getting used to the system and downloaded a bunch of demos and free to play games.  Day two I decided to go ahead and get Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions.  But the store won't let me use my credit card.  We got a new zip code a few years back and it's been nothing but trouble.  My wife tells me that Walmart won't ship to us.  And the Playstation Store is adamant that my zip code doesn't exist in my state.  As such, they won't accept my credit card.  Talking to support was pointless as they just told me to but gift cards or use Paypal.  I'm not a fan of Paypal, and the last thing I want to do is go to a store to pick up a $20 gift card so I can buy a $9.99 game.

I ended up putting some money in my neglected Paypal account so that I could then put it into the Playstation Store so I could buy a darn game.  Of course, that takes 3-5 days, so I've just been playing Jetpack Joyride and watching Netflix.  

I'm sure most people don't have any trouble buying stuff on the Playstation Store.  I'm sure that many people (Peter included) don't mind going out and getting a gift card to buy games.  But as a consumer in my particular position, if I wasn't going to try to develop for it, I would just return it and get a 3DS instead.  Hopefully it will be worth it and I will actually make a decision on whether to use Monogame or Unity before the Vita is replaced with the next new thing.

-Califer

New Wallpaper and Audio Making Progress

While Siphon Spirit has a more limited color palette, I offer this as a separate piece to be enjoyed in anticipation of the game. It is a 1024x768 wallpaper, but I'll be sure to put up some more sizes on the website soon.

I have managed to make progress with the game's audio. It is merely a temporary track to put out with the demo until we hire someone to do it. I have put together a dozen or so sound effects and they are now incorporated into the build. I started scripting them tonight. Hoping to wrap it in the next 3 days. This, along with a bit of testing is all that remains before we make the demo available to everyone!

Utter Research

So I've gone through all my sources and, well, I learned a lot.  Stuff I've never known before.  I've known how to write hiragana and katakana for 15 years now and I picked up a lot of stuff I never knew.  For example; diphthongs, voiced and voiceless consonants, mora, nigori, sokuon.  And you know what?  I learned how to write perfectly fine without ever learning those things.

Most of the things I picked up in my research are words that linguists use.  This, in my opinion, is a problem.  When I was learning Japanese I was taught that the word 'desu' is a copula.  Since I was in high school I just glazed over the information.  When I started teaching, I suddenly wanted to know what it was.  A copula is a word used to link subject and predicate.  Yeah, that's not a whole ton more useful.  So what I'm planning on with Japanese Arena: Kana is to keep everything as simple as possible.  Avoid using words that could confuse the user and replace it with something easier to understand.  Heck, I had students that didn't know what a verb was.  I'm going to do my best to clarify all new words.

But on the other hand, I am trying to make the single thing that anyone should ever need to learn all there is to hiragana and katakana.  So after they've gone through and learned how to write everything, I'm going to add a few extra, optional lessons to cover advanced terminology.

New Look For Siphon Spirit

I decided Siphon Spirit needs a new art style so I'm scrapping the last 3 years of work for this look.
And instead of defeating demons, you just hug them. I think more people will like it, what do you think?!
April 1 2013 ;)

Siphon Spirit Audio

I've been recording and mixing my own placeholder audio for Siphon Spirit. Once placeholder sound effects are in, we will have a brief testing period, then we will be ready to share the game demo on our website!

KABOOM!

The plan is to swap out the placeholder audio with better effects when we are ready to hire someone for the job. Thanks for your patience, we are excited to finally share our project with you in the near future.

-Peter

Glad I'm Indie

Back when I was working on My Japanese Coach for the Nintendo DS I wasn't allowed to go back and double check things.  We were on a tight schedule and even though I had been putting in extra hours on my own they didn't want to keep paying me to be a language expert anymore.  They were paying me to be a programmer.  So in the end, what happened was most of the lessons were just first pass.  I couldn't completely organize the dictionary because of time constraints as well.  And since I never had the chance to look over how the characters were being written many of them were wrong.

For Japanese Arena: Kana I'm able to take my time.  I spent the last week reading through all my textbooks and dictionaries finding whatever information should be taught when teaching hiragana and katakana.  I've got the first two lessons in the game, but I will be updating those.  In fact, I plan on doing several passes on all lessons.  I'm just grateful that I'm now able to make sure that a game is correct and interesting without being pressured by management that threatens to fire me for doing what I was told to do.  I am going to do this game RIGHT.  I am glad that I'm an indie.


In other news, I've recently been playing King's Bounty: Armored Princess.  It's a strategy game where you travel across the map, get into battles and level your hero up.  I was excited about the fact that you get a pet dragon to help you out.  I love pet systems.  I've rather soured on it now.  It's way too imbalancing.  There's a stats screen at the end of the battle and once I switched it to show more I started realizing that my dragon was doing around 50% of the total damage from my side.  Even with five troops each attacking each turn.  It seems like I should have chosen the warrior class instead to use more of their dragon-boosting skills, since my spells aren't too useful.  One thing that bothers me is that whenever I'm playing, I get the urge to got to GOG and buy Heroes of Might and Magic III and IV.  That seems to tell me that no matter how much fun I'm having, I know that I've played something more enjoyable in the past and in the end, I'd rather be playing that.

How to Play, Part 2

Just wanted to go over what Peter said last week.   Hope this doesn't take too long to load, I wanted to try my hand at making animated gifs of gameplay.

First, go to the map and select a level to play.

Absorb orbs that are smaller than you.  This will make you bigger.

Orbs that are larger than you will absorb all your power.  Stay away or they will kill you!

Eaten by a demon.

Whatever you do, don't touch the demonic orbs.  Even if you're bigger they will hurt you and that energy is lost forever.

Ow, ow, ow.

Cast the Reveal Spell by pouring energy into it.  It's okay to touch spells, but be careful to not pour all your energy into a spell or you'll die.

A specter was hiding there all along!

How to Play Siphon Spirit

 

I'm taking a post to explain how Siphon Spirit is played, since it's difficult to tell from a screenshot. The game is very action-packed. The heroine, Miranda, fights demons using energy she collects, called a Spirit Orb.

On the PC, simply moving the mouse moves Miranda's Spirit Orb. Size and position are the most important things to consider--You may only absorb energy from Demonic Orbs smaller than your Spirit Orb. Touching Demonic Orbs causes energy loss so you must siphon energy from a distance.

Demon orbs sometimes move about, you will need to sacrifice energy to activate spells often, and you must regularly dodge blasts of demon energy. Defeat a demon by siphoning all the energy from its Demon Heart(s).

Magic isn't just a menu command as in most video games--In Siphon Spirit, it's a flowing pool of energy and a game of building up from weakness to strength.

Yep, time machine, alright.

Last Saturday I was able to get together with Peter and we finished up the last bits for the demo.  Except the audio.  Wait, why are we working on audio?  The purpose of the upcoming kickstarter is to pay for the audio.  Peter wants to get it all sounding at least decent so we don't drive people off.

But I did mention to him that it felt like a time machine to work on Siphon Spirit after I'd spent all this time coding up nice tools for future games.  He took me aside and booted up the earliest copies of Siphon Spirit that there were.  Now THAT was a blast from the past.  Looking at how it used to be and comparing it with how it is now.  Not only did I get to see some bugs that I have viciously squashed, but we got to see all the design changes we've made.  All of them seem to have been for the better!

As for the Japanese game (getting close to a name, maybe!), I wrote out the first lesson and showed it to my artist to get something better looking than what I had been using so I could figure out the placement of everything.  She got me something really nice and so I put it all together.  Below we have the previous lesson screen.

Perfection.

And underneath, but missing some character art, is the current version.  It's still got some changes to make, but it's much much better!

I'm nothing if not logical.

It's like a time machine

I've been doing some touching up on Siphon Spirit to get it ready for the demo, and it's a lot like I'm working in the past.  I got the game working quite some time ago, and made March to the Moon while I was waiting. March to the Moon was made with the FlatRedBall engine.  I decided to go the engine route because I was concerned that I wasn't using screens for Siphon Spirit and the whole game was basically in a single file with switch statements checking what 'screen' was currently active and running the related update and draw functions.

Using FlatRedBall taught me a lot about how to use the current game state and a lot of other things.  I was happy with it for March to the Moon, but near the end of development I started to get tired of it.  When you made changes with the program for controlling entities and screens, Glue, it would delete the related file and recreate it with the changes.  But for me, sometimes it would throw an error telling me that it couldn't make the file.  But it had already deleted the file first.  I would lose a good chunk of time because I developed most of it on the train with no web access so I couldn't just grab my latest backed up copy.  Then I had issues with how slow it was loading stuff in on the Xbox.  March to the Moon isn't a very intensive game, but every time I did something for the first time it would take time to load it all into memory, freezing the game during the process.  I had to make a new loading screen which I had to just loop for 14 frames after each group of objects loaded their art so that the rats showing the progress would actually move.  This baffled me, but the lead developer of FlatRedBall wasn't part of the creator's club anymore and couldn't run ccgame files on his Xbox.  I started making the Japanese game with FlatRedBall, but had issues with getting Japanese to display.  I eventually gave up and started building my own set of tools to help me make games.  It's slowed down the development time on the Japanese game, that's for sure, but now that it's becoming more mature it's so much nicer to use.

Siphon Spirit hasn't taken much from it yet.  I did go through and make everything into their own separate screens, but haven't changed much else.  So when I do go back and work on Siphon Spirit I need to remember that I don't have a Sprite class to handle positioning, and when I do position things it needs to be placed at the top right of the image instead of the center.  I don't have a nice text manager, but I can still write text to the screen.  Development's come easier than ever for me with these nice new tools.  We have a smaller puzzle game being planned out to pull people into looking at Siphon Spirit, and I'm excited to get his art from it and see how quickly I can build it into a full-fledged game.

This has been on my mind recently because I have been working on a new screen for Siphon Spirit.  It is going to be the most complicated one in the entire game by far.  More news on that next week.

Artist's Introduction

I'm Peter and I'm doing the art and lead design for Siphon Spirit! This piece of art shows off the game's art approach and one of the demons you'll face in the game.
From now on, I'll be helping Califer keep you up to date on the game's progress as it relates to the story, art and design. Check back often!

Now at blog.califergames.com

If you look at the address bar you'll see that the blog is now at blog.califergames.com.  We're going to make a lot of changes to it soon to make it look much better and mesh more with the rest of our site.

For Siphon Spirit, Peter's been keeping busy with some nice wallpapers and other artwork.  He's sent me some early sketches and I think they look great.  He tells me that he would rather post the art himself so hopefully we'll see a post from him soon!

The Japanese Game is making a little progress.  I've written out the first lesson and am getting ready to put it all in the game.  After I have the second lesson in it will be a pretty solid build that allows you to get to all the screens without crashing.  Hopefully I'll get some new art for it soon so I can get it to the indie game night coming next month.

Demo draws nearer

Peter's been getting me more and more art for the demo.  Not only are there some impressive cutscenes, but there have been a number of art upgrades to some of the older screens.  I'm hoping to get all of his changes in today so we've got something nice and new to show at indie game night tomorrow.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to go so I won't be showing the Japanese game.  Which is a shame.  Last time I showed it it spent a lot of time crashing because it was all set up for me to test and make things in it.  So someone would click something and BAM, it wouldn't be ready for that yet and crash.  Now it doesn't crash nearly so much and I've added much more control functionality.  The mouse now works on all screens.  You can play the game with an xbox controller, the keyboard, the mouse, or any combination of the three if you are quite bored.

But what we've been the most busy with is figuring out the whole kickstarter thing.  We definitely want to do it right.  So we're going through and adding a level of polish to everything.  We're going to be going crazy* with that over the next few weeks.

*May or may not actually already be crazy.

Life came up and bit me.

The astute of you may have noticed that I haven't really updated the blog in a month.  I have been rather busy, but not as busy with making games as I would have liked.  Peter probably could have said something, but he doesn't seem to like blogging.

It all started one Sunday when I came downstairs to feed the cat.  Carpet by the bathroom was wet.  I was annoyed at the cat, assuming that she had done it, but didn't have the time to really take care of it right then.  When I came back down I realized that the cat didn't have enough fluids in her little body to have made the mess, so I started wondering what was going on.  I soaked up the water as best I could, but in the evening we found that the water was back with a vengeance.  We had someone come out to figure it out and after a number of cuts in the wall he found a broken pipe behind our shower.  It was coming from our dishwasher and the sink, so the water was pretty dirty.  It had been going on long enough that it had soaked all beneath the bathroom all the way through to the carpet on the other side.

After we contacted insurance and had another company come out to look at tearing up the floor and replacing it we thought we were doing alright.  We just had to wait for the stars to align so that things would happen and things would get fixed.  (The broken pipe that was causing the flooding got fixed, but the mess it left behind is still there.)  Then, Tuesday last week my youngest child threw up all over me (and the dishes I had just washed) right after getting out of the bath.  I figured it was about time for me to take a shower so we got her cleaned up again.  She threw up three more times that night and I was on clean up patrol for each time.  I got to bed late, and woke up a lot during the night to check on her.  Our other daughter wasn't feeling well and was coughing in our bed all night long, which helped me wake up to go check on the younger.

So, Wednesday last week, I was very tired and figured it was about time I did another blog post.  Just as I was about to start my wife called and told me I needed to come home right away for and emergency.  After some prying, it turns out that ANOTHER pipe had broken.  This one wasn't a drain pipe and it was soaking the basement.  She managed to get the water shut off before I got there, but more than half the basement was sopping wet.  Having no water with two sick kids wasn't an option, so my wife took the girls to my parents house for the night while I stayed to clean up and wait for our handyman, who I was really hoping would be able to fix the leak so we could turn the water back on.

Thankfully, he was able to cap the pipe before the leak so we could turn the water back on.  The pipe had been installed wrong, so if he had just fixed the place where it was leaking it would just happen again.  In the end I was up until 1 in the morning soaking up water, moving things and pulling up the carpet to dry.  After that I had a well-deserved dinner and a shower and realized that I was working in the morning.  After 5 hours of sleep I was back up and getting ready for work.

Now that my excuses are out of the way, Peter tells me that we are very close to getting the demo done for Siphon Spirit.  He's given me more art so I can tidy up a few screens, and we're mainly down to audio issues now.  I'm looking forward to the kickstarter.  One thing we're going to do is introduce a smaller puzzle game that backers will get early access to the demo.  Peter will have just about all the art finished ahead of time so I can actually have things looking nice from the start.

The Japanese Game has also made progress (expect for a name, of course).  I've been adding mouse support since that makes much more sense to do things that way.  I just have four more screens to add it to, and of course I saved the hardest ones for last.  Even with all these problems, I think we should have two games ready for being shown off at Indie Game Night next week.

Here's hoping that we'll make enough money to help pay back what it's costing to fix my home...