I Pulled Mortal Legacies From Peer Review Again

*facepalm*

I pulled Mortal Legacies from peer review for the second time. The problem took two minutes to fix and was a nice way to show the pinnacle of my stupidity. What happened was after I implemented my error reporting system I created a button that you could press at any time in the game and it would cause a crash to test the error reporting system. This is obviously something you wouldn’t want to keep in your final product, any intelligent human would remember to do something as important as removing this game ruining button. Sadly I have a tendency to forget to do such critical things and I left that crash-button in the final product of Mortal Legacies.

I have to be honest, I considered attempting to keep this problem “under the hood” and immediately make a patch fixing this as soon as Mortal Legacies was released but I went against it for obvious reasons. First off I didn’t think it was morale thing to do, it wouldn’t feel right to me selling a game to people that I knew was broken. My other reason is that it could of potentially ruined all my work put into this, people wouldn’t buy a broken game, reviewers would rip it to shreds and I’d have wasted my time. I want a good reputation for good games, selling something that didn’t work isn’t right and it would just come back to bite me in the ass.

Now, to justify the little voice in my head that considered rolling with it and acting like there wasn’t a problem. I first want to say I’m not whining or preaching I am simply justifying why I would consider doing something so stupid. I planned to release my game 2 weeks ago, but then it failed for a similar stupid reason on my part where I overlooked something that was crucial. It took me only a couple of minutes to fix, just like this problem but it set me back big time. So here I am, two weeks from my expected release date and at the very least another week’s delay comes along in a form to show how stupid I can be. I must admit I was a little mad at myself for doing something so careless and that was what made so impatient to get Mortal Legacies out of the way that I briefly considered sweeping this problem under the rug.

Luckily, I was smart enough to stop making another stupid mistake.

So what will I do now? Improve it further I guess. Less white space for the dialogue screen, (try) making NPCs move around, Auto-equip better armor to character and much more! Lets hope by the time Mortal Legacies goes back into peer review it’s more fun and BUG FREE!

-Mitchell

Mortal Legacies FAIL

NOOOOOOOOOOO!

I put Mortal Legacies in to peer review, hopes high. Sadly my hopes flew a little to close to the sun and it’s wings melted, causing a crash. That is exactly what happened, Mortal Legacies crashed. I only have my self to blame, it wasn’t a huge problem with my game though and only took five minutes to fix. Sadly, that doesn’t change the fact I now have to wait seven full days until I can put it back up for peer review.

It is a bummer, but I am making the most of it. I’m currently doing things to Mortal Legacies that I didn’t quite have time for previously and I didn’t bother doing because they were little things that most people wouldn’t give a damn about.

The things I implemented was:

• For the player to be notified that a door is “locked” if he can’t enter a certain house or room.
• More relevant weapons and armor in shops based on characters estimated levels.
• Made it easier to walk through some doors that were previously difficult to enter.
• A super-secret-but-now-not-a-secret-because-I’m-telling-you mode that only becomes available after you complete the game. I’m not telling you what it does though (it’s a secret!).
• Out of necessity,  an error reporting system. Now if anyone has the game crash on them in whatever circumstance it comes up with a “sorry for the inconvenience” screen, gives you a full report on the exception and offers to send it to my gamer tag. Pretty nifty, eh?

That’s all I have implemented so far but I still have 5 days to go, expect a lot of nifty features jam packed in Mortal Legacies by the time I am able to resubmit!

-Mitchell

Mortal Legacies Is Coming To XBLIG

So I’ve spent today making a press release. Why? BECAUSE I PLAN TO RELEASE MY GAME SUPER FRICKIN SOON!!!! If everything goes to plan, in two weeks time Mortal Legacies will be on XBLIG. So I need to make a super shiny awesomesauce press release! I’ve been looking at other games press release’s on GamePress.com and I think I got the gist of it. Third person talking, pretend like you are more than one person who works at your studio then state you are a one-man show with a bit of location related humour on the side in your company bio. Don’t underline, space it out, “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE” at the top of the document, three hash tags at the bottom to show your press release is done and that’s about it! So without further ado here is my press release:

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

Hamilton, New Zealand – April 8, 2012 – Ivatrix Games is proud to announce the release of their Japanese Role-Playing Game “Mortal Legacies” for Xbox Live Indie Games.

 

Description:

The crown of Elisia has been stolen in the dead of night. Without the crown, Elisia is doomed to fall to the shadow. The crown was not just a simple crown, but an artifact passed down by the royal line to form a barrier against our world and the world of the shadow. News spread far and wide throughout the land and eventually reached the ears of Valloc, A young wannabe warrior from Sunville. On hearing of the doomed fate of all of Elisia, Valloc prepared for the adventure of his life to find the crown and defend against the shadow.

 

For More Information:

Download: http://www.imaginarylink.com/

Press Kit: http://www.imaginarylink.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ivatrix-Games/269339889798645

Website: http://www.ivatrixgames.wordpress.com/

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/#!/Ivatrix

Contact: ivatrixgames@gmail.com

 

About Ivatrix Games:

Ivatrix Games is the one-man independent game development studio founded in 2011 by Mitchell Davies, located in Hamilton, New Zealand. In between chasing sheep, Mitchell Davies likes to create games that are filled to the brim with funitude. He also likes using made-up words in press releases.

 

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I’d really appreciate any feedback like if you think my jokes aren’t funny(I can take it!) or if you think my press release is a bucket of crap. Telling me I’m awesome and giving me an internets high five would be cool too!

-Mitchell

Polishing Like Crazy And Expected Release Date!

I have had many people play testing my game this past week, offering many suggestions to improve my game which I have listed and I am currently knocking them off that list one by one. You know that saying “The last 10% of work takes 90% of all the effort put into your project”? (or something like that) I’m starting to realize how true that really is. The start of the game development process is easy and fun, your throwing weird and wonderful things into your game without a care to the consequences and usefulness of it. The polishing phase of your game is not so much fun. Your pulling out your hair as you try and solve problems to do with reports of an elusive code 4, having to completely chop out or squish in new mechanics and as all of this is happening your slowly starting to figure out why you have a lack of hair on your head. Some aspects of the last 10% are pretty fun though I must admit. I love hearing feedback about my game, crazy suggestions just to make it that little bit better. Game developers(especially Indies) are probably the best, most creative and fun loving breed of people out there and it’s always awesome having a chat with them.

Changes I have made this week include making/improving the menu sound effect, Xbox guide confirmation popup whenever you save a game, spacey out those awkward one-tile gaps between two NPC that you have to walk through, NPC recognize you as the hero of all of Elisia after completing the main quest, less award exit between the abandoned mineshaft and forest and my favourite little addition suggested by SickKreations, the ability to press RB and LB to switch between playable characters in your party while exploring the world. Sick of playing same, old Valloc? Now you can also play as either Lucieus, Solissus, Syl or Zethera!

My game is still able to be play tested by XBLIG developers and I am planning to keep it there for another 3-5 weeks, after that I’m going to be putting Mortal Legacies in peer review for release so be prepared!

Thank You Play Testers!

In my previous post I whined about my lack of play testers in a month, luckily for me several people have play tested Mortal Legacies and I have gained some valuable feedback on how to improve my game. Most of it is bugs found, simple things that should be changed or added such as more sound effects (which I am currently working on right now) ect. The best stuff is the feedback on how the start of the game went for them, I find this really important because it’s the players first impression of the game and often influences them the most as to whether or not purchase it. The feedback for the start of the game varied a lot, from people thinking the game’s menu was the actual game for a while, game opening too jarring and unable to find the door out the house you begin in(true story).

Take a guess, I'll give you a cookie if you get it right.

There is also some feedback which I know would improve my game, but I can’t do. Not because I don’t want to, it’s just to near impossible. An example of this was one of the play testers suggesting that the characters should have more combat animations. Don’t get me wrong, that would be an awesome improvement but the problem is that I didn’t make the combat sprite sheets, I have no clue how to contact who did and if I ever did reach this person he/she would probably either not want to do it or charge too much to do so.

Well I’m going to get back to making strange noises into my microphone for various sound effects, thanks for reading!

Bullet-Point Hell Of An Update

• Mortal Legacies has been in play test for exactly a month today.
• I have updated Mortal Legacies three times, the most recent one is evil-checklist approved and has all known bugs ironed out.
• I am practically at completion, I’m just waiting for feedback from XBLIG developers to possibly improve.
• Only one person has play tested Mortal Legacies, thanks by the way OnekSoftGames!
• My reasoning for this is that I’m to *unknown* right now, people can’t be bothered playing through a JRPG and my box art sucks balls.
• I can’t get/afford an artist so my box art consists of what I could make or find.
• I wanted something a little more *actiony* for my box art but I couldn’t find anything that fit and I definitely couldn’t make anything good.
• After the end of this current play test (4/3/12) I’m going to take one final close look at Mortal Legacies before putting it in peer review.
• All XBLIG developers should play test my game.
• I didn’t feel like making a giant block of text, so I decided to just bullet-point the hell out of everything.

My biggest, most confusing debugging session ever.

Let me tell you a story.

So there I was, playing through my game seeing if there was any little design errors. I looted this chest, saved my game, sadly died, loaded up my previous save and then I notice the chest re-spawned. After a few different tests I found out that whenever I returned to a room I previously looted, the chests would reappear with all their previous loot inside it.Obviously this was a huge problem. People could practically get an infinite source of gold and free items by abusing this glitch. It had to be fixed straight away.

At first I thought I could just grab a later build and take the code for managing removing/modifying entries but turns out they were exactly the same. To confuse the matter further the error only occurred on the Xbox, the same project on windows worked exactly as it should. This lead me to dig around the internet for a while trying to find all the differences between how things run on the Xbox compared to PC since I’m new to porting. I couldn’t really find anything so I started scrutinizing every line of code in my game seeing if anything was out of line.

A couple million break point’s later I concluded that the code was loading the removed entries correctly and the problem was with how I was saving these removed entries. Turns out that I wasn’t even saving the removed entries at all. There was a conditional statement that I wrapped around the entry saving which only got the green light if the variable removedEntries was bigger than zero. removedEntries got it’s value equal to what a delegate returned after removing the chest. I still don’t know why, but for some reason it always seemed to return negative two. But that didn’t make any sense! I was removing entries, how could this be possible? I still don’t know the answer to this. The delegate was supposed to return plus one every time a chest was removed, so how could it return as a negative number?

I ended up deciding to screw the delegate and just save the list of removed entries every time I closed a chest, it was an ugly fix but it worked. More importantly it taught me something valuable about programming.

It’s really confusing.

Mortal Legacies In Now In Play Test!

The title says it all, Mortal Legacies is finally in play test! All you premium  XBLIG developers can test it out here. There is still a known bug where if you take all the items in a chest, leave the map and then return the chest respawns, the same happens with Party NPC. What makes this extra confusing is that I thought I already fixed this weeks ago, but turns out the fix only works on PC, if you think you can help please check out this forum post here.

Well that’s all I really had to say…

What It Is Like At Near Completion? Find Out!

My game is nearly done! Yes you heard correct, I’m dangerously nearing completion of Mortal Legacies at 120km/h. So what have I done since the last time I made a blog post? LOADS! I fixed up the difficulty scale algorithm, changed around the gradients of the menu screens and both polishing and nerfing where required. What do I have to go? VERY LITTLE! I just have to collect up every shred of dialogue in my game and grammar check the hell out of it. Then from there I need to finally buy a XNA premium membership for $150 NZD and it will be up for play test in a week or so!

I’m not so sure whether or not it was such a wise to hold off buying the membership for so long, being unable to test on the XBOX 360 so far could mean that when I finally do some nasty surprises might appear from the blue as some XBLIG developers have warned me. But seriously, what’s the worse that could happen? Actually, don’t answer that. Let’s just hope my game doesn’t make my console implode or some other extravagant, highly unlikely disaster.

I also will have a bunch of forms to fill out so I can actually be liable for a payout, W8-BEN, PI, ect so that’s going to be a load of fun. While waiting for those to be sent all the way from New Zealand to USA I’ll try to record some game play while play testing is happening for a sneak peek to satisfy everyone and give to the reviewer IndieGamerChick if she decides to bring back “Indies In Due Time”. I’ll also make a shiny trailer later on when my game comes close to release to hand out to various people and put up on YouTube for all to behold.

All in all I have a lot of emotions surging through me at the moment as what I’ve been working on for so long comes very close to completion, the two major ones being anxiousness and regret. Regrets probably not the best word for what I’m feeling but I can’t really describe the feeling that something that you have become so attached to finally just… disappears. I know my game won’t be completely gone from my life once I publish but besides the occasional update the code will disappear from my everyday routine and that’ what I’m really going to regret to walk away from. I’m not sure if any other programmers out there feel the way I do about my code but after a while you start to feel a sense of familiarity and comfort from knowing all the inner workings of your game, a project you spent countless working on. I also feel a sense of pride in my code, to know you actually made something with a language that would be lost in understanding to the majority of the population is a great feeling.

Anxiousness is probably a more understandable thing to feel when your game is close to completion. Will my game pass the scrutinization of my peers? Will people like my game? Will people buy my game? Will all the work I put into this actually turn out to be worth it? I sure hope so!

Mitchell.

Why My Game Development Productivity Just Increased Tenfold

A few months ago, the computer I used primarily to develop my game Mortal Legacies broke down, beyond repair due to the fact I was stupid enough to never make any factory default recovery discs. This made the game development productivity of my game lower drastically, sluggishly, as I used a computer that was not my own and definitely not suited to make games with. Despite all of this I trudged along with the mindset that I would buy a new computer after I published Mortal Legacies.

At the time I didn’t realize how much of a stupid idea that truly was.

Three days from today on the twelfth of January I went out and bought a relatively cheap but high performance laptop, an Acer Aspire 5755G and within my first day of purchasing this shiny new laptop I was back on track. I completed all the various in-game skills, fixed a lot of design errors, set up a character management screen, finished off all the menus in the game, created difficulty modes and added a whole lot of sound to my game.

All in all I have my shiny new laptop to thanks for all of this productivity and a nearly completed to do list. For once since I started developing my game it seems there is a end on the horizon.