Cobra Blade - Games

So far I've made 3 games, and have very early builds of a 4th that can all be seen here.
My goal is to try and have all my games powered by one engine, it'll make life a lot easier when it comes time to updating them, which on the Apple side of things is a constant as Apple isn't shy about killing off older tech and apps.

The other issue of having my games spread across multiple engines is when they cease. My original game Soulless was created in 2008 with a program called Power Game Factory that died when Apple dropped PPC emulation in OS X.

Powerslam was created using BlitzMax in 2012 and I never want to touch actual code again after that, but that too was discontinued.

After that I came across Stencyl, here is one of my early posts of me re-creating Soulless in Stencyl. As Stencyl is also tiled based like PGF it made it easy to make a 1:1 port of my game and I also added more enemies and improvements alone the way. Unfortunately, Stencyl was only 32-bit back then, which I didn't realise would be a problem until near the end of the project as I started hitting the memory wall.

This year, I released a beat 'em up called Brawler that I created using MMF2 and I also have another project, Bioroid that is probably 8% done.

Anyway, that whole write up is to set the scene, because my goal is to get my Stencyl port of Soulless out there as the 1st step in bringing all my games into a single engine. As it is my 1st, and it was already completed in Stencyl 2, if I can get it fully working in Stencyl 4 it'll be just the 1st step. That is why I've made this journal entry, as there will be a lot more to cover as I try to recreate my other games in Stencyl. Akemi helped by updating the Ladder and Water Packs kit that Soulless depended upon, and Justin is going above and beyond fixing a lot of the issues the prevent being able to successfully import my Stencyl 2 project into Stencyl 4. With the progress he has made already I'm really confident that this is actually going to be possible, and Soulless will soon be powered by Stencyl.

So I'm thinking about what is next for me and Stencyl, Brawler only came out this year so Apple won't be looking to tear that down for a while yet, so my next move may be to begin recreating what I've done of Bioroid then continue working on that project with Stencyl. Then there is something completely different. I recently came to the realisation my old favourite game series Battle Arena Toshinden is clearly dead for good, and I've been entertaining the idea of creating a game heavily inspired by it with Stencyl with my typical pre-rendered style.

With this Stencyl release of Soulless, I wanted to do something special. The game originally came out in 2008 and a lot has changed since then. So with this release, I plan to create some kind of in-game art gallery showing the evolution of the characters and have an option added that lets the player choose what soundtrack they want to use, the original from 2008 or the updated one.

I'm hoping to have this out by Halloween of this year to celebrate Soulless' 13th anniversary.
It is possible some things like the gallery may have to be added into a later update so I don't miss the deadline however the alternative soundtracks will be in the initial Stencyl release of my game later this year.

Something I'm creating now is a local high score system. I'm kind of surprised there isn't just support for this kind of thing built into Stencyl by default. Also doesn't seem to be any kits or templates for this either. So once I'm done and I have gotten Soulless out I'll have to rip out the high score system I'm creating and make it available on the StencylForge for everyone that wants a local high score table in their games.

The Stencyl version of Soulless is now live on the Mac App Store!
It got approved so quickly I was shocked, a testament  to the quality of Stencyl built games, ticking everything for a smooth review process.

Had to add additional code for all the touch stuff, but the iOS version of Soulless is now live too! Just in time for its 13th anniversary, this Halloween! Thank you Stencyl (and Justin) for making this possible.

It has also been submitted to Steam, but that'll take more time for them to approve.
Here is a link to the official Soulless website https://cobrablade.net/games/soulless.html

Next up, when I have the time I'm going to try and create that high score template for Stencyl I mentioned earlier.

With so much happening in life outside of game development, I completely missed the fact I still had to manually approve a sale date for Steam, so it didn't go live on there until this year, but it can now be found at https://store.steampowered.com/app/1794420/Soulless/

Unfortunately, too much time has passed for me to easily make the high score template, but if there is an interest in it, please reach out to me, and I'll give it a try.

In the meantime I'm going to try and port my 2nd most  successful game to Stencyl, my beat 'em up, Brawler!

Really cool news is the latest private build of Stencyl is now a native M1 Java app! Anyway, with the challenge of looking after a 1-year-old, I thought I'd try and be creative and see if I can convert Soulless into Brawler. It's crazy, but it isn't like I've got the time to start from scratch, so let's see if a run 'n gun can be converted into a beat 'em up... starting with the easy part 1st, the intro has been converted now. Next will be the menus, all that should be fine. The game itself will be the real challenge.

The intro is fully imported, main menu, options all done. Just working on the character selection now.

So why port Brawler into Stencyl? What benefits will there be? Besides consolidating all of my games into a single engine, so it'll be easier to make any updates in the future, Brawler itself ran at 960x540 to reduce the size of its resources to keep things running smoothly. This Stencyl build will be 1280x720. Most images can simply be resized, but due to the low resolution of my previous version, the actual character sprites suffered. So I'll be re-rendering character sprites for this port, making the sprites look better than ever!

Due to my choice of game engine used to originally create Brawler, a nasty surprise was that it didn't support game controllers for Mac users. So porting my game to Stencyl will mean everyone will finally be able to play the game as it was intended.

So here is a preview of what a difference re-rendering the sprites will make both in detail and size.
On the left you have a sprite from the original version of Brawler and on the right you have it re-rendered for Stencyl.

Uploaded a video of the conversion so far. The menus are all pretty much done along with the intro.
https://youtu.be/l283Nrv-WFM

As the game itself is going to be the challenge, that'll see if this project will be a success or just a failed experiment. Wish me luck.

The lack of posts is very much reflective of my success with the game itself...

Most of the conversation has moved over to Discord. I prefer forums myself, but the forum concept itself seems to be losing popularity.

How did I not see this before now? I prefer forums too, I feel like things get very quickly lost and buried with Discord. But you're right, the wip-games section on Discord would probably be the best place for these updates... but another part of me still wants to post here so anyone new can see the forum is still alive... kinda.

A little progress since the last time I posted, a very rough prototype where 1 character is playable. Enemies don't have any actual AI to them yet... but what is there is working correctly.

I guess I'll move future updates to https://discord.com/channels/209323692205932544/432361155596517387

But as a final update from Brawler on the forum itself, I'll share a super early video of where I've gotten up to so far.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/wFWWHaNAmxc" target="_blank" class="new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/wFWWHaNAmxc</a>