Red Triangle Games Projects (Development Thread)

[RMZ]

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Interiors are nearly done in Surfasaurus. I've also updated a few little things here and there. All I have left to do is fix up the Power Plant, Steam Achievements, then some loose playtesting to make sure nothing is broken and it's done. There's a lot more ambient sound effects too, like in the kitchen you hear sizzling food and boiling water.

[RMZ]

Well I barreled through it and got finished with my Surfasaurus update last weekend. In my experiment to make games a little more time-healthy, it feels inevitable to marathon to the end when the project is near it's close, but taking time and enjoying each session of development has been really good for me. I realize maybe nobody understands why I did update Surfasaurus. It was my experiment game, I tried a lot of ideas there and it kind of felt accessible to add to it. Adding in to MTA is a whole endeavor. Same with Axe Cop. But with about a month of my time I think I made Surfasaurus look a lot better while trying to preserve the original style and vision I went for in 2016.



It's on Steam and itch now. I didn't wind up ramping up the price. Kinda feel like that would be unfair. If I do the MTA route, I would be upping that one's price I believe as it would invest a lot more of my time than Surfasaurus did.

My next project, which is going quite well, is to get Axe Cop up to 30 fps. I'm maybe 75% done with this and then I'll proceed to test the game fully to make sure nothing got overlooked.

[RMZ]

The 30fps update to Axe Cop is going super good. I believe I've got it most of the way done. All that's left for me to do is just play the game front to back and see if any of my mass changes need tweaking.

Because the game runs at a different speed and characters move faster as a result of it, I've updated the run mechanic of the game to have three different tiers, walking, brisk-walk, to run. The late-game unlockable character Liborg has a fourth tier and Bena generously provided some fancy code to make him super special.

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Because he moves so fast he made an after image trail effect. It's so cool and I'm really happy with it. It's an especially nice detail since Liborg doesn't have any out of battle abilities besides being able to jump further. Now he can run faster and also has a unique effect exclusive to him. Thanks Bena!

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PJ also helped on a project this week to get pixel based movement into my last big project, Takoyaki Surprise. Since the game uses mouse and keyboard it felt clunky to do arrow keys and mouse and all that Minecraft and Valheim made me really comfortable with WASD controls plus mouse. The pixel movement works this way and feels really great. We've been discussing other ways to improve the project. I'm really excited to spend the second half of the year on this one. The next world will be the italian food world and I've been having fun thinking up what that will look like before getting to it. There's a lot I need to finish up before I start the art for a new world though, namely finish the intro, make level select properly, etc.

[RMZ]

Been chipping away at Axe Cop 30fps and it's going really well. At nearly the halfway marker for that. Hoping to be done by end of month.

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Inbetween those play sessions I've been working on Takoyaki Surprise. TMC graciously added a command idea I had that helped me with my custom pause screen. I've been working on misc. stuff for the game before I kinda go full steam into it again. PJ is nearly done with all the music for World 1 and all of the things inbetween, and it's been good that it's taken a while because like Digibeasts coming to this one when I want to feels good. I've got a list of things I want done before I go to the next chunk of the game, and it's been enjoyable and educational.


I have no idea why I spent so long making games at 18 fps. Going back and forth between files feels so painful.

[RMZ]

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I'm still tweaking the enemy death things, Swordplay gave me a good idea to do a custom dissolve that I'm gonna try out. Giz helped me refine my food sprays. Overall I'm happy with this and pretty stoked I did this myself using what I learned with Charbile from Fox in the Woods lessons. I'm kinda figuring out more slice management and easier ways to manage it.

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I'm still gonna keep tweaking systems and stuff with the game before I start production on another world.

[Bob the Hamster]

Those food splatters look fantastic!

[RMZ]

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One of the big tasks I've been doing this week has been getting multiple language support in the game. I had somebody play MTA years ago and wanted it translated to Portuguese but it wasn't really feasible with how default OHR stuff is, so I knew someday I wanted to try to make a game that could appeal to more languages, and I'm finally hitting that goal with this game. It is a lot of work but most of that is finished.

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I am a little limited on what I can use but I am happy I got 6 languages supported, English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, French and Czech. I don't really want to add more, this was a more time consuming task than I think I thought it would be.

Steam has a NEXT showcase in the fall that I think I'm going to try and have the game ready for. It's like a glorified demo convention, in the hopes people wishlist games afterwards. The Takoyaki demo will be short and sweet, but it'll be solid I think, featuring World 1, the intro and end of level one cutscene. I'm hoping to have that content done by end of June to test and iron out, while I spend July doing art for a couple other levels to include in the store-front trailer, even if it's a small one. Decided if all goes well to release the game on 2/10/24 which is Chinese New Year. It isn't actually, but will be funny to call it the year of the Octopus (it's year of the dragon).

[TMC]

Wow! Firstly, those custom dissolve animations are really top notch. I missed that before. I'm also surprised you already have the translations done. I'm not sure how much text there is in total in the game, but I guess you needed a lot of alternative backdrops for various titles, rather than having a lot of text strings that needed changing? I'm fairly sure I've never need an in-game language option in an OHR game before. (Just a few cases of multiple version of an .rpg file.)

[RMZ]

Thanks! Swordplay was telling me the original dissolves looked too linear and it challenged me to look further and I think the final result is a really satisfying explosion of food guts.

I'm not great at slices, I can manipulate slice collections confidently, but the whole small slices like the food guts thing has been challenging to wrap my brain around. The lesson I had with Charbile and learning how to store extras and keeping tabs on each slice by extra and with a timer has been infinitely helpful and I'm kinda still seeing the possibilities I can do with it.

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Translations have been time consuming, sure, but there's so little text in this game besides the user interface stuff so once I get all of that done, all I really need to do is update cutscene text (easy). The OHR can use a lot of characters, I've even upped it to seven languages. I felt it was stupid I didn't try to figure out a workaround for Japanese when the game is kind of massively inspired by anime. With Japanese I've done a mixture of Kanji for larger headline text, and for the string data I use the characters and it's worked out really great. For a game that uses default things it wouldn't be ideal to do multiple languages this way and yeah, multiple RPG files is probably only way around that. I'm not totally sure how many more people will explore my game with there being multiple languages so the entire thing is an experiment.

[RMZ]

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Spent a lot of time thinking I wanted this game to feel like Shredder's Revenge and decided to research what intros worked for other games. You can tell a big story with very little sometimes, and the charm of your art and simplicity can go a long way. I figured... will people really be invested in this game's story? The appeal of the game is that it's absurd. So throwing them into the action quickly is what I opted for, and then I thought... what other games did intros that were this way. I love Sonic the Hedgehog but those games don't really have intros except for Sonic 3. So I went with a Super Mario route and I think it works great. I'll need to finally finish the level select screen, cause that's up next, a lot sooner than expected.

Axe Cop 30 FPS is nearly finished. I'm astonished at the number of stupid bugs I've caught in this run. Only a few frustrating speed changing things. Some characters had completely unreasonable stat requirements for the moves to learn. I'm at the end of the game and maining some of the dudes I never really bothered with, I should have gotten most of these moves. So I've rebalanced a lot of that. I should finish with this later on in the week.

[RMZ]

Takoyaki is going super good. The save system is more or less done and aside from bugs and quality of life updates, my demo is nearly finished for World 1.

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I really loved my MMX2 style map I did originally but when it came time to program this, it was just way too small so I redid it, this time spacing out the buildings before I place the terrain. As levels become unlocked the dark gray shadows over them will be removed and they'll be lit up like how World 1 is. I have to update the languages and terrain to finish this. Only other language stuff to update is on the title screen. Hoping for a small test circle for demo v1.0 by middle of this month.

[RMZ]

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Finally finished Axe Cop 30 fps. There's only one real hang up and that's that enemy names appear behind the player menu in battle. I'll check the nightlies sometime to see if it's been addressed, but that maybe effects less than 10 enemies and I can manually fix that. I'm going to make a Settings menu for this version of the game and have some stuff there for people, like adjusting the sensitivity to the auto-run. I don't want to make it where you push a button, I think that would require a whole additional round of testing, but I think this should be helpful to people. I need to go back in and find where the excessive flashing is more than I did and code it so that can be turned off in the new settings area too.

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Takoyaki has been a lot of fun to work on. I was looking around in the 2010 version of the game and remembered the blue octopus character, who was also featured in MTA during the segment I used these characters in. I decided to add him to the plot, which was a very welcome addition to the plot. I've also decided to embrace something I've never done before and that's make a hard mode. Soda and I actually planned for 3 difficulties for this game and we kind of abandoned that. Playing as the blue squid, he plays like how Tako does except he will have 2 lives and not have continues or level checkpoints. There's also plans for a bonus round where you can get a perk to take into a level, this guy won't get those either.

[RMZ]

Glad I logged onto Steam to look up stuff for NEXT Fest like I was planning to submit Takoyaki for, cause the deadline for store submissions is next week. I thought I had another month to knock this out since the fest isn't til October. So I'll be hurrying through all of that this weekend.

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I did surprisingly get all the art done for World 2 finished. It helps I was actively thinking about it while doing other tasks so when it came time to execute it wasn't too bad. I've been doing the same thing for World 3. I have this idea for World 3 being a giant desert of nachos and nacho toppings and think the way I have it thought out in my head could look pretty neat. Since Steam requires me to have a trailer, I'll likely just make a video for World 1 as a gameplay example trailer and post that. I'd like as much variety in my screenshots as possible. I'm optimistic I can get happy enough with my World 3 concept to show three worlds, level select map, title screen and that should be sufficient. As I get more levels done before the actual fest it'll just pad it all out and I can have an official trailer for the game closer to NEXT Fest as well.

The game is quippy and has a small amount of voice acting. If anyone is interested in donating some voice acting, you're more than welcome to, just contact me. There's like 3-4 food based puns per boss.

[RMZ]

I'm barreling through my list for my storefront assets for Steam Next Fest, namely getting things finished for engaging screenshots. I submitted the page today, so we'll see if they like how I did the multi-language aspect of the assets or not.

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One of the neat things I had to do was finish the details of the world map since it got resized. I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. I do plan to go back and animate some water hitting the edges of it at some point but for now I think this is super good.

Shortly after this is finished I'll be pushing to finish up the demo, which has a list of stuff to accomplish, but nothing crazy. I kind of want to show a little of World 3 in my store page since it's visually so different from 1 & 2 but we'll see. The demo will only be 1 & 2, and I'd like players to see more of what's to come for later if I can.

[RMZ]

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I've gotten near the end of my checklist I made and will have to create more tasks on the list. But it's been a really great week. I played both normal and hard mode and think I'm in a strong place balance-wise. I'm sure adjustments will happen but this is a good baseline. I'm not a huge fan of hard modes in games, I prefer a balanced down the middle experience personally, so I'm trying to think about how this can be more than just "harder levels." The levels might be that, but what story there is in the game, is a little different.

I really liked how Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories did it where you beat the game as Sora and then you play the game in reverse as Riku. While that wouldn't work for this game per say, it did inspire me to try to add a parallel story to the main one with the second character.