With each game release I’ve noticed I’ve committed less and less time to writing the ‘fun bits’ and more time spent trying to mitigate complexity and find ways to make as many things as testable as possible. I guess that’s the nature of the beast once you go beyond your average ‘asteroids’ clone. With the recent announcement of SFT getting asynchronous play in the coming months, I’ve been scoping out my dev schedule for what needs to happen to make it reality, and the only issue that I keep circling back to is “how the hell do I make all of this testable/bug free”....

Early on in the development of SFT I had concerns about how I was going to do text rendering on the cards in such a way that things stay readable regardless of resolution, while keeping fonts looking nice. I ran into aliasing issues as well as pixelation, since all the fonts being rendered were simply bitmap textures on top of cards that are flipping, rotating, and scaling in 3D space. I had read about SDF (signed distance fields) font assets for text rendering and was wanting to get something implemented for SFT’s cards....

Taking the “conflict” out of shared roles: https://vine.co/v/inaDFBXgFUB We opted to do a ‘ranked preference’ for role selection in SFT. Instead of players joining/leaving and selecting anywhere from 1-3 players to control and then having more UI flow when conflicts arise, or a character is left unselected, or a few other scenarios, we simply take everyone’s preference list and the game deals out character roles based on them. If there’s a “tie” (for instance two or more have captain as their first choice) it’ll be random who gets it....

Finally got another card ability animation implemented into SFT: https://vine.co/v/i12I565Q9zg The method and architecture I’m using for driving game logic I think has served me well for the past few years. I shipped Outwitters on the basics, and expanded the gameplay “engine” for SFT, which allowed for real-time multiplayer (albeit in sometimes hokey ways). The drawback is I haven’t found a good way to untangle it from the animation layer. It’s all 100% unit-testable, but when it comes to driving user input visuals for card play, it’s still a mess of:...

So much work left to do, but we're hitting a point where the game is fully-playable with basic graphics online and off. Hope to write more about some of the technical challenges soon! A delivery made! But barely! Sign up on http://t.co/Y9RSqo47n9 for release updates on SFT! #indiegames pic.twitter.com/pvanWLGG26 — One Man Left Studios (@OneManLeft) September 10, 2015

This week I’ve got a lot done in the way of Steam integration, save files, automated builds, some better randomization for galaxy generation, as well as some much needed bug fixes to make online play smoother. Got a lot done but not much on the visual side of things. But hey: Nice to be one step closer to a shipping product Got basic Steamworks apis integrated as well. Pretty painless with the Steamworks....

We ran a kickstarter for the game I’m currently working on, Space Food Truck. The game is coming along great, but we lacked the funds internally to really step it up a notch mostly in the audio department as well as some aspects in the graphical department due to budget constraints. I needed to be persuaded on the idea of running a kickstarter, but I eventually came around to it. Obviously, things didn’t work out but it was an exciting, sometimes nerve wracking experience....

Oh my word. This game is my current single player obsession. Loved the new X-Com? Loved FTL? Love RPG’s and the that “one more turn” feeling? I found it hard to stop playing. It came out of left field for me (but that’s how it always feels if their marketing is doing its job right?). I’m not a huge fan of “medieval” or “dark and grim” themed games. But the art style in Darkest Dungeon is amazing and I quickly became a fan....

Wow, it’s been a while. Figured passing another milestone is worth at least some sort of update. Looking back at my 1 year milestone has been amusing. My initial thought was that almost all the points brought up 4 years ago would no longer apply. A lot of the insights back then are strangely still quite applicable. So what’s happened in the 4 years since? On a more personal level, I’ve improved my eating and exercising habits to stay healthier....

As a game designer, one of things I try to avoid is creating disposable experiences. As any creative, if you’re making it for an audience, you don’t want it to be forgotten shortly after it’s introduction. Designing for longevity can be taken in two ways: You’re design is centered around story, atmosphere, characters, with less focus on mechanics. Mechanics are simply a vessel to get through an experience you’ve authored. You’ve designed the mechanics that can be seen in their fullest from minute one, and are deep and relevant enough to have replay value in and of themselves even in hour 300 of the game....