Blogs - viedt-el

Did you know that you can play games and help your local hospital raise money to save kids lives? I have been participating in Extra Life for 4 years now and it is one of the most fun ways to give back that I have found. If you're interesting in donating to help me raise money you can do so here:

If you want to help your hospital out, sign up and play in the 24 hour marathon yourself.

Extra-life.org

Also check out my games here on IndieDB ( Unreal Estate, Cornflower Corbin, and Violent Sol Worlds )

So, we are running a Kickstarter for our game Violent Sol Worlds. We have been on and off this project too much and it is time to get it done. We are going to get it done with or without the money from the Kickstarter, but it will be faster and better with some support from the indie community. Here is a short video of what we have going on. Hope you take the time to check out the Kickstarter page

We are happy to announce that our next project is now on Kickstarter. It's a much bigger game that will be heavily moddable with nice long story line. Get more information on Kickstarter now!

Kickstarter.com

So, Cornflower Corbin launches today on Steam, so I wanted to take this opportunity to explain a couple things.

Basic controls. Use WASD on the keyboard to move, or the left analog stick on a controller. Pretty standard stuff there right? Space Bar or the Right Trigger will shoot. Use Enter or the 'A' button to advance on buttons or in the comic books stories. You can turn on/off sounds and music in the options menu, available off the main menu and the pause menu (ESC or the start button in game). You can also go windowed mode or border-less windowed mode. We do not do a true full screen.

Basically, you need to navigate your way through the levels and defeat the bosses along the way. Shooting causes you to grow, growing makes your lasers stronger, but also makes you slower and easier to get hit. This is an arcade style game so there are no continues, you have to make it through from end to end with the lives given. It's not easy, are you up for the challenge?

To help you out, these are the power ups you will see in the game.

Krill is what you will see to heal you:


Purple Power Ups give you double damage:


Red Power Ups give you a triple split laser:


Blue Power Ups give you a shield:


We also offer an endurance mode, that is a single life, wave clearing never ending run. Basically a score chaser for the leader boards. You can play the story levels on a single level basis after you beat the level.

That's basically it guys. We hope you enjoy this fun little campy whale shoot 'em up. We have had fun making it.

In the near future we are going to offer Workshop for the dialog of the game, so someone can localize it for other languages or tell a different story with the comics, and most importantly, tell different jokes. More on that later.

We've been working with our local art college to get some new assets. It's been a fun experience, they get to learn about how games are made, and we get some upgraded art that we need to make the game look shiny. They came up with a couple of fun new creatures and redid some other assets. It is really making the game start to come together.

In this video you can see a handful of our creatures and some of the new crystals.

Thanks for reading.

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

Also, check out our Steam Greenlight page.

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

A few weeks ago I had to put on my big boy pants and knock out some business deals in our little venture. Two very smart people and I started a gaming studio about a month ago. This is actually a peal off from another company that never got around to forming up the studio like they probably should have. The games we are working on has been worked on for over a year now, so the studio part is really the new thing. We needed to form said "real" thing to protect our products, and invest in our people.

Up till now everyone that has worked on the games, did so as a volunteer, learning about game development and hanging out with some fun people. Going forward now, we are getting serious. As the studio forms we have to figure out what that means for all the people that have been involved up to this point. We also have to figure out what that means for the intellectual property that we feel is ours and someone else may or may not think is theirs. I have been in partnerships working with others before, but it wasn't until this week that I truly sat down to do business. Making decisions that can effect others lives positively or in any way really. It's not the easiest thing to do but my hope is, in the end, it will all be worth it and everyone will come out feeling good about what we've created. No matter what happens though, I am going to be working my tail off to make this whole thing great.

Keep an eye out for Afterthought Games. It should be a fun ride.

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

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

As always, follow me @Viedt_EL on Twitter.

So what does everyone think of a winner for unreleased games? I think it is awesome. I am hoping our game gets some love from people out there. We have been hard at work and it would be great to know it is appreciated in some way. I'm not begging for your votes here, just thought it was worth talking about. With that being said though, I would be an idiot not to provide a link to our game.

Violent Sol Worlds

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

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

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

LET'S TALK MODS

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

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

Hope you like what you see.

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

Also, check out our Steam Greenlight page.

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

I would love to hear from you. Comment below!

I am a firm believer that you need to constantly market yourself and your product (i.e. game). It doesn't take a lot of time and the more people that see the product before it is ready the more people that may buy it when it is. Building up excitement for it and exposing yourself to be held accountable are also things that help.

Some people feel like there is no point in marketing until you actually have a product though, and that might be valid. I am curious what you think.

Let's get a conversation going.

Written by magicrat_larry

After some time Violent Sol Worlds has it's new physics engine. We have it in the game and the bouncy problems are all gone. The engine is fast and acts as we need it to. The process was more of an adventure than I had thought though.

It turns out that the original POC code had a bug in it that made the sample objects I created work perfectly. Once we ported the engine to the real game that bug was not ported over and the game objects started to act terribly. You could pass through walls in a specific direction and get stuck in the car.

Finding the problem was not fun, it took some time. The problem was that we were doing the math on the center of the image of the object not the center of the physics. This worked well if they both correlated, if they did not we ran into situations that no matter what side you were on of a physics body you looked like you were moving at it from the right. This caused the pass-through situations.

To solve this issue we defined a point that was the center of the body. That point could be anywhere relative to the position of the body to the world so it could be off center of the image that is being displayed. With that fix the math all worked great and everything looked like it was going to fit in the game. So we ported that fix over to the game and that is where we are at.

Here is a simple video showing how it is working. At the end you can see we still have some tunneling issues where lasers pass through walls but that is going to be attacked a different day.

Come check out the game here on IndieDB or on Facebook

On Steam

and on our website - ViolentSol.com

Also stay tuned for a tutorial on how to make this physics happen. I will be releasing the POC code and writing a tutorial on how it was done very soon. Watch the project by clicking here to stay informed.