Slashware’s 2020 Rewind

And so, 2020 is over.

Another year of awesome game-dev. Here is the story.

All in all, there was a lot of work in Expedition / NovaMundi, focusing mostly on improving the procedural generation but also doing a lot of further exploration in thematic and gameplay aspects. OpenArthurianX6 also saw some important progress with two more milestones completed tho it is still not finished. Emerald Woods and Roguenet were created and are likely to see future development.

I participated in 3 game jams (7DRL, AdventureJam and js13k), gave talks at Colombia 4.0 and two local universities (Unipanamericana and ITM), had a presence in 4 virtual events (Game Developers Carnival, Tokyo Game Show Online 2020, DevCom 2020, Colombia 4.0 2020). Learned a lot more of Unity and C#.

Slashware Interactive continued operations, supporting the development of NovaMundi and focusing in our main client (Zynga).

See also rewinds for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019.

January

I started the year by wrapping up work in Expedition from CREA Digital, mostly working in visual tweaks and some procedural generation…. maybe? my records are not very clear but I know there was some groundwork done here for future months.

February

I completed milestone 4 of OpenArthurianX6, which involved being able to use items as well as having some foundations for the inventory system, the big work was yet to come.

For Expedition, we did some further work on rivers, now rendering them in a way that was more fitting with the new appearance of forests, and also worked on the visuals for the oceans.

March

I participated in the 2020 7DRL Challenge with Emerald Woods, a relaxed survival and crafting game where you live alone in a hut in the woods where you can roam around exploring caverns and abandoned buildings. I was pretty happy with the results and was my first cooperation with Mapedorr (as well as important contributions by friend QuietGecko). This was my XXth 7DRL entry, keeping my record of submitting an entry for every single one (with varying levels of half-bakedness). I continued working on it thru the month, producing 2 improved versions.

I also worked hard in OpenArthurianX6, managing to complete milestone 5 after a LOT of work to make the inventory system work as I wanted, with drag and drop between containers and the world.

There was also some important work in Expedition’s procedural generation, in order to generate “Coastal” maps inspired by Colombian geography (replacing the “island” generator for the maps with sea).

April

It doesn’t look like I managed to invest a lot of time in Expedition in April, but I worked on making the beaches look a bit better, and probably continued improving the visuals.

May

I teamed up again with Mapedorr and QuietGecko (and two more friends) to participate in AdventureJam 2020 with our entry, No Salem D’ La House. The end result was incomplete but looked pretty nice.

I also participated in Game Developers Carnival, a virtual event conceived, I think, as a response to the physical GDC going down because of COVID. It was pretty fun (tho I don’t think I would have been able to enjoy it if not for my super powerful gaming PC)

For Expedition, I continued working in the beaches, added different “cultures” into the game and also completed the “bartering” system.

I also did some work in Emerald Woods to add fishing, but I don’t think I released it.

June

Further work in Expedition focusing on improving the UI as well as explorations to actually create a fun game with procedural generated dialogs and cultural discoveries.

July

Following advise from Rami Ismail, I created a board game version of Expedition (and then created a videogame version of the board game). It was useful to come up with a core gameplay cycle and balance it a little bit.

I then worked on integrating that design into the game, including adding random events and a full screen scrollable map.

I also decided to rename Expedition to NovaMundi, after a long process involving many considerations and feedback, and proceeded with the launch of our Steam page as well as the creation of a new trailer.

August

Following up on the initial reception of NovaMundi, I went on to consider some aspect of its theme and focus, which took a lot of energy. In parallel I continued developing some gameplay aspects such as expiration days for the food in order to make exploring more challenging.

We also participated in Devcom 2020 (virtual) with some interesting contacts, and I also “revived” the Temple of the Roguelike forums doing some work in the theme but also in the rules and finally deciding to kick out an old time troll.

September

Thematic exploration continued for NovaMundi, while at the same time subsystems for camping, hunting, and cavern exploration were further developed.

I participated in js13k with 404 Rhythm Not Found, again teaming up with QuietGecko, Mapedorr and agar3s (thus briefly assembling back the Black Mamba team). A good entry not without its failures (but still got a good place in the scores) and pretty fun to work in.

We also participated in Tokyo Game Show 2020 (virtual), which was pretty event-less besides some streaming sessions.

October

The Roguelike Celebration (virtual) took place. It was fun, informative and inspiring for future projects.

Continued exploring different theme possibilities for NovaMundi, including a fantasy world fighting against giant bugs. (Still on the cards!)

A new project was born fueled by roguelikecel (but also something I wanted to make since a long time ago), roguenet, a social space in roguelike format. I managed to create a fully functional version of it if a bit raw, as well as a rexpaint map loader.

November

I decided to halt the development and art efforts for NovaMundi until some things regarding the theme and gameplay directions where decided. Based on consultation with many experienced friends, I planned some changes in the theme including focusing on an authentic representation of the Muisca people, focusing on historical scenarios and reviving the Children of Bachué campaign.

I was also appointed as an advisor for Marketing for the winners of the CREA Digital 2020 initiative, sharing my experiences and learning thru the journey of many talented and energized teams.

December

I gave talks at both Colombia 4.0 and Congreso Economía Creativa ITM (link).

For NovaMundi, I completed the translation to English for the first scenario of the Children of Bachué campaign, in preparation of having a demo that includes it.

I also pushed hard in procedural generation for rivers, wrapping up work from past months and shacking the foundations of my current generation process.

Some more work was done in roguenet, polishing the user experience in preparation to some initial public tests. It’s currently up and running here, tho it’s mostly empty (there are plans to include more content in 2021)

Finally, I decided to revive the 1884 Golf Over Africa project, doing a BIG push on it and releasing a new version.

Slashware’s 2019 Rewind

And so, 2019 is over.

Another year of awesome game-dev. Here is the story… stay tuned for the 2020 plans, coming soon!

OpenArthurianX6 saw its second and third milestones completed although not nearly enough dev time was invested into it as planned, Expedition was worked hard through all year, both a first phase following the original design (inspired by Seven Cities of Gold but without a clear focus) and a second phase, Children of Bachue, a campaign (or stand-alone game?) using the theme of the Muisca people (Colombian native tribes).

I participated in 2 game jams (7DRL and js13k 2019), gave a talk at JSConf Colombia, was interviewed for a podcast, went to 2 events away from home (GDC 2019 at San Francisco, and Bucaramanga GameQuest). Learned a lot of Unity, C# and TypeScript.

Slashware Interactive continued operations, supporting the development of Expedition but also doing work for 4 different clients.

Also, since I’m now working full-time in Slashware, doing these posts gets a bit more complicated… I don’t know what level of detail to use! Some months this year I had a lot of people working in Expedition, for instance, and it gets hard to summarize the things that were done.

See also rewinds for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.

January

I started 2019 working with Camilo Ramirez in a small fun project, a recreation of Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch game. It went nowhere, but it was fun.

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Afterward, 2019’s development of Expedition started (also with Camilo Ramirez), we added support to navigate the full world map into the game (a huge, boring, plain world), including the system to load batches of terrain on runtime. We also worked in the weather system, different approaches for storms, and the cutscenes for the James Cook campaign, hoping to have a playable thing instead of just an engine.

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February

Work continued in Expedition, doing some experiment with clouds, as well as triggers inside the campaigns, further pushing the James Cook campaign, which ended up not being very exciting to play so we went back to think how to provide a fun experience there. We developed the hunger and morale systems a bit, as well as a simple interaction to supply the Expedition, looking forward to add some interesting elements to the mix.

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March

As usual every year, I participated in the 7DRL Challenge. In my entry, Heroes of Noresskia, I tried to generate “overworld” adventures with parties of adventurers following the track of a villain from town to town. It was not a very traditional roguelike, but I was rather trying to go after the intent of creating an automated dungeon master as the original motivation of the developers of Rogue. It’s also not very fun.

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I went to GDC 2019 in San Francisco, talked with many people about Expedition and got very valuable feedback. Also, I organized the roguelike developers’ meeting, went to the parties (including POWx9) and explored a little bit of the bay area.

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All along GDC and Afterwards, work in Expedition continued of course. We sought to improve the visual quality of the game, one of the main pieces of feedback we got. This also included doing additional experiments on forest rendering. I also briefly worked the idea of adding procedural storylines to the game.

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April

Some work was done in Age of Golf (an evolution of my Ludum Dare entry, Golf Over Africa), mostly in the visual department as well as adapting it to mobile controls. I planned to add some animations, however, that never happened and the project got stuck.

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Work in Open Arthurian briefly resumed, adding the initial support to define Doors and Keys opening these doors.

And of course, we continued working in Expedition, doing tweaks on scene lighting, camera position, camping, and fatigue systems, as well as doing some general changes in UI to increase its resolution. More info here and here.

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May

Visited Bucaramanga, Colombia, for the BGA GameQuest. It was fun and useful. Posted a complete report about it here.

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Some smaller developments included Tweet of the day, a small module for my projects’ page to select a project randomly every day and present it in a tweet format, and fixing the web renderer for the Stygian Abyss level generator, to display tiles correctly.

Morgaelin, the Ultima 8 – like Java engine powered by libgdx, was also open-sourced. No developments happened on it throughout the year.

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For Expedition, work continued on improving visuals and UX, with more experiments for the display of forest as well as adding more detailed combat commands similar to a RTS.

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However, most of the efforts were centered on building an alpha for our submission to the CREA Digital government program, in the shape of the “Children of Bachué” campaign, themed in the Muisca culture and legends.

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Along with the dev work, there was a lot of documentation to do, mostly boring but useful including a simplified version of the Game Design Document. David Florez and Juan García joined the team as visual and sound artists respectively, in order to publish something convincingly good (it worked great). More info about the work in Expedition can be found here, here and here.

June

While waiting for the response from CREA Digital, we continued worked in Expedition. I did my first big actual code contributions with some work in procedural terrain. We also implemented battle music, worked a lot in combat and mouse movement. More info here and here.

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Another batch of work in OpenArthurian was made to get out of the way a big block of stuff, by adding support for saving and loading games.

July

Work in Expedition continued with more elaborate procedural generation, added support for discoveries, and moving combat to a separate scene. We also added the first version of the automap. Posted some info about it here.

Dramatic Mountains Islands Discovery Journal

August

Finally, a BIG batch of work for OpenArthurianX6, adding many things including Line of Sight, packing as a native App, support for reading books, using inventory items, levers, multiple floors, solo mode, pathfinding, and a lot of foundational AI work. Milestones 2 and 3 were completed!

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For Expedition, we worked in defining the scale for the overworld, as well as an implementation of field of view using camera vignette, and a first approach of adding rivers to the map.

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Additional work was done in the procedural generation module to distort the scale of mountains to provide a more dramatic appearance.

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We also added a first version of the “hometown” screen (used to stock the expedition) and the “voyage mode” (representing the long transatlantic voyage, added pathfinding for combat, and did a lot of UI tweaks.

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We also got the news that we were selected as winners for CREA Digital. So we started organizing work with the team and planning the three months-long project. Posted some more details about all this here.

September

Most of the Children of Bachue team started working this month; we did a lot of concept artwork, trying out some ideas for a new representation for the overworld, as well as the mood to project in the UI and its art style. There was a lot of debate and examining different references for both things.

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We went beyond the concepts and created the first 3D art for the overworld. This didn’t work well at first due to performance issues with the number of trees we were trying to render, so we hard to circle around it and consider other ideas.

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We also conceptualized the Spanish characters.

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Likewise, we documented the references for audio and music, started working on them and did some initial casting for the voice-overs for the cutscenes. We created the infrastructure for the voiceovers (which we changed afterward) and integrated the inventory model with the “units” model.

I also participated for the 3rd year in a row in the js13k jam, creating a simple monster hunter game called “Backpack monsters“. I almost didn’t participate due to lack of time, but I’m glad I was able to scrap some hours to work on it. It was great fun.

October

I gave a talk about Procedural Content Generation at JSConf Colombia. I also posted a summary about it here.

Continued work in Expedition / Children of Bachue: Given the performance issues that we hit with the forests, and also keeping in mind our production budget, we decided to aim for a more “comic” look for Expedition, similar to Northgard. As a result, we came up with a different way to represent forests.

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This also impacted the unit design, we also felt this way it could work better for gameplay purposes (given the issues that games like AoE 3 had, with all units looking the same and being hard to distinguish in combat)

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There was also a lot of work in UI integration, with a more finalized minimap design, and the windows of the game using the newly designed appearance.

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We also worked in the landing flow, the first time user experience, the definitive appearance for the cutscenes, the style for the character portraits, and all along a lot of work in the music tracks and SFX. Some of the work we did was detailed here.

November

Was interviewed for Spazcosoft Podcast, talked about gamedev in general, roguelikes and Expedition.

This was the last month for the CREA Digital “boost” for Expedition, so we did the best we could, creating models for the different types of European towns, integrating the unit models and their animations into the game, illustrating as many cutscenes as we could.

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I decided to make the maps in the history campaigns procedural as well, and created a procedural generator for highlands, and polished it to use different types of terrain textures.

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I’m probably missing a lot of other things we did, but it was hectic!

December

While most of the team assembled for the CREA Digital project was disbanded here, work in Expedition continued beyond the initial deadline. I took a chance to integrate everything we had done, run tests with players, perform content fixes and additions.

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I also took some last-minute decisions, like discarding the low poly forests and replacing them with the trees we had made originally, but with a much more closed-up camera angle so having fewer trees to render at the same time. Also did lots of tweaks in the procedural generator, and integrated the conversations for all the characters we had designed. This all happened before the CREA Digital deadline.

Afterward, with a more relaxed pace, I improved the minimap rendering the roads between towns.

I also posted about candle based procedural terrain generation, just for fun.

Slashware 2018 Rewind

And so, 2018 is over.

Another year of awesome indie gamedev. Here is the story… stay tuned for the 2019 plans, coming soon!

OpenArthurianX6 saw its first milestone completed although not nearly enough dev time was invested into it as planned, Expedition was brought back to life as a game with a modern UI and a 3D look, work in Ananias halted, I participated in 4 game jams, wrote 4 articles, went to 3 events away from home, did a retro animated video, learned a bit of Unity and C# and a lot of PixiJS. All in-between a challenging year where I went full independent with Slashware Interactive, started hiring people back and had a lot of client work in order for it to happen.

See also 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 Rewind.

January

Ananias 2.4.4 was released after a long hiatus of dev, only to go to an even longer hiatus, with no further released being made over the year.

Created a page to gather resources for the maintenance of roguetemple. Worked on moving lots of content into its own private hosting, there are still some redirections to fix to make sure all migration is complete.

Created a couple of articles originating from my talk on the Roguelike Celebration 2017. The first one was “A short history of the “roguelike” term“, and the other one was What is a Traditional Roguelike.

Set up 7drl.com with an informative (and now outdated) page for the Seven Days Roguelike Challenge.

Did some work in OpenArthurianX6 for player’s party ranged attacks and mob AI, but didn’t really pick up dev.

February

What sad month, I was mostly completely busy with client work. However I did publish CvRL on itch.io

March

Haunted Mansions

Participated on the fourteenth 7DRL challenge with Haunted Mansions, managed to complete it and it looks fine but wasn’t really happy at all with the gameplay. Did further work on it to produce a mobile version (not yet published), seeking to find funds to develop it into a full-fledged game on GDC (ha!)

Flew to San Francisco for GDC 2018, went to a lot of parties there, got some contacts mainly for Digital Distribution and/or Publishing for Ananias but didn’t follow up on them thru the year (gotta make a better job at it on 2019). Also organized a roguelike developer meetup there and meet some cool nerds.

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April

Adapted the virtual stickers album I had made for Brazil 2014 World Cup, into Russia’s 2018. Invested a bit on it and got no money back.

Participated in Ludum Dare 41 with Golf Over Africa, was pretty happy with the results, a fun, focused game.

Game Screenshot

May

Did some work on OpenArthurianX6 on the projectiles, but again failed to pick up speed due to client work. At least created a fan-fic to guide further development.

Participated in a short, fun, LCD jam where I created Paladin’s Quest.

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Took a stab at editing wikipedia’s roguelike article with my findings on the origins of the roguelike term. It has stuck there up to now.

June

Finished implementing projectiles on OpenArthurianX6, but again didn’t really pick up speed. At least managed to lay some plans for work done in future months.

Thought on participating on procjam 18 with a pokemon town generator (with the intent of using it on a future version of MonsterTrainerRL) but failed, too busy. At least posted an article with a kind of deconstruction process that can be used to created similar generators.

July

All I managed to do was writing a pretty long article about “Ultimate Collector”, Richard Garriott’s stab at social gaming, and how it related to the Ultimate RPG project and Shroud of the Avatar.

ultimate-collector-ultima-items — Razimus’ Ultima collection inside Ultimate Collector.

August

Serious work put into OpenArthurianX6, including its first source code release for backers! Still at a very early stage but at least gave them the opportunity to play around with it and have an idea of what it can do.

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I also created the retro-looking trailer for Roguelike Celebration 2018

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September

Participated in the js13k 2018 with ArcherFire: Duet of Aces, a hotseat two players shooter with music and animations in 13 KB. Results were pretty good although the judges didn’t think so.

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More work in OpenArthurian happened, adding support for ranged enemy attacks.

October

Flying around and client work let little time for indiedev. Went back to San Francisco for the Roguelike Celebration 2018, where I organized a tournament for Ananias and gave a talk about the connections between D&D and roguelikes.

Adam Boyd receiving his prizes at roguelikecel

Also attended Colombia 4.0 in Bogotá which was much better than I expected, got to meet some indie publishers and learned a lot in the talks.

November

OpenArthurianX6 had its own website created, and lots of work went into it to finally complete the first planned milestone.

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Having finished some of our client’s projects, we started working in the Tech Demo for the revamped Expedition. For a long time was deciding what to do with it, finally settling to using Unity, and making a real-time game in 3D.

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December

A lot more work was put into the tech demo for Expedition, you can sail around the map, there are different weather effects, you can land with your party and walk around, check your map, navigate storms, and some other things detailed in three updates 2, 3 and 4.

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Wrote an article about the connections between D&D and roguelikes, based on my talk in roguelike cel 2018.

Slashware 2017 Rewind

And so, 2017 is over.

This is an account of the least important projects I worked over the year. The most important project, of course, was “Gabriela the Human” which was released on September after 9 months of development (and I’m now working on adding new features to it).

That being said, it was another year of awesome indie gamedev work. Here is the story… stay tuned for the 2018 plans, coming soon!

Ananias was finally released on Steam and iOS, Expedition was almost brought back to life, OpenArthurianX6 was funded and development started, I participated on 5 game jams and did 3 retro animated videos, learned a bit of RiotJS and ReactJS and a lot of Phaser.

January

The year started with the release of version 1.79 of Ananias, although most of the work on it was done on December 2016. This version included character creation, rune portals and lots of gameplay and UX tweaks, all in preparation to the 2.0 release on Steam. This was continued on version 1.80 which added an intro, and more polish and UX enhancements

Then, to refresh my mind a bit, I worked back on Morgaelin, the Ultima VIII demake project, doing a lot of reverse engineering on the plot of the game to accommodate it to the Ultima V level engine, as well as implementing the first cutscene, and even coordinated with jucarave to create an HTML5 version of it.

February

Visiting the Ultima Dragons Internet Chapter 25th anniversary and GDC on California ate some development time, but I managed to finally release Ananias 2.0 on Steam; we had a release party and the game was well received.

This followed up with v2.1 with important gameplay tweaks based on the feedback I received, as well as an optimized mobile UX which finally allowed the game to be released on iOS by the end of the month!

March

I participated on the 7DRL challenge with PokemonRL and almost felt like I failed because of the YUUUGE scope I set to do. But in the end it was playable and interesting. In classic 7DRL fashion I continued working on it and ended up with a more complete versions 1.1 and 1.2

I released Ananias 2.2, with much better Keyboard support and gameplay tweaks,

I remade the slashie.net website to (learn how to) use ReactJS. Similarly, I created Project Picker as a simple app to learn RiotJS.

To add some fun, I considered doing some simple Atari2600 development for Ananias (but didn’t pursue it further)

Finally, I released an updated version of CatCafe with UX changes to make it more useable on mobile.

April

The hearth of Britannia commissioned me to build the animated intro for the (sadly cancelled) HoBLotH IV event.

In a weird move (?) I renamed PokemonRL to Monster Trainer RL and renamed all pokemon (Pikachu -> Kachupi), the new version I released also had small but important fixes and changes.

Finally, I released Ananias 2.3 adding support for Steam Achievements and Challenges, and some gameplay tweaks.

I also took some time to wonder about the future of Expedition

May

Running full screen at 1024x768 with extended FOV

Running full screen at 1024×768 with extended FOV

After receiving some feedback regarding the plans for Expedition, I decided to work on “Voyage” first, and thought it’d take less than a month to release (WRONG!). I worked quite a bit on it, trying to build a worthy product out of the old codebase and design and was doing some good advancements, but as usual, got carried away.

I also released Ananias on Newsgrounds.

June

I launched the campaign for OpenArthurianX6, an engine to create games similar to Ultima 6, and updated “Project Picker” to use RiotControl, just to learn how it works (needed it for work)

I also released a new version of Ananias including some important new spells and gameplay tweaks.

July

With the OpenArthurianX6 campaign underway, I did some work on it and described its design on detail to grab the interest of potential funders. By the end of the month, it was funded 🙂

I fell in love with the Castlevania Netflix show and decided to work on a tribute video, named Curse of Wallachia afterwards. Along its development, I worked on the javascript motion picture experiment, trying to emulate how the first movies worked by moving a strip of pictures quickly thru an obturator.

August

The campaign for OpenArthurianX6 finished successfully with 136% funding, and I went onto planning its first iteration.

I finished the Curse of Wallachia Castlevania tribute video and created another one for Game of Thrones, based on the ages old pixel art Westeros Map project.

Lastly, I decided to jump into the js13k challenge with an exploration game. This was the first time I created a somewhat extensive physics based game on JS, which proved to be very useful for later projects.

September

I created the prototype for Queen of Westeros (along with raveneye), mainly as a result of my participation of the Velocity Partners Hackaton. That’s project is worth evolving to include a graphical map and being more useabel.

I also finished Lost in Asterion (lots of work went into it!) it was pretty happy with the results (they jury not so much so :)). I then went back to push hard with OpenArthurian X6, mainly working on the combat mode, and started streaming the development of it.

October

I did a lot of work in OpenArthurianX6 (Ranged attacks, party members, pathfinding, day/night cycle) and produced a special halloween release of Ananias with a new class (Witch). I also participated in the Octobit pixel art thing creating a pixel art piece daily for 14 days.

November

I went to the Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco where I gave a talk about roguelike interpretations. I decided to jump into Github GameOff producing Rogue Program, an ASCII RPG, along with a public version of JSRL, a template project for creating roguelikes in JavaScript. Finally, I created a new version of Roguelike in a tweet, using the new 280 characters limit.

December

I started December by participating on the Ludum Dare 40 with Life of Chuckles. Then I was mostly busy with privateer projects for the rest of the month, except a maintenance release of Ananias and some experiments for a real time version of Expedition. I also did some work on OpenArthurianX6, but didn’t manage to produce an alpha release.

Slashware 2016 Rewind

2016 is almost over, another year of awesome indie gamedev work. Here is the story… stay tuned for the 2017 plans, coming soon!

There was, of course, a lot of time invested into Ananias for most of the year, and still no Steam nor iOS release… but that may change soon…

January

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Participated on “Reddit Procedural Generation Monthly Challenge # 2 (Castles)”, creating a retro Ultima castle generator

Ananias: New version with gameplay and UX changes, tweaks on balance and player info popup.

February

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Ananias: Released new versions with better magic system, more explosions and bugfixes.

Also worked a bit on my Exult Turn Based Combat project, but didn’t manage to release.

March

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Participated in the 7DRL challenge for the 13th time with Rise of Kramora, my roguelike for Android Wear (and also Android phones)

April

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Ananias: Released a new version with tactics settings, mobile UX tweaks and lots of bugfixes

May

1.74.1

Released a new version of Ananias with new equipment slots and the corresponding items to fill them (helmets, shields, gauntlets, boots, pants) and more UX enhancements

June

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Released EXODUS: Virtual Dungeon Simulator, after my adventures on Britannia.

I also released my google maps powered Pixel Westeros Map and a short story and retro map related to my journey in Castleton.

July

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Released Lorenzo, a game about a bull who flees the bullring to save his mother

Ananias: Released a new version with lots of new items, enhancements on keyboard UX and more.

August

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Released Cat Cafe for Web, Android and iOS

September

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There were no major releases in September, it was kind of busy with boring stuff but I also flew to San Francisco for the Roguelike Celebration and met awesome people. Development-wise I did most of work for Ananias release to be done in October.

October

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Worked in my geolocation monster training game, still unreleased. More info to come about it soon.

Ananias: Released a new version with gameplay and UX enhancements, in game manual, conduct tracking, tombstones and more.

November

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Ananias: Released two versions including idle animations for players and monsters and more usability enhancements (as well as the return of the “portrait” mode for mobile)

December

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Released ROGUElike ONE, an adaptation of Rodney themed on the Star Wars universe, more specifically the newly released ROGUE ONE film.

Ananias: Will release v1.79 with more animations, character creation, changes on portals and more, in anticipation for Jan 2017 steam release.

Slashware 2015 Rewind

2015 is almost over, another year of awesome indie gamedev work. Here is the story… stay tuned for the 2016 plans, coming soon!

January

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The year begun with heavy Ananias development, while a funding campaign was running (raised a grand total of 63 USD) the web backend for the online functionalities was being implemented and the game appearance changed greatly with a new perspective. I also briefly worked on the slashbot, an interactive storytelling app which I didn’t work in further.

February

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The online features for Ananias were finished, along with enhanced tilesets for some locations by Mark Honnor. With this, the Fellowship Edition was released, marking the first time where a paid version of Ananias could be acquired; this initial Fellowship Edition allowed access to the online features.

I also started working on LUNE, but didn’t manage to work much more on it during the rest of the year.

March

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I worked mostly on my entry for the 7DRL challenge, Stygian abyss, along with Exodus Destiny Dragon (a.k.a. jucarave). I was very happy with the results, although we didn’t get much attention. No further work was done on it.

The game is a 3D first person dungeon crawler with huge randomly generated levels.

April

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For Ananias, the Steam greenlight campaign started. The Desktop packages for Windows, Mac and Linux were also implemented and released on itch.io, IndieGameStand and GameJolt.

I also had my first contact with hardwarish things during Ubidot’s IoT day, where we build a home automation system.

May

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We had a very successful sale on IndieGameStand, as well as the news of being greenlit in Steam at the same time. The game was also approved for distribution on Desura but that was short lived since the service went down (sort of). All in all, lots of people got to know the game on May.

A big change was made to the Fellowship Edition adding 2 new classes (Slayer and Barbarian), with the online features being included into the standard edition, while the desktop edition continued evolving.

June

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Ananias was rejected from GoG.com, but the road to making it more useable started with lots of work put on user experience. We also started the production of the trailer. I also did a talk a the local Comic-con discussing the game development.

July

While the efforts to continue polishing Ananias gameplay and user experience continued, and a test iOS version was created, I also worked on two smaller projects on July.

I challenged myself to create a Roguelike in a tweet, this is the game I’ve made with the smallest source code, beating the previous 1KB roguelike, LUCK.

I also updated misilleta.com to create flower arrangements from pictures.

August

I launched a more ambitious campaign for Ananias (2000 USD target with stretch goals). Also continued working on gameplay enhancements for it including new monster abilities, and toyed around a lot with technical stuff for the Android version, going back and forth between plain Cordova and CocoonJS

September

This month was pretty busy; I created the first version of the KnightsWatch, inspired by a cool real-life luxury watch. This was the first time I released a native Android app.

I also revived the Savage Empire SNES translation project, advancing greatly on the script extraction phase (that phase is almost finished).

Another thing I did was creating a short tutorial for a multiplayer real time strategy game using socket.io. That’s the foundation of the Kingdom of Elias project.

Finally, major changes to Ananias were introduced, including having monsters chase you from other rooms.

October

A whole new User Interface made specially for mobile was developed for Ananias. It was quite a bit of work.

November

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After having the idea rolling in my head for long enough, I developed and published the PixelWorld watchface for Android Wear.

December

A new magic system was added to Ananias, adding lots of new strategy and tactic elements.

2014

Here’s the account of the projects that were worked on 2014, the first year after the destruction of the second Slashware Fortress.

January saw some short development for the still very alpha PX2 engine; it remained inactive through the remaining of the year, although the Pixal spritework ended up being used on another projects.

Not much was produced on February, however knowledge was gained on Phaser.io and Object Orientedish JavaScript for game development, which would prove useful through the year. And yes, a Flappy Bird clone was created.

As with every year, development was revitalized with the yearly 7DRL challenge. March saw the development “The Tablet of Ananias”, a HTML5 game in which I focused on accessibility for tablets and smartphones, much more would happen with it afterwards. There was also some incomplete work on ArcherFire, trying to simplify it and make it a more streamlined experience.

Two projects were started on April: BrazilAlbum.com and the DND1 remake, which was an entry for a programming challenge.

BrazilAlbum.com was a JQueryMobile + JSP app for the world cup, which in the end failed to acquire a big user base, but was a good exercise on designing UI for mobile screens.

The DND1 remake was also a good exercise… on patience! it was about porting an ancient BASIC game into JavaScript. The most fun part was maybe creating JSTTY, a library to simulate the display of teletype games which I released as open source. I ended up as a runner up of the programming contest with DND1; the contest’s rules were not very clear and I think I was closer to the original game than the winner (which I thought was the main criteria, being as close to the original as possible without adding new features), however the biggest prize was being able to interact a bit with Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima Series.

May was a mixed bag: DNDX, an enhanced version of DND1, was created just for fun, and more features were added to BrazilAlbum.com. But more importantly, the development of The Tablet of Ananias was resumed, and it’s name changed to just Ananias. Work made on this month would eventually allow the game to continue evolving.

In June, the first crowdfunding campaign for Ananias was launched, and a lot of work was done on the game. The campaign would eventually fail, but it increased the reach for the game and allowed obtaining lots of useful feedback for the continued development. The cleanup of ArcherFire continued through this month as well.

The second crowdfunding campaign for Ananias was launched in July. Under it’s umbrella development continued fiercely, CircularJS was also created as a result of the need to serialize the game data for saving games. It’s a small open source javascript library which can be used to serialize and deserialize cyclic javascript object networks.

Development of Ananias continued in August after collecting the results for the second crowdfunding campaign; the goal was not met but the partial funds were helpful to pay the artists (musician and pixel artist) for their efforts. The development of Britannian Underworld was also started by Exodus Destiny, and some work was made on level design as well as organizing the art pack.

September was basically huge amounts of work on Ananias; It was also the month with the biggest % growth on active user base on Android after it became public, jumping from 474 to 2572. Sadly, Britannian Underworld’s development was frozen due to not having a pixel artist to draw animated sprites for the monsters.

In October, Ananias hit the 10.000 downloads mark on Google Play, and heavy work continued on it. Some painful infrastructure changes were also made, having Slashware Interactive become my brand for finished games and Slashware Software Solutions grouping my currently dormant business software efforts. Slashie.net became the cool kid with the long list of projects and this blog. Some artists from TigSource.com were also contacted, hoping to revitalize the development of Britannian Underworld.

Ananias continued growing in November, hitting the 20.000 downloads mark and gaining new features that made it a more complete experience. For Britannian Underworld, the design for the first level was mapped into the engine.

Closing the year in December, more work on Ananias and the beginning of a new project: Lune, of which not much has been disclosed but which is being worked together with Exodus Destiny and Oryx, hoping to bring some cool oldskool fun. There was also some work done on a IRC bot for story telling along with some friends at work, namely the slashbot.

2014 1st semester wrap up

This is some of what I’ve made on 2014 so far for Slashland

Ananias

A multiplatform straightforward roguelike (game). Check it out

Started as my entry for the 7DRL Challenge, successfully made a completely playable game, then went on to continue polishing the user experience, finally jumped into an IndieGoGo campaign to fund its completion. It’s still running but is unlikely to complete. Have had fun doing a roguelike, learned a lot of JavaScript and Phaser.io, put Denzi’s pixal spriteset into real use.

Future: Finish developing the goals stated in the campaign.

ArcherFire

A social space shooter. Check it out

Went on a rampage to remove all unfinished features and turn it into a more fun and balanced game.

Future: Do the final tweaks, reenable payments

Brazil Album

A virtual figures album for mobile browsers. Check it out

Went from being a pet project to me trying to market it through social media, mainly facebook. Did Ad integration with appia hoping it would bring some revenue (it didn’t).

No future.

DND1 – DNDX

A remake for one of the first computer RPGs. Check it out

I participated in the DND1 contest launched by Richard Garriott to port an old game to JavaScript, was fun, still waiting for the results, sprung forward JSTTY. DNDX is my own enhanced, not so high fidelity version.

No future.

JSPWD – MyPassword.co

Generates passwords based on the site and a passphrase. Open Source. Check it out

Small project based on an idea given by a workmate. Has been useful for myself for now.

Future: Adding a simple DB backend to store people’s site list

JSTTY

A fancy javascript display emulator for teletype devices. Open Source. Check it out

Made it for my DND1 contest entry but it’s generic, use it to create old fashioned games.

Future: None

Pixal 2

A passive time game, actions take real world time in parallel to all happening in the fantasy world.

Carry over work from 2013, did a bit work on this on January, didn’t manage to deploy publicly.

Learned quite a bit of JQueryMobile and put some pixal pixelart into use.

Future: I don’t really know…