Remy's April newsletter - 🔥🍬👁🥞💪🎶 (Patreon)

Hi everyone!

I have very exciting news this month!! But we'll go through the less exciting stuff first!

I started making a new Pico-8 game, around a fire effect I've been experimenting with. I worked a lot on SUGAR to bring post-porcessing shaders to it! (it was a lot more work than anticipated) I made a game for Ludum Dare #48! And there is a delicious new project coming together from Benjamin Soulé and myself, which I'm announcing for the first time, here on this post!

Let's start with the Pico-8 game! This fire effect is based off a tweet by Tim Soret, describing a trick used in Dreamworks movies: drawing negative space to animate a fire, instead of drawing the fire itself. I had already toyed with this effect a few years ago, and I even wrote some about it in a Doodle Insights back then!

But that was before Pico-8 gets fill patterns, and then bit selection for drawing. And so I wanted to put it all together, and see what I could get, hopefully with reasonable CPU performance.

And yes, it took some tinkering but I got there! Layering 6 times the effect, with 2 layers per color, using the classic grid dithering: each pair of pixels has one pertaining to one layer, the other to another layer. I think the effect works really well and I did manage to make it not use too much CPU. (~60% at 30fps) And so I decided to try and make a game out of it!

From there, I ended up getting lost in more graphical effects with the fire balls and the swinging animation which is all code, no sprites. Time to get technical! You can skip the to next paragraphs if that's not your cup of tea!

That animation is basically "pixel marching", we're looking at every pixel in a rectangle and deciding what color it should be based on calculations. In this case, we're calculating the distance of the pixel to the center, and we compare that with the angle of the vector defined by the pixel's coordinates. Put in some animated values when the player hits the controls and it gives you a cool singing effect which you've spent way too much time on, because of all the fiddling and headaches... But the effect is cool and I'm happy, so it's fine!

The fire balls use the same layering technic as the rest of the fire on screen, drawing circle particles following a directed sine wave, with some tweened values defining how intense the sine wave depending on how old the particle is. The whole thing uses seeded RNG so as to not use memory.

But then, I... stopped working on this. The problem was that even though I was having fun on this game, I was taking too much time on every single detail, and it was actually fairly low priority in the grand scheme of things. And so I moved on and back to SUGAR!

I finally set myself to add shader post-processing to SUGAR. It's something I've been wanting for a very long time, and I always thought it wouldn't be too hard to make happen, as I'd just have to compile a texture from the screen data and "slap a shader on it".

I couldn't be further from the truth, this was such a bore!!!!!!

I went with OpenGL for the shader stuff because Microsoft owns the only alternative, which is DirectX. I could not believe how badly documented OpenGL is. I swear, it is tragic. There's no way I've been the only one tearing my hair off in front of the OpenGL documentation.

In the official documentation, the functions are listed alphabetically, rather than being categorized. Most of the function descriptions are unreadable at first. You really have to learn and get used to the vocabulary they use to understand things, it's a journey. Some informations are simply missing. I ended up finding some I needed on random tutorials and guides off the web. One particular information (which I'll admit was fairly obscure, but I did need it) I found in a long write-up listing "beginner mistakes with OpenGL".

*takes a deep breath*

In the end, somehow, I managed to make it all work. And so we have post-processing single-pass shader support on SUGAR. Meaning we can have some cool effects, which is great! I even made it so you can create the window with your shader so it gets applied to the SUGAR boot-up animation, which is somewhat risky, but fun!

And it happened to be (almost) ready for Ludum Dare!

Ludum Dare #48 happened in late march! The 48th edition of the 48 hours gamejam! Nice!

The theme was Deeper And Deeper. I immediately wanted to make a vertical-scrolling digger like DOWNWELL. It's a genre I find really satisfying, with a good mix of shooting action and destroying terrain.

And of course, like all gamejams, it was a great opportunity to try out ideas that had been brewing in my head for a good long while! I've been wanting to do some sort shooter with procedurally-generated enemy behaviors for litteral years! It's an ambitious idea because there is much of a challenge in making such a game fun. A lot of 2D shooters are only fun if they feel challenging but fair. It's a balance that can be difficult to find even without much randomization, so randomizing a core element of the game like this is... risky.

And another idea I've been meaning to work into a game is divination! I've been interested in tarot readings for a few months now. While I don't personally quite believe in readings, I am absolutely fascinated by their power of suggestion, especially when given by a practitioner. I think there is a ton to analyze there, and I would love to make such power of suggestion an important part of a game.

I took both of these ideas, put them on a very small scale, and mixed them with my idea of making a vertical digger, and I made DRLLVINATION!

In this game you control a bouncy drill character, you destroy demons that shoot at you, and after you destroy a few, you get an omen. The omen does two things:

• New enemies have a chance to get the omen (it will show above their sprite) and it will change their behavior, giving them more / faster / bigger / pass-through / aiming projectiles. Any enemy can have multiple omens, stacking those modifiers.
• At the end of your run, whether you win by getting 5 omens, or loose by getting killed, a written divination is compiled from the omens you got, from the number you have of each type.

Of course I also spent a very unreasonable amount time working on the graphics of the game, making it look both minimalist and fancy with a nice handmade shader. That, and the satisfying controls of the game end up being the best part of the game in the end.

I'm kindof happy with what I did of my ideas, but I didn't have any time to set up context for the player to understand what's happening in the game, and so it's just very confusing. From what I've seen, players seem to barely notice the divination side of the game, and are mostly puzzled by the enemies behaviors.

I haven't done enough digging into exactly how things could be made better yet, but I think I will eventually do just that, since I still really like the ideas and this game was a good way to test them out for the first time. I'm not too happy with the game itself, and I'm still glad I made it.

(this picture is nothing more than a sketch, the final logo may not look like this at all)

Ok so I have been hinting at Benjamin and I working together in previous newsletter... Well it's finally happening!

Benjamin's games are fairly well known on Pico-8, as he was one of the first users of it and made quality work with it! We met last year and now for a few months he's been helping me test SUGAR. We had been meaning to work together at some point but in the end we found we were more comfortable each working on our own things. Which bring us to my announcement...

We're starting a duo: PUNKCAKE Délicieux, and we'll be releasing one new game every month!

But we won't make the games together! Well, we will help each other for sure, but every time it will be either my or Benjamin's game. In truth it will probably be mostly Benjamin's games, as I will be focusing on the engine SUGAR, which we'll be using of course, and on marketing the games we put out.

The whole idea is modeled after Sokpop's business model! You might have heard of them: they are the one boyband of indie games, a collective of four gamedevs releasing one game a month (used to be 2 but it changed this year) with a Patreon-based subscription system and the games also being put out on itch.io and Steam.

That's pretty much exactly what we want to be doing, except we're just two devs, but considering how we're used to work on very small projects spanning short time periods, we think we'll be ok!

And we would like to use my Patreon for this whole thing! We would change it to be PUNKCAKE's Patreon, and we would base our subscription system on it. There would still be newsletters, plus more updates along the month, and more tier reward content. But this is still up in the air, because I feel I need your permission to do this! I made a separate post with more information on what this change would entail, and a poll! Please go over there, vote and give me your honest opinion! 

In the meantime, I can tell you a little bit about what Benjamin is working on for our first game!

Benjamin is remaking his Pico-8 game Mr.Beam! It's a game he made for the More is Better jam back in 2015. (fun coincidence: it was also one of my own very first gamejams, I had not even discovered Pico-8 yet!) It's a shooter game where you can only move your character and shoot towards an object that moves on its own, and you have to defeat waves of enemies to move to the next room. It's really fun and you can of course still play the Pico-8 version if you want a taste of what's coming!

We're looking to have the game mostly done by mid-May, and then release it, and launch the whole PUNKCAKE project, in early June.

In the meantime, I'll be solidifying the SUGAR engine according to Benjamin's needs, and I'll be working on PUNKCAKE's identity! It is a busy month ahead to be sure!! I do hope you're looking forward to all of it!

Ok, moving on to the usual recommendation sections!

With spring being finally here, I'm spending more and more time outside and less playing games. That said, there is one game I've played for the first time this month, and which I want to recommend: My Exercise!

It's a japanese 3$ game about doing sit-ups. I mention that it is japanese because it really does have a very good japanese vibe in its silliness, and I love it.

It's a short game and it's difficult to write much about it without spoiling the experience. But, it's really good. It is one of those games where you need to go into it without knowing what to expect to fully enjoy it. It's a very fun, simple game, which controls with just one key. It's not challenging, it's just fun. (and lord do I love writing that about anything ever)

It's 3$ and I think that's an excellent price for it, so yeah, get it and play it!

On the musical side, Myd has finally released his first album after multiple EPs and singles! I've written about Myd in previous newsletters, he's been making his mark in the french electro scene these last two years with very... sunny songs. His musique is quite unique but very danceable and fun to listen to. His new album Born a Loser is very good and I do recommend you give it a listen! If you want to judge the album on one track, I suggest listening to Let You Speak first!

Metronomy has released a 10th anniversary version of their first (and best) album the English Riviera, adding to it some previously unreleased tracks! The English Riviera is an indie electro-rock classic, very unique and very danceable as well, you almost certainly have already heard the two singles The Bay and The Look, but the rest of the album is also super good!

And that's it for this month! Thank you for reading all the way to here! In May I'm focusing on our PUNKCAKE project, and it is both very exciting and very stressful! I can't wait to launch the project in June!!

Please do take a minute to vote on whether I should recycle this Patreon for the project!

And as usual, thank you all so much for your support! None of this would be possible without you!

Special thanks to all my 3$+ supporters:

★Blas, zep, Anne Le Clech, rotatetranslate, Andrew Edstrom, bbsamurai, berkfrei, Flo Devaux, Jearl, Joel Jorgensen, Marty Kovach, Paul Nguyen, amy, Cole Smith, David Cole, Eiyeron, Elias Alonso, Eliott, Ivan Karanovic, Raphael Gaschignard, Sam Loeschen, Seth Giovanetti, Gruber, Jakub Wasilewski, Pierre B., Sean S. LeBlanc, Simon Stålhandske, slono, vaporstack, Luke Davies

Have a nice month of May!

Take care!

Rémy🍬