Remy's July 2020 Newsletter 🐈🧱🍬🏰⚔🎵🖼 (Patreon)

Hi everyone!

This month was very hot where I live, but somehow I didn't completely melt into a puddle of inactivity!

Instead, I worked on a new Pico-8 game, on the SUGAR engine, I made games on Castle's secret mobile project, and I got a cat! Meet Coco!

He's cute and growing super fast. If you want to see more pictures, I put some in this Twitter thread!

And under Coco's watchful (though sometimes sleepy) eyes I started making a new Pico-8 game! Behold!

The premise of the game is this: a tsunami is incoming and the current structure on-screen cannot support all the (yet-to-be-implemented) little people above the tsunami's level. Your goal is to reshape the structure to save everyone.

It's a game about changing structures that are inadequate to people's needs.

The main gameplay of the game is to grab bricks and place them again, all the while dealing with the game's retro physics. Each level, you will be presented with a procedurally generated structure and you'll know the level of the incoming tsunami. Little characters will jumb from brick to brick to get higher as you rebuild. At the end of a timer, the tsunami comes and if you manage to save everyone, you get to the next level, with a bigger structure and a higher tsunami!

So far I worked mostly on the physics of the game and the grabbing and placing of bricks. I also did a few iterations on the game's look and went for a rather chunky style.

Eventually I grew bored of coding physics and as soon as I got it to a stable state, I moved on to work on Sugar. I'll come back to this game and finish it very soon though!

So this hasn't really changed since the last time I showed it off, but that's because I'm still figuring out how exactly I want to integrate lua scripting in SUGAR.

I've spent a lot of time reading parts of the Lua documentation, and I did a few tests, and I'd say I'm getting closer to actually knowing what I should do.

The biggest thing is making the bindings between the Lua scripting and the SUGAR C++ API. I feel like I could have gone ahead and make those bindings while figuring it all out, but I think that would result in dirty code with a lot of repetitiveness, tedious to write and hard to debug. That's not what I want. Instead I really want to grasp how those bindings are going to look before I actually write them, and that's taking some time. But I'm getting there.

I also feel like I'm learning a lot since I've never integrated a scripting language in a C++ engine before. Although I could hardly put into words exactly what I've learned so far yet, I'm definitely getting a better feel for things.

Hopefully I will have more concrete information about this subject in SUGAR next month!

Castle has moved on from their desktop client to make a mobile platform where you can make tiny games, toys and animations with visual coding. It hasn't been publicly released yet but I have been involved in testing it for a few months already and it has come a long way so far. Recently they changed the drawing system and the collision system in the app, and that really made me want to try and make new things with it. So I made a simple bowling minigame, and a ragdoll skeleton!

This new Castle app still needs time to be in a releasable state I think, so you won't be able to play these masterpieces of mine before a while, sorry!

With the heat and the acquisition of my feline friend, that's all I managed to work on this month. In August I'm hoping to finish the Pico-8 game, and to actually move forward with the lua integration in Sugar.

Aside from developing video games, I also played video games! This month, I mostly played Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition!

The original Age of Empires II is a classinc real-time startegy game that came out in 1999. When I was a kid, we had a CD of it at home, and I played it, a lot. Being a kid though, I wasn't very good at it. I could beat the easiest AI maybe, but mostly I used cheats to build sprawling cities with a lot, and I mean a lot, of castles. It seriously was a lot of fun. I didn't really care for a challenge at the time, I was content with the simple fun of building towns and unfairly crushing my enemies!

In 2013, Age of Empires II HD came out on Steam. The graphics were mostly the same but the game supported much higher resolutions, there were some tiny gameplay tweaks, and there were much better AIs than in the original game. I tried playing that version in 2016 or 2017 I think but I didn't really get into it.

But late into last year, Age of Empires II Definitive Edition came out, and it is, in my opinion, on another level.

The graphics were completely redone, and are really beautiful. The gameplay was polished to be super smooth and a little easier to play. There are new AIs. The historical campaigns were rebuilt from the ground up, while keeping fidelity to the original game. There are dedicated servers for multiplayer play. It's a really good remaster of a classic game.

And so I started playing it again, this time more seriously. I learned some hotkeys, started doing things much faster, and learned some tactics and counters. I started playing a bit of the campaigns, and I played in multiplayer with friends.

Then December, the month of festivities, came by and I didn't have much time to play Age of Empires anymore. After that, I mostly didn't play it until June 2020 when I started playing it with friends again. And in July, I played it a lot.

It's a really satisfying game! The base mechanics are easy enough to grasp I'd say. But then you really have to practise playing faster to be any good at it. But there is something insanely fun in building out an economy and then an army, and then send that army fight another army and destroy another economy. That sounds kind of glum, but the medieval setting and the game mechanics really doesn't make it feel all that violent in my opinion. I think the game plays more like a game of chess rather than just a glamorization of war, although there is some of that too.

Something I find interesting is that it feels extremely rewarding to win a game of AOE2, but losing is particularly disheartening. When you see your buildings get destroyed, your army wiped out, it really feels like something you built just got crushed in front of your eyes, and it's not a great feeling. Yet, the game is made so that if you lose a battle, you don't necessarily lose the game, you can still make a come-back if you have enough ressources left. But still it's a feeling that is hard to shake, and although it can make you want to get better, I find it mostly discouraging. I wonder if there could be a way to diminish that feeling in a game like this.

Apart from AOE2, I also played Vignettes! It was included in the giant itch.io bundle from June, and I meant to play it for, er, ever since it came out.

It's a very chill and beautiful puzzle game where you rotate 3D objects to turn them into other objects! The goal of the game is to find all the different objects, which are separated into different settings, and sometimes use more puzzly mechanics to get to, but every object in the game is accessible from any other object, making it feel like a particularly continuous experience.

It's really good. It's very well made, the mechanics works great and the puzzles are clever but easy enough that it won't cause you a headache. And it has really nice sound design too, what more could you ask? I strongly recommend it!

Moving on to music now, with just two songs, two absolute bangers, two remixes from Myd, whom I already wrote about two month ago:

Myd's remix of Major Lazer's Lay Your Head On Me is one summer song.

Myd's remix of Salut C'Est Cool's Cassoulet is also one summer song.

I mean, it doesn't get any more summery than this. These songs are the summerest. I love them. Especially the Cassoulet one.

A non-musical recommendation I have for you this month is a talk from Sos Sosowski, titled "Don't burn your house down"! It's advice for not burning out! Good advice too, and while this is an issue that is extremely present in game development, we definitely don't talk enough about it and the solutions for it. Sos offers some actionable tips, and maybe you don't need them, but also maybe you do!

And another non-musical recommendation: Shitty Watercolor, an artist who makes super wholesome watercolor comics. It's deceptively cute, mostly sad, and usually they have a positive conclusion. It tackles subjects around existential dread with a positive turn. It's elegant and good.

And that is it for this month! I hope you found this interesting! Don't hesitate to comment on this post if you want to discuss anything I mentioned in here!

I hope August goes well for you! Remember to stay safe with the epidemic still lurking outside, but also remember to relax and have fun!

Thank you for reading and thank you for your support!

Rémy 🍬