Metaprogress! | 03:16 PM -- Mon November 21, 2022 |
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The State Of The Broken Build | 04:35 PM -- Wed October 26, 2022 |
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Scripty Update | 11:58 AM -- Tue September 27, 2022 |
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Broken Build Simulator Coming | 06:08 PM -- Thu September 8, 2022 |
I started out just seeing what Dall-E thought, by asking for the exact title: "broken build simulator, digital art style" (Asking for 'digital art style' tends to give you really nice bright colorful images). In retrospect, I'm not at all sure what it was thinking. | |
So I tried "enormous broken machine, sci-fi, digital art style", which gave all pretty cool results. I really liked this one. A title image for this game is tricky because there is no one real 'thing' to show - there is no main character or big badguy or special location. It's just a melange of insanity. So I'm going more for something conceptual. I did some tests with actually using this image and I did like it. | |
I liked it so much in fact that I asked for variations on it, and this was my favorite of those, but didn't really want to use it. | |
I wanted to try other directions, so this is "a watercolor painting of an enormous broken robot". It's not bad at all, but not really the vibe of the artwork in the game. | |
After having converted some into the game's palette, and greatly shrinking them down (the game has a 256 pixel vertical resolution), I thought something that is just sort of vague shapes might be the way to go, hence "an impressionist oil painting of an enormous broken robot with dark colors". | |
To better match the style, I thought I'd try Synthwave (I hadn't heard that style before, but Dall-E tips suggested it. It's basically Miami Vice/Cyberpunk/Rad Racer/1980's style). So this is "a synthwave picture of an enormous broken robot with dark colors", and incidentally, this (very cool) image was one of the alternate options of the image I actually used, which you can see on the steam page. So this prompt gave me results. I also tried making variations of the one I used, but I'm not even going to show them, they're awful. | |
After getting awful variations, I thought I'd try describing the one I liked and see if it could make others along those lines, with "monochromatic synthwave art of a robot shattering through glass". The results were all kind of pencil/ink type art, not very synthwave at all, and this one has a little too much Hitler to it. | |
I didn't really want to go with the big mech robot style, since that's not a part of this game. I was looking more for a general machine, so I asked for "monochromatic purple synthwave art of a broken machine smashing through a window". These were an interesting way to go, but I decided against them. All of them had this kind of Office Space style, like employees are shoving the copier out the window. | |
I wanted to lean into the actual gameplay of the game, so I tried "a broken machine firing hundreds of missiles in anime style" (I thought anime would give me some nice colorful cartoons - I was picturing something like Robotech where dozens of missiles swarm around each other). It really came out more like manga, just pen sketches. This was the most colorful one, looks like a manga cover. But where are the missiles? | |
"a broken machine firing hundreds of missiles, digital art style" gave better results. This picture feels like the game - stacking tons of guns on until you're totally overpowered. I really liked this image, but downscaled and color-reduced, it was not very workable. | |
Still hoping to get a sky full of swirling missiles, I asked for "many missiles launching, digital art style", and that did not give me what I wanted. One thing I find kind of amusing is that (in all 4 options it gave me) it didn't make all the missiles the same. That would make the most sense as well as being simpler. But you can't predict AI and it's probably better at organic images. | |
My last-ditch effort was "many missiles launching from a destroyed citadel, digital art style". It's alright, but not what I needed. | |
This is unrelated to the game, but it's my favorite response to "a donkey wearing a sombrero, and a cowboy is riding the donkey. They are in atlantis." |
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Scripted Comedy | 10:47 AM -- Thu August 18, 2022 |
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Recent Biz | 11:37 AM -- Wed August 3, 2022 |
New Project (title's a secret!) is moving along. Slower than I would like for a simple game, but I've built a ton of important infrastructure in GUI stuff, fonts, and so on. It is definitely not a game yet, but it has a fun feel. It is a top-down twin-stick arena roguelite shooter. There are a variety of heroes to play (well, one so far, but you know), with different skill trees and weapons. The skill trees are kind of the unique feature - usually all the upgrading in a game like this is about randomly choosing one of three upgrades. We have that here, for the weapon upgrades, but we also have the skill tree for a more fixed build aspect. You might want to adjust your build based on which weapons and upgrades you get. |
This is the main menu, and as you can see, we plan to have several game modes, but currently they are all "20 Minutes Till Lunch" (which in itself is nowhere near done). As you may be aware if you have seen 20 Minutes Till Dawn (a game I recommend highly!), the game modes are sort of parodies of popular roguelites. Or at least some of them are. I have some ideas. 20MTL is a simple 20-minute survival against demonic foods, with fixed waves. At the bottom, you can select which hero to use (Bug Queen being the only one that exists so far), which weapon to use as their primary (you can gather five weapons as you play, but you start with one), and which special ability to use. The Bug Queen and her primary weapon, the Infestor, are actually at the more exotic end of the spectrum, definitely not the stuff you'll start out using. I wanted to start there to just dive into the deep end and implement some of the more complex skills and upgrades, so that when I go back to the simpler characters I can just buzz right through and not have a lot of special cases and new abilities I haven't already handled. |
And here's the upgrade funtimes! Your skill tree has 3 columns, each with a different focus, and then you get a 4th column to upgrade your ability. You're definitely not required to match a particular weapon or ability with a particular hero, but there is some connection between their skills and their 'native' ability and weapon to encourage it (in this case, Bug Queen's left skill line is all about dealing damage over time, which means the Infestor is an ideal weapon for her). As you can see by the row of 3 swords at the bottom, I haven't implemented all of Bug Queen's skills yet. But I did make all the skills for Shell! Shell is a long-cooldown ability that gives you a decently long period of invulnerability. My favorite skill for it is Juggernaut - while it's active you can just plow through enemies and fling them aside, dealing big damage. The Lootbox at the bottom of the screen is how you upgrade weapons. When you kill enemies, they sometimes drop lootboxes, which give you the traditional choice of 3 weapon upgrades or new weapons. Weapons can also be leveled up (level ups appear in the lootboxes), all the way up to level 99 if you're playing a shockingly long game mode (as the name implies, 20 Minutes Till Lunch is not shockingly long). The level ups slowly increase the damage for the weapon, so you still have some way to get stronger at those really high levels when you've maxed things out. |
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What's next at Hamumu? | 01:34 PM -- Wed June 22, 2022 |
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The Sci-Fi Pack is here! | 09:45 PM -- Wed June 1, 2022 |
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More Hamumu Source Code! | 10:08 AM -- Mon May 23, 2022 |
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Kid Hallow: Sci-Fi Pack Update #16 | 02:58 PM -- Mon May 2, 2022 |
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