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About Alamantus GameDev
Alamantus GameDev is an independent game development studio run by one guy named Robbie Antenesse and whichever friends he can rope into helping him. The earliest recorded activity by Alamantus GameDev was March 3, 2013, marking that day as the beginning of the tiny studio. Robbie has years of experience working with Game Maker and has been working with the Unity 3D engine since 2014.
We aim to make as much of an impact in the game development world as possible, spreading the gospel of game development accessibility by talking openly about how to develop video games, passing along whatever advice we can find, and acknowledging the importance of women’s presence in video games by making one of our goals to have a female lead in the vast majority of games it produces.
Alamantus GameDev is still pretty new, but we’re learning, and we’ll keep getting better and better until the day we die.
TL;DR: I just released SKATER+, a tabletop RPG for playing as a skateboarder doing sick tricks to prove that you’re a Skater Legend!
Hey there! It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on here, and I’m sorry about that! I’ve been pretty busy with work and doing non-GameDev stuff. In fact, the only thing close to game development that I’ve been doing is making a tabletop role playing game system called GUTS+, which is a far cry from what I used to post about on here!
About a month ago, I saw this frankly really cool modern Tech Deck copycat setup at a mall nearby:
I shared that picture and someone said it would be the perfect setup for a skate park themed TTRPG setting, and from that moment on, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head!
Fast forward to this week, where I heard about and joined the #RPGenesis 2019 game jam to make a 5000+ word tabletop role playing game just for fun. One of the options was to build a hack of an existing RPG, so I decided to jump in with a hack of GUTS+ using the skate park setting that’s been rattling around in my brain. I get going, the process becomes easy because I just keep having so many ideas, and then I’m actually able to playtest it with some people from my Dungeons and Dragons group! They had fun, I had fun, and long story short, I was able to finish writing the 5000+ words in time!
You and your crew are skaters taking on either each other or an opposing gang of skaters to do the sickest tricks and show everyone who rules the skate park.
Do you have what it takes to be a skater legend?
The game does require someone to be game master and at least 1 player, but it’s free to download, and it’s best if you print at least Appendix 1 and 2 as gameplay resources!
If you like fun tabletop RPGs and you have good memories of the old Tony Hawk Pro Skater games, then this will scratch a nice itch for you!
Saturday, August 10, 2019
TL;DR: I just released SKATER+, a tabletop RPG for playing as a skateboarder doing sick tricks to prove that you’re a Skater Legend!
Hey there! It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything on here, and I’m sorry about that! I’ve been pretty busy with work and doing non-GameDev stuff. In fact, the only thing close to game development that I’ve been doing is making a tabletop role playing game system called GUTS+, which is a far cry from what I used to post about on here!
About a month ago, I saw this frankly really cool modern Tech Deck copycat setup at a mall nearby:
I shared that picture and someone said it would be the perfect setup for a skate park themed TTRPG setting, and from that moment on, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head!
Fast forward to this week, where I heard about and joined the #RPGenesis 2019 game jam to make a 5000+ word tabletop role playing game just for fun. One of the options was to build a hack of an existing RPG, so I decided to jump in with a hack of GUTS+ using the skate park setting that’s been rattling around in my brain. I get going, the process becomes easy because I just keep having so many ideas, and then I’m actually able to playtest it with some people from my Dungeons and Dragons group! They had fun, I had fun, and long story short, I was able to finish writing the 5000+ words in time!
You and your crew are skaters taking on either each other or an opposing gang of skaters to do the sickest tricks and show everyone who rules the skate park.
Do you have what it takes to be a skater legend?
The game does require someone to be game master and at least 1 player, but it’s free to download, and it’s best if you print at least Appendix 1 and 2 as gameplay resources!
If you like fun tabletop RPGs and you have good memories of the old Tony Hawk Pro Skater games, then this will scratch a nice itch for you!
Here’s a little trick I’ve been using to render the ocean in A Short Hike! The water is just a plane that follows the player around. The texture and vertex animations are all done in world space!
Wow, that’s so clever!
Saturday, October 13, 2018
This also applies to game development or coding in general! People like @neilmakesgames are always doing something, and his games are always getting better!
I’m hoping to get back onto a project soon, myself, too!
There are many instances where the player will find they don’t speak the language, requiring an interpreter. Why did you include this?
Being non-native English speakers ourselves, language barriers are a big part of our daily lives, and it’s incredible how isolating it can be whenever you want or need to communicate something, but you just can’t. Also, as the game is set in the real world, we didn’t want to have characters speaking with “funny accents” or spouting random foreign words, we wanted to show them speaking real languages (which is a bonus for bilingual players).
Since the beginning of this year, I haven’t really been able to make anything. Sure, I’ve dabbled here and there, drawn a few pixels, edited the draft of the story for writers group, but I’ve had to force myself to do all these things. Even the thought of working on something harder made my brain shut down. I was terrified to make anything.
In other words, I burned out. It was a combination of NaNoWriMo, perfectionist expectations, general exhaustion, impostor syndrome, and family health issues (everyone is fine, by the way). It sucked having the desire to be creative but feeling just completely dried up. I wanted to sit down and work on enemy AI, but couldn’t bring myself to even try. It wouldn’t even be that hard; I have the framework and everything. But I couldn’t do it.
A few weeks ago, I grabbed the audiobook of The Neverending Story on a whim. It’s a favorite of mine, though it’d been many years since I last read it. If you’re not familiar with the book, it’s pretty different from the movie–the movie follows the first half of the book, but then goes off in a different direction for the end (and there were awful movie sequels that were only vaguely connected to the book).
The second half of The Neverending Story is very strange, and a lot of people don’t like it. The pacing slows way, way down, and the adventure gets even more surreal and weird. I love it. The protagonist grows in a fascinating way–learning who he is, learning what his deepest desires are. In order to do that, he has to make wishes.
His first wishes are to be strong, handsome, impressive, and adored by the masses. But over time, these wishes change him for the worst, and he literally begins to forget who he is. And in the end, he finds these aren’t things he really, truly wanted. He only thought he wanted them, but they ended up hurting him.
While reading about this character discovering what he actually wanted, actually needed, a knot inside me sort of… untied. My own path hasn’t been one-to-one with that of the protagonist of The Neverending Story, but the combination of rereading one of my favorite books and seeing him go through a similar creative journey affected me in a really healing way. It made me think about making stuff and why I do it and what healthy motivations look like.
This post won’t have anything new from me, quite simply because I don’t have anything new that’s shareable at the moment. But I still want to share something!
First, if I can be honest with you: it’s hard to see other people making Zelda-like games faster and better than I can. A few were published on the Switch, making me feel like I missed my window because I’m too slow.
I try to ignore that jealous part of me whenever it rears its ugly head, but it’s still there. It’s jealousy rooted in fear, and that’s not healthy. There’s more than enough room for other people to make games (yes, even if they end up better than mine!), and so–maybe for my own health more than anything–I’d like to share some of these wonderful people making wonderful Zelda-like games with you. Please go check them out! :)
t3nshi’s working on The Steamhaven Chronicles, a Minish Cap-esque take on the Zelda formula
dicey’s making Tunic, which you might have seen at E3 and has an adorable fox!
naemo is working on Desecrated Light, which has one of the most gorgeous pixel art styles I’ve seen
Nathanael Weiss made Songbringer, which looks super cool, and it’s already out!
Juice is working on Mistiqa, and I’m always impressed by how quickly he makes progress and how much varied gameplay he has
Fervir is creating Elysis, which has a really fluid-looking item/combat system
ITTA’s jammin’ on Itta’s Gun, which is probably more of a Hyper Light Drifter-like game than a Zelda-like, but close enough
Aloft Studiois creating Hazelnut Bastille, which is very LttP-ish and has a crazy variety of items!
What now?
From this point on, I’m going to make more of an effort to just make the game as I can. I won’t force myself to make every #screenshotsaturday and #indiedevhour (that didn’t work anyway). I’m going to give up expectations for follower count, likes, favorites, retweets, reblogs, freaking out trying to calculate the most effective time to post, all that stuff, because in the end, that stuff doesn’t matter. Not really. I’m not making a game to validate my worth as a person. I’m making a game because I want to, and I’d like to share it with whomever else wants to play. I think a game made with that angle will be a much truer, purer experience rather than one made by driving myself crazy trying to be perfect.
This is the reason it’s a hobby and not my job. I can take my time. I can work on the parts that I want to work on even if it doesn’t make “good business sense.” Not that I’m going to run away from difficult problems that pop up! But I’m not going to rush after success and validation. I don’t need to be admired by the masses. I just want to make a game, so that’s what I’m gonna do. And I’m gonna do it in a healthy (probably meandering) way because that really appeals to me. That’s how I started, and I wish I hadn’t forgotten that for so long.
Thanks to all of you who are here for the ride. :) I’m grateful that you see something in The Waking Cloak! I’m back in the saddle and very much enjoying it.
I feel this post at a very deep level, and I really appreciate you for writing it, @thewakingcloak! I’m glad you were able to reorient yourself and remember what you want to do—I hope you’re able to keep it up and that you’re able to finish your game!
And the demo is out too! Go have a blast and tell us what you think!
This game looks great and is inspired by the best Paper Mario games. The campaign has just 15 days left, and they’re at a little over 90%! Let’s get them the rest of the way and show our support! :)
I was looking into the Godot Engine again because it looks really nice and I want to try it out, and I came across a collection of videos comparing Godot with Unity. The person who made that comparison video made a follow-up video a couple of months later with a short but important message about game development in general, and I’d like to share it as a reminder to you all.
TL;DW: The game engine you use doesn’t matter, as long as it works best for you and you can make the game you want to make.
I use Game Maker a lot and there’s a lot of stuff I read about it being bad. There’s aspects of it that I don’t like (such as exporting), and there’s engines that have aspects I like better (I love how UE4 allows me to customize individual actors following their blueprint in its presentation), but there’s enough there that works for me and my way of thinking and wanting to do things that I’m happy with it.
Like with different GDEs and different programming languages, different art styles and different religions, no engine is a be-all-end-all tool for communicating a game idea, but a different set of perspectives on approaching it. I think this is why people initially get so strongly attached to a GDE or a game development method when they do click, because they align with their way of thinking so well that to insinuate it doesn’t work for everyone can feel like a personal attack. “If you don’t think like I do than you’re an idiot” is the whole attitude I get from folk like that.
All of it does take a great effect on how a game turns out and other important factors, but game development is full of thousands of compromises. “Are you willing to take on an engine’s existing features in spite of not having complete control over every aspect?” is just one of them. So I can’t imagine how much more that varies when it comes to how one wants to organize hundreds of different assets and scripts, and how they all come together and how versatile or restrictive they are.
I think the best advice is, if you want to get into game development but one engine/approach you’re using doesn’t work for you, go try something else. It might feel like starting from square one but various disciplines carry over and the new environment will give you a different perspective. You might stick with it or go to something else but I think understanding what process is most efficient/enjoyable for you when developing a game (something that can take months to years) is the most important consideration when choosing an engine.
I was looking into the Godot Engine again because it looks really nice and I want to try it out, and I came across a collection of videos comparing Godot with Unity. The person who made that comparison video made a follow-up video a couple of months later with a short but important message about game development in general, and I’d like to share it as a reminder to you all.
TL;DW: The game engine you use doesn’t matter, as long as it works best for you and you can make the game you want to make.
Studying 3rd Person Shooting Mechanics and thought I’d share something interesting I found with y'all.
It is easy to read this as HZD being lazy but the choice (do arrows fire from the bow or the player’s view) is a trade off and I think both games made the choice in the way that fits them.
The arrow firing from the bow is more logical and doing so makes the game more immersive by sticking to the logic of the game world. This rarely comes up but it is the details that really sell a game’s world and this is a good one. On the other hand it makes hitting targets with arrows harder sometimes. The arrow’s actual trajectory is going to be slightly different then the shot the player is actually trying to make but this difference is only really noticeable when you are making close range shots.
Link’s primary weapon is a sword, he uses a bow for ranged attacks but most combat is done in melee range with melee weapons. Aloy uses a bow as her primary weapon and you are often asked to make close ranged attacks on small targets (vulnerable pieces of enemy bodies). In the context of a game that expects you to use the bow up close firing from the player’s view makes perfect sense; otherwise player’s would just kinda miss up close shots sometimes without them realizing why which would be frustrating.
Choices don’t exist in a vacuum, whether they work or not depends on the rest of the game.
This game is still chugging along slowly (4 years and counting). It’s wasn’t easy juggling between work and this side project, so the graphic side has remained somewhat stagnant. I was just too drained to do art after a long day of work. On the other hand, coding has been going pretty well!
Some things I’ve managed to do this year:
updated UIs and controls
support for branching levels
destructible walls
fire propagation
new AI system
reworked map generation system
basic sound system
various game mechanics (not gonna post any spoilers!)
lotsa bug fixes!!
Just a few more essential things to do before I get to the fun part: adding game content! =D
That’s all for now. Have a great new year ahead!
I’ve missed seeing your posts on here! Excited that you’re still making progress. I’m in the same boat with work and not being able to work on stuff when I get home, so I really hope you’re able to find a balance that makes you happy!
I started working on the overworld ocean for Oceanfarm! It’s implemented in a basic form now, though you can’t actually collide or interact with anything yet.
I’m not planning on anything too extensive with this, it’s mostly just a way to get from island to island. I’m not gonna have naval combat or whatever. Still, I’ll experiment with some things so it’s not just a glorified slow map screen. Maybe have like, one of those classic race-through-the-rings kind of minigames somewhere. Boating around is pretty fun on its own.
I’m excited to see what you do with this! I had a somewhat similar idea with the movement/scale (though a little more limited) with Trade Winds, except that the boat movement was the whole game instead of just an overworld. The name “Oceanfarm” alone sounds like a fun idea! :)
