Flan's Blog

Hello again everyone! I've been toying with all sorts of things this week to try and pin down my tool chain and lay some groundwork for future projects. I've used Google Blocks VR for modelling in loads of gamejams and to a very minor extent in Minimancer. I love it, it lets people without the know-how to use Max, Maya or Blender to start creating models very quickly. The trade off is the cap on complexity and simplistic style, but I actually quite enjoy those limitations. It reminds me of working on Minecraft icons and working details into that 16x16 sprite. The exported .obj models from Blocks are really easy to use but, while jamming on BeetHoven, I started to experiment with custom materials and shaders. While fun, the massive pitfall I happened into while doing this was that I had no way to automatically apply those materials, and so I ended up dragging and dropping a material onto every bit of every model. Oof. So last Thursday I put together a custom model importer, uv...

Last week was all about COVID shutdowns, getting set up in my home office and a helpful splash of writer's developer's block. So coming into this week, I really wanted to hit the ground running and make something.  The plan was to make a game in 12 hours, no matter how bad it looked or how terrible the gameplay was. I've done my fair share of gamejams, and crunched hard in a lot of them, but I've never made anything with quite such an aggressive time limit before. Nonetheless, I had some hex map code running by lunchtime and managed to get a very basic resource collecting game going with a handful of animations and effects for a bit of added flair. I've just been referring to it as "Game" so far, so I present to you; Game Episode 1: Beebles Begin The gameplay is as simple as placing minions in chains to get resources from the wild to the shop, or Business Bee. To help you move resources over long distances, you are given a bunch ...

Working one job Monday / Thursday and another Tuesday / Wednesday / Friday is quite an experience. It felt like every single day was the start of the week and hitting Friday was a bit of a surprise. Monday this week has been full of Coffee Chaos, including finalising a print for UK Games Expo coming up in May. That means shiny production quality cards and a lot less paper cutting for me. Look out for photos in the next couple of weeks! As for the rest of my newfound time, I'm going to be toying around with some more digital projects, with a mix of new ideas and old projects that haven't had much love for some time. So it seems fitting to start things off by blowing the dust off my old Steam game and giving it a post-mortem.  Minimancer has a lot of flaws, but I'm really excited for building on it and taking it somewhere different, so I'll be booting it up for the first time in several years and having a play through on stream. This will be on Thursday evening, ...

Whoa, I'm actually here. My role at Payload is now part-time and I'm in the Tentacle Zone (Payload's awesome co-working space in London) two days a week. Let's hit the ground running with an announcement! I've mentioned a card game previously, with the codename "Tea for Two", but I can now officially announce the main thing that I will be working on over the next few months; Coffee Chaos! Coffee Chaos has you and your friends   new-found enemies battle it out to collect ingredients and equipment to serve customers a wide variety of beverages. All the while, your friends arch-nemeses can play actions to steal your kit and trick your customers. For 3-8 players and focusing on 30 minute rapid-fire gameplay, it will be coming to Kickstarter at the end of May. Expect more frequent blog posts from now on, in a mix of Coffee Chaos news, Flan's Mod updates and jams (I'm currently doing the Tentacle Zone's Autistica Jam ) And if you want ...