Indie game developer, beer brewer, ukulele player.
It’s really fucking stupid that I have to say this, but since the whole nintendo thing is going on here goes:
Let’s Play/youtube folks, please play my games. I love you, your videos, and the feedback you give me. Do whatever advertising you want on your videos, after all you put the work into them.
I would request (but not demand) that if you use one of my games you give a courtesy link back to my blog or the game’s page if it has one.
First look at having a pilot’s body in First Law. Huge addition in terms of immersion!
Developers are sharing their dreams of space, and far away places. Players are exploring hostile environments and seeing wondrous things from our offices.
Last night I went through all the forum posts I could find and all the twitter and youtube comments that I got about the initial build, and tried to collate all of the individual items of feedback into a list I can work from. Some of the items were mentioned far more often than others (e.g. - improving ship handling was probably most common). I broke the list into 3 sections: Stuff that’s being actively worked on, stuff that’s on the TODO list but isn’t actively being worked on, and stuff that wasn’t even on our radar.
I was happy to see that a lot of the feedback overlapped with stuff I wanted to work on next, it makes me thing that I’m working with roughly the right priorities. But it’s a lot of work to do, so it will be a busy month!
Stuff already being worked on:
Controls: Better ship handling/physics
Controls: Recenter button for yaw drift
Gameplay: Boost/afterburners
Gameplay: Enemy turning speed
Graphics: Pilot’s Body
Graphics: More active screens in cockpit (objective screen, missile/ai command screens, etc)
Input: Joystick support
Sound: Laser sound
Sound: Weird effects at high speed
Bug: Screen info rendering in world cameras
Bug: Enemies can shoot you through meteors?
Stuff on the todo list:
Controls: In-game control mapping
Graphics: Asteroid Textures are too low
Graphics: Better explosions
Misc: Controls for non-rift players
Stuff that’s new:
Input: Hydra support
Input: Hydra positional tracking
Gameplay: Full newtonian physics
A new video of my game First Law! I also released the first public demo for anyone who has an Oculus Rift, you can get it at http://rjevans.net/firstlaw
Early combat footage from First Law my April #1gam and first project for the Oculus Rift. The sense of immersion is insane. Hoping to ship a small combat sim by the end of the month, and add some missions into the game next month.
Now with configuration support for keyboard & controllers!
It’s not a fancy feature, but hopefully it makes things a bit easier for you if you have a non-traditional keyboard or want to play with a gamepad.
Download Links:
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In the early 1980’s a mall near where I lived had an old arcade called Gold Mine. I wasn’t usually allowed in there but I remember sneaking in a few times to look at all the arcade games. They kept the lights in the arcade pretty much off, so everything was lit by the neon glow of arcade machines.
It was a magical place.
With my February #1gam, I wanted to make an arcade game that wasn’t a slavish replica of games from that era, but rather how I remember them thinking back to walking through Gold Mine. Loud, bright, glowing, fast, and challenging.
The best way to play this is hooked up to the biggest screen you can find and the lights low, trading off between friends to see who can get the farthest.
Enjoy!
The Press
So early on Saturday, I woke up and saw this:
Rock Paper Shotgun - Everyone Was Thinking It: Cod of Duty
Holy crap, right?! And then over the course of the next 48 hours, it was followed by:
Absolutely blown away both by the coverage and the positive response by the people who took the time to comment. Thank you, everyone!
The Players
As of this post, Cod of Duty has had 16,579 unique visitors from 116 different countries. Here’s a map of the distribution (darker green = more players from that country):
Preferred Play Method
I’m really glad that developing in Unity gives me a wide variety of options for deployment, since it seems like there’s no clear favorite for players. I’ll definitely spin a full set of builds like this for future games!
All of the downloads ended up generating just over 100GB of traffic on my web server this weekend - I’m very happy I have a good server, a lower end one might have melted.
Again, Thank You
It was a wild ride this weekend and one of the most encouraging ones I’ve ever had as an indie game developer. If you’re looking for more fun games to play, check out some of the other crazy games over at One Game a Month! And if you like the sound of co-op arcade multiplayer, come back at the end of February for when I post my next game. :)
The only big change is an invert y-axis button for the folks who wanted that. Bring up the pause menu during play (esc key) and toggle to your heart’s content.
Download for:
And then there’s the final battle, which is just majestic.
I’m blown away by the positive response. You folks are absolutely amazing.
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Download for:
For my January #1gam, I wanted to do something that’d be both small in scope and something that I hadn’t really done before. Based on a joke that my friend John made about Call of Duty always being abbreviated ‘CoD’ on the internet, I decided to make a first person shooter where all of your enemy are fish.
A lot of the ‘joke’ is how I feel about the standard FPS single player campaigns. Short, not terribly interesting, and completely over the top with their story elements.
From a development perspective this was actually a lot of fun to work on, even if I spent way more time on it in January than I ever anticipated to. I had never made anything like a FPS before, and I had never had any sort of scripted elements in a shipped game before, and this let me try out both of those things.
Things I had wanted to do that I ended up cutting in the interest of time:
In retrospect I think any more levels probably would have taken too long to play, and the joke frankly gets a bit old by the end of it. The 10-15m it takes to play through now seems sufficient.
A game I made this weekend for Pirate Kart is now done! It’s called Love Letter to Lightspeed, and is inspired by games like Drifter, Privateer, and Elite. The goal in this game is to kill pirates, collect cargo, and upgrade your ship. There’s no “win” condition, just survive in the universe and have fun.
There’s a bunch of other stuff I’d like to add, but now that the initial 48h time period is over I’ll have to work on it as time allows.
EDIT: Link to playable web version
Screenshots:
Saw this tree when visiting with family over Thanksgiving. I can’t remember I saw a tree that was so red (especially when compared to the rest of the trees in the area!)
Spent the last 2 weeks in maui. So, so nice.
