A Growing Channel and a New Tutorial Series

Work on my current game project continues, but I’ve also been busy creating a new set of videos and tutorials for the game development class that I teach. This year I made the decision to drop Playmaker, the visual scripting tool I’ve used for the last three years, in favor of Bolt. I’m three months into the class and I’m very glad I made the switch.

If your curious why, I put most of my reasoning into a video that looks at the pros and cons of each platform.

I’ve had great fun learning the new platform and creating videos to support my students. Since Bolt is fairly new its a bit short on tutorials, especially compared to Playmaker.

This shortage of tutorials made it pretty easy to push my way into the scene and start to create my own little niche in the larger YouTube community.

Let’s be clear! My channel is tiny. My channel started as a place to host a game trailer and evolved into an attempt to support my class.

When looking at the analytics it’s pretty clear there’s an inflection point in the traffic stats when I released the first few Bolt videos.

I leave out the actual very small numbers…

And again! My channel is tiny. The view count is laughable. I gain fewer subscribers per month than many sites gain in a day or an hour…

But still.

It’s fun to watch. It’s fun to create. And it’s fun to think about how far this trend might go. The question that keeps nagging me is whether the graph is linear? Or could it be curving upwards? Can the channel sustain the recent 25-30% month on month growth? Can the subscriber growth continue at 40% per month? Can I continue to create weekly content that’s engaging?

I’ve seen spikes in the channel stats before, but this time feels a bit different. And this time I’ve started asking a different question.

Two years worth of data. The trend becomes a little more clear.

Could my channel help support my game development?

I don’t mean that next month I quit my job, but if that graph is curving maybe in 2-3 months the channel can cover my Unity subscription? If it continues to curve in 6 months could it pay my monthly internet bill as well? And then…?

And if the graph isn’t curving? If it’s straight as an arrow? Or if starts to curve towards horizontal? What then?

Then I’ve had fun and given back to a community that taught me how to make games.

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So… If you’ve made it this far then why not go one link further? Come check out the channel? Maybe hit that subscribe button? And check out some of the videos and the coolness that is Bolt visual scripting…

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Screenshots from the next handful of tutorial videos.

Building a Farming Game Loop and Troubles with Ground Water

Game #2 (still unnamed) is centered around economics and the environment. So a natural starting point (at least to me) when thinking about a game loop is farming. Yep. Farming. Does the world need another farming game? Hopefully!

A farming loop needs to allow the player to plant, harvest and sell crops. Nice and simple. Right?

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Sunflower Farm: Testing visuals for setting up simple farming.

This means that models need to be built, stores need to be coded and basic UI needs to be added. So I setup a quick and dirty (ugly) inventory that allows the collection and basic handling of items. Items are stacked for organization and stacks can be split and recombined. Nothing fancy, just enough to play test. (A good tutorial to get you started.)

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An ugly but functional inventory UI

Basic animations allow a player to dig and get some tilled soil in which to plant a crop. Crops can be added, but I didn't grab a image.

Testing of basic digging mechanics.

On top of this crops should respond to the environment. Crops should grow when the conditions are right - it doesn't make much sense for corn to sprout when it's below freezing or there's no moisture in the soil. So this means setting up each plant with ideal conditions and scripting growth. Still not too hard.

This is apparently what I think a carrot should look like... The jury is still out on this one.

Which brings me to the current struggle...

Getting a working environmental simulation was a matter of a few hours of coding - okay probably double digit hours of coding, but still a very reasonable effort.

So far the wind is working, temperatures are reasonable, seasonal changes are working, it's even multi-threaded (not coroutines!) so there's no real performance hit. All good so far.

And then comes the water cycle. Damn the water cycle!

Ground water and ocean water evaporates into clouds. Clouds move and release water as rain. Sounds easy enough, but we all know what happens when you assume things.

The problem is getting a stable amount of ground water from season to season. How fast does the water evaporate? How fast can the clouds move? How much water can the clouds hold? How fast does a cloud release its water? How quickly does water drain back into the ocean? How many hours can I spent looking at a heat map? 

Visual Feedback on ground water... 

So many variables. Each with the ability to muck up the whole simulation. I could hard code values, but then I'd lose the players ability to screw up the world... And that has to be part of the game. Its part of the real world!

So who's idea was this game anyways? Why couldn't I try to make a 2D platformer like everyone else?

A few changes, including fixing a stupid mistake, are giving me some hope. I have now seemly stabilized the lowest ground water level for a given thermal input/output. This should allow players to mess up the CO2 level and get a higher evaporation rate and thus drier soil... Or allow other season to season changes to impact crop growth. 

One change was to make the ground water flow rate respond to the amount of water in the soil. It is also a function of how many environmental cycles there are per game year. 

This basically slows the rate if the average ground water dips below 0.5 and raise the rate if it climbs above 0.5 (almost all of the environmental setting are floats between 0 and 1). Not a perfect feedback loop, but seems to help contain the crazy swings. This would seemly allow the (minimum) average ground water to be a function of ground water flow rate, evaporation and temperature. 

If I can stabilize a minimum ground water level then I should be quite a bit closer to getting a overall stable and reproducible water cycle.

Fingers crossed. 

Leaving Early Access

After almost exactly six months after the initial release Fracture the Flag is leaving Steam Early Access!

FTF has come a long way from that first buggy release back in June! A sincere thank you to all that gave feedback and helped shape FTF into a much better game. The goal of an Early Access release was to get feedback from a wide pool of testers. No game is ever complete or perfect and FTF is no exception. There is always more that could be added and details that could be polished, but there also needs to be a time to call a project “finished.”

Support for FTF will continue but will be focused on fixing bugs rather than adding content. I look forward to taking all that I learned over the last few years and applying it my next game...