New Siphon Spirit Art,

Spirits of Elduurn is coming right along!  I've got a language system so it'll be much easier to get multiple translations in.  The new demon smashing mini-game is also near completion and just needs a touch of balance.

Aside from a few major things that I'm waiting until the last to do, I'm running out of things to work on.  So this morning I stopped and just played it. Decided to get really nit-picky and got a new list of little things to work on.  Lots of minor things that I can clean up fairly quickly.  That's something that I can appreciate since I'm getting a little worn out on Spirits of Elduurn.  After cleaning up this list I'm going to take a break and focus on porting Siphon Spirit over to Unity.

Tune in next time for some new art from Peter!

End of January Update

Peter's gotten a more steady schedule now which will allow him to get more art done.  He's also being more willing to let me help out on the cutscene scripting and the level design.  Siphon Spirit is definitely going to come out this year!

With that in mind I've been going through and polishing up a number of things in Siphon Spirit to make it a more smooth experience.  I'm also fiddling around with getting it into Unity so that we can get it on more things, like tablets.

But before I go too crazy getting Siphon Spirit in Unity, I've been working on porting Spirits of Elduurn first.  I'd love to get it on phones, tablets, vita, and basically everywhere that I can without eating up all of our meager resources.  I'm trying to take my port a step further, with some language support (Japanese and Spanish so far), and a purchasable extra set of levels.  It's coming along well and I hope to have a screenshot with some Japanese in it soon.

Spirits of Elduurn and Kana Match

Why is it that good habits are so easy to break?  Well, it's about darn time that I made another blog post!

During the time of my silence (burn out), we've released a few games and went to a convention!

Spirits of Elduurn is a puzzle game where you play as some spirits that brought life to the world of Elduurn.  If the art style looks familiar to Siphon Spirit, that's because they are in the same series, and take place in the same world!  We released it for free on Kongregate, so head on over and give it a play!

Kana Match: Learn Japanese is the Japanese puzzle game that I'd been working on.  After having put it out to play on Kongregate I realized that it needed to be much better to be a good tool for learning Japanese.  I'm probably going to scrap it and find another way to teach Japanese.


I'm going to try my best to keep more regular posts coming!

Japanese Puzzle Game Progress

I've been getting a lot of progress done on the Japanese Puzzle Game.  I'm just going to list out everything that I've done since the last post.

• Redid the tile art to make it easier to read.
• Enlarged the timer/background art so it was easier to see how much time was left
• Changed the score to be larger, show the numbers increasing instead of jumping, and got it out of that little box.
• Every time you get points it now shows the amount of points you earned.
• Fixed a bug that would count matches multiple times (matching five in a row also gave you points for four in a row and three in a row!)
• More than doubled the vocab list, with a lot more to come!
• Matching four-in-a-row makes a new tile of the type you need to make a word.
• Matching five-in-a-row makes two new tiles of the type you need to make a word.
• The four-in-a-row tile will give you double points when you match it.
• The five-in-a-row tiles will give you triple points when you match them.
• Fixed a bug related to clicking, releasing, then clicking and dragging somewhere else.
• Completely redid the exporting of the word data and loading it in so I could make a web version.
• Added a score multiplier.  The longer you keep the puzzle going the higher the multiplier goes!

So yeah, I've been a little busy.  Here's what it looks like now!

Obviously, still pre-alpha.

Though with all of that said, I'm still trying to come up with a name!  Japanese Puzzle Game doesn't really roll off the tongue...

Indie Game Night

Last night was Indie Game Night.  Those are always fun, and Peter and I stayed very busy showing off three different games.

Peter was showing Raiders of Elduurn and Spirits of Elduurn.  Both of these games are small spin-offs of Siphon Spirit, which takes place in the world of Elduurn.

Raiders of Elduurn is a card game where you team up with friends to defeat a demon.  Each player gets a team of heroes together and they try to find a strategy for taking down the boss before he takes them out.  It takes place 20 years before Siphon Spirit does.  For more art and gameplay instructions, take a peek at his Deviant Art page!

I got a lot of feedback on my Japanese Match-3 game.  First thing I learned is that even people who like games enough to make games don't know what a match-3 is.  Guess I'll just be calling it a puzzle game from now on.  This also makes me realize that I can't just put a match-3 in front of someone and expect them to figure out.  I guess I'll need a tutorial even for something like this.  Even more so since about half the people who tried it got confused and were trying to switch tiles from one side of the board to the other.

The other feedback that I got was that it was really hard to read.  All the images at the back of the tiles were making it too hard to really see everything that was going on.  I think I've fixed most of the issues now, but it's a strong reminder that Peter is the artist on this team!


Peter's hoping to launch Raiders of Elduurn as a free, printable black and white version sometime next week.  Hope to see you there!

I didn't make it

Yeah, long story short, I did not finish the Japanese Match-3 game.  I have been making progress on it, but my family and I spent a week sick so I'm behind.  Also, every time I sit down to get something done, Terraria somehow starts up.  Then I end up playing late and don't get enough rest to function well enough to work on complicated stuff during my development the next day and I end up playing Terraria and ... well.  It's a viscous cycle.


I did get a number of things done though.  I've got most of the icons done, and I've updated the web page to export words in a format that I can read in and pull vocab from.  It's now selecting a word and pulling the tiles from that.  I don't think I'll be doing too much gaming over the weekend since all my computer parts have arrived and it's time to rebuild my computer!  Looking forward to finally getting off of XP.

Peter's been having some issues with his computer.  He's taken to referring to it as his "zombie".  While it's down he's doing storyboarding and getting the story for Siphon Spirit completely nailed down.

Not too much to say, but hopefully there will be a lot more next week if I can just convince myself to get to bed at a decent time!

It's matching time!

While putting together the Match-3 in Unity I found out that velocity was supported, but not acceleration.  It didn't take me too long to get tired of blocks falling at an even speed and I decided to try using gravity.

Turns out adding physics to a match-3 wasn't the best idea.

Stuff ended up not falling very far before getting stuck and stopping all gameplay.  I ended up putting in my own acceleration to make things better.

One of the biggest problems I've had when telling people about the match-3 I'm working on is that no one knows what I'm talking about.  I almost always have to tell them "Like Candy Crush.  Match three things and they vanish."  Once I got past that past and told them how I'm going to make it an educational game, they are usually excited about the idea.  

Since it's not very far along, I didn't want to have many people test it.  That was a big mistake on my part.  I've shown it to two people so far, and even just as a basic match-3 I could see there were some problems.  I've got it set up for click and drag, but both of them clicked on a tile, then clicked on the tile they wanted to switch it to.  Allowing that method of play is my next goal, after I finish building the database.  

One other thing that showed up in testing was something that I was worried about.  I had the board set up so that only one thing could happen at a time.  You switched tiles?  Nothing can happen until it either makes a match or switches back.  That's pretty fast, so no worries there.  You made a match?  You can't make another move until the tiles are gone and new ones have fallen in to take their place.  I kept telling myself that it would be okay, but I knew I wasn't being truthful.  After watching their frustration watching the clock tick down while they couldn't do anything I knew I had to change it.

That took longer than expected, because I didn't plan it out well and my todo list just said "make it so you can match at any time", when really that should have been broken into smaller tasks to help me focus.  It was basically a rewrite of the update function and I changed a LOT of stuff around.  But as of today it's all working and it's much better than before for it.

I'm feeling pretty motivated to get this thing finished.  There's a Japan Festival coming up on the 26th and I want to have it done by then.  Will I be able to?  I'm not totally sure.  But I'm hopeful!