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Like it or hate it the AI revolution is coming ready or not. I for one welcome our AI overlords and to appease them I’ve tried to learn their ways through trying to recreate some of my cut scenes and game assets for the smash hit game of 2015 IZBOT and it’s recent(ish) sequel IZBOT 2.

Platform

There are plenty of tools out there but I used Midjourney . The anime style it’s able to recreate using the Niji Model 5 is amazing. I signed up for the Basic monthly plan which was $10 US a month.

Firstly a couple of tips:

I used the Midjourney Discord bot to initiate prompts, this was so much easier as it kept everything in the one place.

The higher the detail in an image, generally the better it will be for a reference, my games are pixel art games so some of the reference are either pixel art or upscaled pixel art. The low res of pixel art seemed to be harder to extrapolate images from.

Image Generation

This is an image that I did a couple of iterations (maybe like 5) to get the final result.

Prompt: lean humanoid white robot with a spherical head and one red eye, black hands, black knee pads, black shoulder pads, looking over the shoulder back to the camera, futuristic city background, full body image, mega man X style --ar 2:3 --niji 5 --s 400 --style expressive

While awesome, it wasn’t quite the style I was after so I started using some of my commissioned art as a starting point. The commissioned art is on the right, generated on the left.

Prompt: https://s.mj.run/kMC62ydYL0w futuristic robot with one red eye, video game cover --ar 2:3 --niji 5 --s 400 --style expressive

I got a bit cocky after that one and tried to recreate some of the pixel art characters, with mixed results. I honestly don’t know wtf was going on here.

Prompt: https://s.mj.run/13tFaF0FtGo rhino kaju fighting a white humanoid robot with one eye in a futuristic city --ar 2:3 --niji 5 --s 400 --style expressive

This is the main baddie which turned out pretty good. There were a lot of versions of this where the tubing was all over the place. Still I think it nailed it considering the pixel art source.

Prompt: https://s.mj.run/qxQMUMHENe0 video game villain, human in a futuristic yellow mech suit holding a large high tech rifle connected to a backpack, top body shot --ar 2:3 --niji 5 --s 800 --style expressive

Conclusion

In my little experiment I generated around 300 or so images. I found it hard to get something specific but I can totally see it as a cheap fast iteration concept generator. It’s moving at such a rapid pace though who knows where this will end up.

With the latest 2.3 update GameMaker has released a super useful new resource called a sequence. This lets you chain and layer objects and animations to create a cool looking…well…sequences.

For me, a really easy win for sequences was to add one after one of the bosses in my game dies. I had already implemented something in code for a previous boss and although the final result looks pretty good. It took a lot of trial and error to be able to do it in code. You can see below I have a number of alarms to control timings as well as a collision event when it hits the ground to trigger more explosions.

To be able to replicate a similar death animation using sequences only requires two lines of code!

var seq = layer_sequence_create("Blocks_Layer", x, y, sq_Boss2_Death);
layer_sequence_play(seq);

The sequence itself is created in the gamemaker UI. You can drag existing sprites onto the sheet and play around with timings. In this cases it allows you to stack explosions on top of one another to create a cool effect .The other thing I’m doing here is a a simple key frame positional move with the main boss sprite as it losses power. You can change a number of different properties such as rotation, scale, colour and position over time. As I said you could do this in code but this shortens the feedback loop and allows you to experiment a bit more freely with different effects.

When you want to trigger the animation you would do something like the below:

• Create Sequence (same x,y alignment to the boss object)
• Play Sequence
• Destroy / Hide original boss object

And this is the final result after the boss is dead and the sequence is triggered within the room!

There’s some really great tutorials out there on sequences, but give it a go it’s really easy to get some quick wins.

Steam has a handy little feature which creates a little widget to be able to embed a link to your game in things like a blog post for example 🙂

On your store page, click on the ‘Embed’ button edit the text and generate the HTML then just paste that bad boy in and it’s on like Donkey Kong.

 

I’m currently heads down, bums up in gearing up for a release of my game on steam. One of the many decisions that need to be made revolves around what date to to release on. There are a few factors to keep in mind when choosing a release date.

First things first you should obviously allow for anytime to complete all the remaining tasks in your checklist (I’m using Trello for this and it’s magic). Once you’ve come up with an approximate date check out the ‘Coming Soon’ section in Steam. This should give you the upcoming games for your chosen date, make sure there’s not any similar titles going live around this date as it may add unnecessary competition for press. Speaking of press, that should be another consideration, generally Saturday and Sunday are relatively quite days for game articles. So I’d recommended choosing a day early in the week (depending on your time zone you may have to adjust this a bit).

The other thing to avoid releasing in (unless you have a massive following) is the major sales. These change the layout of steam and the visibility of the game may be obscured.

I chose the 1st of September for the release of iZBOT which is a Tuesday. There wasn’t any other similar games around that time, although there is a major release happening at that time.

Good luck with your release!

EDIT: OK, so choosing to release on the same day as TWO AAA games in hindsight probably wasn’t the best strategy. I was thinking that the additional traffic would be a bonus and seeing iZBOT next to those titles might give it a bit of a boost, but this is offset by the fact that they are guaranteed to take up at least a couple of the popular new release slots which pushes you down the list.

I’m very excited to officially announce that iZBOT is on Steam Greenlight!

iZBOT is a faced paced precision platformer that focuses on tight controls and small bite sized platformer levels.

You can vote for our speedy little robot over here:

 

You’ve made an awesome game, sent it out to all your friends, posted it up on TIGSource and Itch.io but you’ve only got a couple of people give you actual feedback.

Analytics to the rescue! Although analytics isn’t going to give you feedback game feel or art impressions. What it can really help with is level design, difficulty tweaking and marketing / promotional items.

My personal preference is Google Analytics, it is really easy to set up gives you a tonne of metrics both custom and built in ones. I use GameMaker to develop platform independent code and then publish it out to the various platforms I’m targeting. One of the main problems with this is that there isn’t a simple analytics solutions that covers the all the platforms that I publish to. This is the main reason why I created a Gamemaker marketplace asset to be able to quickly and easily send events out across any platform. You can check it out here.

Once you setup pageviews from within your game and the data starts rolling in you can get a really good idea of who’s actually playing your game. Apparently I’m big in Iran and China.

The real benefits of analytics  really shine when you set up custom events to track key game elements. I set these up to track room by room / level by level. Things like deaths per room allows you to pin point levels where people are getting stuck on and quitting. Other things like level times, collectables, baddies killed. Whatever makes sense to your game.

Our friend Blob has escaped the lab and he’s on the run. Blob is no ordinary run of the mill blob, he’s been infused with colour changing abilities. Change colour by jumping up and down and avoid the lazers.

Run Blob Run is inspired by a couple of great games, Canabalt, Flywrench and the ol’ Flappy Bird. I’ve tried to mix the colour matching of fly wrench with the running and jumping of Canabalt with the death and destruction of Flappy Bird.

Jumping changes your colour on the upward and downward flight. The lazers will only let you through if you’re colour matches.

Use ‘Up’ to jump and ‘Right’ to dash, that’s about it. Sounds easy right?

Play Run Blob Run here:

Fixing bugs is a part and parcel with game development. It’s not usually the most entertaining aspect of any project.

Occasionally though you get a silly one that makes you laugh. This happened while I was coding a power up. I had a condition in the game’s step event to add a power up when a certain score is reached, but I didn’t reset any sort of counter, anyways this is what happened: