Star Child Dev Log #1
Since this is the first time writing, you'll likely want to hear a bit about the studio behind the game, Pale Blue Studios. It's a small indie game studio from the U.S., and is headed by Jay Ingle. Jay does most development, game design, and pixel art by himself, and gets assistance for other things like music, promo art, marketing, and so on. Jay is mainly assisted by Janne Enberg, who has a long history in development and startups. He takes care of a lot of the practical work required like video editing, web development, project planning, version control, builds, store page management, and so on. Janne also assists with some design questions, as well as tougher development challenges as necessary. The music and sfx for Star Child are made by TantrumTech.
And also briefly about Star Child, the game we're working on. The really short version is it's a pixel-art sci-fi metroidvania. The slightly longer version is that we're trying to honor the classics of the genre, while adding our own creativity to the sauce. We want the game to feel fast and fluid, and have just the right level of challenge.
Latest update from Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:
We want Star Child to be a fun action game. When I look at other fun action games, one of the main things that stands out for me is projectile patterns. These projectile patterns need to be interesting, varied, and they need to provide the player with an opportunity to learn, react, and adapt to different situations. My skill at coding natural projectile pathing is minimal, but with that in mind, I set up a Projectile class, to provide base functionality for all projectiles.
We have one class for projectiles that I can control directly with code, such as projectiles that go straight and do not need to react to the physics of the world. In Godot, these projectiles are easily created with Area2D nodes. For more complex projectile movement, I use the RigidBody2D node, allowing Godot's built-in physics engine to do it's job, handling physics calculations for me.
I created a simple ceiling turret enemy to test my Projectile class, and after a bit of struggle, all is working just fine.
I also created a couple animated fireball projectiles (using the excellent PyxelEdit application), which are combined with other effects such as a glow, a fiery particle tail, and an explosion on contact, in Godot.
I now look forward to pretending like I am creating a bullet hell game, and making cool patterns of fireballs for you, the player, to avoid and overcome!
Latest update from Janne - the other guy:
Pale Blue Studios didn't have a lot of the basics in place for communicating with the world, so I've been trying to set up all the basics for that. First needed to set up the domain, then build a basic website for it, a press kit for the game, set up email hosting for the domain, and started collecting a list of industry contacts to send keys to when we are close to launching the game.
Jay already owned the domain, but it had nothing set up on it. I first migrated it to a domain registrar I was happy to work with, and set up name servers for it with Cloudflare due to their excellent service. I then built a simple website using SvelteKit and Pico CSS, and published it on GitHub Pages. Also set up automation so any updates we make to the content get automatically published as well. After configuring the DNS on Cloudflare to point to the GitHub Pages -hosted site, we now had palebluestudios.net up and running.
With the domain generally set up and working, I looked at the current landscape of email hosting services. Wanting a high quality service for a reasonable price that wouldn't make us waste time on manual processes with downloading invoices all the time etc., I ended up picking Zoho, signed up for it, and set us up the accounts and groups we need to operate, and started to update our listed email addresses.
I also took the chance to set up a custom domain handle on our Bluesky account to make it a bit easier to verify it's us, and with these set up I went though the process to ask the Bluesky "Games Industry Labeller" service to label us as a game studio. I also went ahead and found a bunch of relevant Bluesky starter kits for us to follow.
Lastly I started to set up some new marketing tools for us, a new account on imgur, as well as a list of game industry contacts. Spent several hours digging through lists of relevant people I already know and follow, wikipedia's list of video game magazines, various searches on Youtube and Bluesky to find the business contacts Youtubers, streamers, game journalists, podcasts, etc. have posted online. We'll want to send these people free keys to try out the game close to the release with the hope that they'll talk about it, make videos, blog posts, reviews, or articles about it and so far we're up to 67 contacts. I expect we'll want to get to somewhere around 1000+ before the launch due to the low success ratio of sending keys out en masse, I read somewhere that 2-3% is a pretty common result.
The domain registration costs us about $10/yr, each email account 0.90€/user/month. The other services set up here, Cloudflare, GitHub Pages, Bluesky, Imgur, and Google Sheets where we store the contact information are all free.
And also briefly about Star Child, the game we're working on. The really short version is it's a pixel-art sci-fi metroidvania. The slightly longer version is that we're trying to honor the classics of the genre, while adding our own creativity to the sauce. We want the game to feel fast and fluid, and have just the right level of challenge.
Latest update from Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:
We want Star Child to be a fun action game. When I look at other fun action games, one of the main things that stands out for me is projectile patterns. These projectile patterns need to be interesting, varied, and they need to provide the player with an opportunity to learn, react, and adapt to different situations. My skill at coding natural projectile pathing is minimal, but with that in mind, I set up a Projectile class, to provide base functionality for all projectiles.
We have one class for projectiles that I can control directly with code, such as projectiles that go straight and do not need to react to the physics of the world. In Godot, these projectiles are easily created with Area2D nodes. For more complex projectile movement, I use the RigidBody2D node, allowing Godot's built-in physics engine to do it's job, handling physics calculations for me.
I created a simple ceiling turret enemy to test my Projectile class, and after a bit of struggle, all is working just fine.
I also created a couple animated fireball projectiles (using the excellent PyxelEdit application), which are combined with other effects such as a glow, a fiery particle tail, and an explosion on contact, in Godot.
I now look forward to pretending like I am creating a bullet hell game, and making cool patterns of fireballs for you, the player, to avoid and overcome!
Latest update from Janne - the other guy:
Pale Blue Studios didn't have a lot of the basics in place for communicating with the world, so I've been trying to set up all the basics for that. First needed to set up the domain, then build a basic website for it, a press kit for the game, set up email hosting for the domain, and started collecting a list of industry contacts to send keys to when we are close to launching the game.
Jay already owned the domain, but it had nothing set up on it. I first migrated it to a domain registrar I was happy to work with, and set up name servers for it with Cloudflare due to their excellent service. I then built a simple website using SvelteKit and Pico CSS, and published it on GitHub Pages. Also set up automation so any updates we make to the content get automatically published as well. After configuring the DNS on Cloudflare to point to the GitHub Pages -hosted site, we now had palebluestudios.net up and running.
With the domain generally set up and working, I looked at the current landscape of email hosting services. Wanting a high quality service for a reasonable price that wouldn't make us waste time on manual processes with downloading invoices all the time etc., I ended up picking Zoho, signed up for it, and set us up the accounts and groups we need to operate, and started to update our listed email addresses.
I also took the chance to set up a custom domain handle on our Bluesky account to make it a bit easier to verify it's us, and with these set up I went though the process to ask the Bluesky "Games Industry Labeller" service to label us as a game studio. I also went ahead and found a bunch of relevant Bluesky starter kits for us to follow.
Lastly I started to set up some new marketing tools for us, a new account on imgur, as well as a list of game industry contacts. Spent several hours digging through lists of relevant people I already know and follow, wikipedia's list of video game magazines, various searches on Youtube and Bluesky to find the business contacts Youtubers, streamers, game journalists, podcasts, etc. have posted online. We'll want to send these people free keys to try out the game close to the release with the hope that they'll talk about it, make videos, blog posts, reviews, or articles about it and so far we're up to 67 contacts. I expect we'll want to get to somewhere around 1000+ before the launch due to the low success ratio of sending keys out en masse, I read somewhere that 2-3% is a pretty common result.
The domain registration costs us about $10/yr, each email account 0.90€/user/month. The other services set up here, Cloudflare, GitHub Pages, Bluesky, Imgur, and Google Sheets where we store the contact information are all free.