My Top 10 Games of 2021

Hello from beyond the grave. I will still probably never post things consistently, but hey, no one really reads or comments on these. So no harm done. This is mostly just for me to look back on as time passes and I'd like not to forget everything.

My top 10 games of 2021

In order of 'Last Played' on my Steam library. Definitely not all games are from 2021, I just played them this year. Starting from January 2021.

1. Salt & Sanctuary [2D, Souls-like + Metroidvania]
   
   I probably started this in December of 2020, but finished it in January, so it makes the cut. This one is a bit of a rough gem, and I loved what it was doing. It wasn't super polished, it had the feel of a NewGrounds flash game circa 2006 with its skeletal animation and generic looking no-nose hero. But the world was huge, the backgrounds and sound track were very pleasant (as pleasant as horror lends itself to), and the bosses looked awesome. The controls felt very good to me, heavy weapon loadouts felt heavy and clunky, mages felt much more agile. I recommended it to a friend, and he HATED it, but he was definitely high as a kite when he played, and this game demands some precise inputs, especially early on when your armor is made of wet paper. Not for everyone, but definitely for me.
   
   
   
   
   
2. Ittle Dew [2D top-down, Zelda inspired, comedic puzzle game]
   
   I played both Ittle Dew 1 & 2, but I love the first one. It takes a few hours to play, great for a single stream session, if you are so inclined. World record is like 10 minutes or something crazy like that if you optimize the snot out of it. I think I got down to 20ish. There is an achievement for 15 minutes that I gave up on. This game was made by Ludosity, and I love pretty everything they've made. Card City Nights will always be a favorite.
   Ittle Dew 2 is very similar, different weapons, 3D instead of 2D, but also a good time. I am a 2D kinda guy, so 1 takes the top spot.
   
   
   
3. Valheim [3D Survival Crafting Viking Simulator.]
   
   Man I wish I got to play more of this game.  I started solo in the midst of the pandemic lockdown, then started playing with some friends on their discord server, then I hosted my own local server with a new character with another group of friends. I got real good at making up to iron, then they all slowly stopped playing and it made me sad to keep playing all by myself in these little empty villages. Either way, it is an amazing game.
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Gwent: the Witcher card game [The Witcher inspired CCG]
   
   I played this a lot in the beta in 2018(?), but then stopped. Then I started again with a buddy who loves the Witcher. It's a solid game. I don't play enough to keep up with the new sets, so its something I dust off to play with him and catch up. I have a few decks, the one I like playing is a Nilfgaard lockdown that was made during the Viy takeover. It is not fun to play against, and I dont have the dust to make something new, so I drifted away from this after a while. Still a very fun game when the mood strikes.
   
   
   
   
   
5. Enclave [Fantasy hack-n-slash/run-n-gun (magic missiles)]
   
   I won this from a Twitch live stream event called Bragging Rights on iMonters channel. There was a raffle and I won this. Its a 20-year old (2002) 3rd person hack n slash. You play as one of a half dozen or so characters, with the ability to chose which one at the start of each level. Each character has a giommick, there's 2 melee weapon users, 2 rangers, and 2 mages (so far, I dont think I beat it or unlocked them all). Each level adds to your gold budget to buy better and better weapons, armor, and potions, which I felt was a cool mechanic. The story is kinda generic, but I like the world they created, a world literally dived by a canyon created to stop an old war, but now the war in resuming and you need to stop it. The graphics are definitely of the time period, this game is dingy and muddled like Morrowind was (a much better game than this one). But there is a charm to this game. It feels like something a few friends made in college for fun. (Or at least, a small <10 person team.) A decent array of mini games to breakup the levels from feeling to samey. Overall, nothing overly special about the gameplay, but for $5 (and it is almost always on sale for less), it will give you a dozen hours of gameplay. Blasting orcs is almost always a fun time.
   
   
   
   
   
6. Tails of Iron [2D, mouse/rat themed souls-like]
   
   Easily one of my favorite games of the year. The flavor and story is practically dripping off of this game. The art is fantastic, The controls are tight, the weapon variety is fun, and weapon damage scales well. It feels like a LOT of care went into this game, and it shows. The story is cute, frogs invade your rat kingdom and steal your family and you need to rescue them. The story is really just a vehicle to get you to explore this beautiful world. The characters are wonderful, the biomes diverse, and I cannot recommend this game enough. 10/10, would replay. (In fact, they released some free DLC called Bloody Whiskers and now I probably will!)
   If you are an achievement hunter, this is a good one for you as well. The game isn't terribly long, and I managed to get all of the achievements in my first play through.
   
   
   
   
   
7. Puddle Knights [3D puzzles]
   
   This one was a cute fun puzzle game. Not a brutal as Baba is You, but some of the puzzles twisted my noodle a lot. I dont think I have completed the final world yet (There are 10 worlds, with ~20 levels per world.) A cute aesthetic, and the puzzle premise is great: a noble person needs to get to a ball but has to cross a muddy path. Your job as their knight attendants it to use your cloaks to get them there without getting muddy. The later puzzles were quite difficult, but the early stages really hit the feel good button when you solve them.
   
   
   
   
   
8. Inscryption [Horror, Roguelite Card and Deck Builder]
   
   This was the last game I bought for this year and I devoured it. It is amazing, everyone who has played it knows its amazing. I am sure it will win awards if it hasn't already. This feels like a master class in story telling, tell by doing, game design, color theory, and just so much amazing things packed into a single package. It is creative, suspenseful, and exciting. Daniel Mullins and Devolver Digital REALLY delivered  with this one. If you like card games, play it. It you like immersive story telling, play it. If you like Roguelites, play it. 11/10. Always take the Mantis God.
   
   
   
   
   
9. Across the Obelisk [Fantasy Roguelite deck builder]
   
   Another card game? Yes. I have a type.
   Unlike Inscryption, this one is lighthearted and whimsical. The story is inconsequential (for now, its still early access). You have a team of 4 characters, the default being Warrior, Scout, Mage, and Cleric, but you can have 3 Cleric 1 Scout, or 2 Warrior 2 Mage, or any combo of classes. Each class has a unique card pool, and each character has a preference for a play style within that pool. Endless replay value, very inspired by Slay the Spire. Each run can take 1-3 hours, and win or lose, your characters gain EXP to level their meta-perks. AND it supports multiplayer! Which is a HUGE plus. I play this with a friend or two every week or so, and each run is unique and we have a blast.
   
   
   
   
   
10. Super Auto Pets [Emoji Autobattler]
    
    This one has consumed my free minutes between tasks, and many evenings. Low commitment, totally free, plenty of achievements to get, cute animals, and the gameplay is as fast as you want it to be. Like most autobattlers, there is a bit of a learning curve figuring out what animal does what thing. But once you figure it out, you can turn on fast foward, and play a dozen rounds in minutes. Endless animal configuration, the ability to play on the same account on my phone, Kindle, Steam, AND any browser is wild to me. The future is now and its a smiling turtle that puts a watermelon on my fish. My  favorite part is the no-wait between fights. Other autobattlers have you waiting on other live-right-now players. This one stores your team to the server, then sends you one that someone else sent off before. You have a match within 15 seconds most days.
    
    
    
    
    

 TLDR: I like cards and 2D Souls games. Shocker.

Gloobs update #3

EDIT: I discovered I had just left this as a draft and never released it. So this is very late. Woops...

Hello World!

Tis the eve(ish) of Gloobs of release , or at least close to it. I've been real busy trying to keep on schedule and working and life and fixing my car and making sure to eat occasionally, so uh, sorry for not posting updates all that often, viewer count be damned. For the time being, I'm waiting for an update, so I'll will you all in. So, my updates.

1. Totally Gloobs related, but not game related. I got these made.

Wood burnt Gloobs! Want to know what they're for? Come by our booth at #gdex on October 29th & 30th to find out! #woodworking #games #gloobs Special thanks to Collin Kasler for making these!

A photo posted by Lantern Light Studios (@lanternlightstudios) on Oct 15, 2016 at 7:43pm PDT

They will be used at GDEX 2016. I'll be there. You might be there. It'll be a party.


2. There's a lot of things that are new. Many of them not implemented by me. So many, I'm sure I'll miss some and I'll have some other people on the team tell me, and then I'll make another post about things I forgot, it's just a domino effect of more things for me to do. I'll do my best.

Google Play has been implemented. (Not me, but still probably the most significant)

This allows a whole slew of nice things: Leader boards, Purchasing, Promo Codes, Events/Quests. It seems useful. There do seem to be some issues I'm running across building this for iOS, but there are always issues with iOS. CocoaPods not installing correctly, XCode having linking errors, there's always something. But I worked my way through it. I had to remove the Google Play from iOS because the plugin was not compatible at that time. If they update, so might we.

Speaking of, have I ever mentioned how much of a headache iOS can be? It helps now that I can build on an actual laptop, and not just a VBox. But having to wait 30 minutes for Unity to compile on a virtual machine on an already old laptop made me tear my hair out.

Streamlined Gloobiotic Table (This one is by me)

Looks great.Good job me. The button are dynamic, the resource pull isn't very large. We refactored the way Gloobs are stored so that the entire prefab isn't pulled at once when the table is open, which became a problem because there are like, 100 Gloobs. Now we have this pretty... list of strings. It works though.

New Splash Screen(s)

Again looks great. Cool. Good job art team.

There are other things too. UI updates, streamlined Gloob artwork. Plenty of bugs squashed. Most of the Dev options have been removed for the public release. Better event progress tracking and work saving between application loads. MUCH better wording on the Tutorial.But those are harder to take a picture of.

I'm sure there is more, but I'm tired, it's late (EDIT: way more late than you thought, past self). As always, C&C welcome. Let me know if you liked this post, the game, or how I could make either of them better.

Until next time,

-Eric

Gloobs Progress Report #2

Hello World,

Welcome back to another Glooby Update. A few things have been been crankin' under the hood since we've last met. So without further, ado:

First thing of note: THE INDIEGOGO IS STILL GO-GOING. Check it out if you haven't. Now what you really came here for.

1. Bug Reports

Don't spam the screenshots, they are saved locally on your phone

We are human, after all. And while I am a well seasoned Unity Veteran (/s), bugs happen. We've tried to make the game stable, but we can't cover every corner case. So, if or when they appear, we wanted you to be able to tell us about it in a quick and simple way. So, in came the Reporter. You type the problem, and send us the problem, all from the comfort of the... petridish... And it takes screenshots!

2. Detail Cards

The big one on the right moves!

This one is kind of cool. I guess I haven't talked about the Gloobiotic Table at all, but that's because I didn't write it. This is my blog, and I am a selfish person and this is my pedestal (/s?). This panel holds all data on the Gloob in question. That little sign saying unavailable will disappear at some point. It might also not be a log book either, but it's a 'working title'. I kind of know what I want to do with it.

3. ANALYTICS

Look at that professional quality censorship!

I made Google work for us! Keeping track of data is important. This will do that for us. Side note, the documentation for Google Analytics has left much desired from me. My body was ready for something I did not receive. Regardless, I made it do my bidding.

To be fair, they did make a Unity Plugin which expedited the process. It has a lot under the hood, so I imagine that a lot of work I didn't have to do was put into it. Which is a huge +1. So I made it a bit easier to use across the game, and plugged it in. 

And that's a wrap for this post. I'll be back in a yet undetermined amount of time with more screenshots and updates about the game. Again, let me know if you've read this, or what you think of Gloobs, me, or if there is anything lacking with my writing style. 

Until next time,

-Eric

Gloobs Progress Report 0&1

Welcome back!

So I've been Gloob'n it up for a little while now, and I've gotten a fair share of tasks completed. Apparently, there was some progress stagnation before I joined up, and I was the breath of fresh air that the group needed for a nice motivation boost. Which makes me feel all bubbly inside. In this post, I'll touch on the tasks that I've completed so far in Gloobs. Since I've been there for a little while, this might be larger than furute posts, so it gets numbers 0 & 1.

1. Wheel of Gloobs

This was the first thing the team wanted done. Luckily for me, this meant that the art assets were already done, and I love making something when the visual assets are already completed. It gives a real sense of accomplishment, making some static images turn into a working game mechanic; as opposed to just white boxing it and having some moving lines.

When I started to dig in, I discovered someone had already started on the project. However, it was... pretty janky (in my opinion). The way they were doing it was to have the diamond pointer at the top "read" the object it was touching. Which meant they needed the wheel to be separated into segments and re-aligned into a circle in-editor. Then each segment would need a script attached to it hold the values of itself. It would probably work, but that setup seemed messy, hard to organize, and had the possibility for the wheel segments to have ugly gaps in it and cause the diamond pointer point at nothing. So I started this one from scratch. I'm not in the habit of deleting old things (even though we're using a repository), so I threw the old scripts into some dusty folder that needed some love and set off.

My implementation only has 2 parts. The wheel and the manager. Technically, there are 3 wheels, the main colorful wheel above and 2 silver multiplier wheels.

I made a generic WOG_Wheel script that could accommodate these and just tell whoever asked what the top prize is. This script asked for how many prize slots there were, and if they were all the same size. If yes, life is easy. Each slot is the same size, so a simple equation would discover which prize tab was on top.

return wheelZones[Mathf.FloorToInt(zRotation/anglePerZone)];

Nice and easy. But there are two problems that need addressed. One I've mentioned, The other though is a little less obvious. 

1. What about tabs that are different sizes (see the gold tab on the silver wheel above).
2. The wheel GameObject starts at Rotation=0. But the pointer is in center of the tab. So the actual rotation is not 0, it is halfway through the first tab. So we have to compensate. And this only got stickier when you have tabs of different sizes. 

I should note, the gold sector of the wheel is NOT the only sector with an adjusted size. The two "x1" sectors gave up a part of themselves to make the gold area, therefore they are also smaller than the rest of the sectors.

I'm sure other people have solved this issue before, and perhaps more cleanly than I, but I like my solution. In the WOG_Wheel script i made a struct that could be edited in the Inspector for each wheel tab. This struct contained what the prize of the tab was (using an Enum, just to be safe from typos [such as "type='prize_multipleir']), it's value (allowing for different tabs of the same prize to have different values), and its "altered angle size" or AAS (internal angle of this particular circle sector). The AAS is hard to find from Unity, I had to make a small snippet that printed out the circle's current angle and do some math at different angles to get the right numbers. However, these adjusted angles are the only ones you have to worry about, and the script will fill in the rest of the mathematically correct sizes.

The manager is more complex, but easier to describe. It manages which wheel is active, which state of movement it was in (spinning, idle, or coming/going), told wheel when to spin (via player input), and awarded the prizes to the player. The hardest part was getting the wheel to spin in the correct direction relating to your finger. 

2. A Resource System

Each time you started the game, you would just be assigned something like 500 GEL and 10 gold, the in-game currencies. This is obviously a problem because if someone works hard to get their points, and then stop playing, they reset to those base numbers. So I dug into PlayerPrefs and saved them. In order to keep them safe, we looked at 2 options.

1. Use a 3rd party PlayerPref Encryption
2. Do it ourselves

We tried some 3rd Party things, but they are a little slow for mobile. So I did it myself. It isn't Apple quality encryption (But the Government doesn;t want to crack our phone game). I won't go into any details about how I implemented this security for obvious reasons, but it'll keep the script kiddies away, and those who want a (little) challenge can try to break it. If you do break it, come tell me about it, I'd like to know. 

3. A loading Screen + Mini Game

For those who didn't know, Loading Screen mini games are no longer patented. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to make use of that little fact. I have plans for at least two more potential games that could appear when the game loads. For now, I have one implemented for the Beta release.

You don't appreciate how hard it was to take this screen shot

It's simple enough: tap the GEL, Nommy eats it, you get points, and that GEL is added to your GEL Reserves. It's simple, and honestly pretty addicting. Although it is pretty hard to do with a mouse.

4. A Better Tutorial

There was already a tutorial for Gloobs when I got there. But it was pretty linear, and easily disrupted. So they wanted a better system, and I jumped on the case. In the making of it, I reduced the number of gameobject in use, made it completely discovery based, and attempted to made it "fool proof".  

As I said, the old version was very linear, having the player follow instructions to make their first Gloob. But it didn't explain anything, and you get stuck at certain points. I restructured it to be less linear, more discovery-based. The only thing we really instruct is "This is the tool that does things" (in the corner) and "this is how you interact" (touch it). Then you're off! When you click on something new, you get a quick few lines of info, and your back to the game! To help with debugging, I also made a quick-n-dirty editor to show which tutorial flags had been triggered or not. This window causes some bugs when compiling the game, but that's fine, we just delete it when we make the builds and SVN puts it right back when we want it.

That's all for now. I have added some other things as well. Better keyframes, reorganizing some HUD pieces, etc. But they are small and mostly just visually pleasing. Lemme know if you've read this, or what you think of Gloobs, me, or if there is anything lacking with my writing style.

UPDATE ABOUT OTHER THINGS

We have an ongoing AMA on Reddit. Feel free to stop by and ask something. I am /u/GloobsGuy. If you want to ask me anything over there, feel free to send a PM or tag me in a post.

IndieGoGo is going well. Smooth sailing and a steady uptick of the % reached.

Gloobs!

So I've officially entered Lantern Light Studios as a game dev. And we have a working version!

If you want to see some the progress we've made, come check out out IndieGoGo.

Either way, here are some gifs of the game:

Or if you have any questions for me about, or you want to ask anyone on the team, feel free to shot me a message.

Thanks!

Indies Vs Gamers 2015 and the importance of a good repository

So I have assembled a team and have entered the Indies vs Gamers, hosted by GameJolt. Our game can be found here.

This team was set up very short notice, and I had made an assumption. Because my teammates are all in different locations, we would need some form of Subversion. My assumption was that my teammates knew how to use Git to some level. So the night before the Jam started, I created an empty project on my GitHub, made the initial empty push, and went to bed with some level of preparedness. When the next day came and we had our meeting, a mere hour before the Jam theme was announced, I discovered none of the other members knew how to Git. A slight problem.

So, in that one hour time span, we attempted to setup a different SVN. It was all for naught, as none of us knew how to setup any others. The list we looked through was TortoiseSVN and VisualSVN. Visual looked like it would be the easiest to setup, but with less than half an hour at that point and everyone wanting to get started, we decided on the fallback option that a few of us knew we didn't really want to use. Dropbox.

Dropbox is NOT a SVN substitute. Only 1 person can really work at a time effectively. If 2 people are in a scene, Unity's backend files will mess with the other person's work. For example, I was working in the Main Menu scene, and a teammate was in a level scene. I swapped from Unity to Mono, changed a script, came back, and my scene had been replaced with everything in the other scene, but was still technically my scene. Had to restart Unity. Another problem, if a teammate has any errors in a script, you cannot run the editor because that error will prevent you. And if you fix it and save the script so YOU can work, your save completely overwrote everything your partner had done since his last save. It's a mess.

There may be someway to make working in DB easier, but I do not know it. If anyone reading this happens to know a way to setup a simple repository on a windows laptop that select outside users could get in and work with me, let me know. Or, if you know of a good GitHub tutorial, that will also suffice.

Now for the Jam. The theme is Arcade, so the game we are making is called Meta Arcade, or METARCADE. You control a person in an arcade, For the jam, we are probably only going to make one game in the arcade, but it will be the main game. If I have time Sunday night, I will make a small mini game to put in as well. I will probably do that as well, but after the Jam. I've had the idea for this type of game for a while, and now that I've looked at the GameJolt API, it seems like that would be the best place to host it for a number of reasons.

I might put more down later, but I should really get back to the Jam :p

Later all
-Monte

BrickBreaker Clone Update

I did it! The Brick Break clone can be found on GameJolt. It's not totally complete, but there is a working version up and running.

The project took ~48 hours. It is a very simple game: 3 lives, 1 play mode, no HUD. I realized after putting it up that I forgot to enable the trophies... I'll probably do that at some point in the future. If literally anyone asks me too, I might go back and finish the other modes too ;)

The entire point of the project was to practice with the GameJolt API and setting up their scoreboards. After realizing that the old tutorials were virtually worthless for API 2.0, it took some documentation digging. But I got all of the scoreboards working in one day, so it wasn't to bad. I consider this little experiment a success.