A combination of a 2D platformer and a RTS, Danh-Gbi is my take on a Kingdom-like game, iterating on my legacy project Battle of Cheese.

RSM 2019

The jam, exhibition and fair were all complete successes! I had a great evening at this year’s retro game fair. We had lots of players, both on the first, more intense day, but also on the second one. I solved a bunch of design flaws ahead of the second day. Lots of people showed up and did their part as well as helped each other out letting everyone have a chill time. Pretty much all setup and practicalities were super smooth. Not all cabinets made it all the way, but to me that’s just part of being experimental (which is good).

Thanks everyone for a great event!

Final evening & move to site

Today was the final day to prepare ahead of the fair. Josef had made a super cool intro image which I added and animated. I manage to tie the game loop together somewhat. People were great at building their stuff and we moved pretty much all the cabinets to the venue. Me and another guy organizing the thing will be here early tomorrow to move some more stuff before the fair opens though. Really looking forward. : )

Bonus third build evening

It’s the workers holiday today in Sweden which is a red day. I had promised to babysit my kids cousin today, but I managed to haggle my way into getting the family to attend our workshop as a type of kindergarten, allowing me to host builders during the day.

Not the same presence as the last evening, but really good nevertheless. Also managed to get hold of the fair organizers and clear up all details surrounding the actual event where we will showcase our creations.

Second build evening

We had a second build evening today and while the fair is coming up quickly, we had great attendance today. There is much to do, but it’s great to see all the enthusiasm and skill going into this jam! : )

For my own part, the time consuming aspect of being a parent is really coming into play. Between helping others and watching my kid I really didn’t get that much done personally. But there are always the nights. ; )

Resources

Created the stem for an enemy agent and also managed to create an investment system as well as resources which can be picked up. The player can now resurrect subordinates by finding hearts (life chips) and coins as well as build weapons (just coins).

So lit!

It’s Easter holidays here in Sweden and while I spent a lot of time with family and friends (which was great fun!) I managed to get some solid progress into Danh-gbi as well. I cleaned the pixel collision engine, merged pixels with a light engine and added some parallax effects together with some sort of day and night cycle.

More pixels

Today I invited people to the first of a series of build evenings to support the other jammers in creating both software and hardware for this year’s RSM (local retro game fair) jam. Only one showed up, and some random person who apparently makes a thing out of attending as many tech related meetup as they can. Nevertheless, I got a lot of progress out of it.

By building on the pixel collision engine for my Megaman clone I managed to get som working player movement and autonomous agents into the game. I addition, it looks like a really skilled pixel artist is going to help me out. He works at a small studio called YCJY and, while I like making graphics myself, I like working with new people. Let’s see how he interprets my game concept.

Tiles and ideas

So I played the game Kingdom by Noio recently again and was reminded how much I liked that concept and wanted to make something in the same spirit as well. I though about what kind of game that would be, what I would make differently from Kingdom. Then I was reminded of my old Battle of Cheese project, and how that was heading in the direction of Kingdom as well. So I expanded on the Battle of Cheese idea and came up with the following:

There is a planet with a resurrection system that has been corrupted by warring factions. The corrupted system engulfs the planet like Jörmungander (from norse mythology) or the ouroboros. The players takes the roles of commandos of competing factions which try to retake the planet. The resurrection system is called Danh-Gbi after a life giving, African snake god.

The game is going to be a 2D platformer with RTS elements but it will use the y-axis more than Kingdom and have a sci-fi setting.