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  Kid Hallow Insider Info #2 04:20 PM -- Sat October 30, 2021  



I forgot to add any links last time, I should probably be advertising the game while I do this... Let's talk about the new art in Kid Hallow! All the stuff that looks good is by Ben Rose as usual. It starts with the awesome new title screen which you can see in miniature above, but here's a juicier taste:

From there, we see the good ol' Costume Party menu:

Probably some level names that old Costume Party fans remember in there. The new stuff here is mostly subtle, but also we have these walls on the side. That's what goes up in order to cover up the dead space because nowadays, monitors are wider than they are tall, and back in my misspent youth (2008), they were square(ish)! So you always have those on the sides in full-screen, but they don't just sit there. You'll see what they do! It's nothing important, but it's fun.

Then there's also a game in there (click for bigger)!

If you want to dig through a bunch of screenshots, you can visit the Kid Hallow Press Kit. But there are some cool new things going on here. Obviously the display at the top is all new and cracked up. But there are also new backgrounds (the only returning one is the brick background in the middle shot. It's iconic and already pixelated), and a bunch of new stuff I should be saving for the next update... but it's hard to ignore: yes, levels can be dark now, only letting you see stuff that's not behind walls. There are also Purplekoopa's Eyeball Trees, which are pure evil. And Boneheads! Other new stuff in those shots too, but that comes in the next update. I guess in the realm of "just art" we have those brick walls in the middle and right screenshots, with torches and windows - those are new background tiles. They go in the overlay layer, but they show up under everything instead of on top of everything.


Definitely something for tomorrow, but look - there are some new animations for most characters! Specifically, ducking. Every character that used to not be able to duck, now can. For most of them, this is completely useless, but it feels nice (squats are healthy). For a few, it has real important functionality. Guess you'll find that out tomorrow when we talk about the new tricks the characters have!
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  Kid Hallow Insider Info #1 01:24 PM -- Fri October 29, 2021  

You may have heard Kid Hallow is coming Nov 1st...

It's pretty awesome. But since anybody who actually finds their way to this blog is a true Hamumian (probably, that is. If you're not, get out before you are discovered), I figured we can talk about the true details of what's new vs. the original Costume Party. We can get into the meaty details that aren't appropriate for press releases, or too nitpicky for "normal people", or just require that you remember playing the original game.

Big thanks to SpaceManiac for his huge role in reviving this game - he did all the real techno mumbo-jumbo, while I scribbled new pixels and goofy stuff (but speaking of pixels, we also have HSB on the project who did the awesome new title screen and backgrounds, like the title you see above!). So let's start with new features that are techno mumbo-jumbo:
  • You can now play the game offline! Of course you can't play any online levels when you do that, but what this means is that you can save your levels offline, and just share them with other people as normal files (you can find them in the /local folder of the game's installation folder - in Steam you can right-click on a game and select Properties/Local Files to explore the installation folder).

  • What else it means relates to our new pause menu:

    As you can see, you can just click to download a copy of any level you play! This means you can figure out what all the secret tricks in the level are, or tweak it to practice different parts, or make an offline copy for your own use or for a historical archive, or make a remix of it with your own twist.

  • Also new in that menu is "Die & Rate Level" which is kind of dumb - you can always just use Restart to die and play again. But Die & Rate Level was added because in rare cases, someone might make a level that is near-impossible to finish, but also prevents you from dying (it can't be impossible, because they have to win it to submit it, but close enough). In that case, there's no way to rate the level and warn everybody about how terrible it is. So we added this button. Yeah, we have to plan for people being terrible.

  • We've also got a bunch of tech under the hood to make the online experience more functional and tidy than in the past. It automatically logs you in with your Steam or Itch.io account depending on which platform you use, and just works magically. And - fingers crossed - we hopefully have better tools for handling bad players who are ruining the experience for others.

  • Speaking of that, now when you see your friend is playing Kid Hallow (on Steam), you can click to take on the exact level they're playing! Make it a contest. We also have a discord bot coming who will announce newly made levels, and you can click the link it shares to instantly play that level. We'll see how spammy that gets (I guess we should hope that it IS too spammy!).

  • I may be misremembering, but I think the original Costume Party would only run in a window. True or not, it's not true with Kid Hallow! You can seamlessly swap between full-screen and windowed mode any time, even while playing (Hit F11), and everything scales quite nicely, including our lovely new smooth fonts as you see in the picture above.

  • There's also a variety of new and improved menu elements and smoothness - cool transitions that make a clunky noise, decently highlighted buttons in the editor (that was hard to see before!), and a bunch of changes to the menu flow and function to clean it up.

  • And of course, the game now has 100% gamepad support everywhere! Play from your couch! You can even type in level names with a handy onscreen keyboard. Level editing with a gamepad is far from ideal, but that's about as good as you can expect. Gameplay with a gamepad is fantastic.
There's a lot more new stuff, but we'll get to those things in our next installment of Kid Hallow Insider Info!
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  Kid Hallow! Coming Nov. 1st 02:23 PM -- Wed October 27, 2021  

Remember Costume Party? Of course you do, it was amazing! Well, it's back, with a host of new features, items, and working-ness. All your favorite stuff is in there, along with a whole bunch of new ones. Sadly, the old levels are lost to time, but this new version supports saving and sharing offline (as well as online, of course!), so your new creations can be kept for all eternity (or less, depending on the storage medium you use). Behold the wonders!


Here's the marketing blurb:

No plot required. Kid Hallow is an action/puzzle game all about slipping on a variety of Halloween costumes to get past horrifying monsters that will haunt your nightmares, and of course, collecting all the Candy Corn. It's a brutally difficult precision platformer - but only if the player who built the level made it that way (mostly they do though, let's be honest). Don't like that? Make your own easy levels!

Each costume has unique abilities, shifting the gameplay from action-slasher to puzzle-solving and everything in between. Build your own levels using the extremely simple level editor, and share them online with the world! Rate and compete on endless levels created by your fellow players.

Bonus! Includes 9 more costumes and dozens of enemies and objects from the Winter Pack, Dumb Pack, and Fantasy Pack. Play as a Wizard with fire and ice powers, the fattest Santa Claus you've ever seen, Happy Stick Ninja, and more!

Originally released in 2008 as Costume Party, we've updated this game for 2021 with shiny new technology, starting with over a dozen new tiles that can interact in a myriad of ways - from the Earth Shrine that pacifies all botanical enemies (that is, if you light all the Earth Shrines in the level...), to the Poltergeist which can both possess enemies to supercharge them and possess any block to turn it into a hidden threat. We've also added a ton of visual enhancements and new effects. Best of all, many of the costumes have received upgraded abilities - the Vampire can now turn into mist to dodge bullets, Bouapha can pick up and throw Princesses and Baby Penguins (trust me, this makes sense once you play the game), Santa can drop Gifts in mid-air, and most amazing of all, Kid Hallow himself can now duck! It doesn't do anything, but it sure looks cool.

I have yet to actually get all the pages and info up about the game on our website, but the trailer was ready so I felt like I had to share it!

Go visit the game page on Steam and wishlist it to make us more popular! The game will also be available on Itch.io here.
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  The Hoedown 2021 Watch List 10:39 AM -- Fri October 1, 2021  

In the interests of getting people into the interest, and because I've already done most of the movie watching already, I wanted to share the full list of movies for 2021, so you can get ready to enjoy our podcast properly! These are not all appropriate movies for all viewers (in fact, they're mostly not appropriate for MOST viewers), and some of them are horrendously awful, so choose with caution!

We were forced to watch the movies on the left by MovieBot (listen to the podcast for details!), and I found Evil Twins for them via extensive googling. For the evil twins, I chose them entirely based on their title and the fact that some website mentioned them being horror. Of course, many amazing options had to be tossed out because I couldn't find any way to actually watch them. When I had multiple choices that were good, I did make some executive decisions, but I always aimed to get the one that was closest to being a twin to the official movie, not the one I wanted to watch the most. So not all of them are actually horror, and definitely not all of them are good. It's interesting choosing a movie based on nothing but the name.

There are 2 special cases: Dead Silence was the perfect twin to The Silence, but I've already reviewed Dead Silence! So I figured why not review it again and see what I think now? So that's happening. The other issue is that the perfect twin to Girl House is His House, but MovieBot actually made us watch His House! So those two movies get no evil twin, since they are each others' evil twins.

DateMovieBot-Demanded MovieEvil Twin Movie
Oct 1The Blob (1958)The Blob (1988)
Oct 2Detention (2011)Detention (2019)
Oct 3Cry Wolf (2005)Crying Wolf 3D (2015)
Oct 4Dark Light (2019)Brightburn (2019)
Oct 5Await Further Instructions (2018)Await The Dawn (2020)
Oct 6The Silence (2019)Dead Silence (2007)
Oct 7Ginger Snaps (2000)Ginger Snaps 2 (2004)
Oct 8Alice Sweet Alice (1976)Hush, Hush... Sweet Charlotte (1964)
Oct 9Girl House (2014)see His House below!
Oct 10Prevenge (2016)Revenge (2017)
Oct 11Cadaver (2020)The Possession Of Hannah Grace (2018) (AKA Cadaver!)
Oct 12Blood Quantum (2019)Blood Vessel (2019)
Oct 13The Veil (2016)Miranda Veil (2020)
Oct 14The Bye Bye Man (2017)Goodnight Mommy (2014)
Oct 15Black Rock (2012)Black Sheep (2006)
Oct 16Clown (2014)Clown (2019)
Oct 17His House (2020)see Girlhouse above!
Oct 18Noroi: The Curse (2005)The Curse (1987)
Oct 19Martyrs (2008)Martyrs (2015)
Oct 20La Llorona (2019)Curse of La Llorona (2019)
Oct 21It Comes At Night (2017)It Waits (2005)
Oct 22Charlie's Farm (2014)Farm (2010)
Oct 23Cargo (2017)Cargo (2019)
Oct 24The Stylist (2020)Personal Shopper (2016)
Oct 25The Unborn (2009)The Unborn (1991)
Oct 261BR (2019)One Missed Call (2003)
Oct 27Splice (2009)The Wisher (2002) (AKA Spliced!)
Oct 28Who Can Kill A Child? (1976)Where Are The Children? (1986)
Oct 29High Tension (2003)High Anxiety (1977)
Oct 30What Keeps You Alive (2018)Buried Alive (2007)
Oct 31The Loved Ones (2009)The Last Ones (2012)

Watch with us, won't you?
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  Meet Devi! 11:01 AM -- Fri September 24, 2021  

Look, it's actually about meeting someone!


Devi Bhura is the main character of Moon Invaders 2! The fabulous artist Ben Rose - known to many of you as HSB since he's been a Hamumian since approximately birth - has done portraits for all the Moon Invaders cast that will be used for conversations in the game. Whoa, his username on our forums was actually HSB, but I just realized it could stand for Hamumian Since Birth (it doesn't, by the way). Deep.

As a player, you won't have to meet Devi, the archaeologist from Earth who was sent up to the moon to examine the alien monolith, since you are her. But the other characters are ones you will be meeting as you make your way around the moon, getting to know them better in typical Groundhog's Day fashion, by squeezing info out of them so that on your next loop around you can get to know them better, until eventually you have their deep dark secrets, allowing you to convince them you are caught in a time loop and get them to help you without having to spend your entire loop explaining things to them (see the Tom Cruise movie Edge of Tomorrow if you are unclear on the concept - it's a fun movie, too).

Right now I'm deep in the tangled tentacles of how this conversation/friendship system works and it is indeed a mess. I'm getting some ideas though.
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  Meet Missiles 03:12 PM -- Fri September 3, 2021  


So at long last we have another video update. This one is just an assortment of different things I've added since last time. It's actually missing a lot - a couple of new moon buildings and the features they create, tech elements and bug fixes, a bunch of stuff. But you get to see 2 cool new towers! There's now one tower of every category in the game: Blaster, Laser, Missile, and Support.

Since I explained what makes lasers unique last time, let me explain what makes missiles unique: instead of having a magazine they have to reload, missiles have a storage capacity which is constantly refilling by building new missiles. But building missiles takes a long time, so we also have the Cease Fire button. When you press that, all your missile towers will not shoot until you press it again. So you let your non-missile towers do work most of the time, while your missile towers build up their arsenal, then (as the video says) whammo blammo, you open fire and the missiles clean up the screen. You can also just let your missiles run all the time, they just won't do much damage since they're firing at a very low rate (I mean technically they're gonna do the same DPS either way, it's just a matter of when that DPS is applied). So every category of tower has a different style to it, to spice things up a bit. And there will be 4 tower types in each category, eventually.
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  The Future Adventures of Bouapha 10:39 AM -- Fri August 20, 2021  


Thanks to Ben Rose (aka HSB) for creating a tiny bit of art for me. It was just an idea I had and wanted to see. My elevator pitch was "Dark Souls Bouapha". I did not suggest the Yerfdog shoulder tattoo, but now that I see it, I feel like I may finally have to get my first real tattoo. Maybe. Not the no-pumpkins one though, because I have no problem with pumpkins.

I had it printed out on canvas, and it looks amazing on canvas. I have not managed to get it framed yet, but I'll share that when I do.

While this picture does not represent any actual development plans, it can be assumed that if Bouapha returns in a 3D adventure, his hammer will be at least this big.
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  Old Hamumu Flash Games! 03:02 PM -- Fri August 13, 2021  

Hey folks! Someone was asking me about playing the old games, and I looked in my files, and there is indeed a way to play my old flash games (not all of them, for various reasons, but a lot)!

You will need this tool: Adobe Flash Player Projector

Download that (don't even need to install it!), and then download the flash games from here: Hamumu.com/sourcecode. Drag them onto the projector EXE, and blammo, you're playing! I included Mia's Happy Day here, but it's fairly broken without internet stuff. You can still play the original levels at least. Others might have some minor issues as well.

I got sucked into these all morning, and not to toot my own horn, but those Boy's Life games are awesome. Super addictive. Pardon me while I continue my Scouts vs. Aliens build.
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  Meet My Pain 10:31 AM -- Fri August 6, 2021  

Well friends, I thought I should update more often, and here I am. But this week's update is the update of pain. I started straight in this week on making the Cryolaser Tower functional, and it is straight up pretty awesome (will show in the future). A slicey icy beam of destruction, which currently doesn't freeze anybody but does seem to rake in the damage, probably faster than it should since freezing is its purpose.

Well friends, there was a little hiccup. On a level with a large number of enemies, suddenly the second the beam starts firing, the framerate drops. HARD. In fact, in the debug build, it reached the point where the game actually quit out, reporting an infinite loop. There was no infinite loop, it's just that it had gotten slowed down so badly that it assumed there must be one (as far as I can tell, anyway). Like 1 FPS. So obviously before I could do anything else, I had to root out this issue.

Well friends, the issue is still there, and I found more issues. The first thing I tried was to see if this is a debug-only problem, which is quite likely - dealing with lists of enemies (actually, the issue is the cubes the enemies are made of - each one is its own entity, and there are a lot of them) is inevitably going to be massively slower in a debug build than a final build where it may be effectively instant, if the optimization is good. So let's see how the final build runs. It'll be good to see how to even make a final build, which I haven't done yet.

Well friends, we do not have a working final build. After a few hours of getting through a bunch of errors that only showed up in the release build (UE4 bugs/limitations, really - you have to manually recompile every blueprint that uses a structure if you change anything about that structure. They work fine in debug, but somehow it requires that manual recompile to get the release version working), I got it running, only to find that the aliens are invisible in the release build. Not only invisible, but the towers won't fire at them (understandable, you can't shoot what you can't see!), although they do wind up their firing animations. That's where I currently sit because I do not know how to resolve this. Something quite strange is going on with these items that are only visible/functional in a debug build. I'm sure it's solvable, but I don't really know where to begin since the code clearly works fine, as long as it's a debug build. It's gonna be a long long string of rebuilds with slight changes until I can pinpoint the issue, and building for release takes a long time each time. This is my least favorite kind of bug, and it's a real issue when working with somebody else's engine where you can't know what's going on inside.

Well friends, I've had a few days off doing other important life projects, and I'm glad for the break! So yeah, that's the update. Sometimes you hit these brick walls, but I will bash my head against it until something breaks, and I'm hoping it's the wall.


Well friends

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  Meet A Cool Dude 09:55 AM -- Fri July 30, 2021  

Hey dudes! I think things are coming together in a new way in this game. The past couple weeks have been all about ironing out all kinds of really dumb 'in-dev' type issues, like how I was ignoring a major issue with the repair truck (it would constantly freeze in mid-repair, making towers take three times as long to repair), because I had other things to do. So I cleaned up all manner of little bugs and missing elements. I didn't do a lot of actual new content, but here is one (half-finished) such piece.

It's the Cryolaser Tower! Classic, straight out of the original Moon Invaders, though there are some subtle changes. The tower is no longer a tank, for one. But also - not that I've coded this yet - it fires a continuous beam rather than pulsing individual shots. The beam gradually freezes the targets more and more (up to a point - it can't stop them completely).

While Blaster towers have ammo magazines of a certain size that have to reload, Laser towers work differently. They heat up with use, and when overheated, they have to cool completely before firing again. It's not *that* different, but it does mean that if no enemies are in sight, the laser can partially cool off and get more use rather than having a fixed number of shots between reloads.

Since the models are so tiny in-game, I thought I'd show the full-size Blender model today, to give you an idea of how that is. The materials are just very rough approximations, since I have to make the materials separately in the actual game anyway, so I don't bother to make anything fancy in Blender. I even changed my mind and made those yellow side bits blue (it's a CRYO tower!), although I'm not super liking that either, I should change it. The coolant tank's color isn't for looks, it's indicating how overheated the laser is.

I still haven't figured out what a "reasonable" number of polygons is, and I suspect I'm massively undercutting it by orders of magnitude. But I'm very old-school and I can't help but minimize it as much as possible. This model is 1,786 triangles. A quick google indicates that a Playstation 2 could output 20 million polygons a second, so I might be a little on the low side. I could probably add a detail or two. But you wouldn't be able to see it on that tiny tower anyway!

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