Star Child News

Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:

Allowing the player to rebind controls, using the Godot engine, is complicated and difficult. The basics aren't too bad, but when you get into the details, things get very complex, very quickly. Input events and actions are data structures in Godot, and they are difficult to understand, work with, and debug.

I spent most of this week staring at my controls rebinding code, pondering, considering, what EXACTLY do I want to do with this current code? It almost works perfectly, but it is abysmal to debug. I could take some time to restructure it into a less-confusing mess. I have some good ideas.

In between sessions of looking at dumb UI code, I updated the graphics and effects on some of my environmental mechanics. The new tech style is different from our alien planet organic style, which can make these important objects stand out from the alien environment.









Janne - the other guy:

Jay took a bit of time to finally show me how to use our level template scenes to create new test levels, so I had a bit of fun playing around with them, experimenting with how it all works, and doing some testing. Found a few more things we might want to fix due to this testing.

Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:

This week I made teleporters. Two of them, working as a pair. I got them working pretty quick. They are fully functional, but limited in a few ways: there has to be exactly two of them, and they each have to be designated as the initial starting or destination teleporter. Since they share a script, and signals, more code would be needed if I wanted them to behave in any other way.

Then I added the visual effects, a red/green particle effect on the teleporter itself: green indicating which teleporter is active, and red your destination. And I think the player shrinking/growing when teleporting works well to sell the effect.

Creating levels with these teleporters is fun, and when mixing together all of the other mechanics and gimmicks I have already, there is no end to the flow of ideas.




Janne - the other guy:

Unfortunately the system we'd been using previously for keeping track of the progress is being shut down, and I've been investigating what options are best for us. I found that Mattermost supports boards, and they seem to be ok - not great, but good enough for what we need. Since I already have a Mattermost server running, I thought it would be a fine thing to start using and I've been migrating our content over.

Also I did some play testing and fixed a bunch of small issues I found with our controls, loading settings, file structure, sound buses, and gathered a list of issues I found overall with the gameplay.

Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:

This week I set out to make a bunch of mini-challenges, using my existing enemies and environmental hazards. These little challenges will mostly be hidden in the numerous secret areas throughout the game. I made 10 of these this week, here are a couple of them!



Creating this spikey room made me want to create more levels for my first game (Toleo). Toleo has lots of spikes, and precise platforming. But for Star Child, we are making a less difficult game, so the challenge here is much lower than Toleo. Spikes, as the only challenge in a room, will be very minimal, but keep your eyes open for just a little Toleo-style spikey-hell in Star Child!



I made some rooms with only one enemy type, and some rooms with every combination of enemy and hazard I currently have. I think these crawlers are cute.

Steam has some file size limits on embeds, click on the images for higher quality screen recordings.

Here's the latest updates in the development of Star Child


Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:

Lately I've been playing with fireballs again, prototyping the mini challenges I'm trying to build into the game.

For this I used the projectile classes and scenes I set up previously, wrote some projectile spawning logic, and coded some signals so the nodes can tell the turret when they die.

Still working on getting the projectiles pointing the right way, Godot's look_at() doesn't seem to work quite as I expected for this and I might need to write my own logic instead.

Looking forward to creating some cool graphics for this little encounter. Would appreciate any suggestions you might have on visual design. I'm planning on reusing a smaller and simpler version in other parts of the levels.




Janne - the other guy:

I've been working mostly on the little background things, continued setting up accounts, preparing materials, collecting lists of contacts, and planning how we'll find a significant number of relevant contacts before the launch.

Most of my weeks are fairly light on the different types of work, so the updates for my part are going to be typically shorter than on the first one 🙂

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.