Blogs - Arvydas_Zemaitis

Good day!

It's been a long time since I posted a blog, have been kept busy by my day job, a few contract work, Shop Keep and the Top Down shooter asset which was released today yay!

->Unity Asset Store Link<-

With the asset you can create top down shooter games, with unlimited weapons, easy body swapping, all the variables are there for you to play with - bullet spread, shotgun shell amount, melee range, the AI are autonomous, just give them a path to patrol, and they will get back to it after they smash an intruders brain in!

News about Shop Keep - This weekend is a big one, follows reviews, Greenlight announcement, and big news concerning skills, tax, shop future, and more items!

Good day colleagues, followers, friends..

Another boring day at work that is smothering me :(

Here is a new screenshot of how my "Hotline" shooter system for Unity is looking, I have found an artist who would like to make original artwork for the asset when it will come to the Unity store. I had a sleepless night yesterday and decided to do the right thing and e-mail Dennaton Games telling them all about the future system and that I am using their Tiger (Character from the second game) sprite sheet just for demonstration and in no case I am claiming that it is my work. Off course I explained that the system is heavily inspired by their Hotline:Miami franchise but it is not a ripoff in any way, as the system is fleshed out enough that changing a single variable can create a whole new game, I have just fine tuned each variable available to change to resemble one of the greatest top down shooters ever made.
The system at the moment has "Chaos Dynamic" as I like to call it - You will always get a different outcome. blood, bullets, camera shake, camera movement is all hard coded into the system, and it depends on variables that you will be able to change with the asset and create your own unique gameplay, GIF gameplay will follow soon.

Shop Keep! Our artist have supplied me with a whole new set of items for the customers to buy and equip! I will be posting kind of a Wallpaper in the evening I hope demonstrating the new items. We will be working on a skill tree system, and then I think we will be done with an Alpha 1.0 release. As well as fine tuning demonstration scenarios.

Good day to those that care haha! How are you doing? Me, I'm bored. I'm stuck at my day job which PC has a 2 core athlon with 64 MB of video memory, but I was able to sneakily load up Unity4 (Unity 5 is out fo the question here) and make a top down shooter Template heavily inspired by Hotline Miami (Just finished the second game). I am actually thinking of making a tribute to it, but from my country Lithuania! Who would like to see that? Either that or selling this template for 5 bucks on the asset store when it's done. For now I got the distinctive camera movement, shooting a pistol and a shotgun which both have their own bullet spread offsets, and the lovely blood splatter system that will simulate a bullet tearing trough a body and splatting blood outside the exit wound (Need more sprites to have variations)

Next step would be trying to make my own hotline miami-esque characters and assets to bring life to the visual side. Melee weapons and a score system with some simple AI to just slash trough.

SHOP KEEP

It's been about a week since the last update, we got a main menu now, a splash screen, and game music, menu music, random sounds that help bring the game to life. Our artist Ian has been swapped with work the past week, so he could only do bit's and bobs for Shop Keep. Still he is hard at work to bring quality visuals to us, and our sound guy Daniel has been awesome at what he does. We will be posting his videos of how he made different sound effects and composed original music on the next update. The starting shop has changed a bit, having a bigger entrance, windows. Lot's of changes done that is too much to list here before the news update. But it really is shaping up. We are about a few weeks from a build that reviewers, youtubers will be getting to show all of you guys actual gameplay and give harsh criticism, that will make us kill ourselves! Stay tuned.

Something really bothered me for a while now. I know me and most of the projects that are made on crowdfunding sites aren't worth much to other people except for the creators themselves. But harassing the developers / inventors / artists with your "services" which offer a tweet to 1000 followers sometime in the morning or one share on Facebook to a few followers without any effort and asking money for it is just too much for my brain to handle. People who are on crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo etc. are not there because they got money to spend on advertising, they are there because they need a fund injection to at least try to finish or start the dream they got. They put effort into the background of their project, and into the presentation. They poured their heart out in trying to show people that it is something worth, worth a place in the world, mostly for other people to enjoy. Then they come in, like sharks who saw blood underwater, let's leech off a poor dev who really really want's to fund his idea, or to fund manpower to finish up on an idea that has been in development for some time, they promise full funding in almost a few days just because they are that good, I have seen agents contact joke crowdfunding projects such as "I want to make game, need million dolla, fund fund" They always copy-paste the same over and over "Great idea! Let us help you be successful!" I do not respect that kind of business practice. Yes, I have not used any of the numerous services that has been offered to me, some may say that I do not have the right to rant then, but I know people who did, and nothing came out of it, never really. This is why I mocked up this, and I will be sending it to any and all who try to offer their "shit" services. To be honest I do check out offers, and some are actual people like on Fiverr who just ask a few bucks for their knowledge, but they do not make false promises, they just say that they know some tricks and are willing to share for a fee, they make it clear that it will not be enough to get maximum funding, but will help in the long run. So those people are free of my anger!

I have finally decided to go on and post a fundraiser on IndieGoGo to quit my day job and pursue my dreams! Not much to post about, but go have a look there guys! Maybe you will find something interesting! ->LINK<-
Now when this is in motion, i will be concentrating on getting as many people to see this, tho still, the deep nights at home will be spent coding everything I have promised, and more. I appreciate everyone of you who contributed, and who give words of wisdom and encouragement! Let's hope for the best!

Good day fellow developers and curious followers!

Having a fast paced week now, some of the projects, that i am contributing as much as i can got issues with animations, so I kinda have to wait to put down some more logic code into the planned features, but that left me a window to work on my own personal project, which you can visit via this ->Link<-

More info about it is right in the page I just referred you to, I will not go into big detail about it, just that I am very happy with the progress on it, I have even enlisted some help of some talented sound engineers to help me bring the game play to life, we will see how that goes in the following week.
Going back a few posts, i posted about a database editor, now it has evolved into a Scenario editor as well, it helps me make different gameplay scenarios for Shop Keep on the fly, and edit them to fit the settings of one or another shop, situation.

I might find time and make something similar for anyone else who is working with Unity if they require it. Believe me it's fast and comfortable!
Looking forward 1-2 weeks, i even dare to think that a release will be ready to go out next month. Holding my fingers crossed!

Been away for a while, the reason being being swamped with my day job and coding projects at night. Onto some updates, a somewhat "contract" work is going slowly as we are waiting for some people to start pulling their weight, and noticed some stolen work, so that put us back a few weeks in development, as some of our "Team mates" thought none will notice if they just used other people hard work and presenting it as theirs. So while we are getting back on track, i had more free time to work on my own secret project which is going along nicely, and just remembering how the prototype looked back a few weeks ago, and how it looks and plays now, is just glorious to see, this actually brings me to the point of why i got a blog post without any images? It's very unlike me is it? Well because i am very excited about this project, and if i cant post any gameplay or screenshots for anything else until i can strongly say to myself - I can show this to people. For now most i can say is that there are some games fitting a similar venue like the one i am developing now, but there is more depth, and the testers who actually got the alpha on their hands say that at first it sounded strange, but actually playing it, the gameplay was strangely satisfying, and that they see a potential for it. And this blog post is an opportunity for me to look for another artist to make simple models and or textures. If anyone got some spare time, message me, and we can talk all of this over!

Have a great day fellow game dev's.

I Have been out of the picture because of my day job, family stuff, and one other project I'm a part off but must be very very hush-hush like about it until it is officially shown to the public , but this is one part that i can show. When I was developing an inventory system for said project, I had myself a database that was loaded before the start of the game in order to pull out needed information about a given item, but editing that Database was a bit of a pain. Sometime ago I saw someones made database editor with a big green button which added an item into the DB, looking over scraps of code it looked confusing to me back then and I guess the developed made it confusing in order to not let someone copy paste their code, fast forward a year from then to now, I got fed up without having a similar editor and sat down, made my own from scratch, I am very excited and happy with the way it turned out. Will be adding functionality to be able to load different DB's which will be used in my own personal upcoming project, which framework is done, AI is about 80% finished, All i need now is to get some models, sounds into it, so waiting on my contacts to supply the basic start, and then Alpha testing may commence, yay!

Hey hey! Posting once more. Trying to get some rest from the inventory system as it is already very big, how we coder's rest from coding? - We code something else, so i took apart my LD #31 Jam game Beneath Crystal Mountain Link: HERE and reworked the combat and movement, have added ranged combat, and now i just attack the stuff in front of the character (Added a FOV mesh for you to see where is the range) instead of just browsing trough stuff that are in the collider. All of this is highly WIP and placeholders, I am trying to make an adventure game that has been bugging me for a few years now, maybe this year is the year it will see light? Well at least an alpha of it, OK prototyping phase, well any progress is progress.

Good day, here is a small demonstration of the updates that are coming along, I have added a dynamic loot window, if it has more items than the window can hold, it will spawn a scroll bar for easy scrolling, pressing an item basically adds it to the inventory, the closest empty slot, when the loot window is empty it closes itself, there is as well as a combat log type panel that tells you how much and what you got, what was equipped and unequipped etc etc, and always holds a static amount of lines, fades out after a set time.
P.S. all art are placeholders