A Site For Sore Eyes

Get it? Well anyway, I've finally created a site that will contain my blog posts from now on along with games I make and other things. This will also be a place I can sell games and maybe even some custom vinyl toys. All good things. The new site is http://www.dougmakesgames.com/

ThumbderDome Alpha

One Thing Missing
So I have the first build of the game and everything is working great. I don't have any audio yet but I've been looking into sound effects and the various licenses I need to obtain for certain things. Further info is being collected but I haven't implemented anything for that yet. I also didn't quite make it all the way to my alpha goal. The game is playable from beginning to end but it's missing the taunt scene in between the match and the continue screen. this scene is cosmetic and has not input from the player so I'm lumping it into my beta deadline next Sunday. So let's take a look at some things That have changed.

Character Selection Animations

Characters now play a selection animation when you select them. If you move to another selection they return to their idle thumbs up animation. This animation is re used when the player wins the match and also when they continue at the continue screen. A bunch of refactoring went in to support this because before I wasn't expecting to have anything play when character is selected.

Split Screen Adjustments and Struggle Meter

I change the orientation of the split screen margin. It used to be diagonal but it was weird for one player to have a different view space than the other. I also change the second player cam to more closely reflect the first player camera on the left. They still aren't 1:1 but I will sort that out in the beta build. Additionally I added a struggle meter at the top. When a player is pinned they wiggle the joystick and the meter will push in the other players direction until filled and they escape the pin. Before I was just incrementing a counter and didn't have any ui to support this. I also added some code that would allow the player that is pinning to fight back against the struggle meter to force the pin down. This is commented out as I can't really test it on myself because my brain is always letting the other half win. The idea is that the pinned player will have a max value to achieve that is multiplied by the number of times they have been pinned in a round. The player that is pinning has a static value for which to fight back so the more times a player is pinned the harder it will be to win against the pinning player. At least in theory. Again I haven't tested it yet so it's commented out in code and I'll test it with some players. I also changed the "Pinned!" ui text to be on top of the player that gets pinned instead of showing up in the middle.

The idea I went with for character select scene.

 Another example of some grids leading off into the distance.

Player Specific Win Animations and New Look

 As I mentioned before animations are being used for each winning character. For Grave Digger I googled "Relgious hand gestures" and found one that I hope isn't offensive. The other are ones that I just came up with. This also required some hefty refactoring to support the changes. You'll also notice the neon grid in these scenes. Let's just throw this out there. I like 80's pop culture art and misc. I don't know why exactly. Maybe just something fun to look back on. Maybe it's the super simplicity of it. Maybe it reminds me of being a kid. I just like the way technology and the future were represented in the 80's.  In any case after making the start screen I realized there was a visual inconsistency through the scenes. I decided to create something simple but still appealed to my direction of wrestling's golden age in the 80's. I looked at some images for inspiration and added some of them below to look at. My characters don;t really have any specific 80's look to them they just represent a theme that a wrestler might have taken on and represented to such an extreme. Plus they're floating hands sooooooo you know.

Continue Screen

I added a continue screen where a countdown begins. If the player doesn't press their respective trigger then the game ends and it returns to the title screen. If they continue then it returns to the character select screen. This was all done on Saturday night. I looked at the clock when I called it done and realized it was 5:00 am. I have to stop doing that. (Don't look at the timestamp on this post.) The 80's neon grid is in view here as well. I made a shader that would falloff to black so it would look like the grid fades into the darkness. Also made some trigger icons that follow the theme of the font I'm using.

Conclusion
So there is still plenty of work to do to reach beta. I need music and sound effects along with a bunch of other things on my list. I need to make the taunt screen I mentioned a polish some animations. I started looking into selling the game for a really small amount and still haven't worked out all of the logistics there. We'll see where I land once this things is done. I also still need to make a simple animation of a ui element telling the player to wiggle the joystick when they get pinned. I'll post another update soon.

Title Change

Welcome to Thumbderdome
So I decided to change the title. I went through a couple variations. One was a play on WTF Wrestling Thumb Federation but it still lacked something cool and there is already some web series called TWF Thumb Wrestling Federation. Mine was way too close to that. I also just didn't like "Thumb At Me Bro!". It was just a little off and didn't sound right to my ear. After writing down all of the things that came to mind when I thought about wrestling entertainment from way back I knew I wanted to have some kind of imagery to capture the golden age of wrestling. I also think constantly about the cage matches and the whole "Two men enter. One man leaves." So with that, I landed on ThumbderDome Wrestling. The other cool thing about this name is the "bd" consonant paring. In the font I was able to adjust it to somewhat resemble two thumbs facing each other. I made some other updates in code unrelated to this but I just wanted to make a quick post to put up the start screen art.

Thumb At Me Bro!
This is the title I'm going with for my thumb wrestling game. I have made a ton of progress and I've only really been working on it for two weeks but it feels really good to see it come together. Since the scope of this game is so small I'm free to play in between the lines. It's in that spirit that I've added 4 skins for the hands which are acting as characters. I'm really drawing inspiration from the feeling of pro wrestling entertainment I watched as a kid and the personalities each wrestler had. They always seemed to embody some kind of specific gimmick and go way over the top with it. The other fun thing is that since it's so easy to just make skins for the characters I can make a bunch if I want. So now I have a character Select screen that fades into the main event scene where the match happens.

 I also changed the way pinning works. Before I was checking for some ranges where the pin could be in a pinnable state and then you had to click the trigger to invoke a pin. this caused a lot of fatigue on the players hand so now you can use the trigger on your side of the controller. Additionally you can invoke a pin with this button even if you're not holding up. Each time you miss though there is a moment of vulnerability whch makes the game more exciting. I also added some effects when you miss a pin so you can read it very easily as a miss and it's way over the top. Obviously. 

If a player lands a pin each character has a unique effect that happens. Moscow Mule has something that looks like a hammer hitting hot steel. Grave Digger has one that looks like a lightning bolt strike.

I will be working on the character select screen this weekend some more on top of creating an intro screen, a start screen, a player lose screen where the winning player says a winning taunt and a continue screen with a countdown. If the losing player hits the trigger during the countdown it will start the character select screen. Currently I only have a simple rematch choice on a black screen for continuing. I am giving myself until Monday to have the game in an Alpha state. Playable from beginning to end and then I will have the game in Beta by next Sunday. I still have to work out music and sound effects which I really want to be awesome so we'll see how the heck I pull that off. 

What Am I Doing?

Making the game has been a lot of fun and I have had several people tell me to try and sell it for at least $0.99 or something. That sounds great. Problem is I don't know how the hell to sell a game. This is going to be my biggest hurdle. How do I copyright the game? What kind of thing will this do to my taxes? Do I have to register an LLC? It's a lot to think about. I've been very careful to make sure I'm not using any assets or resources that may be under a freeware license that denies commercial use. My only concern about an asset right now is the text font. I got it from 1001 free fonts and I read it up and down and it said it's available for commercial use. I even tried to look for the author to contact but could't track down a contact. Anyway we'll see. Changing fonts is the lest of my concerns.