Powerhoof!
game development blog

HOW TO MAXIM-ICE YOUR TIME AT GDC

What REALLY goes on at GDC?

You’ll hear a lot of noise about developer talks and IGF awards, but there’s another side to GDC, a gritty and sometimes shocking underbelly. Beneath the cheery surface we find a steamy, horrifying environment where developers battle daily simply to keep their milk from becoming warm, and potentially undrinkable!

That may not seem too bad on the surface, but when you take into account the box of Special K involved and just how arid that gets when you try to ingest a few handfuls dry, you might just get a glimpse of the terror we’ve been up against.

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Another Update is live!

Here we go again!

We’re off to GDC at the end of the week, so we’ve put out a small update to keep everybody going while we’re away!

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We’ve got a new environment in there – The Mines – along with a bit more variety and lots of little tweaks to the existing dungeon environment. Dave has tracked down a lot of bugs and I’ve added a new Tier 4 monster to the skeleton evolution chain – The Bone Warden.

Woo!

-Barney

Random update

What now?

I’ve been intending to get updating the site much more regularly even when I don’t have a lot of new stuff to show, so this is just a little update explaining what I’m working on.

This week I’m doing pretty boring stuff- breaking up my environment concepts and setting them up as assets to work in-game. Working on room shapes and the prop/scenery generation values for the new environments, and trying to get a sense of how long it takes me to implement a whole new enviro.

We are planning on going to GDC at the end of the month and I would love to get an update out before that, so keeping track of how long this takes will let me know how possible that is.

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Over the weekend, I doodled some characters from a random game idea I’ve been daydreaming about. Going a bit higher res makes combat/action more laborious to animate, but having more details in the faces and hands is much better for acting/personality stuff… would be fun to make a game in this style some time!

-Barney

Another enviro

Castle Keep

This is the final one from the initial list I thought up:

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So next I’ll put a little time into testing out some of the more “out there ideas” before I knuckle down and start fleshing these out and putting them in game…

-Barney

More enviro work sketching

Mines

Working on rooms and unique props for mines:

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Next up- Castle Keep…

-Barney

Working on Environments… and stuff

What next?

Well, mostly I’m working on environments for the next update- here is a little taste:

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I’m just throwing around ideas at this stage, I don’t know what will make it in and what won’t, but currently I’m investigating: “caves” (shown above) “mines” “castle keep” and a much more experimental “haunted forest”.

I’ll try to keep you posted as I go!

Also, I’ve been toying with streaming/recording software, and I’ve started setting up the necessary equipment. I’m hoping that I can record/stream some animation process stuff as I’ll be doing the work anyway so it shouldn’t take up much extra time 🙂

My goal is to get familiar with the setup, and maybe start to record regular playthroughs as we test out new content and discuss the design/development process. This seems like both the least labor-intensive and the most informative way to keep everyone posted through development, so we (hopefully) don’t have big silences while I panic for a deadline, instead we just have panicky videos 🙂

Anyway, this is all just daydreams at the moment, I have no idea if it will fit in with my working process until I give it a try, but I am working on it!

*edit: here is the haunted forest concept too

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-Barney

Plague Mushroom Update is LIVE!

Woo it’s finally here!

We’ve been working like crazy on this update- I can’t wait to see what you guys think of all the new stuff!

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Here’s the basics:

  • A new boss
  • 5 new monsters
  • 4 new gods
  • 20+ new interactive props
  • big balance fixes for demon lord, scorpion and witch
  • minor balance fixes all over the place 🙂
  • kill tally system
  • improved colour palette
  • another 1,000,000 balance tweaks and little fixes 🙂

As always, let us know what you think! We’ll be keeping our eyes to the forums and our ears peeled, so please let us know if you find any bugs or issues- your testing is super valuable!

ENJOY!!!!!!

-Barney

Second update is 99% ready!

Woo nearly ready!

Alongside the new boss, we have some color grading to balance the palette…

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HEY LOOK WE’RE STILL ALIVE!

Remember how I used to post stuff here?

It seems like ages since I’ve posted here. Looking at the previous post date confirms it- more than two months, officially ages.

So whats the deal with that? What have we been doing for two months- slowly eating a single taco? Living in a box?

Well, looking back through my emails and photos for the past months, I have pieced together the following outline of events:

PAX Aus

We had a big panic preparing to show Crawl at our first convention- PAX Aus! My mum drove me in with her van to drop off my big TV for the booth- thanks mum! We set up the stand with much less need for panic than we were prepared for, then proceeded to systematically panic anyway at fairly regular intervals.

image“lords of looking”

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Playing with some Tshirt designs

Tshirts for PAX Australia

We’ve got a booth at PAX, and people keep asking me if we’re gonna do Tshirts! it would be cool to make some for ourselves just to wear, and we’re also also looking into making some to sell… first I’ve been playing around with single-colour designs for a basic screen printing process- thought I’d share what I’ve been up to and maybe you guys will point out some cool ideas I’ve missed 🙂

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I’ll be looking at some full-colour designs next… Thoughts? Ideas? Taco recipes?

-Barney

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