Hey everyone, I will be launching Hand Cannon: Janky Reality in late February/Early March. Currently, you can add the game to your wishlist here. For those that do not know what Hand Cannon: Janky Reality is, it is a 1-bit platformer, heavily inspired by Mega Man, features a Metroidvania NG+, and a level creator, which allows you to create your own levels. You can even create your own Metroidvania levels.
Currently, the game is set to release on PC (Steam and Itch.io), PS4, and Xbox One. I hope to release it on Switch eventually, but I may need to find a publisher if I cannot get a license from Nintendo.
Hello everyone. It has been a long time since I have posted anything to Newgrounds, but I have still been lurking around playing some of the latest games, watching some animations, and listening to the music. This post isn't here to say that I will be posting anything here anytime soon (but I have been working on music so who knows), but instead I am planning on releasing my first commercial game really soon. Because of my total lack of a work/life balance this project has taken me about 2 half years to complete rather than the 8 months to a year that I originally planned.
The name of the game is Hand Cannon Janky Reality and it is a homage to the classic Mega Man games, but features a few unique twists of its own such as physics engines, recoil movement, and a level maker. The game features a 1-bit pixel art style, 12 levels, 10 bosses, a crap ton of enemies, and 9 weapons. Currently I am planning on releasing it on PS4, Xbox one, PlayStation Vita, Steam, and on a little handheld named Play Date (https://play.date/). I am eyeing the Switch as well, but am still waiting on a response from Nintendo. I don't currently have a steam page or anything, but if you are interested you can follow me on twitter (https://twitter.com/Suicidal_Robot) or here since I will be doing another post once the steam page is live.
Below is a screenshot of the level maker. Not all of the art is final, so do expect some improvements. I am aiming for a Q2 release, and should hopefully have a trailer in a few short weeks that I can share with all of you.
I know I have been hyping this for a while, but the time has finally arrived we have released the trailer for the upcoming game "Eden Blue". The journey has been long, and the ride not as smooth as I'd hope, but it all has been worth it. Before I show the video I feel obligated to explain what Eden is for those that may have not been following my post.
What is Eden Blue?
Eden Blue is what @CartoonCoffee and I like to call a fighting-adventure game. We choose this name over action-adventure for one reason. Combat. The combat in Eden Blue is not like your typical action adventure game, where you just spam the attack button at a group of bad guys until they die, but at the same time it does not have the rigidness of a Ninja Gaiden. Instead, we choose to create a very loose combo system, that would give the player full control of their character, allowing them to react to any sudden changes in the battlefield. Now you may say "That sounds cool, but where are the fighting game elements"? At the moment I cannot get into too much detail, but I can say elements such as; Zoning, Wiring, Sweeps, Cross Ups, Punishes, Juggling, Directional Input, Attack Cancels, and Jump Cancels all make an appearance in this game, and that is just the start of it all. The combat system also features a custom physics engine, which takes each enemy types weight into account when it comes to juggling, pushback, and wall bouncing. This does not even take into account the maneuverability of the character in the game, but I feel like I have already talked your ear off and built up the hype, so instead I will let the video speak for itself.
How you can help
Now after watching that trailer you may say to yourself "Wow that game looks awesome I can't wait to play it and kick some ass." Well, you are going to need to slow down a little bit there, the game is still a ways off, and development is slow, because we both work our jobs and only develop Eden Blue in our spare time. Though, this is where we can help each other out. For only $20 you will get beta access to Eden Blue once we are ready to show it off to the world, and any future beta builds we will release before the final game is out. Now for those of you out there who don't have much money to spare, such as myself, can still contribute monetarily to the game, any amount helps. If you are really broke, there are a few other ways you can help. Like and share The Eden Blue Twitter Page, TheFacebook Page, The Instagram Page, The IndieDB Page, and most importantly The Eden Blue Website. This will all help out enormously. But that right there is only the start of it. Show off the Eden trailer to your friends, write a blog about it, and create forum topics about why you are so hyped for this game. If I see that kind of effort from the fans I may just give out a few beta access and copies of the game (but don't tell @CartoonCoffee). Last but not least, I just want to say that I love you guys to death, and I really want to give a huge thanks to @bomtoons and @darqtimmy whose updates kept me motivated and made me realize that I could do this, I just have to believe in myself. P.S. that is @sirundead in the trailer, one of the coolest dudes on the planet.
So I just graduated from Sacramento State yesterday, which means I will have a lot more of free time coming up. Hopefully I will get around to recording some of this music I have been putting off because of all of the homework and reading that was keeping me busy. I will try to get my Tron mixtape out before the end of June, but I won't make any promises. I have an unfinished game that is almost complete, which still needs some level design done to it. Not sure when it will get done, but hopefully I will find some time before the summer ends. Lastly Eden is still alive and well, so keep an eye on me and cartooncoffee for updates. Hopefully I will find the time to finish and upload a secret project that me and my sister has been working on as well.
So this year has been awesome, I start my final semester in College in the end of January. But I am getting ahead of myself. 2014 was the year I met CartoonCoffee and was introduced to his Eden series. Since then we have spawned a friendship/partnership that will hopefully continue well into the future. We linked up in May of this year and since then have been slowly plotting to take over the world through our game Eden, which is based off his cartoon. I participated in my second gamejam, but this was the first time I actually had an artist to work with. Things didn't go perfect; because flash can be a bitch sometimes, but in the end we were happy with the results of Pride and Punishment.
Now back to Eden. The Eden game has been a labor of love for the both of us. We pushed flash/starling to its limits early on, and soon learned that the program/framework was too unpredictable for us to use for a game of our scale, and what we were trying to accomplish. So after over 4 months of work I had to swallow my pride, and we moved over to Unity3D instead. Since then I have learned the ins and outs of Unity, and there is probably much more to learn in the future, but as of right now my knowledge is suitable for what we need. I have also seen CartoonCoffee grow as an artist, and all I can say is it is amazing to see the transition from where he used to be artistically to where he is now.
Now the question is where do we go from here. 2015 will bring in the Eden demo, which we will show off hopefully much more sooner than later, and will tell you how you can get your hands on it a few weeks before its release. From there everything else is more or less up in the air. I have until the end of January to work on Eden full time since I am out of school, and I can assure you I'm making some major headway. I have a few side game projects that I was working on before we started the Eden game, which will probably be released in the next few days. Eden will more than likely not see a full release in the upcoming year, but only time will tell where we are going to be at. I graduate in the spring, and depending on how successful Eden will be will more than likely determine my future in game development. If the game is successful, then I will more than likely continue on to other big projects like this and do this full time. If not then I will end up going to Law School, and if I ever find time in my life make much smaller games.
Musically, I am very uncertain about what 2015 has in store for me. I have a project in the works, but can't tell you if or when it will ever be completed. I have uploaded a few of my beats this year, not sure if that trend will continue or not, but if the response is positive enough I will be more than happy to upload a few more.
Other than that if you love the things that I make, or are looking forward to the Eden game spread the word about it. I will give you guys with a few screens of Eden to end the post along with a few side projects that will hopefully be released soon as well.
There has been quite a bit of time since my last update, and for good reason. We were having trouble with Flash and Starling loading ATF files consistently; sometimes it would not load a background right and crash the game. So we decided to move the game over to Unity, which has come with its own struggles. I already knew C# from my time playing around with XNA while I was in high school, so I thought things were going to be pretty easy. Instead it has been anything but easy. I had never used a 3D game engine before, so I had to get used to meters and calculating pixels as .01 of a meter, which in itself wasn't that bad. I had more trouble the collision system, and the physics engine than anything else. In Unity you cannot use bounding box collision without using their physics engine, so I had to learn to use ray casting instead to determine collision, which took longer than I wanted it to. After about 2 weeks of fighting with Unity I figured things out, and I am far from a Unity expert, but I have figured out quite a bit of things and continue to get better and faster at solving problems.
There is good news, and quite a bit of it. We are back to about the same point in development where we were before in less than a month time. This was mostly because I already had things working in flash, so instead of creating everything from the ground up it was more or less moving those things over, and changing things here and there. The combat system is mostly up and running again, I have yet to port over my AI system, but honestly I'm thinking about restarting it all over again and take a different approach on it. CartoonCoffee and I have submitted the game to the Indie Mega Booth for PAX East, so hopefully we get in and some of you guys can come and see us, check out the game, hang out, etc. In Unity the platforming feels as good as ever, framerate is 3-4 times faster than flash at the moment, and it even runs on my little brothers crappy laptop from 2007 at a full 60 FPS. So it looks like everyone with a computer from the last 7 or 8 years should be able to play the game. We are going to try our best to keep the system specs low so everyone is able to play at 60 FPS, but I won't make any promises.
I would like to give you guys a date of the demo release, but as of right now its really up in the air. Combat needs some major readjustments, physics needs a few more tweaks, AI needs to get redone, some art still needs to be drawn, so it may still be quite a ways off. Instead I shall leave you guys with a few screenshots of the current build, hopefully you will get a little hyped for the game.
I feel obliged to update everyone on the status of the Eden game me and CartoonCoffee are working on. I had to move to a new apartment and school has started all over again so development has been a little slow, but I have got a lot of major backend stuff out of the way. Calvin can now do a few cool tricks such as jumping off walls, grabbing onto ledges, etc. The real challenge for me has been a bunch of backend stuff that most people probably wouldn’t care about, such as loading ATF textures dynamically, creating a system that keeps track of what is currently in memory and what isn’t, and creating a system that can accurately keep track of your combo, even if your game will not be running at a steady 60 FPS. So far this project has been a real learning experience for me, and I am sure that it will continue that way well into next year. We have a date of when we want the game to be released, but with the way how game development works you can never be too sure, and with soooooo much work ahead of us I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up just to let them down. Below is a screenshot that I took its nothing too much, but I think some of you may like to see where we are at, at the moment.
Also for anyone who is expecting music from me, fear not. I now have my own setup in my apartment, and lyrics that are ready to be laid down. I just have to get a few hours of free time between school and Eden to release a few songs. I want to finish my mixtape, but I am unsure if I will find the time between now and December for that, but only time will tell. Anyways I hope this screenshot sparked maybe a few people’s interest in the game, and if not go to CartoonCoffee’s page to look at some of the animations in action.
Damn, where to start. All I can say is that I'm happy I am done with Pride and Punishment. It was made in about only five and a half days, but it has been a fight for me. Me and CartoonCoffee have vowed to never do another Game Jam again, because of the stress and pressure, but it reassured us that we have the skills to make a game.
The day of the Game Jam, literally 2 hours before the deadline Flash bascially gave me a big "Fuck You" and deleted 90% of the assests CartoonCoffee drew. That had to be the most frustrating moment of my year, and made me want to say "fuck this game" and just walk away from the Game Jam. But I knew CartoonCoffee had worked too hard on all of the art to do it, so instead of finishing up the game into a semi-playable state, I was reimporting assets just so we could have a project to upload. After we had uploaded the game I felt like shit, because the game was so buggy, didn't have a boss fight, or even half of the features we had planned. So despite me being burnt out I started working on the game all over again that night. Throughout the week I have been making some incremental updates to the game, and now I can say that the game is basically done. The only thing that I need to do is add some sound effects, and CartoonCoffee is going to do a few graphical touchups.
I wish I could go into detail about my programming and the things I did, but thruthfully I don't feel like I did anything amazing programming wise, but instead just made a game that I find fun. I hope everyone else does too, if you don't know already you can find the game here http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/642573 .
CartoonCoffee and I are also working on another game, based off his Eden series. This game is not going to be an "Online Flash Game", but instead will be a downloadable title. The game uses the Starling Engine, and is going to run on Adobe Air, instead of Flash. We hope to have a demo out and about by the end of August, but nothing is 100% at the moment. If you want to see a few animations for the game then head over to http://cartooncoffee.tumblr.com/ .
Lastly if you are looking for new music from me there are a few songs that im currently holding onto that will probably be released in about a week or maybe sooner, depending on if i get the time to mix them and make them sound the way I want.
So apparently the link to my mixtape "When Hell Freezes Over" went down, because apparently Limelinx is no more. So instead here is a new download link to an old project that most fans of my music already have http://www.mediafire.com/download/pll46dqmhtaei4b/Glitch_-_When_Hell_Freezes_Over.zip . I am also extremely sorry for any expecting a follow up, new music, collaborations, or just anything from me recently. I have been extremely busy with college so far this semester alone have written over 120 pages worth of papers (thank god for double space). This summer should bring some new projects, and not everything will be music either.
Me and my brother Eliah the Gift will be working on a mixtape or maybe an album we are not sure yet, which will hopefully be out by the end of this summer. Also I currently have a few games in development that I work on in my spare time and hopefully one will be out by the end of June. I also have a super top secret special awesome project in the works that I am not ready to say what it is, because it may take some time. Also if anyone is going to grab BattleBlock Theater when it comes to PC let me know, because I would like someone to play with. My Steam ID is GlitchS2D.
I've missed you Newgrounds I have been away far too long. Also here is a pic of my last live performance with my brother Eliah the Gift (That is me in the Kenny shirt looking all creepy on the side). Also some game screenshots coming soon.
So it's been exactly a year since I released When Hell Freezes Over and I hoped everyone who downloaded it enjoyed it. If you never have then you can get it from here http://limelinx.com/files/f96f1c9513aa a9d8382aaff4f3c3c0c6 the mixtape was a long musical journey that I needed to take to find my voice as an artist. Also sometime around Christmas I will be releasing a new mixtape with a much more upbeat and techno sound and at the moment im in search of an artist to do the cover for me. So if anyone is interested hit me up so we can disscuss it.
I wish all of yall a Happy Halloween be safe and download the mixtape if you already haven't.
