Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: More Hairstyles and New Make-up

Last time, I reported that I had finished creating nose options and had started on creating new hairstyles for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

Sprint 2024-14: More hairstyles

Completed:

  • Create hair options

In Progress:

  • Create make-up options

I continued working on hairstyles. Drawing hair is kinda hard.

But I think I did a decent job:

Clown Alley Creator - buns with highlights

Clown Alley Creator - split-dye bob

Clown Alley Creator - top swirl with highlights

I have ideas for more clown hairstyles, but I wanted to move onto make-up. I started out by replacing the smile.

It originally looked like this:

Clown Alley Creator - close-up view of Punny

But now smile make-up looks like:

Clown Alley Creator - new smile make-up

It’s…well, frankly, it’s a work in progress. I know I want some shading, but even then, this art is not making me smile, and I want another crack at it.

So this coming week I will focus on updating the existing make-up options.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: New Noses and Hairstyles

In my previous report, I added the ability to name your clowns and started work on providing more production-ready nose options for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I finished adding noses and started on hair options this past week.

Sprint 2024-13: More noses and more hairstyles

Completed:

  • Create nose options

In Progress:

  • Create hair options

In this project, you can choose to customize your clown’s nose, hairstyle, and more. I was using placeholder art and options up until two weeks ago.

I’m quite happy with how the noses turned out, especially once I added shading, and now that I’ve worked on changing the placeholder hairstyles so that they are production-ready, the game overall looks and feels so much better.

Clown Alley Creator - gallery view

Clown Alley Creator - close-up view of Punny

I just wish I could also do the same with make-up, eyes, and more at the same time, because otherwise it feels like part of the game is more done than the other.

I like the idea of planning my work such that the game is always “done” at any given point, but now I am doing the work in a way that feels uneven. I’m not quite sure if there is a better way to plan the work of adding the production version and variety of options for a given type of customization. Working in a way that I would add a nose option, then a hairstyle, then an eye, etc seems weird.

Anyway, I’m fairly pleased with how the hairstyles are turning out. So far each hairstyle has two variations. One allows for a secondary highlight of color, and the other variation is what I have now learned is called “split-dye” and reminds me that sometimes game design really livens up your browser search history.

Clown Alley Creator - pink hair with highlights

Clown Alley Creator - split-dye hair

Having production noses and hairstyles, the clowns are looking much better, but I can’t wait to work on the make-up to make it more cohesive.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Naming Your Clowns

Last time, I reported that I had added an options menu with audio toggles and a menu for choosing custom eyes in my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I continued adding new features this past week.

Sprint 2024-12: Name Your Clowns

Completed:

  • Allow player to name clown
  • Update navigation buttons

In Progress:

  • Create nose options

Up until now, each clown was identified merely by a number, and when you looked at a particular clown up close, that’s what you would have seen:

Clown Alley Creator - close-up clown view

Today, if you go to add a clown to your clown alley, you get prompted to name the clown first:

Clown Alley Creator - prompt to name your new clown

If you don’t, you get told you should:

Clown Alley Creator - prompt to name your new clown

And finally, when you view your clown, you see that clown’s name:

Clown Alley Creator - clown view with clown's name

When I first started working on this project, I had envisioned a set of navigation buttons at the bottom of the creator mode, but it was premature, and some of the features they represented got cut.

I finally got around to removing and updating the buttons:

Clown Alley Creator - new creator mode navigation buttons

If I get to it, I would also like to add a button for hats and accessories, but we’ll see in a few weeks or months how things are going.

Finally, I ended the week by updating the existing four nose options and creating a bunch more, which required adding navigation for submenu pages.

Clown Alley Creator - multiple pages of noses to pick

Some of the noses are a bit more textured and sparkly:

Clown Alley Creator - multiple pages of noses to pick

I’m not quite finished creating the various noses, plus I’d like to add some shadows to the existing ones.

Still, I am at the point in the project where much of the feature work is done, and so I am focusing on adding more and more options for each of the submenus in order to provide players plenty of ways to make their own clowns.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Clown Skin Colors and Eyes

In my last report, I worked on audio sound effects and music in my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

Since then, I’ve added an options menu and a few more customization options for the clowns you can create.

Sprint 2024-11: Options Menu

Completed:

  • Create gear icon for options menu
  • Allow player to mute SFX and music separately
  • Allow player to choose skin color for clown
  • Create eye options

I started the week working on adding the ability to mute and unmute music and sound effects from within the game, which is why the theme for this sprint was “Options Menu” instead of skin color and eyes, which ended up taking up the larger amount of time and effort.

There were already buttons to toggle audio from the main menu, but the player may want to do so while the game is running, so I created the gear icon and created a modal that pops up over the top of everything.

Clown Alley Creator - options button

Clown Alley Creator - options modal

Then I decided it was time to work on clown skin colors. So far the default was that you were creating a white face clown, but not all clowns have white make-up for a face.

For now, I just used the sample colors I’ve been using for everything else, which aren’t very realistic skin colors or even realistic clown make-up colors, but I’ll work on adding those skin tones and such later.

Clown Alley Creator - a clown with blue skin?

I also wanted to give the player options for eyes. The neat thing is that, assuming my math is correct, now it is possible to create over 9 billion unique clown faces with just the few options currently available! That’s a lot of creativity potential!

Clown Alley Creator - some clowns with unique eyes

And of course, over the next few months, I’ll be adding more and more variety to each menu, so you’ll be able to create your favorite clowns with just the right noses, make-up, and hair styles.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Colors, Music, and Sound Effects

Last time, I reported that I was adding primary and secondary color options for each selection in my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

After a somewhat productive week, I not only have finished creating most of the functionality the game needs but also added music and sound effects to make it feel more complete and real.

Sprint 2024-10: Clown Faces

Completed:

  • Create color picker for nose
  • Create color picker for hair
  • Create color picker for make-up layers
  • Create background music
  • Create button press sound effects

You can now not only choose a custom nose, hairstyle, or make-up layers, but for each of them you can now choose a primary and secondary color.

Clown Alley Creator - selecting primary and secondary colors for each option

Clown Alley Creator - selecting primary and secondary colors for each option

Clown Alley Creator - selecting primary and secondary colors for each option

Clown Alley Creator - selecting primary and secondary colors for each option

Now, please (PLEASE!) keep in mind that this is not the final art that I plan to ship with this game when it is released. The point is that each selection can be customized by having two separate colors available if you wish, giving you plenty more options for your creativity.

Normally, audio doesn’t necessarily find its way into a game until the end of a project, but I’m making good progress. As I said, most of features are finished, so in a way it already feels like the end of the project.

And I found a really nice music track on SoundRangers.com during their last Black Friday sale, so I had to get it and think it fits perfectly in this game.

You can hear and see the game in action this clip:

Even with just the test sample of options for the nose, hair, and make-up and six color options I have so far, it is possible to create over 1,000 unique clown faces!

In the coming months, I am expecting that most of the work will focus on creating the many pieces of art for more such options, giving the player a much greater variety of ways to create their own perfect collection of clowns.

And I will get to enjoy the sounds I’ve added whenever I run the game to test out any such changes.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Creation Mode Layers and Colors

In my previous report, I allowed the player to choose make-up in layers in my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

After doing some end-of-year review work and writing a post about it, I got back to finishing up the layer work.

Sprints 2024-8 and 2024-9: Clown Faces

Completed:

  • Create make-up option and submenu

Started:

  • Create color picker for nose

If you’re paying attention, you might have noticed that I said I already completed the make-up submenu work last time.

But I realized I didn’t have a better place to capture the idea of adding the chosen make-up icons in the appropriate boxes on the screen, which is what I had left to do.

Clown Alley Creator - layer boxes now show icons

I also added an option to clear your selection.

Once that work was finished, I noted that I definitely have some clean-up work to do, mainly in terms of how the icons look kind of awful when tinted a particular color as it applies to the entire icon and not just the relevant make-up part.

But I’ll worry about splitting the icon up into multiple images later. For now, I am finally adding a color picker menu.

Clown Alley Creator - color picker menu

Basically, there will be a primary and secondary color for each option. So far, I have created the menu to choose a color, so this week I anticipate finishing the color selection menu, saving the player’s selection, and updating the clown previews to show those colors.

I will start with the clown nose, but a lot of this work will overlap with the rest of the chosen options, so I anticipate having the ability to choose colors for every option soon.

The main trick will be separating the nose, hairstyle, and make-up into a main colored part and a secondary highlight/texture part, but that just means each option requires two sprites to be rendered instead of one, so it isn’t much of a trick anyway.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Categories
Game Development Marketing/Business Personal Development Politics/Government

2024 Wasn’t Great, but Perhaps 2025 Can Be Better?

I’ve taken some time at the end of December to look back on the previous year and think about what I want for the coming year.

In 2024, I wanted to build upon the success of 2023, a year that saw me hitting a sales goal for the first time.

One sale per month is barely pizza money, but it is a start, especially since I had never earned that many sales before in the years I’ve been trying to run my indie game development business.

However, I decided that metrics like the number of sales isn’t really an actionable goal. It is more of a lagging metric.

So for 2024, I have the following outcomes I am aiming for:

Increase my newsletter audience from 30 to at least 42 subscribers by December 31st
Earn at least 2 sales per month by December 31st

As for actionable goals:

Release at least 2 Freshly Squeezed Entertainment games by December 31st
Perform at least 2 SEO activities per month by December 31st

My thoughts were that if I make and publish games AND do things to make my website more effective and easier for people to find what they want, then I can increase my audience and my sales.

So, how did I do?

My Goals

Published Freshly Squeezed Entertainment Games (Target: 2) — 0

Two games a year for someone to work on alone very, very part-time is technically doable, but I haven’t been able to do it yet.

In fact, I didn’t do it last year, either:

That’s two years in a row in which I did not publish a new game.

Much of my current business strategy depends on releasing games in my Freshly Squeezed Entertainment line, which are polished, playable prototypes that provide complete entertainment experiences and are given away for free. The general idea is that the games are supposed to be quick to develop and have a low barrier to entry so that they are more likely to find an audience. I hope to get feedback from that audience, and if enough interest exists, I can always create a “deluxe” version of the game that I can sell.

So not releasing a game isn’t great, because there cannot be an audience for a game that doesn’t exist.

At the end of 2023, I had put in a year of game development effort into a family-friendly, non-violent party-based role-playing game called The Dungeon Under My House, and it wasn’t anywhere near done yet. I didn’t have any reason to be optimistic that I could complete it within six months of 2024, but I moved forward as if I could.

About 20 months into the six month project, I decided to put it on hold. I finally sat down and scoped out what I thought the rest of the project looked like, and an optimistic estimate said I still had at least another year of development. Oof.

So I made the hard decision to put the project on hold. I published a post-mortem for The Dungeon Under My House, and I hope one day to publish a second one after I return to the project and truly finish it.

For now, I started work on a project with a much smaller scope. I normally try not to plan everything upfront and instead let the project build up in iterations.

This approach works fine. I’ve built and published games this way. But it clashed with my goal of releasing games quickly. I had to recognize that there was a difference between publishing a game eventually and publishing a game on a more or less predictable schedule, and that only the latter was going to help me satisfy my business goals.

Thanks to some advice I got from Dora Breckinridge (you should hire Dora, by the way), I decided to try to truly capture as much of the scope of my new project as I could, plan on working on features and technical infrastructure for only part of the project’s schedule, and leave the lion’s share of the schedule for leveraging what I had built to fill in the content of the game.

As of this writing, I am finishing up the first phase of work, and thanks to a realization I had about how to arrange the work in a more Agile way, I am incredibly confident that I will ship this project in six months easily, mainly because the project will always be in a shippable state long before then.

Basically, I went from a project with no end in sight to a project that could potentially be done early if I really want it to be.

However, it won’t be released in 2024. I can’t work miracles.

Perform at least 2 SEO activities per month by December 31st (Target: 24) – 2

Ok, so I abandoned this one fairly quickly. SEO felt like a solution that might not make sense in a world where search engines are getting less useful and almost actively hostile towards websites that aren’t in the top results, plus a world where genAI is allowing people to churn out garbage so cheaply that the search results are polluted anyway.

Also, my website barely gets any traffic. Not like it used to when I had more time to blog more frequently about a variety of topics, anyway. Much of that existing traffic is from game developers interested in my blog posts about project management and copyright for indies, and so not necessarily people who would be in the target audience for my games.

But just having this goal, even if I did give up on it, did get me to make some important changes.

I felt like I didn’t have a good baseline to know if my SEO was actually doing anything positive. I didn’t want to make a bunch of changes without any concern about how effective they were. A change could produce a negative outcome, and I would want to revert that change right away. But how would I know?

So I started creating automated metrics reports from my website, plus I started grabbing page visit and download data from the various app stores my games are in and throwing them in a combined spreadsheet. It’s a bit more manual of an effort, but it is worth it to know this data, and I can probably figure out how to automate some of it.

These metrics came in handy when I decided to experiment with ads for part of the year, giving me a good insight into whether or not a particular ad was moving the needle for my games in any particular app store.

I think I might revisit this goal for 2025, not because I want to improve my search engine rankings but because there are things I could do to make my website look and feel better to people who actually visit it. If I optimize the site for real people and their goals as opposed to trying to appease some search engine algorithm, I think things will work out better for everyone.

My Outcomes

GBGames Curiosities Newsletter subscribers net increase (Target: 12) — net 4

My current business strategy has my GBGames Curiosities Newsletter at its core. I want to cultivate an audience of people who specifically said that they wanted to hear from me and are fans of the kinds of games I make.

I don’t have many subscribers yet, and this is the second year in a row in which I was aiming for a net increase of one subscriber per month and didn’t make it.

Unfortunately, I didn’t do anything specifically to try to grow the list, so any efforts to do so were one-offs and not consistent at all. Still, I gained 4 subscribers and lost 0, which is a positive trajectory.

Clearly if I want this number to be higher, something needs to change in terms of my approach.

Earn at least 2 sales per month by December 31st (Target: 24) – 16

Last year I sold 13 copies of my games, beating my 1 sale per month goal by one. I was sure that doubling the goal was both ambitious and doable, especially if I kept up my promotion efforts.

Unfortunately I did not, as I spent much of my capacity trying to make progress on game development.

Now you might think that at least 16 sales is more than 13 sales. And it is true.

But the reason most of those sales appeared is because I spent money on Facebook ads, and unfortunately I spent more on ads than I earned in sales income.

On top of that, this is the first year I have put my game Toytles: Leaf Raking on sale. I was experimenting with the price to see if it might encourage more purchases at a lower price point, or if the act of being on sale made it show up more easily in various app stores. In the end, I think it just served to earn me less money for each sale.

To compare, in 2023 I sold 13 copies of my games and made a total of $103, much of it because of people contributing more than the minimum amount on itch.io. Despite selling 16 copies of my games in 2024, I only made $76 from those sales, and 0 came from itch.io.

Analysis

I sold more copies of my games but made less money, as I said above.

I didn’t take advantage of itch.io sales as much as I maybe should have. I think I was disappointed in the amount of work I put into some sales at the end of the previous year that resulted in nothing, and I am also wondering why I don’t always get advance notice from itch.io about joining an upcoming sale so I can prepare.

But frankly, most of my effort went into game development and not promotion, and so it is no wonder I didn’t see more success in terms of sales.

Last year, I said that my megaphone is tiny, and it still is.

My website has very little organic traffic, and my social media accounts all have limited ability to get awareness out.

I said then:

Basically, the more I rely on social media to promote my game, the more effort and/or money I need to expend for at best a temporary boost in potential traffic.

Focusing on social media isn’t sustainable, and it is partly why I wanted to focus on SEO. However, I worry that the days of useful search engines and a useful Internet in general are behind us.

So should I focus on advertising some more? Maybe. In my experiments this year, I basically proved to myself that if I could get my game in front of the right people that some of those people do, in fact, purchase the game.

That’s good!

But ads are too expensive to run for one-time sales, and I don’t have enough of a backlog of games to cross-sell and make it worth it.

However, if I focused on promoting my mailing list rather than any one particular game, then perhaps the calculus changes significantly. One purchase of a game today doesn’t necessarily mean more purchases in the future, but one mailing list signup today means being able to promote my games indefinitely.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible that people are finding that their inboxes are getting more and more useless the same way that search engines and the Internet as a whole are getting worse. Maybe all the data about how mailing lists are still very effective isn’t accurate anymore?

Or maybe they are, but most game developers are so tied to the app stores and Steam that they don’t find mailing lists useful for THEIR business models.

And I think my target audience doesn’t necessarily even know what Steam is, let alone uses it for finding and playing games.

Relying on Apple and Google to sell my games is therefore a bit risky because I have no way to contact the players who play my games unless they specifically sign up for my mailing list.

Some numbers

I did a total of 359 hours of game development for the year.

For comparison, a full-time game developer working 40-hour weeks would have accomplished that number in a little over 2 months.

I did 62 hours of writing and published 59 blog posts and 12 newsletters.

I did 23.75 hours of video development and published 12 videos.

The above mostly represents a weekly development log, plus the occasional video update, as well as some one-off blog posts and sale announcements.

I originally continued the weekly devlog videos, but the amount of work that went into each video took away from development work. After a couple of months of this pace, I decided to release videos once a month or so. It meant more details in each video, making them more compelling for viewers, plus an easier work schedule for me.

I wanted to focus on my health. In 2022 I had horrible back pain due to an unknown reason, and I think my regular morning exercises are keeping me strong enough to keep it at bay, but I felt like missing a day of exercises was enough to make day to day living feel risky.

So I started doing more exercises meant to help build up strength and stability. I used to do yoga, but I think I was doing something to cause problems. Instead, I started doing weight/resistance exercises.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep things up. My knees were hurting until I stopped doing squats only a couple of months after I started doing them, which is too bad because they were supposed to be a great all-around exercise. I did 780 squats total.

Also, my wrists were bothering me from doing push-ups. I stopped doing them in May, so I ended the year with only 1,230 push-ups.

The good news is that I added regular walking, slowly building up from 10 minutes a day to 25 minutes a day and from 2 mph to now warming up at 2.4 mph and increasing to 3.2 mph before cooling down at 2.4 mph again. I have done about 50 hours of walking for the year.

As for losing weight, I didn’t want to count calories or anything too onerous, so I simply cut snacks. I now eat three meals a day and if I have a snack it is once in awhile. I probably still have dessert too often. But I ended the year down a few pounds, despite heading into the holidays to potentially gain them all back.

I read a total of 60 books, of which 26 were audiobooks. Some favorites include:

  • Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace
  • The Impact of Iwata by Lucas M. Thomas
  • Secret Iowa by Megan Bannister
  • Black AF History by Michael Harriot
  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
  • One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (first time reading it since it was assigned reading in high school)
  • Useful Delusions by Shankar Vedantam
  • Killing Commandatore by Haruki Murakami
  • Hunter by Val Gale
  • Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang
  • Procedural Generation in Game Design by Tanya X. Short and Tarn Adams
  • Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
  • LAN Party by Merritt K
  • Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • Zero by Charles Seife
  • Finna by Nino Cipri
  • This Is What It Sounds Like by Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas
  • To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini
  • Mindful Games by Susan Kaiser Greenland

I was playing Minecraft heavily in the beginning of the year. I played in Hardcore mode, but each time I died, I would create a new world with the same seed and play again. It was like Groundhog Day in that I can’t keep anything I made except the memory of where resources and landmarks were located, and I found it quite compelling.

But otherwise I wasn’t playing games regularly. Steam says I only played 3 games, but most of the games I do play tend to be through GOG or Humble or itch so that’s not representative.

I found out that Flatspace, a game I reviewed a long time ago for GameTunnel.com, is available on Steam, so I played that game quite a bit. I played a little Tooth and Tail as well as Gods Will Be Watching. None are recent games.

More recent games included Once Upon a Jester, which I really enjoyed.

But the game I probably played even more was Kitsune Tails, a fun Super Mario Bros 3-inspired platformer, which did release in 2024, so I’m still hip and with it.

Goals for 2025

Once again, my goals will focus on game development efforts and promotion efforts.

I ended the year feeling very positive about being able to ship my next game in a few months, and I think it has given me confidence that I can repeat this feat.

But I also want to revisit Toytles: Leaf Raking, partly to improve it, which I know will take up some time. While I’m proud of the game and think it is still a good one, I can tell that it is rough around the edges and might not appeal to more people because of it, especially from screenshots.

So two actionable goals are:

  • Publish at least 1 free game by June 30th
  • Publish major Toytles:Leaf Raking quality improvement update (including demo) by December 31st

I think I’ll easily accomplish the first one early. I already have almost two of months of effort in, so I should be able to finish this six month project by the end of April. Still, I’m one person and very, very part-time at that. I could get sick, my day job could take up more of my time, or there might be family emergencies. So between April and June, expect my next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment game.

Meanwhile, I clearly need to do something more proactive and consistent in terms of getting my games in front of people.

I don’t know if I can capture it in a goal by quantifying specific activities such as SEO or ad campaigns, though.

In fact, those are tactics, and while they might be useful and important, I find that I struggle because I don’t have an overarching strategy for them to fit into. I’ve put the cart before the horse.

There are some fundamentals to marketing and selling a particular game, but I also want to promote GBGames as a whole.

Specifically, I want more people to think of GBGames when they think of compelling entertainment that encourages curiosity and supports creativity. I want people to think of GBGames when they think about family-friendly, LGBTQ+-affirming entertainment. I want people to think of GBGames when they want to play games that respect their time and their privacy.

And I’m still figuring out the how for making it happen.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Clown Make-up

Last time, I reported that I had implemented clown noses and hair and was starting to work on the more complex layered make-up menus for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I made great progress on it and think I’ve had a surprisingly productive December so far.

Sprint 2024-7: Clown Faces

Completed:

  • Create make-up option and submenu
  • Create clown preview make-up cut-outs

Much of this week’s efforts felt like a bit of a struggle, and I’m not sure if it is because I felt like I couldn’t focus on the work or if it was just because it was complicated.

Picking a clown’s nose is just choosing from a set of options, but I had envisioned the make-up menu to be made up of multiple layers.

That is, you don’t just pick a single make-up option. You can layer make-up on top of make-up, allowing you to mix and match options to create a clown face the way you want it.

Clown Alley Creator - make-up submenu with layers

As you can see, there are potentially four different layers of clown make-up available. I created some sample options that include the mouth as a smile or as a frown, a teardrop on either side of the face, and buckteeth.

Here you can see a clown face with a frown and a left teardrop.

Clown Alley Creator - make-up submenu with two layers of menus

To finish up this work, I want to show the icon in the box corresponding to the layer it applies to, number the layers to make it clear which order they go in (I think bottom to top is intuitive, especially for people who use art programs like Gimp or Photoshop), and finally choosing colors.

Right now, make-up is defaulted to a blue color just so I can see it differentiated from the hair and the nose, but I want to allow the player to choose primary and secondary colors for each option. What this means is that the various sprites for the clown face will need to be split into primary and secondary versions. In the case of hair, maybe it look like streaks of color, and in the case of make-up, perhaps outlines around the mouth and teardrops and such.

With Christmas coming so soon, I doubt I’ll be as productive as I’ll be spending more time at family and social events, plus I’ll want to spend time creating my annual year in review blog post. Still, I feel like I’m ending this year having made some great progress on this new project.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!

Categories
Games

Three Tips to Save Your Christmas Morning

This is a magical time of year, and if you got your loved ones a phone, a tablet, or a video game console, I hope I caught you before you wrapped it and placed it under the tree because there are three things you are going to want to do to save your Christmas morning.

First, make sure the device is charged!

Imagine it is Christmas morning and you get a Nintendo Switch and thinking you are going to play some fun games only to discover that you get to plug it in and charge it for hours.

That’s no fun. Charge the devices beforehand!

Second, and this is even more important to do before Christmas morning, is to make sure you’ve updated any operating system, firmware, or software updates before Christmas Day.

You might think that it shouldn’t be a problem to wait, that these updates sometimes only take minutes, right?

Wrong!

It’s Christmas morning! EVERYONE is trying to update their brand new devices! All at once!

The Internet pipes will be clogged, servers will be overloaded, and you’ll wish you had thought to update these devices beforehand.

Third, and this goes hand in hand with the previous tip, is to find some quality software to put onto the device now.

Generally these devices aren’t enjoyable by themselves. It’s the apps and software that makes them fun, so it makes sense to find some to pre-install before there is a rush to the app stores, right?

Again, no one wants to sit there with their cool new game console or phone and find out that they can’t download anything because everyone is using up all the Internet!

You’ll want your loved ones playing happily with their new devices instead of feeling frustrated, right?

So get some apps now! May I suggest my game Toy Factory Fixer? It’s fun for the whole family, it doesn’t feature any ads, it doesn’t do any data tracking or other invasions of privacy, and it is free.

Toy Factory Fixer

I hope these three tips got to you in time and that your Christmas morning will be full of curiosity and wonder and not frustration and disappointment.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Geek / Technical

Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Giving Clowns Hairstyle Options

In my previous report, I got the spine finished for my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

I continued to build upon the work, focused on finishing the Gallery view and adding hair in the Creator mode.

Sprint 2024-6: Clown Faces

Completed:

  • Paginate gallery view
  • Create Clown Specific View
  • Delete clown
  • Create Hair & Make-up menu
  • Create hair option and submenu
  • Create clown preview hair cut-outs
  • Create Clown Specific View

As I said last time, I pretty much have everything in place that the player might do.

And yet, there is always something to enhance or improve.

For instance, the Gallery View allowed you to see 12 clowns at a time…but only the first 12 clowns.

So I added pagination in order to see more of them.

Clown Alley Creator - gallery view pagination

You may also notice that I added eyes to the clown faces. It was getting weird not having eyes, and while eventually I’ll let the player select eye options as well, for now it looks less strange.

Since you can add new clowns, you should be able to edit and remove clowns, so I added a close-up clown view with those options.

Clown Alley Creator - close-up clown view

Eventually you will be able to name your clowns and see that name instead of something like “Clown 6” in the title bar.

Editing just opens up the clown creator mode with the existing clown’s settings instead of a completely new clown. I’m very happy with how easy it was to do. In fact, I feel like this project has been surprisingly smooth sailing in terms of writing just enough code to not be wasting time while also writing good code that is easy to expand and extend.

Anyway, finally I added the hair menu. I had some concerns about how to actually implement hair. Clown hair/wigs can be quite wacky, extending quite a ways from the clown’s head, and I wasn’t sure how to approach it. Do I create separate sprites for the top and sides?

For now, I’ve created larger sprites. Basically, the head shape is one size, and the hair sprite is much larger, which allows for the hair to be fairly big if it has to be while also covering any part of the head that needs to be covered. Here are my mock-ups:

Clown Alley Creator - hair mock-ups

Clown Alley Creator - hair mock-ups

Clown Alley Creator - hair mock-ups

And here they are in the Gallery view:

Clown Alley Creator - clowns with different hairstyles in the Gallery

I ended the week getting started on the make-up menu, but I was also trying to figure out how to allow the player to customize colors for various options.

Clown Alley Creator - Hair & Make-up menu with Hair, Nose, and Make-up buttons

Clown Alley Creator - mock-up of color picker

Clown noses should not just come in red, and I think being able to choose primary and secondary colors for hair would be great, too.

But I feel like choosing colors is getting ahead of myself, so that’s on hold for the moment.

The biggest thing I’m trying to figure out is how to implement make-up. I’ve already decided to allow the player to do so in layers, which means making it clear which layer they are working on as well as the ordering of those layers. I mocked up this tabbed view, with the idea that you are currently selecting options for a given layer, and I think it should be intuitive that the layers are applied in order from top to bottom.

Clown Alley Creator - make-up menu mock-up with tabs

I need to do more work on this menu’s design. I expect it would be nice to move layers up and down, which means I need space for buttons to allow for it. I like buttons because expecting the player to know something like drag & drop is an option is harder to communicate, and I think too many modern UI elements are inexplicably hidden from the player, presumably to keep the interface looking cleaner or something.

It’s been a joy to see this project get more and more finished while at the same time feeling like it is always in a good state to be considered done. Last week you could customize noses for your clowns, and this week you can pick clown noses and hairstyles. Assuming I have time to work on the project as we head into the deepest parts of the holiday season, I expect to make it possible to choose make-up options in layers after this coming week, and after that point I’ll introduce color options. Each week, I’ve managed to make the game richer and fuller.

Of course, there is a difference between something being “technically” releasable and something being “marketable.” It is not unusual for projects to struggle with or even ignore being able to create a release until the very end of the schedule, so I feel really great about the way this project has been going.

I anticipated that December would be a slow month for me so part of my schedule assumes I’ll be working on these mock-ups and figuring out flows into January. Even so, I’m impressed with what I’ve put together in just the last couple of weeks. Soon after I’ll switch my focus to creating lots of options for each submenu, allowing a player to create potentially thousands of unique clowns using the existing menus. Then I’ll be polishing things up, testing things, and getting it ready for an official release.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

Want to learn about future Freshly Squeezed games I am creating? Sign up for the GBGames Curiosities newsletter, and download the full color Player’s Guides to my existing and future games for free!