Greebles
Making a game fast
Hi, I’m David, and this is my space to discuss what I love most: creating video games with my 14-year-old son, Luke. Last year, we released a roguelike called Brawlberry. This year, we released our demo for our Irish-themed couch-coop 3D platformer called Druid’s Crown. This is where I share my progress and nerd out about all things games and game development.
So, the Druid’s Crown demo is now launched. It was a bit of a tumultuous ending, but we got it out the door in the end. One benefit of this being a hobby rather than a career is that when things do not go right, or when life priorities take over, we can take a step back and remember that this is not life or death. We can drop it for a while and come back when we are ready. That is exactly what we did.
Now we are back, and I am energised. Most people would think a job redundancy would dampen my mood, and yes, the stress of interviews and trying to land something quickly so we do not burn through our savings definitely weighs on me. But I am no longer coding all day for a living. Sure, I am grinding LeetCode for technical interviews and blanket applying to every open job in my field, but there is only so much of that you can do in a day.
I have found myself in a strange position. I went from working nine to five at my job, then five to eleven renovating a house, to suddenly having nothing scheduled at all. Both Luke and I have felt that sudden freedom. Rather than sitting around feeling sorry for myself, we have poured that extra time into our next little project. I mentioned a prototype we built during Druid’s Crown development in a previous article, and now it is time to get that game’s demo on its feet. Now called Flow Strike.
Based on how long it took Luke to get the prototype up and running, I am excited to share how far we have come in just a short time.
Building on the prototype, we split tasks. Luke focused on enemies and swordplay, while I focused on levels and the overall content pipeline.
Luke and his little brother love the game TABS. That goofy little sandbox has seen endless playtime in our house, and I think it was this inspiration that sent Luke down the path of ragdoll-based movement and physics for this game. I suspect he will regret that decision eventually, since physics can be tricky to get right, but for this project, we are living by the rule of cool. A bit of physics jank will not be the end of us. So far, we have a spear-based enemy and a shield enemy, which is a big leap from the capsule-based foes in the prototype.
Getting them moving has been quite an undertaking, and getting them to properly react to our sword attacks required a full rewrite of our sword mechanics. It is always fun when you spend two days writing code and, when you finally succeed, you end up exactly where you started.
For my part, I wanted to focus less on coding this time. I know that once I am back at work, my bandwidth for that will drop again. So I looked at what I could do to best help us hit those ever-present deadlines, and honestly, content production and asset pipelines are what slow us down the most.
With my free time, I worked through a few tutorials to see how others handle it. Shout out to Playable Workshop and their tutorial series. I love their format of one expert paired with one complete beginner.
We want to take the nature work we did in Druid’s Crown and stretch it into the science fiction space. Solarpunk is something we explored in our cancelled project Sons of Dagda, and it felt right to revisit that idea.
While researching, I stumbled across a term I had heard before but never truly appreciated until now. Greebles.
For the uninitiated, greebles refer to those little science fiction thingamajigs stuck all over spaceships in Star Wars. The original model makers used old Airfix model parts to give the ships extra texture and detail.
It is kind of like playing with LEGO, except all the pieces are weirdly shaped. The video that sparked this idea really clicked for me, and that is where I began. I knew levels would be a bottleneck for us, so I started with our first one. I sketched out areas to show off key features, whiteboxed to find the right flow and shape, and then greebled all over it.
It is surprisingly relaxing, and the results are looking fantastic so far.
So there it is. Work on our VR trick-based sword-fighting game is well underway. It has been a fun time, and I am excited to see where we will be in the future. For anyone with an Oculus Quest, we will be throwing it up on the store as soon as possible in a bid to gather feedback on our now two demos, so keep an eye out.
Thanks for reading. Try out Druid’s Crown and let us know what you think.
Your son is really talented.
Who does his youtube editing? :)