Remy's March 2020 Newsletter! 👁🏝🖌🍬 (Patreon)

Hi everyone!

In January I wanted to start making daily videos. I made a few but pretty quickly lost whatever grip I had on that project and stopped. It didn't help that a few days later I went on a six-week-long house hunt at the other end of France with my partner. That was a rough time. But we did find something! And then came the moving and the buying of furnitures! Enough stuff to keep me busy aside from making games for Castle. (because moving in an unfurnished apartment for the first time costs money!)

We still have a few boxes lying around, but since we're in self-confinement, we can't go buy the missing furniture we need for those things, so at least we don't need to (/can't) take care of those for the moment. Mostly we're pretty well settled now though! I now live right next to Bordeaux, a pretty big city in the south-west of France. It's nice.

In the meantime, I've been keeping on making games and things! So let me tell you about those!

If you've watched the videos I made in January, you might remember a game about a grid of wealth where you could push that wealth around and the goal was to equalize the whole board... That game's name is Fortune and I'm still working on it! It's been a while but it's definitely larger-scoped than what I'm used to, and I'm also taking some risks with it's design, both in the underlying mechanic of the evolving wealth grid and the graphic style. As I write this, I finally have a version of the game with the main gameloop, where you can loose and win the game. But from the feedback I got, it's very obvious that I'm going to need to change some things, at the very least to increase the clarity of what's what and what does it do. So I'm about to spend probably an entire day to untangle and fix the mess that is this game's design.

I'm hoping to finish this game and release it on Castle during April. I'm hoping, but I don't really think it's going to happen. More likely, like this last month, I'm going to start one or two tiny side-projects and take my time for Fortune. You can play the current prototype though, but it's definitely rough around the edges.

As I was telling you, I also made two tiny side-projects during March. The first one I actually didn't finish yet, it's an Island maker! With my friend Eliott, we did a small gamejam between ourselves, and the theme we chose (half-randomly) was pizza person. While brainstorming I found that I really wanted to make an Island making toy, so I went with that, even though the link with our theme was pretty weak (the island is the pizza?). In the end I absolutely did not finish it in the time we set ourselves for our gamejam so idk, it's ok, who cares about rules. Eliott finished their game in time though! It's a pretty snazzy game where you have to quickly recognize the word pizza. It's fun, and I think you should check it out at least for the amazing gamejam-style sound design.

As I was saying, my Island making thing is not quite complete yet, but there is a playable version up on Castle. I want to add saving/loading, an undo/redo button, and a few more materials, and maybe a feature where you can add points on the island with pop-up text that you write as the creator of the island. Right now you can just place dirt, sand, rocks, and trees. You can play it here.

To make it, I took code from my old unfinished sunset voxel island Pico-8 project! If you want to check that out, I'm attaching it to this Patreon post! Look for it at the bottom of this post! :)

Later in the month I made Forum! This one's finished! In fact I made it entirely in one day!

It's a permanent shared canvas! Anyone can come and draw on it! It's a simple little thing but I'm rather happy with it! I've been wanting to make something like it ever since another Castle user Bytestats made Palace, where you can place one pixel every 30 seconds on a shared canvas.

I made it so that if two people are drawing on it at the same time, the board will update over time. It uses Castle's server storage, which is pretty slow, so the synchronisation is what took the most time to implement, as I wanted it to be discreet and... not too bad.

You can play Forum here!

In this format - which btw I will try to do again for April, but I'm obviously terrible with consistency so who knows - I also want to write a little bit about other things than what I'm making! So here's that!

This month I've been playing ScourgeBringer from Flying Oak Games! And at first I really didn't like it! And then I did like it! And then I eventually found out how short the current (early access) version is!

When I first saw gameplay from Scourgebringer on Twitter, maybe one or two years ago, I was already looking forward to playing it. One thing that I loved in particular was that the player character's sprite formed a solid circle on-screen. This is great because it makes obvious the hitbox of the character, and that can be a game-changer in bullet-hell games. This is something I love in Nuclear Throne for example, where all the characters, player and enemy both, have their sprites fit pretty snuggly into rectangular hitboxes. Managing to have this clarity of gameplay while also displaying some truly beautiful art-style, especially in the case of ScourgeBringer, is both very unique and very enjoyable.

The game has been in early access for quite some time now, but I rarely play games as soon as I can. Usually I'll buy the game then and play it a few days/weeks/months later. And this month I set myself in front of ScourgeBringer, with pretty high expectations I should say.

So first off, the game is beautiful. Really this game has some of the prettiest pixel-art I've seen in a videogame. The studio's art director is Florian Hurtaut and I will definitely be keeping an eye for whatever next thing he'll be working on. The music is also great but if you're not ready for heavy metal going off every 30 seconds, you might not like it as much. I did find it to get pretty annoying after a few tries, so I admit I turned the music off after some time. The sound design though is amazing and extremely satisfying. Joonas Turner is incredible at his job and this is one more proof of that.

The gameplay... gave me a pretty bad first impression. I played the game and I felt like I was playing the game Monolith, a personal favorite, turned into a platformer. The room/map system is the same, the basic gameplay loop is the same, the basic attack + dash felt the same, the shop and upgrade rooms are litterally just the same, a lot of graphic elements are similar, and even the boss intros are the same, down to the cool font it uses! A lot of it is the same as Monolith!! I guess I especially didn't like it because just before playing the game, I saw it described as a mix between Celeste and Deadcells, two games much better-known than Monolith. And sure, the platforming is kinda somewhat reminescent of Celeste, and I did identify one reference to Deadcells with a certain healing item. But to me the comparison with these two stops there. The comparison with Monolith though!!!!!

So I didn't like that. And facing the rather hard difficulty of the first world in the game, I quit after 30 minutes of playing. The next day I decided to give it another shot. I wanted the game to surprise me. And it did, and I kept playing it the next few days until I hit the end of the game as it is currently!

The game is mostly permadeath, but with permanent upgrades that you unlock with a currency you gain from beating bosses and mini-bosses. Most of those upgrades are new mechanics adding to the core gameplay of the game. Off the top of my head, one upgrade lets you reflect the enemies' bullets with your heavy attack, one upgrade unlocks a combo system which earns you in-game currency (which lets you buy upgrades and health from the shop), one upgrade unlocks a new ability that removes all the projectiles currently on-screen and lets you deal damage to all the enemies. These upgrades make the game considerably easier and also, in my opinion, much more unique and fun! The game with all the currently-implemented upgrades is really fun! Why did I have to play more than an hour to unlock most of it though?!

The difficulty progression is also pretty rough in my opinion. The first world is already pretty difficult, but the second world is much harder still, and I would always have only a few remaining HPs when getting to the second boss, which inevitably crushed me every time. The first time that I beat it, I went right through the third world and beat the third boss too. The third world was also very difficult but not much more than the second world in my opinion. And there the game told me that this is all the content the game has for now.

In the end, I think ScourgeBringer is a pretty good game at first but only becomes really good and satisfying after unlocking the extra features. However, once you do unlock all the extra features, there are chances you will either play through the game to the end pretty quickly, or you may end up quitting in frustration because the game's difficulty progression is so rough. But this game is in early access, it's not finished, and I can definitely see potential for a really great game in it. I will definitely want to play it again when it reaches a proper release state. In the meantime, I do think that Monolith, which has very obviously been a huge inspiration for Scourgebringer, is a superior game, and I can only highly recommend that one if you haven't played it yet.

I don't really have other videogames to write about for this month. I'd like to play the new Animal Crossing but I don't have a Nintendo Switch. There is an update coming to Risk of Rain 2 though, and I will definitely be playing some of that in April. I think I'll be writing about that one for the next newsletter because it might well be the best action game I've ever played.

And with no transition whatsoever, here are some music recommendations: (I get pretty close to fanatical in those recommendations, sorry I just find these artists to be exceptionally talented)

El Huervo released a new album!! I love El Huervo's work, his graphic pieces are absolutely gorgeous, and his music has this absolutely unique style of sample-based electro-hiphop, with super interesting textures. He's definitely an inspiration for me, and as you can imagine, I'm very happy to get a new album from him! Plus, this album, A Thing With Feathers, is free/PWYW with unlimited streaming! So you have no excuse to miss out on it!

Another hero of mine, 20syl is doing a series of 36 short daily music videos with the motion design collective Nope! 20syl is a french hiphop composer who makes exceptionally good instrumentals in my opinion. I love his work. And this series happens to also showcase a super varied collection of motion design pieces which can also be a really good source of inspiration! You should check it out!

Finally, let me share with you some ressources I found this month!

First there's Tom Francis' 5 minutes talk "Consider Giving Up". My take-away is that when faced with a difficulty, you should consider what's at stake and whether there might be an easier way to get whatever you're looking for. It's easy to be set into your workflow and get frustrated as things get hairy, so it's always good advice to take a step back in this type of case. You should definitely watch the video, especially since it's so short!

Next is Nathalie Lawhead's article about Desktop Pets! This one really made me want to start making desktop pets myself and that's my main reason for telling you about it. It's really interesting, Nathalie looks at an era when Computer Pets of various kinds were flourishing, and how they died off, and she finishes on what might be the start of a comeback! It'll take longer to read than the video above, but still I really recommend it!

Finally, this isn't a gamedev ressource but I wanted to share with you this video! WheezyWaiter is a video-maker I've been following for several years, and since last year he's been trying different self-improvement practices and he makes (very good) videos about them. Recently he tackled journaling and it happens that I've done journaling in the past and it's really helped me, but I've always ended up stopping doing it because I couldn't find the time. With this video he motivated me to do it again and also made me realize that I can just write in my journal at any point of the day, whenever I feel like it, and I think that will help me keep my new journal alive for longer than usual. He also shares my vision of journaling as easier to do on a computer despite the trend of doing it on a physical notebook. I've always done my journals in basic text editors or in code editors, and it's so much easier, I'll never trade that for handwriting. It's a 10 minutes video and I recommend it!

And that's it for this newsletter! If you want to discuss some of the things I wrote about here, be it one of my projects, or anything I recommended, definitely let's do that! You can post a comment here on this post on Patreon, or we can talk more directly on our Discord server! Also I'd love to know if there are any things you're looking forward to in April!

Please take care and stay safe everyone!

Have a very nice month!

Rémy 🍬