Hi there!
September has passed, and it’s time for a little summary. What’s new this month?
I – Marketing
I’m still focusing on marketing with ads on Reddit and festival applications. The ads are yielding some results, and I’ve reached 3000 wishlists for the game. It’s not bad, but if I want the game to have a chance to succeed, I must aim for at least 10,000 wishlists. So, there’s still a lot of work to do!
I’ve also spent some time tracking similar games that streamers have played in the last few months to reach out to them. Hopefully, this should happen in the next few weeks.
Luckily, since the demo came out, some streamers spontaneously played the game (here, here or here or here), and were quite positive. However, it didn’t reach a super large audience. Nonetheless, it’s always comforting to see people play and enjoy my game!
II – New Little Game
And now, a little surprise! This summer, I took a detour from Zefyr and worked on some small projects (as I usually do during holidays). This time, I worked on “Splash Kids”, a co-op game about my family recoloring a gray city and fighting the Zombie-pocalypse. It’s a mix of Splatoon and Zombies Kids. I created this game as a gift for my (numerous) nephews. It was a lot of fun to work on and allowed me to experiment with new techniques and systems:
- A customizable avatar generation system
- General-purpose GPU computing (GP-GPU) for map coloring
- Custom GPU instancing with tweening shader animation for vegetation
This was super interesting from a technical perspective, and I believe the final game was well-received. It’s completely free, and you can check it out here: https://oneiricworlds.itch.io/family
III – Classes & Level Editor
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been conducting classes on Game Design and Level Design. Consequently, progress on Zefyr has slowed down a bit. However, during this time, I dedicated some effort to develop a tool to enhance and streamline level design. I’m not entirely certain about its potential, as the mathematical aspects are more complex than expected. Nevertheless, I sense some promising possibilities.
Here’s the idea: envision something like Townscraper, but with the ability to control the base grid. Artists can provide simple, independent 3D tiles for the level designer to swiftly paint a semi-procedural 3D city (or any kind of level actually). This could be useful for rapid prototyping (which I’ve noticed consumes a lot of my time). While I think similar tools exist for regular quad grids, there’s a gap for completely customizable topologies. If this tool proves successful, I’ll use it for many of my projects, and hopefully, others can benefit from it as well.
Currently, it’s in a very early stage, quite rudimentary, buggy, and not very intuitive. Nonetheless, here’s a glimpse of what it looks like:
Roads (main topology lines) are built from a flowmap (or tensor field for math people) that the user can manually draw
Automatic quadrangulation/triangulation for concav inner parts. Far from perfect, but we’ll get there.
And that concludes this month’s update. As always, thank you immensely for your ongoing support! If you want to support me financially (if you don’t already) you can check out my Patreon. Thanks a loooooot !
Catch you soon and take care! Peace!
