Goldbar Game Jam 1 - Tic-Tac-Toe

I like game jams. They're a great idea because they can lead to even better ideas for games. For instance, my attempt at Ludum Dare 30, a VN engine, inspired me to start working on Detective Butler's game engine in Unity. Similarly, Ludum Dare 33's game jam inspired me to create a 2D map generator, which gave me the confidence to try my hand at the 3D map generator. Even if you don't finish a game, you learn valuable skills that can be applied to later ones.

I really wanted to partici ...

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3D Map Generator

The 3D Map Generator is a piece of functionality I'd been working on recently for Detective Butler. Basically, our goal was to release chapters in a fairly timely manner. Our biggest hurdle in doing so was getting 3D models for the backgrounds. It was difficult and time-consuming for us (read: me) to work in Sketchup to create the backgrounds, and any mistakes would be too costly to try and redo. In short, we needed a quick and efficient way to make our backgrounds, and this idea seemed like it ...

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Visual Novel, or Adventure Game?

Recently I posted a discussion thread on Lemmasoft Forums asking what it meant for a game to be a 'visual novel'. After all, this had confused me since I looked up Wikipedia's definition. It seemed to imply that a visual novel is defined by its representation of the story (static sprites, backgrounds, and textboxes) rather than any inherent gameplay element (such as choices). My problem arose when taking a standard visual novel and continually adding gameplay elements to it, and changing its ...

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Kinjo's Jekyll Adventure

In other words, this is an explanation for what happened to the website over the past two months.

I was getting ready to post the August blog post when I realized I was unable to log into my Wordpress admin panel. I was also unable to connect to my server via FTP and decided to do a hard reset, hoping things would magically work again. So the server shut down, and I waited for it to come back up.

Except, it never came back up.

Ultimately I had to start over from scratc ...

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Programming a Serial Game

Some authors of the murder mystery genre have said that the detective story is a game between writer and reader. Some would even compare it to a conversation. Well, I might be taking it a step further — Detective Butler 2 will literally make use of a conversation: a client-server connection! Today I will talk about the latest programming development, which affects how the game will be played, and I will also go over the story of how everything so far has been leading up to it.

When ...

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Writing a Serial Story

Working on Detective Butler 2 has been an interesting experience so far. Right now we are currently in beta testing mode for the first chapter. I’d like to go over a lot of things I’ve learned during the past eight months or so during the development process. And I’d also like to explain how Detective Butler 2′s story will be different from the previous installment.

For the first episode, we used ONScripter for our engine. Now we have switched to Unity, for two reasons: I felt ...

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Meeting 07th Expansion

So the other weekend I went to Anime Central, where I finally managed to meet 07th Expansion in person. I had meant to write up a post sooner, but time flies, huh. Anyway, first thing’s first: my signed Umineko merchandise!

umineko signed Meeting 07th Expansion

And of course, most importantly, a signed copy of the Kinjo portrait!!!

kinjo portraits signed Meeting 07th Expansion

I attended all three of the 07th Expansion panels, whi ...

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WDK - Game Mechanics

We’ve been making a lot of progress on Detective Butler lately, and you’ll see lots more of it in the months to come. So, why not focus on a game I’ve been neglecting for quite a while now: Witch Doctor Kaneko!

Let’s talk about the process I’m using to design the mechanics and levels for this game.

[Concept art by Osato-kun]

In the first place, I wanted a unique game mechanic that other games simply don’t have. But even before t ...

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