Game Yeti

One of the final things to do when making an iOS app is the...

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:41:42 -0400

One of the final things to do when making an iOS app is the marketing materials that get uploaded along with the app to be displayed in iTunes. Here are the 4 screenshots that will be displayed to iPhone users.

I finally finished the last spell effect for MatchCraft! I still...

Thu, 31 May 2012 20:07:00 -0400

I finally finished the last spell effect for MatchCraft! I still have a bit of work left for the UI as well as sounds but this baby is almost ready to release. The last spell, Water Spray was a challenge. I thought it would be one of the easiest but that wasn’t the case.

Most of the spell effects operate on a timer. This generally works well but since this spell effect travels across the screen and can have a weird origin, such as the lower right corner of the window, the effect was harder to pull off. Using a timer alone wouldn’t work, as the gems would destroy at weird moments in the animation. Sometimes they would blow up too early, sometimes too late.

I fixed this by calculating where the leading edge of the water spray would be based on the current frame of the animation and destroying the gem nearest that point, which is how the effect would work in real life anyhow!

I just finished the Lightning Arc Spell for the Wind Element....

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:03:00 -0400

I just finished the Lightning Arc Spell for the Wind Element. This spell had me the most concerned with particle effects (Chain Lightning was too long to fit on the buttons after I got everything in game).

I never could wrap my head around exactly how you make it look like it’s one continuous jumping beam, but I think it turned out pretty good! I had to make a lightning particle effect and calculate the position, rotation and length needed to hop to the next closest game piece that was of the same type.

I just finished the coding and graphics for the first spell that...

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:14:00 -0400

I just finished the coding and graphics for the first spell that the player gains access to as the Wind Element in MatchCraft. The Gale Force spell causes strong winds to blow across the board and shear pieces off, sending them flying away and awarding you points!

From a development perspective, spell effects are fun to make. The rules that govern the particle effects are many and you can end up with some pretty crazy results. The Gale Force effect is a combination of 4 particle effects along with in-game adjustments of the game piece’s position, velocity and rotation over time.

I think it turned out quite well and I hope you agree when you’re finally able to download and play MatchCraft!

The last few days have been spent working on the modals that pop...

Thu, 03 May 2012 16:45:03 -0400

The last few days have been spent working on the modals that pop up after you open a treasure chest or level up. Here’s a screenshot of one of the screens you see when leveling up while playing as Water. Each of the modals are themed for the element, just like the rest of the UI.

This should be the last bit of proper user interface I have to do before finishing up the spell effects and adding sounds. Getting closer to a release candidate!

I finished the graphics on the first page of the “Magic...

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:22:00 -0400

I finished the graphics on the first page of the “Magic Store” today and got them in game. This screenshot shows the current list of the items that you can buy with coins. I always try to apply a lot of polish to what I do and as a result anything with UI takes a long time for me to finish. Now that it’s in game, the next step is to get it wired into the currency system so that you can actually buy the stuff!

It’s said that premature optimization is the root of evil...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:39:00 -0400

It’s said that premature optimization is the root of evil in programming. I’d like to recount a 4 hour long waste of time that I caused because of my own premature optimization.

When I started this project, a strictly 2d game, I started by putting thousands of sprites on the screen and looking at the profiler. I noticed most of my time was spent in a Physics update routine. I decided early on to do physics myself because this game wasn’t going to use anything more complex than pretty simple translation. Translation would be moving an object from one point to another over time. I found out you can reduce the times that the game engine recalculates its physics by changing something called the TimeStep. I cranked that sucker to maximum and went on my merry way.

4 months later it came back to bite me. I thought I didn’t use anything from the Unity Phyiscs library, but it turns out I was wrong. The box colliders that surround the buttons in my game use a RayCast to see if the mouse or your finger is over them. All has been well until a few days ago when I started animating the menus. They now slide on and off the screen. It looks pretty sweet, but the weirdest thing would happen. After moving a menu on the screen, the buttons would be unresponsive for around 10 seconds.

After several hours of tweaking and debugging I tracked it down to a RayCast failing to hit an obviously good condition. In the screenshot above you can see the mouse pointer is well within the green box collider of the button; however, the physics engine would report a failure when raycasting.

The issue turned out to be the TimeStep variable above which was set to maximum. Guess what that value is at maximum? 10 seconds.. It makes sense that the physics engine couldn’t update the location of the box colliders until it ran again, which I naively set to maximum those many months ago. Fortunately I am reminded once again to stop premature optimization.

One of the main menu screens in MatchCraft. The game and art is...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:39:00 -0400

One of the main menu screens in MatchCraft. The game and art is finally coming together nicely and I’m proud of the way it looks. It may be a match-3 game, but it’s beautiful!

I love the idea of working at home, but the truth is I rarely...

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:28:00 -0400

I love the idea of working at home, but the truth is I rarely accomplished anything in a days time because of distractions created by myself and others. Today I moved into an office about 15 minutes from home. I don’t like the idea of spending unnecessary money, but as my brother said, “I don’t think you can afford to not spend money on an office”.

I’ve only been at my new desk for 2 hours and I’ve already completed more than I would have in a full day at home. I expect much more progress on my games moving forward.

Here’s how I spent two days on redesigning an art asset. I...

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:08:00 -0400

Here’s how I spent two days on redesigning an art asset. I decided to change the way the player earns items. Previously the only way to earn unlockable items in MatchCraft was to get a match-5 and then there is a percentage chance to earn an item from a treasure chest. I decided it would be nice if the user could buy items as well. I will keep the % chance that an item is discovered in a treasure chest, but it’ll be skewed more heavily for coin and experience rewards. I wanted coins to be a “first-class citizen” of the game and thus they should be a major game piece. When you match 3 or more coins, they’re added to your bank which can be used to buy items, temporary boosts, etc

Not Good Enough

I had a game piece that was both golden and round which I could have used for the coin, but it was also my least favorite piece of art. I don’t think it goes well with the rest of the art.

Artist’s First Coin

I had my artist Anton make a new game piece that would specifically represent a coin. I wanted the user to know that they were collecting currency that could be spent. I liked the theme of a Sun being in the coin and gave him a screen grab of Zeus’ coin from the movie Clash of the Titans.

Back and Forth

Although I liked the art and design of the initial coin Anton made, I didn’t think it looked like a coin and I felt the design was far too busy when on the game board with the rest of the pieces. I sent back a more specific mockup with an idea for the “rim-size” of the coin and the type of inset. I guess I really liked the Zeus Coin :) The next coin Anton sent me was not nearly as visually complex, but it still didn’t feel like a coin.

Developer Art

I figured that since I had such a specific design in mind, I would take what he had provided thus far and try to make something myself. Normally I am willing to bend a bit for the artist because they generally have a much better eye for these things, but I felt the visual queues for a coin were still missing. It needed to be bright gold and have a standard coin rim. I tried a few different styles and what I ended up with is below. I’ll pass this along to the artist to see if he can improve it any, but if not I’m happy with the results. And that is how I spent two full days working on a gold coin.

MatchCraft is my first title set to be released in Spring of...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 23:57:00 -0500

MatchCraft is my first title set to be released in Spring of 2012 on iOS and Mac App Store. Android and web releases will follow depending on the initial success on the Apple flavored stores.

An Overview

MatchCraft is a match-3 game with RPG undertones and follows an elemental theme. My goal with MatchCraft is to create an easy to play casual game that has more depth than the traditional match-3 puzzler but without all the complexities of a title like Puzzle Quest. While playing the game, you control of one of the 4 elements: Earth, Wind, Fire or Water. Matching game pieces will award experience, gold coins and sometimes magic points.

Gaining experience will cause your character to level up, unlocking spells that help clear the game board.
Gold coins can be spent on magical items and one time use potions that make your character stronger.
Magic points are the currency used to cast the spells you’ve unlocked.
You can play as all 4 elements, mastering different tactics for each play style.

Some History

I created the first build of this game back in 2006 using the Torque Game Builder, a 2d game engine released by Garage Games. I abandoned the project before it really got started because Puzzle Quest released not too long after I started and I didn’t really know how to distribute on the desktop or handhelds at the time. I even debated making this my debut title on Unity3D because I felt I wanted to create something more exciting than a match-3 game; however, I still find myself playing Bejeweled when waiting on friends so I obviously enjoy the genre. I wanted MatchCraft to sit between Bejeweled and Puzzle Quest in terms of complexity. I feel that Bejeweled is fairly unexciting and Puzzle Quest is too complex for a quick game session.

Current Status

My wonderful artist Anton is finishing up the game’s graphics (Anton’s website is here). I’m about 60% complete on game play and pushing toward completion. It’s getting exciting now that real art is in place and it’s starting to look like a great game. Expect to see more posts about what’s going on with the development of MatchCraft in the future.

Developer tools are important. Visual Studio is an exceptional...

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 15:56:00 -0500

Developer tools are important. Visual Studio is an exceptional IDE for developers and is probably one of the primary reasons I chose to learn the languages I did. Although I’ve written my own game engines in the past, I decided to let other people focus on the engine tech this time so I could focus on content and creating a viable business. I already own a source code license to the Torque Game Engine, but when I learned about Unity I knew it was destined to be my new friend.

Unity does so much, but here are the few reasons I chose to use it.

C# development using mono.
Multiplatform Export: iOS, Android, Web, Flash, PC, Mac, etc
Active community and healthy parent company

Expect to see some Unity specific posts here in the future.

My goal with this blog is to give the reader an inside look...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:50:00 -0500

My goal with this blog is to give the reader an inside look regarding how an indie game developer creates games, markets to the public and creates a profitable business. Certainly my style of game development will be unique, as my approach will be shaped by the path I’ve taken so far in software development.

Who am I?

My name is Jared Schnelle and I am the only full time developer for Game Yeti. I graduated college from Texas Tech in 2005 with an Honors degree in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics. That said, almost all of my professional career in software development was in a subject that wasn’t taught in school. CS programs tend to focus on lower level languages and algorithms; however, the last 7 years of paying work has been: ASP.NET, C#, MSSQL, WPF and a lot of Photoshop — none of which I studied in school. Almost all of my work has been front-end related because for some reason programmers are afraid of UI work.

Why Games and Why Indie?

I love creating visual software. I think that’s one of the reasons I’ve always done front-end development. The ability to see what you’ve done immediately and be able to show it off to coworkers or friends is very satisfying. I’ve always dabbled with games and how they work since I was a kid downloading demos from HappyPuppy.com. I made maps and mods for half-life, was an area creator on a MUD through high school and always had some type of game dev related hobby throughout my career. You’ve gotta be kinda certian kind of special to convert an RPG engine from VB6 to XNA in your spare time.

The “Why Indie?” question is simple. I want to make the games in the style that I want and those games should be bootstrapped for profitability as soon as possible. I wouldn’t turn down investment in a title I’m working on, but I don’t think I’d enjoy working on a multi-million dollar software project again.

Thanks for stopping by

I thank you for giving me your time in order to read this blog and I promise I won’t take advantage of it with more boring posts like this. Content is king!