Long long time ago.

Well well well. It's been too long. I've not been writing for a while now. I've been a bit lazy I guess.
Well that changes today. So what has happened in December? Mm..

Unintended

Progress has been pretty slow on this front. I've let this one sit a bit until I figure out the next puzzles of the Windy City.

I think I have something now that makes some sense. I've added these characters that Live in the Windy City, but the players are not able to understand them before they learn the language through some tribulations. 

Inside the buildings I'm planning some Cog puzzles that are most of the obstacles in the way of the parts that are needed for learning the language. I'm thinking it's a magical book series, or something.

Only after knowing the language will you be able to find the hidden item from this city. The third elemental item that is needed to enter the last world.

Finland 100 Anniversary.

This was one of the biggest things to happen this year. Finland turned 100 years. During the year I've been working on an event for Steam for this occasion with the help of some colleagues here in Finland. The idea came in some conversations with our neighbors (Oddrok) and we decided to try and pitch Steam something for the occasion. First we gathered some of the bigger companies from Finland on-board. (Housemarque, Frozenbyte, etc.) Once we had a good group of 7-10 Finnish companies, we pitched it to Steam with a possibility of gathering 100 Finnish games to the event.

Steam said yes to our initial pitch and we continued working on this throughout the summer. I tracked down around 60 companies  from Finland and asked if they wanted to be a part of it.
Mostly I just used this Steam curator to help me find the right ones. First a lot of the big ones were hesitant to join, even though they found the idea of the event great. Eventually Steam managed to get the rest on-board. We asked Neogames if they could help with some of the art for the event and they actually did. In the end steam took that art and made it so that it fit well on their pages.

This was the end result of the Sale Event:
http://store.steampowered.com/sale/finland_sale/

The event ran from 5th of Dec to 8th of Dec and we had around 96 games on sale that day.
Suffice to say, I was very proud of it. It had a spot on the frontpage and most reported very good results from the sale. We did around ten times our normal sale events in revenue which is really great.

Thanks for everyone involved there. Warms my heart, that we can get something like this done.

Lanzarote

During the same time that Finland was celebrating it's big day. We, with some friends were actually on a vacation in Lanzarote, Spain. We rented a nice villa called Villa Antonio. I have to say that it did not disappoint. It was so nice to get away from this gray weather we have here. 

The weather was fantastic. Most of the time we had around 20°C to 25°C.

Movies

Star Wars : The Last Jedi

So I went to see Star Wars of course and I was already warned about it being bad. However I was pleasantly surprised about it. I kind of liked this one much better than the earlier part of this trilogy. 

There were a lot of the same nonsense of course, but I enjoyed also some parts much more. I felt like they fixed a lot of the issues I had with the earlier part. (That mask and etc.)  

Even though It was a long movie, I never really felt like I was bored or anything. I would rate it 8/10.

Les Misérables

So while looking for something to watch at home, we came upon this Musical from few years back. I was very sceptical about it, but went along for the ride anyway. The movie was crazy long and felt like it. Right after the movie was over I was left with pretty mixed emotions. Almost every line in this movie came through a song. A lot of it could have been just regular acting. However after few days I notice that I'm still thinking about the movie and the epic plot it had. The songs kept ringing in my head and I'm now listening them from Spotify. I read some of the history of this story and started to play with the idea of possibly reading the 1900 page original novel from the nineteen hundreds. 

I think it was all together a very nice movie and I can see why it got some Oscar nods too.. 7/10

Okay. Maybe that will do for now? 

• I wonder which is better. Having this much stuff in one post or having the posts split into smaller ones? 
• I also wonder if I should just stick to mostly  game development stuff instead of these random subjects.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Cheers.

Johannes 

Unintended and Chinese stuff

Hi all.
It's been a while. I skipped last week's post since I didn't really have anything interesting to say. This week however, I felt I had to mention a few things.

So here we go..

Unintended has been progressing a bit. I've finally started the "Windy City". I posted this picture last week in twitter. It's an initial tilemap test and overall style sketchup.

I like the volumetric light and I feel like the clouds are also shaping up nicely. This week I continued to work on some of the buildings in the area. I played around with some different building perspectives for this level, but after some consultation I decided to go with simple high rising buildings.

Here's the current progress with them:

I will probably continue on these a little more to flesh out some stuff around it, but I still feel pretty happy with it.

My rib seems to be finally fully healed and so I'm back in the gym :) That's nice. Does eat some unintended time, but I think it will be worth it.

We've been working on some patches for the Lucius games. We released a Simplified chinese patch for Lucius 1 and saw a significant jump on the sales during the Halloween sale. The figures did quiet down after the sale but the percentage seems very high still. Definitely worth it and paid itself probably in the first day. So that's nice. We also released a patch for Lucius demake (Pc/Android). It has some improvements in the overall game and also the simplified Chinese. Let's see how that goes.
Ryan Clarke mentioned in his twitch video about the crazy numbers that (I think) PUBG brought in.

So this is what has been the talk lately:

So this is from the Steam hardware survey and it says that already 56% of the total steam users speak simplified Chinese. It's quite crazy. Anyway this means that probably all my games in the future will have Chinese on launch day. I will try to collect some more numbers for our results in and post about them, once I have at least a month or two of sales to draw from.

So. Can't think of anything else now, so maybe next time!

Later!
-Johannes

Let there be light.

Hi.
So. Still working on the misty forest. Adding some new elements to the whole light reflecting puzzles. I've added a darkened area to the map that you will have to illuminate. This darkened area is infested with wolves but luckily they will steer away from fire.

Hopefully that gives a clear enough idea of the situation. I'm liking the forest now a lot more. Maybe I'll add some rats until getting to the clouds.


Lucius Demake is out now for Android. 
It's not really doing much sales yet, but we'll hope for the best around halloween.

It costs 2.99$
All the support would be appreciated :)


Our office move has not been the best ever experience. A lot of the construction were still underway when we got there with our truck. They are now saying that they will be ready in a month or so.

The roof is leaking :(

This is how it looked when we got there:

Well. That's about it for today.
Until next time.
-Johannes

Itsy bitsy spider..

Pheeew..
I've been so lazy lately. Never do sports. Had to take some x-rays and it turns out, I have a broken rib! I would love to say that this is the reason why I haven't been updating much, but it's not really the case. I've just been lazy. Next friday we are going to be moving our office to a new location. It's exciting. The office is slightly smaller, much cheaper, and probably much nicer. It's still being renovated. The old building is going be renovated too, so that's why we had to move. Anyway all good! We are cutting down some expenses and hopefully that will translate to some good stuff for Lucius III. 

Speaking of Lucius. We are almost done with the Android version of Demake and will be soon releasing it. Maybe slightly before Halloween in hopes of Halloween featuring. It will be available in the Play store and the Amazon store. (hopefully).

Other big Lucius news: We also released Demake in the new Jump platform. It's a subscription based service that doesn't use any streaming. It has mostly small, but highly curated bunch of games.
I like it!

You can check it out here:  https://playonjump.com/

It has a nice 14 day trial, so what's there to lose. Try it!


About Unintended...
I've been still working on the Misty Forest parts. Mainly I want to add another sort of boss type of fight. So I'm just adding some creatures and stuff before we get to the Windy City.
Here's an example of a spider I've been working on. It has been quite a challenge to get it working. So far I have no ideas how to add a puzzle to this. Perhaps it will be enough to just avoid it. I don't know yet. I'm hoping to eventually combine all the forest parts to one large combination of things.

So here's the spider:

I like it so far. Just needs some more stuff to really stand out. I figure I need quite a few of these more interesting parts to the game, so It's easier to market it.

Well.. That's about it for now.
I'll update some more in a week or two.

-Johannes

The Misty Forest

Hello everyone.

Very busy weeks. Bunch of gamedev parties and stuff. I also started a new hobby, so I'm just going to give a quick update on the Unintended progress.  It's some footage of the Misty Forest.
This is fairly empty still but I plan to add some more creatures once I have some time. The Misty Forest opens a path towards the Windy City and this is all behind an elaborate light reflection puzzle with several steps to it.

So.. As you can see, there's some spiders there already. I used the mud stick that I placed there just for the purposes of this video to close the spiderhole. Also you can see here the rotating mirrors that are in the woods. This is how you will be able to reflect the light around. What to do with that light then? You will have to play it yourself to find out.

Okay that's it for my quickie update.
Later!
-Johannes

Unintended Magma Kingdom

Hi,
So here is the first version of Magma Kingdom art. It's one of the last areas of the game, but you get to see it slightly before you actually have to go there.

I'm pretty happy with it. The fires are a part of an asset pack I bought a while back. They fit well here. It's got a pretty nice atmosphere. I'm writing this in Rome, so not too much happening here.
But next week I'll show you some more areas that I've been working on.

Until then..
-Johannes

Unintended Inventory Iterations

Another take on the inventory. I still wasn't happy with the inventory I came up for the co-op. It was somehow too small and hard to make out. So I created another iteration. This time more in line with some of the other changes I've done lately.  So this is the third iteration, so let's hope that the third time is the charm!

Here's a layout of the whole progress so far:

This new bubble is a bit limiting space wise but I feel like it should be enough. Anyway I think it's way better than the earlier versions now.

This also now worked pretty well with a second player. Next week I'm going to be traveling to Rome. So not work happening here. But I've been having a lot of progress in the upcoming areas Misty forest and Magma kingdom. I'll try to show them soon.

-Johannes

Birds and stuff.

Hi.

So I've got a small update.

Check it out here:

So what I've got here is a level where you need to get the eggs to a gate keeper, but when you pickup an egg, the vultures start to follow and attack you. Also there's some rocks flying around all the time.
I've also added a small river with a waterfall. I still need to work on the smoothness of crossing it, but other than that, I think it's a fun idea. A Little frogger game :)

So that's what's going on there.
As for other news. I had some family parties and stuff during the weekend. Saw grandmothers and everything. I've also developed a sudden interest on smart appliances and a smart home in general.
So I've been playing around with Cortana's voice commands and coding some stuff for it. Maybe eventually I'll have everything voice controlled.

-Later!

Unintended Speech bubbles

Hi!
So, what has been happening? A lot I would say. Almost time for my summer vacation. That means a lot more work on Unintended. Hopefully I will be on the end-stretch after this vacation.
I've been working on the ridge a bit more. A lot of obstacles and enemies. To tell you the truth, Lucius has been taking a lot of my attention lately. But it's fine. That needs to be a priority anyway.
Here at home, I've been looking into re-doing the conversations. Since they also need to work somehow in the same screen multiplayer. So here's how




This system would mean that I loose the portraits and the titles from the earlier system. But I think it's for the best. Have to still figure out some placing issues though. Hopefully this will work okay in the end. I would have some more stuff to show you from this map, but I think I'm gonna save that until next week.

ps. I have my rant about PayPal over there as a draft, but once I got the problems finally figured out, my anger kinda went away. We shall see. If I get bored I'll finish writing it and publish it.

Anyways. Until next week.

The Rimestone Ridge

The Rimestone Ridge

After the mud city, after some caves and a mohara desert, it's time to move on, through the eternal pit and the bats of eternal flame. The only way to your next destination is through The Rimestone Ridge. It is a dangerous place that only the most agile heros may cross. Through the never ending rocks and vultures one can survive only to find a gatekeeper, tollman, assigned by the emperor. It is the Ridge Binhan, who stands in your way then.

Here is the first part of the area. Some falling rocks and stuff.
I'm thinking of changing some things still. Maybe change the ground where the rocks hit to different color, so you would have more an idea of where to go here.

I think I will also create some new music for this one. Maybe I can have a more height feeling to it. I have some new characters also planned for this area and some new type of puzzles. Did someone say frogger? We shall see.



-Johannes

Unintended sandman

Hello Hello!

Getting some stuff done. Let's get straight to it.

Today I'm gonna show you the sand monsters.

They are not very dangerous. They do kill you but they rarely hit you. 

They are also pretty hard to time and kill, but they do have a higher drop rate for rewards.

They have a pretty funny sounds. I should make video rather than a GIF. We'll maybe in couple of weeks I'll compile a video of these last few posts so that you can hear it with sounds and music.

This desert is kind of a crossroads type of area where you get to return at least couple of times.

It's got currently over 7 caves and 2 other entrances. I'm still hoping to add some more. 

Next I think I'm gonna show you guys the ridge. It's got some new art and new type of enemies. More of running than relaxed puzzles. I like it. It's missing a music though, so I need to do that soon.

In other news:

I've been struggling with PayPal a lot lately. They have been a real pain in the ass. I think I'm going to write a rant of some kind about the whole experience once it's resolved. It's very hard to understand how companies like this can even exist.

Well. Laters!

-Johannes

Midsummer and unintended break.

Hi.
I'm back. I went to Vehniä for a few days. It was around 3 hour train ride. Some friends, beer, lake, sauna and etc. Basic Finnish things. It was pretty fun. So what has happened in the game?

Bunch of things. You finally get to cross the eternal pit and meet some bats again.

There's two options on the bats. Just dodge and avoid them or there's also a way to get them to leave you alone. Like so.

I've also created some new "sand monsters" for the desert area and started working on the ridge. I will show you guys some more next week.

In other news:
Steam summer sale has begun and all our games are on sale again. Seems to be generating some income. I've bought several games already from the sale.

Let's see when I have time to test them out properly. Actually I already played some Hidden folks and it was pretty cool.

Okay that's it for now. Later!

Unintended continues.

Hello,
I've now kept a tighter schedule and it's definitely been much more productive. Helps me to keep track of everything.
Here's one thing I did lately:

The villager is lost and you need to take him home. It's fairly simple.  I've tried to fill the town with these sort of easy problems that reward a lot, so you will have some gold for the shop. There's some hidden gold stashes here or there.
I also changed the conversation system a bit to allow several sentences for one conversation and the text now appears one letter at a time.  I still need to think about the co-op and how the conversations work there. It's a bit intrusive for other players, so I might make it a bit smaller. We shall see.
Have to test it out first.

So that's what's happening. Midsummer's Eve is coming next week and we will take a trip to the countryside, as is tradition here in Finland. It remains to be seen if I have time to post anything, until after that.

The Unintended Schedule

Ciao!

I've been looking over the Unintended project now with some producer glasses a bit, and started to map out the whole project and the workload for completing it. It's very hard to determine a clear and precise tasklist for the game, since I only have a very loose outline written out for the game, but I feel like I'm not gonna be able to really finish it otherwise, so I actually scheduled all the work evenings for myself and created a sort of a tasklist that I felt like would be required for completing all the playable content in the game. I basically decided to create myself deadlines for each task so I won't stay too long fiddling out with nonsense.

Here's a quick snapshot of the sheet I made:

I scheduled four evenings a week for this project and used that to calculate how long would it take to finish it. So the current content-ready-status would be around January 2017. This is not really ideal, but I can live with that. It would mean that it would come out just slightly before Lucius, depending on the polish stage. If by some miracle I manage to fill these tasks out all in half the time I scheduled for them, then I can be ready with the content by October. So let's aim for that. I can then start to polish and test everything once I have a clear ending to the game and everything in between.

So! No more slacking off! We need to get some results out there!

In some other news.
I just found out about a game called: Crypt of the Necromancer, and I have to say I'm very inspired. Love the music in it. Danny Baranowsky is a genius. It's all just very cool. Great work there!

The Mud Stick. What is it?

Hello Fellow Human Beings!

So I'm back in the Unintended business. Leaving the Mud City behind soon. I had this problem of the mud stick. What is it exactly? I have had the idea of it for a long time now. Now it finally works.
Here's the Stick in action.

So with the stick you will be able to create some new routes. I also started to work on the web pages for the game, mainly thinking about the possible greenlight situation, but as it seems Steam actually had some news for me and they kinda affect the situation a lot.

So if you haven't already heard, then check this out:
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?feed=steam_blog

They pretty much say that the price of "Steam Direct" will be 100$ and it's even recoupable. So that means, it will be very cheap and greenlight now probably does not make that much sense.
It's a pretty crazy decision. I feel like the price should have been a lot more. I don't think this will fix any of the current Steam store problems. There will be a ton more of fake games coming in and this was suppose to start fixing that problem. So I guess they like the idea of being similar to the mobile stores.

Anyway, here are the Unintended webpages now: http://theunintendedgame.com 
The videos and the gifs are kind of placeholders for now, until I get some proper stuff there.
If you have any ideas or comments about the pages, please let me know. I take criticism well, so don't worry about offending me :)

In other news:
I went and saw the Wonder Woman movie. I liked it, but I was still a little disappointed. There were couple of obvious bad choices here or there. It was one of the better DC movies out there, probably right behind the Batman trilogy. Love Zimmer in soundtrack. Actually just watched him performing live couple of weeks ago. But still. I'll give it 7/10.
Couple of tweaks would have done it for me.

So that's about it for today.
Hope you are having a great summer.
-Johannes

The Unintended liberation

Hia!
We had a four-day-weekend. Thursday was a holiday here, so most kept the friday off too. I've mostly used this time to produce some music and It's been mainly for Lucius. After that I've been struggling with some bugs in the new inventory system, but finally managed to get it fixed. (I think)
So now I've progressed into populating the clean version of the mud city.
I've created a bunch of new NPC characters for the town.

Couple of them look like they are naked in this gif but that's not the case in the game.
They are pretty simple characters like before. I am planning on some puzzles around them. Getting items from some and bringing them to others. Also I think I'm using some of the conversations as helpful clues for the secrets in the town. The player is now stuck here unable to return through the same route he came, so he must find a new way.

The music production for Lucius has taken a considerable chunk now from my evenings and weekends, but I think I'm starting to have what I need. So I can probably continue to focus on Unintended more.

I've been thinking about putting the game to greenlight soon. I wonder if it would go through with it's current state. This would allow me to get a head start on implementing the Steam stuff to the game.

In other news: 
They've opened up a movie theater near me, where you can drink alcohol and sit on a sofa with your own table. So we went to see Trainspotting 2 there. It was surprisingly good. We watched the first part just before watching the second one, and I feel like the second one was actually a little bit better. 7/10


-Johannes

Lucius Music

Hi.
It's been two weeks since my last post, and they went by fast. Very little progressed in Unintended. I've worked a little with the inventory, but mostly just small adjustments here or there. I've had to do some music for Lucius so that has kept my weekends pretty busy.
I've already managed to rack up quite a lot of stuff for it. This time I'm going for a more simplistic and atmospheric approach on some of the music, to better serve with the gameplay and the structure of the game.


This first one is trying to be one of the more darker tunes of the game. It would be fitting to a situation where the player is getting close to a kill.




This second one is more in the style of a an investigative theme. We will not have much looping environmental music like in Lucius II, but I suspect I have couple of places where to put this specific theme.


I've already done quite a few simple tunes for the game. Here's a screenshot of my working music folder as of now. Few of them are just small singular instruments playing some long notes and creating atmosphere, but also quite a few are full songs.

This will also probably give some small hints about the actual game too. :) Not too much though.
We've also bought at least one song from an actual band, that we will use in the game. It's possible that the first trailer will see something like this also, hard to say at this point.

I'm dying to show some gameplay footage and bunch of cool stuff from the new Lucius, but I'll still have to wait a bit for them to be on a reasonable fidelity. Soon the concept images in facebook will end and we will start showing some 3D character art probably next.

I will probably keep doing some music for now, but will also soon return to Unintended updates.

In other news:
I joined a Steam fantasy league that I find very interesting. It's a fantasy league where you try to determine which games do well on Steam. Should educational and interesting.

I also went to see the new Alien movie. It was better than I had hoped, but still not certainly the best alien movie. Some good parts and some strange action sequences. They keep trying to make the second movie again, but what they should try to do is the first one again.
I give it 7/10


Okay.
See you later.
Johannes

Unintended flowers.

Hi,
What a week it has been. Shiver is doing it's tax returns and so am I personally. Quite the busy week. I've also put in some time trying out bunch of games. Quake Champions was pretty fun. I also started to replay Grim fandango. Certainly has been very entertaining, but everyone knows that.

As for "Unintended". The mud city has finally been rescued and the summer has returned. Here's some footage of the changed look of the city that I call now Judey.

As you can see the pipes have all been destroyed and the mud has dissipated. Houses are clean and there's bunch of flowers everywhere. 

This is Judey. Missing only its occupants. Which I will be adding during the upcoming week. (hopefully) Also we get to try out the dynamites and the new stick item.

So not much, but still something.
I just came from the movie theater, still a bit shaky of all the colors. We were watching Guardians of the Galaxy 2. It was pretty fun. Very crazy but still enjoyable and fun. Tons of action in that one.
7.5/10
Go and see it.

We also watched Get out. I'm a bit torn on that one. I liked the movie. It was definitely a descent movie with an interesting plot, but I feel like it's getting a bit over hyped at the moment. I feel like it's a solid movie with an interesting plot, but by no means was I ever surprised during the movie. I called out every plot twist way ahead, and it all felt very predictable. Putting that aside it was still an interesting flick. Not a real horror movie tho.
7/10

Well that's it for today. See you next time.
Cheers

-Johannes

Unintended shop with diamonds and dynamite.

Hello, 

So big changes coming. I've added the first shop and it seems to be working well. I also added diamonds to the game and they equal 10 gold pieces. This seems to work well.

You can check them out here:

So now it's finally due for me to work on a fundamental problem that I've had.

I've known for a while now that I need to redo the inventory to fit better on a local multiplayer game. 

So that's what I've done now. Here's the new inventory that should work much better than the old one.

So now for the multiplayer it should work without interrupting the other players too much. I still have some small things I need to work out with it, but mostly it seems fine. Now this change also removed the HUD from the game completely and I kinda like it when It's a bit cleaner, but on the other hand it would be beneficial to see your assigned buttons at all times, so I might be bringing that back. I'll have to give it some thought. 

Cheers 

-Johannes

Working on mud.

Hi.
Two weeks went by. I think I'm finally "mostly" done with the mud city.  Since last update I've added several new houses with new puzzle in them. It's a quest for the four keys made from blocks.

I also added some health for the mud walkers. They are scattered around the town. I still need to work on few things with them, but overall they feel much better now.

There's a few of these keystones, you need to hunt around the town. Most are somehow hidden.

I also changed some of the mud castle floors due to some feedback that I got while people were testing it. I think It's pretty fun now. Still wondering if I should add health to the player or some sort of life system. I hesitate, for it might suddenly look too much like some of its peers and that would not be ideal. I'm not too keen on adding any hearts on the top or anything like that. Then again if it works, then it works.

I'll probably be still polishing some of these features around the mud buildings and adding some secret stuff here or there. So no... We did not get away from the mud yet, but we are close. New features should be right around the corner. Stick that can create land and some shopping mechanics. I've settled on the dynamite. Also adding a stamina or mana of some sort, would create more opportunities for the shop.

Lucius is also coming along nicely. Our statistics show that we are around 50% mark now on content though there's not much of actual gameplay yet. No real puzzles yet. But soon.. It's even got a secret web page already: http://Lucius3.com

But don't tell anyone I told you. ;)
There's also a possibility to add yourself to our mailing list.

Okays that's it for today. Thanks for reading.

-Johannes

Some Unintended business.

Soo. I'm feeling good now about the mud king encounter.
Next I need to work on the mud city a bit. There's a lot of unfinished things there that need to be finished. So I'm currently working on them and getting them ready.

Here's the city. It's got some houses and I'm currently creating some puzzles inside so that the player can get access inside the castle. I have the main puzzle already laid out, but this also needs some smaller obstacles here or there.

It's good to also bring some of the features for re-iteration that I used elsewhere. Like the magnet..

I also created some new crates. I needed something that could give some random loot and fill the rooms a bit.

Once I'm ready with these I'm gonna clean up the mud city and bring the original town out from under the mud. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll have some shops and homes.  I've been also thinking about bombs like in Zelda. But I want them to be unique to the Unintended world. Not sure what that is going to be yet, but it would have to be something that can break a wall.

Well. That's it for now. See you later.
-Johannes

The unintended break.

Hello again.
My break went a little bit long. I was suppose to take only a week off, but things and life kinda took their toll. Anyways I'm back again and hopefully will be staying on a schedule. I have been slacking off a bit on Unintended, but not entirely.
I've still been working on the Boss encounter of the Mud King and I think it might be pretty close to being ready. Maybe some polish and aftermath is still needed. I decided to record the whole encounter and show it for you. The video is considerably long this time. So some spoilers ahead, but hopefully you will forget those before the game is actually out.



Maybe the changes in the phases also need some transition music sometimes. I'm not sure. But I would like to move on soon from this encounter so that I won't get stuck doing this forever.



One other interesting thing was that Lucius was a part of Gamer Block M. It's interesting to watch those unboxing videos. Hopefully I'm getting one too. I'll be sure to take a picture of the box and put it here.

Okays..
Maybe next week?
Who knows. Bye!
-Johannes

Some small graphical fixes.

Hi.
So I have a vacation coming up. We are gonna travel to Lisbon and hang out for a week.
This means there will not be much updating going on during the upcoming week, but maybe thats a good time to show something from Lucius.

I've been adding some small details on the earlier parts of the game lately. I think I will be doing this a lot as the time goes by. Just to make the world seem more dynamic and interesting.
Here are a couple examples:

Dropping leaves.

Smokey jiminy.

I've aldo added the third playable character now. It's another boy. Hope someone likes it. So now all we need is another girl. 

My pipeline for these characters is terrible. It takes way too much work to create a new playable character. I should create some sort of automatization but I guess since we are all ready doing the last character, it makes very little sense to do it now.

Okay Cheers.
I'll be in Portugal.

Another Unintended Boss

Hi,

It's been almost two weeks since last update. Sorry about that. Progress has been painfully slow, but I finally do have a sort of an idea of the mud king encounter. It's a boss fight and I've spent quite bit on thinking about this one. Finally I have a clear idea what's it going to be.

Here's a video:
So what happens here is that the monster will jump every 20 seconds and the player will fly in the air because of that. Now once in air the player can fly around and he must try to stay with the mud flying with him, so he can land safely. He should then proceed to break some pipes where they are vulnerable and some of these spots might require the flight again.
Once the pipes have been broken the king is vulnerable and the hero can actually dispose of him.

I still need to create a beginning to this and an ending for the encounter. Destroying the king would give the player a new item and also would change the mud city into a totally new area. I needed to create a song for this and I wanted it to fit the 20 second loop. I feel like it does the job of a boss encounter music and is pretty well in sync with the encounter. I also created some new songs for Lucius too while I was at it. They were pretty simplistic piano things.

Well. That's about it.
Until next week maybe?

Cheers
Johannes

The Unintended news and moving around + Masters of Doom

Bujaka bujaka!

So. I have no officially moved and working from the new apartment. I had to get rid of my old desk and buy a new one so officially I did not work on anything from home during the last couple of weeks.

Reason for getting a new table was to save some room. I wanted to try and put my piano under the desk somehow, so I bought a desk that can be raised a bit to appropriate level.
It's a bit of a dominating part of the room but it kinda works.. sort of.

Anyway now I'm finally back to working on Unintended and a lot of things happening in the game development news.

First off, it seems Valve is removing the Greenlight program and replacing it with a more expensive but totally uncurated version called Direct.

I think it's a step towards the right direction. I don't quite see why would they just not hire a small team to curate the games and let fewer games in. It's baffling to me how all these scam games get through. I was under the impression that they are still hand picked from the greenlight system. I guess that is not the case. Anyway it's a good sign that times they are a changin.

As for my little unintended project. I'm not quite sure what to do with it now. Should I push for greenlight early? Or just fork up the money later? I'm fairly certain it will be the hardest couple of months ever to get through the greenlight, since everyone wants to get past it before it becomes expensive. The game is not really that visually impressive or interesting, (it's not really the main point) so it might be hard for me to get through at this point. I was going to add more eye candy gradually as the game progresses on and really work on the trailer a lot. This anyway sparked some interest to get back to some of the things needed for a clear presentation of the game.


For example I've redone the title screen and added some context to it too.

I also worked on a much more complex background painting, but decided to scrap it and keep it simple instead. Now while doing this, I still discovered some issues with the player selection screen and some other problems at the main menus, so I started to polish them a bit. I might be naming the main characters soon and creating the final two playable characters. I think the game also needs a story cutscene at the beginning. So maybe I'll first work on the mud-king-boss-encounter and an intro cutscene soon after that.

On other news.. Someone recommended a book that I should read called Masters of Doom.
I have to say that, five chapters in, I would already recommend this book for anyone interested in videogames and their development or history.  It's very good so far. Carmack is such a genius.

I also went to the movies again and watched John Wick 2. It was very entertaining. It's interesting to see that no matter what genre, if you have passion for the craft, it will come out great. 8/10


So that's about it for today.
I'll get back to you in a week or so.
Good luck and Stay frosty

Unintended Puzzle Rooms

So. Next week is moving-day for me. Yay! That means that there probably will be a small gap on the blog and Unintended progress.

This week I continued on the Mud Tower and its main tower puzzle rooms. I've managed to create some fairly fun ones, I think.

Here are some examples:
One where you run through a room with spikes and try to keep ahead of the ones that are raising back up. It was very exciting for my tester. It probably should have a music also that keeps getting faster during the run. Have to think about how to achieve that.

Another room I did was this magnetic apparatus room. It basically has a magnetic connection thingy that will remotely control few of these blocks.

I think the tower has seven floors altogether, so maybe the next stop might be the boss man himself.

On another note: We did have our first outside tester for Lucius III and it seems we have something like 45 minutes of content "somewhat-done". It played fairly smoothly and did not have much problems on the progress. Overall feedback was also fairly positive so we shall see. I'm pretty hopeful on our current progress. It is pretty straight forward in the beginning. It remains to be seen how well it goes after that.

Well that's about it for today. I'll return in a week or two provided that I have an internet of some sort.


-Johannes

The Unintended Maze of Mines

Hugabuga!

Nothing much happening here. I'm slowly progressing through the Mud Castle levels. This is floor number two. It's a sort of a maze of mines. Mine maze? While having this tested I also got some very much unintended and accidental content that I think I'm gonna be using towards the end of this tower.

Anyway, this is how the mines work in Unintended.

 

It's important to me that the gameplay and content feels fresh and new most of the journey, so that's why I'm trying to implement new features on every corner.

The video seemed to come out pretty laggy for some reason. The game itself runs extremely smooth so it's just my recording software or compressing that's doing it. If there's any developers out there, I would love to hear some recording setups you might have. I have been mostly using Fraps and then converting it with some other software, but I keep loosing some of the colors that way for some reason. This was taken with Screencastify but that tends to not really capture the sound very well and sometimes the framerate seems laggy on the recording. So if you have a secret formula for the best possible gameplay-video-setup then please leave a comment, and I'll probably give it a try.

Thanks

-Johannes

Unintended crochet and falling tiles.

Hi.
I got a present today. It's pretty cool :)

I like it. It's got a permanent place on our household :)
I've been also working on some music during this week, but didn't really find the exact thing I was looking for. I've also started working on the Mud Castle from the inside. It will be comprised of 7 floors that each have a different style of a puzzle game inside them. One by one you will proceed to towards the top floor, where you will find our second boss fight.

This room has some falling floor traps in it and you will have to find the correct route through. I know, It's a pretty straight forward puzzle, but the next room will already be much more challenging.
The room is currently pretty sterile. I had to create yet another tileset for this castle. I will be probably adding some mud here once I'm done with the puzzles and certain it's not gonna interfere with them too much.



Next week I'll be showing some more floors and hopefully soon our second boss fight.
Cheers.
-Johannes

A small Unintended title screen.

Hia!

Today I'm gonna share some work in progress stuff again. I've been working on the mud city and some catacombs beneath it. Currently I'm at the point where the player is actually able to enter the Castle. I did some investigating and I did find some examples from the 8 bit era that used perspective backgrounds at some points, and I was looking to give the player a special feeling before entering this place. It still needs some work and fine detail, but I really like the direction this is heading.

I'm probably gonna change the music for this part. This is a new tune that somehow is stuck in my head so I had to record it and now it's in game. I'll probably end up using it somewhere else tho. This part would require some more delegate piano sombre moment thingy. I'm not sure.

Also Lucius has been having a good week. I was afraid that the changes in the Steam store would have a negative effect of the sales, but it seems that it's selling still somewhat in a regular or even better pace. The Lucius Bundle is currently -85%.

We'll that's that. Next time I'll take you inside the castle.

The Unintended catacombs.

Hello.
Working on some unintended things. I'm just gonna quickly show you couple of the new areas that are still under construction a bit. There are some spoilers ahead, but I'm hoping that everyone will have more than enough time to forget these and they are still anyway subject to changes.

I created some mud filled rooms first. I had to do a couple of new tilemaps for this, because I plan to use the clean version of this room too. I also added a secret door to one of these rooms

This door leads to a secret room that has another new tileset. This one is themed more in a castle or catacombs style. I still might be cleaning this up a but. We shall see. At the center of this room there's a weird artifact holder type of thingy. Each of the artifacts can be obtained from various places around the mud city.

Where this might lead then? Are we gonna meet some monsters here? Maybe a new friend?  

We shall see.

-Johannes