Stinky feet: The adventure of BigFoot | DEVLOG #1
Hi, my name is Strahinja and I think I am an indie game developer now!
I am also a software tester and that is my bread and butter and I do game development for the joy of it and the love of playing games.
I am going to give you some context here about how I started developing games.
7 or 8 years ago I tried creating a simple stickman game in plain javascript and wow was it hard?
Yeah, it was, and it was a huge failure. And I kinda drifted away and stopped thinking of creating a game on my own. It is too hard and I was unable to grasp it.
Years passed, and at some point, I was scrolling some social network and had some extra time and looking at what could I do in my spare time.
And there you go an add pops up and it is showing me this course on udemy on creating games with vanilla javascript.
I enrolled and ended up creating my first game.
It is not much, but it is quite fun to play and it has multiplayer and annoying mechanics.
My sister played it, she and her boyfriend liked it. It did cause them to fight, on who is winning and why, so they stopped playing it.
I concider it a sucess yes!
After all, I made a video game! WOW!
And after that, I then again had a pause.
Some work-related stuff came up and I had to put my hobby away.
Some months later I tried making something new out of it as the game I made from that tutorial was vanilla javascript
and I had to build a game engine, kind of, for that game, I tried reusing it.
It is a hot mess and there is no way I was able to do it.
There was just too much math and grinding to have the simplest feature.
So I started another game dev course.
This time it was UNITY!
And it was fun I must tell you, and the learning curve is not so steep at least not for me.
And I wanted to recreate one of my favorite games ever:
DX ball.
As I understand it DX ball is a clone of another ultra-popular classic game called Arcanoid.
anyways...
And I did it!
Yeah.
I made a game, I called Block annihilator!
Super cool name right?
And I tried to make people play it.
I was pushing it on to my friends and family and even tried to sell it.
And I was getting mixed reviews, the thing is, Block annihilator is not really special.
It is special to me, but it is just a clone of a clone it's just not original, I did manage to sell a couple of copies.
Two, three four I am not sure.
Even got two small youtube channels to play my game.
Both of them are here on itch so thank you guys you are awesome!
After that, I joined a couple of game jams.
In one I created this procedurally generated, platformer and I called it T.G.H.N.N
T.G.H.N.N is an acronym for The Game Has No Name, it is endless procedurally generated levels and 4 different characters with special powers.
You can go check it out on my itch.io page, I will link all this in the description.
Again I was playing around with new things and learning about unity, and game development in general.
Checking out tutorials, on procedural level generation, trying to figure stuff on my own, failing and using someone else's solution to a problem.
I think that is actually a good practice, you know, you have a problem that someone else solved, why bash your head around use existing solution and if it fits, great!
If not then go and make up your own solution!
And now, finally, a century later, the game I am working on now!
This game jam had a cool idea and this guy that started this community on Itch that is all about people growing and not about self-promotion and stuff, go check out the Angry Smile on itch and discord!
The theme was bigfoot.
Now my thought process was like,
How to hell do I draw a bigfoot?
A god damn sasquatch?
There is no way me drawing it.
Bigfoot...
Come on man, why can't it be something easy I just want to make a platformer...
Ok, let me google this BIGFOOT.
And I am presented with a page full of big ugly and probably bad smelling feet.
Wait!
I can draw a bigfoot.
Single bigfoot, it can have like 6 fingers and stink a lot!
Yeah, that would be cool!
Ok but, if it is a big stinky foot, who are its enemies?
Water is dangerous if you want to smell bad, ok so fire trucks and soap and water outlets!
I started coding and drawing and putting it all together.
And a week or so later, I had a crazy game and I think people liked it because it was original.
People liked it, at least those who played it liked it.
And again I had another job spike and increased velocity and scope at my day job, and I was burnt out, and my home computer was off, for months.
Holidays were here and close and a long-overdue three-week vacation was incoming, so I was wondering what to do with all that extra time I will have in these three weeks and I decided to dust off my bigfoot game!
So I opened my Trello board and started planing. What do I want to do?
I want to add new game mechanics, like moving platforms, time vanishing platforms, I wanted to implement some way to deliver some sort of a story in my game and I wanted to make it look great!
Well, now, I wanted it to look better.
So I did.
I Implemented 2d lights, to add more atmosphere to the game, I drew new tiles for the background and added normal maps to all sprites in order to make scenes look more alive with moving lights.
I created a water shader and it is totally killing the performance so I removed it.
Yes, hours and hours of work and it is killing performance on my potato i5 4th gen laptop. So I deleted it.
So I made the water move when it is hit by an object.
I created a boss level with a huge fire hydrant that is my enemy now and wants to kill me!
And this is where I am.
You can see some of the footage of my new version of BigFoot game in the YT video:
Wishlist me on Steam!
Go check out my games:
GameJamVersion of Stinkey Feet
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