Hello internet! I’m not dead. Just very very busy. Here’s a new interview for you, though!

http://astringentgaming.com/articles/koya-rift-interview-zach-kehs_18183

- Zach

Original article: http://code-drama.com/2011/07/09/demo-post-release-impressions-reviews/

Hey everyone. I hope you didn’t think I dropped off the edge of the world or anything; I’ll try to explain what’s going on the best I can.

Koya Rift released a little over a month ago. I’ll admit, I did a terrible job at marketing the game. My sole focus was to create the best game possible in the time I had allocated, and I seemed to have ignored other important factors that would have contributed to more successful sales – such as making sure people actually know about the game.

There was my problem. I was ready to release a project I had worked very long and hard on, but nobody knew about it. I was very excited and nervous coming up to release day, but I was overlooking the fact that I had not prepared any press or worked hard enough at acquiring followers before the game had released.

Sales have been miserable since.

Shortly after release the fact that my game had pretty much bombed in sales became apparent and really discouraged me. The people that did buy the game were happy with it, and from them I got praise and my hopes had been raised some. But I was disappointed  in myself for not marketing it better. And I’m not sure why I was so upset with myself – I was juggling school and my part-time job on top of developing the game! So on one hand I feel like there’s nothing I could have done (the quality of the game would suffer), and on the other I’m pissed at myself just because I’m a perfectionist and my pride-and-joy has fallen far short of my expectations and initially failed on the market.

Another reason I was upset is that I only started sending release announcements and asking for reviews after the game released – I wish I would have tried to schedule them before hand. Many websites are simply ignoring me, or telling me they’ll get to it but then never doing anything (you know who you are). This is most likely because they’re already booked with news about other games, and if I pop in and try to get some coverage it’s difficult for them to find time to get an unplanned article about this unknown indie game written.

I promised a demo within a week or two, but it’s been over a month and I have one prepared for you all only just now. My failure in sales had demoralized me, and I was unable to get my head in the game and continue to work on the project that was the sole product of my passion and became my ever-present reminder of my failure, my last one-and-a-half years of life that only led me to an empty wallet.

I kept the demo in mind and worked very slowly on it. I moved into my university almost two weeks ago, the move and the classes have been eating more of my free time. But I’ve had time to reflect.

I put a lot of work into a project that I’ve heard great things about from my peers, and the people on the internet that have played and know about it. The product is done, can’t I try to market it now? I’m supposed to start up with a new team soon on a new game, but I guess I can always try to improve sales on KR and at least keep a measly income stream coming in. Only that most likely won’t happen because one of my payment distributors only pays me every $500 I make, and at this rate I don’t know if I’ll ever see that money.

Koya Rift was reviewed by a few sites, and they were positive! Each review provided me with a little bit of positive reinforcement, but because they weren’t from very big sources, only one or two sales each. So my victory was short lived.

Here they are if you want to read, the people that own these sites are very nice so I suggest you check some of their other stuff out:

Astringent Gaming: http://astringentgaming.com/gaming_reviews/review-koya-rift_30131

(The astringent gaming site seems to be offline for now, which is a shame considering it was my favorite review.)

Tas Gamers: http://tasgamers.com/pc/koya-rift-review/

Indie Game Reviewer: http://www.indiegamereviewer.com/koya-rift-an-indie-game-review/

Indie (Magazine); Issue 3: http://www.indiefunction.com/issue3.php

pigames (this is in polish, so if you want to struggle through a translated version you can try): http://pigames.pl/2011/06/koya-rift-recenzja/

And there’s a demo now, too. The differences in the demo from the real game are:

• No difficulty adjustment. It’s always at 480.
• No level generation. It’s one level. All the time. How lame.
• No campaign (duh.)
• No warm fuzzy feeling that results from supporting an indie developer.

This is a copy of the original post at: http://code-drama.com/2011/05/24/koya-rift-on-sale-now/

After a year and a half of solo-development, I’m ready to share my work to the rest of the world. Please support me a buy a copy (7.99 USD!). Click the giant button below. You will be taken to a BMT micro checkout cart; after paying they’ll give you a link to a .zip file including the game (gloriously DRM free, so you can copy it to your other computers if you want). and here’s a nice advert image (click to make bigger!): Thanks a ton everyone! -Zach

That’s right my friends. The day has come. Koya Rift will be up for sale on May 24, 2011. That’s less than a week from when this post was written!

New release trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5NQ7cJuKPI

Who are these Code Drama guys?

Code Drama games is the new team I am joining to work with on *SECRET PROJECT*. However, I’ll be selling Koya Rift off of their website so that people the purchase Koya Rift can track the progress of our new game while they check for updates to Koya Rift.

Where’s it going to be sold?

The game will be releasing through some game distributors (such as possibly Desura or Impulse) in the coming days / weeks after release, but the game will primarily be sold off of the new website (code-drama.com). Our payment distributer is BMT Micro, so you don’t have to worry about us handling your credit cards or anything; a professional company is taking care of all of that.

How much will it cost?

7.99 USD. I know this may seem a little cheap, but I intended this to be a smaller game that’s an easy buy. If I make it cost less than your dinner, I hope that more people will be able to support me and follow my progress as I continue game development in the future.

Ugh, now I have to subscribe to yet another website to follow you?

Yeah, sorry about that. I promise that I won’t be leaving the Code Drama website for a while though.

Don’t forget! Spread the news!

-Zach

Things are going pretty well. The GML runner was updated to version 8.1, which includes various speed updates, security updates, and other things I really love. The one thing that’s driving me nuts right now is that they changed the argument syntax for methods:

The rules are;

• if you use argument0 to argument15, then you MUST supply up to that number in the argument list. So if you use argument2, you must supply 3 arguments – exactly.
• If you use the argument array (argument[x]) then you are free to supply as many or as few arguments as you wish.
• If you use both argumentX and argument[x], then you MUST supply up to argumentX, but are free to supply more if you wish. So if you use argument1 and argument[x], then you must supply at LEAST 2 arguments, but can then use any optional ones that have been passed in.
• argument_count will hold the number of arguments passed. (0 is for no arguments passed)
• accessing argument[argument_count] or higher, will throw an error.

As nice as it is that tighter syntax will make me a better coder, this means I have to change the body code for the hundreds of methods (scripts) that are called in Koya Rift to meet the new standards. This is; changing all instances of argument# to argument[#]  (where # is 0-15 of the passed in arguments), and then tracking down EVERY CALL of those methods and making sure that I pass in undeclared parameters as 0 instead of letting them free. So instead of scr_generate_weapon(2,3,15); which would generate a shotgun weapon between power level 3 and 15, I could have called scr_generate_weapon(2); and it would have defaulted the lower and upper bound limits for me, because undeclared passed arguments were defaulted to 0. But now, I have to change all of them to scr_generate_weapon(2,0,0); so it has the same functionality. This is thousands of lines of code! Unfortunately this isn’t python, where I can specify a default value for undeclared arguments.

So all in all this pushes me back a few days. I just thought I would say that – it’s all worth it, because supposedly I should get a nice speed boost due to better memory management and more efficient masked collisions on the raw-engine side of things that I can’t control. Otherwise, things are going great and I’m looking to release on schedule.

UPDATE: Fixing these is going faster than expected. This actually might only put me back a few hours, which is nice.

UPDATE2: It appears the sound engine I’m using won’t work with the new syntax changes, and I can’t modify it (compiled DLL, no source available). Hopefully a patch for the sound engine or a patch for the GML runner, or else I’ll have to revert to 8.0 for now (the game needs sound!)

UPDATE3: Yep, can’t get the sound to work with the new runner. I had to revert all of the game back to the old 8.0 runner. Oh well, at least I’m not missing out on any huge improvements. The speed updates I talked about earlier supposedly are hardly noticeable for 2d games anyway. All that’s left to do now is translations and a bunch of marketing materials. If you would like to interview me or get a review copy of the game, shoot me an email! (SunnyKatt @ live.com)

-Zach

I just thought I would update you guys on what’s going on. I’m getting closer and closer to getting the game done, it’s just taking annoyingly long to get a lot of stuff done when I barely have time to open the source code until the weekends. I’ve been so busy – if I actually had a full week to work on the game full-time, I could get it done. But finding time to work on it right now is really hard and so that’s why I moved the release back until May.

The list of what does need to be done is pretty small:

• Boss Battle and final level set
• Translation
• Finish the campaign interface (it’s not quite done yet).

Also, here is an in-game shot of what a sample campaign map would look like. Yes, these are procedurally generated (what isn’t?). I wanted to keep it relatively stylistic, so I made the map monochromatic with a slight gradient blended over it, and then in-game the individual points of the map glow by color and size based on their difficulty over the map so it gets a cool styled(glassy? waxy?) look to it.

The red points with green glows around them are relatively easy for you, so you should do them first. The ones with strong red glows are harder and should be saved for last.

Also, there is other news in the world of Koya Rift. Two new interviews have been published!

The first one is with fanboy confidential. This is an audio interview, so not only do you get to hear my annoying voice, but you also get to see some additional footage of the game. This interview was a big deal for me because these guys interviewed the developers of Shank and Super Meat Boy before, so it made me feel pretty important (I sure sound petty now…)

The second interview is with a blog called Life’s not Simple, which is apparently about video games. This is formatted like the interviews normally are, but it provides some more insight into the development of the game.

Oh, and I made a facebook page for Koya Rift. Maybe I’ll post more regular, shorter development updates on there, but don’t count on it. When I don’t update things for a while it usually means I’m getting work done, which is good.

Woah! Koya Rift really took off. I’m extremely happy and relieved it was taken so well by the internet – I’m certainly not used to the attention!

I’ll keep in touch will all of the guys on the internet while I continue to develop the game. I’m getting into the campaign stuff now, so I’ve got to make sure I have enough time to make it absolutely the way I want. This upcoming weekend I’ll be offline most of the time programming, so don’t worry if I don’t reply to your email for a bit.

Koya Rift ended up being featured on a bunch of websites, so I’ll just mark the notable ones here (click on the titles for a link!):

IndieGames.com – The Weblog

Arguably the most important mention I got. I wouldn’t have gotten near as much attention from everywhere else if they hadn’t mentioned my trailer on their website. Thanks guys!

Kurt Waldowski’s Game Development Blog

(Interview!) Wormintheworks.com

GameMakerBlog

The Astringent Gaming Journal

This is a relatively lengthy write up; very very good. I’ll be doing an interview with them soon, so prepare to see that as well!

Gamin.ru

This website is in russian, just to warn you. I’ve got a bunch of views from it though, so they are worth mentioning! Koya Rift will be translated into Russian, so be sure to remember me guys!

There were also a handful of other sites that mentioned Koya Rift, but they didn’t write much or otherwise weren’t really interesting enough to send you guys to read, so I’ll refrain from posting them. I’ll try and keep this updated as Koya Rift gets more and more attention across the net (yay!).

Preview Demos will start to be handed out to willing/selected blogs and websites so they can write about their thoughts of the battle system of the game (no campaign in these demos!). If you would like one to write about on your website, make sure you shoot me an email at sunnykatt@live.com. Don’t be shy!

Also: Maybe some early campaign screenshots in a few weeks?

-Zach

EDIT: New visitors; welcome to the website! If you want to keep up with the latest news on the game, please click on the link to the right about subscribing to this blog by email. This way, when I make a new post, you will be emailed; and you (and I) won’t have to worry about you remembering to check back here.

Koya Rift is around 3 months away from completion, so I’m looking for an april/may release. Now is the time that developers supposedly have to begin their marketing ramp for a healthy release. I’ve made an advertisement image and two videos for this purpose, here is the advertisement image first (click for full size):

click for full size!

The dimensions of this image are ideal for posting in forums, so you don’t have to type out an explanation of what it is every time. Feel free to pass the image around and post it wherever.

And these are the two videos. The first one is a short promotional trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQwfvc07vkI

And the second one is a longer gameplay video that has longer spliced sections of gameplay put together:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TddbS_KEvlY

I’ll be contacting blogs and preparing demo builds of the game for previews. If you own an indie-game related blog, be sure to contact me (SunnyKatt @ live.com)! I am open to interviews and also to preview copies of the game at it’s current state.

-Sk

So the combat system of the game is pretty much done. I have to add a few labels/tutorial messages, and then throw in directinput gamepad support, and redo the main menu, and I’ll be done all my goals for this year. Sometime after the battle system is all done, I will make that lengthy video I promised (in a few weeks I’ll do another gameplay video first!) and then move on to power through the campaign and multiplayer, hopefully in time for the release sometime after march next year!

I took some new screenshots to celebrate, enjoy!

First I want to show off the fancy new gun rendering. There are 11 bodies and 10 fronts, making for 110 possible gun looks before colors are even considered.

Just a couple I lazily generated.

And here are the in-game shots that show off how well this has come along since you’ve seen the last ones (click for full size, as usual!):

Check out the shield upgrade. Looks pretty nice next to this sexy generated weapon!

General chaos. Notice the red reticule that lets you see enemies under the obnoxious amount of effects.

More general chaos.

Part of the new tutorial system is little helpful popups during gameplay like this one. If I'm ignoring an enemy shooting at me this pops up and tells me to press the left mouse to fire at him.

Duel in the caves!

Another epic duel! This one with a level 2 droid. We were both moving and missed eachother; but it still looked cool enough to post.

This is one of the new upgrade orbs that the player collects to get upgrades, which are shown as those little yellow icons at the top of the screen. They lay randomly strewn about the level, but you also get them for every five ranks you gain (and you gain ranks by just killing enemies!)

As you unlock new weapons, your most recent one is highlighted in yellow and your little gun inventory adjusts so you can select them all.

The night sky looks so much nicer now. It's been desaturated a bit and I've added stars. Also notice the new tutorial popup that tells me to get to work.

The glows keep you happy while killing things.

The shield kills incoming gnats and helps deflect small bullets like you can see here. However, if I move around and I move into some of the bullets, they can still hit me and they will weaken the shield.

Stay tuned for the next gameplay video; it will most likely be posted in a few weeks.

-Sk