Ace Armstrong
Wishlist Baseless On Steam Now!
Wishlist Baseless On Steam Now!
Ace Armstrong
Huemongus ~ my tiny game about color perception ...
Huemongus ~ my tiny game about color perception (playable now in browser on itch.io)
Ace Armstrong
Join the Fermenter Games Discord
Join the Fermenter Games Discord
Ace Armstrong
Baseless has a trailer!
Baseless has a trailer!
Ace Armstrong
Hair Nightmare is OUT NOW (for GMTK Jam 2020)
Hair Nightmare is OUT NOW (for GMTK Jam 2020)

David made it to the big leagues. (STEAM!)

 
 

It had been almost a year on Greenlight, and I’d actually given up on Greenlight after it looked like it wasn't going to happen, so it’s really awesome to be telling you about getting Greenlit and the upcoming release.

Thanks to everyone who voted, and thanks to Steam for giving David a fantastic audience.

Making it to Steam is a huge breakthrough for a little developer like me. I've got my foot in the door, so I'm just gonna walk in and make myself comfortable.

Look for David as it launches for $0.99 at 1PM (PST) on February 16, 2015.

Baseless - Dev Log #3

10/25/2014

Things:

// TwitchTV! http://www.twitch.tv/aceypoo92/
// Flamethrower powerup!
// Stuff stays on fire and can cause chain reaction fire spreading. Neat! 
// x2 bonus if you kill two enemies at the same time!
// Secretly planning Greenlight and KickStarter campaigns! (I'd love any advice. :p)

10/18/2014

It's been a whole week without sharing any pretty gifs? How rude of me... I've gotta make a few more, but here's one to hold you over until then. I'm working on some more enemy type variations. This guy sucks.

10/11/2014

Another quick update:

I've been playing around with a bunch of power up ideas, like the wrecking ball gif from earlier. Below is another possibility; a little robot ally turret guy.

These powerups would only last a short amount of time, but they can make a huge difference in how you play for that short amount of time. Furthermore, these are stackable, so you can for instance get the rapid fire powerup WITH the multishot powerup and be a powerhouse for a brief time. Some pretty interesting combos happen. 

I'm pretty happy with how things are coming along lately. Wish me luck with the rest!

10/9/2014

Working on some sweet powerups and special weapons. Here's the funnest one so far, inspired by the great Miley Cyrus:

Some behind-the-scenes stuff is happening too, and my game is starting to feel like a game. They grow up so fast! <3

10/8/2014

Long time no update! Lots of work being done, but it's not necessarily pretty/shareable. See?

Trying to figure out what the gui/hud should look like, and, more importantly, the general gameplay objective/flow. Trying a bunch of ideas and seeing what sticks. Getting closer! I've felt stuck for quite a while now, but I AM GETTING CLOSER. Wish me luck, and gimme all the ideas, plz.

9/22/2014

Yoooo, after getting some feedback, i went from these options:

to this combo win/win.

Baseless - Dev Log #2

9/16/2014

Hi Touchers! Carter Dotson of TouchArcade kindly wrote an article for Baseless today! According to my web stats, that's probably why you're here. Welcome to my website, thanks for coming, and thanks to Carter for helping a little dev spread the word.

Well, since you're here, I suppose I might as well show off this new enemy concept:

The view is a bit zoomed out, but I think you can get the gist. A big ol' slow-flying electricity shooting baddie! I'm not sure how I feel about the actual enemy ship sprite. The electricity aesthetic was an accident I stumbled into, but I really like it. It's that low-poly geometry that's totally in style right now.

Anyways, that's all for now. I'm off to get back at dev'ing. Wish me luck!

9/9/2014

Still pondering the gameplay, so I might as well make things look good while I'm pondering.

These little guys are are just being too cute. (And sometimes they even hop from planet to planet. <3)

Also changed some things up with the larger enemy turrets. pointy! Here's a close up in which you can see the tip get brighter when it's charged, and the particles and recoil when it shoots. Inspired by the big enemy tank things from Halo.

Here's another gif showing some action-movie quality moves as I jump and slide across the barrel of the big turret. Also you can see here, that I've made the enemy flying jet things a little more lively by making the wings come in if they're going fast.

Still a little clunky as of now, but hey, it's on it's way! Would it help to know what's going on if I added a subtle mouse cursor or something in these gifs?

Last thing, and it's pretty important I think. The demo I have up (http://fermenter.itch.io/baseless) has been downloaded over 200 times, and that's sweet, but I've made so much progress since then, and it's a ton better because of that. I'm not sure what I should do about the current demo. I don't want people to play it and think that the final version will be much like it. I feel like it's probably doing more harm than good at this point. At the time I needed the feedback, and I'm super glad I put it up, but I'm thinking I should probably take it down now. What do you guys and gals think?

Thanks for all the encouragement during this development. It's really been awesome so far. Also, I'm always open to suggestions so keep em coming!

9/7/2014

giph jif gifs:

An eyeball?

Recoil animation on the enemy turrets.

And hey, I've got a question! What do you think about this for the gameplay objective/rules?

  1. arrive in first galaxy. filled with enemies to kill that give you points upon doing so.
  2. you have 120 seconds until warp/end of round.
  3. you need to rack up at least 100 pts in this time.
  4. 120 seconds passes: if you have at least 100 points, you keep going. if you didn't collect enough, game over.
  5. any points over 100 at the end of 120 seconds can be spent on upgrades(weapons/hp/speed/fire-rate/ammo/etc) inbetween galaxies/rounds.
  6. repeat! warp to next galaxy. same thing as last time, but you need to get more points and/or the enemies are tougher.


Let me know if that makes sense, and if it does, would you like it? I'd love any feedback/questions.

9/5/2014

Shotgun, stars, and shiny stuff.

I guess it's hard to see the stars in this gif... :(

Also, I've got it looking rad on multiple screensizes. Check it out on the iPad below. My current process is to develop for the smallest screensize first (iPhone 5 in my case, 1136px x 640px) and once I've got it looking good small I then work on responsiveness and scaling things up. 

BwrfGrgCEAAIIrO.jpg

Also, I've got some sweet ambient beats in the mix. It's tough to find the right musical sound for this game, but this'll do for now.

And most importantly, I think I've got a direction to go for the actual objective of the game, and I'll be posting about that shortly.

9/3/2014

First off, shout out to Christian of Indie Game Enthusiast. Check out some insightful reviews here: http://indiegameenthusiast.blogspot.com/

I've been working on some promotional aesthetics and practical icon and menu stuff, and I think I'm pretty happy with how things are looking. Check it out!

More game-y stuff soon!

8/26/2014

It's encouraging when you can't stop play-testing cause you're having too much fun. My "real" job has been keeping me painfully busy, but here's a few new gifs since last time:

Small snakeworms. Gotta figure out how to keep em from glitching out like this.

A for-testing-only planet creation system.

And here's a last one just for fun. I find myself trying to do this orbiting thing all the time when testing. Physics maaaaaaaan.

Also, I got another monitor at home for game dev'in'. All da monitors.

Bvds9JzCIAAQxAz.jpg

8/10/2014

This past week, I went to Colorado with the in-laws, and had a really refreshing time. Non-#gamedev work has been incredibly draining lately, so this vacation was a blessing. Mountains, rivers, chilliness, and many other non-Texas stuff. I know it was vacation, but I love to work on my games, so quite a few times I opened up the laptop and made a few additions to Baseless. Here you go:

Prettier galaxy birth.

Ability to have multiple snake worms in existence. Looks gross/beautiful

gmgif11.gif

And lastly, planet-defending turrets and fighter jets.

gmgif12-3.gif

Baseless is starting to take shape, and I'm really liking the look of it so far.

8/1/2014

Adding additional additions to Baseless before my colorado vacation. Bye!

7/26/2014

I just found something pretty spooky while developing:

Baseless - Dev Log #1

baseless is a game. a game about space cowboys and scarves.

THIS IS A DEV LOG (for now)

7/23/2014

I'm still not sure exactly what direction I want to go with the actual gameplay, sooooooo more misc pre-polish, randomly-generated space/planets (lol #nomanssky) and TREES!

7/22/2014

Decided I wanted to challenge myself again, so planet jumping with relative gravity and a rotating view. It's quite fun! But it might be too freaky. We'll see!

7/20/2014

More gunzzz.

7/19/2014

Instead of sticking with those stacked-paper things for the enemies, I wanted to push myself away from the David-y look, so I put together this sky-snake-dragon thing. My wife loves it. :D As you can see, it definitely stole some code from the scarf.

gmgif2.gif

Sometimes it death-spirals, and its terrifying and funny and a bit beautiful i think.

gmgif7.gif

7/15/2014

I'm a nerd and had watched Attack On Titan, recently, and was really influenced by both the high-flying/jetpacky combat AND the character design of the kid Mikasa. That SCARF yo.

http://www.deviantart.com/art/Mikasa-Ackerman-Wallpaper-371773529

http://www.deviantart.com/art/Mikasa-Ackerman-Wallpaper-371773529

So here's a combination of those things:

madegif.gif

I really like how the scarf turned out. I think it adds a lot of playfulness to the all the movement.

Also, at this point, I was going for a stacked/folding-paper look with the enemies and environment, but I think I'm not going that direction anymore.

ALSO, super grenade rocket boom guy. 

7/14/2014

After some fiddling, I decided on a vague visual direction. Fantasy space with a fairly well defined color scheme. Looks like some sort of fall sunset, and I love it.

7/13/2014

A new project is born and revealed to the public. I'm deciding to be more publicly open and show-n-tell-y during the development of this project, and I decided that for a few reasons.

  1. Publicity.
  2. Community.
  3. Constant Feedback.
  4. Visible/Tangible Progress.
  5. To work on my mad writing skills.

The project was originally titled "Hitter" and I started out with something really similar to Planet Punch. But it felt too similar to David. So GUNS INSTEAD. Here's a screenshot of a bunch of debuggy numbers that told me the speed of each bullet. Kinda silly, but helpful at the time!

twitpic.jpg