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After almost eleven months of hard work, today is the day we are releasing QBob: Remastered to the world!

The last bit of content in the game was getting John in the “booth” to record new dialog for the final boss. There are a dozen or so new insult, taunts, and mad ramblings to which QBob will be subjected.

Most of the past month or so has been spent building up our Steam Store presence with tons of graphical assets, creating a few trailer videos, undergoing lots of Valve content reviews, and porting the game to other platforms. Much of the hardest work her on this final stretch has been building the game for MacOS and Ubuntu. Craig did all of the work getting the MacOS game working. Apple makes it very difficult to create anything (despite what hipster Web devs may say). I handled the Ubuntu port using a virtual machine and it was easy-peasy. In theory, that build should run natively on Steam Deck, but I have no way to test it.

Finally, I created a thirty page manual for the game. I would like to have a few of these printed up to distribute, but that’s going to be kind of expensive.

So now, without further ado, here are the links to everything QBob: Remastered that is being released today!

Read the previous Devlog post.

After having finished the bulk of the game (see the last QBob report), I have been spending the last month or so getting the game ready for distribution on Steam. And, as of today, I can finally announce that the game has its very own live Steam page!

Before I dig into the details, I’d just like to say for the first time (and definitely not the last): please go to the QBob: Remastered Steam page and add it to your Steam wishlist. Wishlists play a big role in getting new games noticed and, even if you never buy the game, adding it to your wishlist will be a great help.

As of this writing, it’s very much a work in progress. But you can’t imagine the amount of effort it took to just get this far. I couldn’t have done it without Craig, who helped with gobs of corporate paperwork. The other bit that took a bunch of effort was generating the dozen or so new art assets for every possible store location the game banner can appear in.

One of the biggest new features that I have added to the game are achievements. There are twenty-two total and they range from super easy (RTFM, flip through the entire manual) to well-nigh impossible (1cc the game on hard difficulty). Each achievement has a custom icon and they have been successfully linked to the Steamworks API.

There is also an in-game fallback if the build of the game isn’t linked to steam. You can’t believe how excited I was when I saw that little floater pop up in the lower right corner for the first time.

I also did a full gamepad support pass to allow the entire game, from menus to high score entry, to be accessible without the help of a keyboard or mouse. Now, I fully admit that playing the game with a gamepad is not ideal, but Steam really pushes gamepad support, especially for making titles compatible with Steamdeck.

There are still a couple of items to complete. I’d like to get cloud saves enabled, which, in theory, is just a matter of mirroring the GameMaker local storage folder to Steam. I also need to make a short game trailer video which is going to require me capturing a bunch of gameplay footage and editing something together. Then there’s the soundtrack and game manual PDF. Back to the grind.

A ton of work has gone in to QBob since my last report. There are only one or two little audio bits missing and maybe some tiny graphical tweaks. In the coming weeks I need to get this pre-alpha version out to some play testers to see if there are any bugs of major design flaws that I have missed. It’s really hard to get perspective on a project that you’ve been immersed in for half a year,

A huge amount of time in the last month has been devoted to playing the levels at all difficulties and trying to balance the game. This involved trying to beat every single level in one life just to make sure it’s possible. The last three levels are really hard to beat on the highest difficulty, but not impossible. That’s good. I’m sure some 14 year old speed-runner will have no problem, but my aging reflexes are worn thin after hours of attempts.

I thought I was done with game art, but I hadn’t realized how much background art was needed. When you play the game it’s hard to notice what’s going on behind the play grid, but I put a lot of thought into giving it a sort of narrative arc. It’s not exactly a story, but there is a progression from one area to the next.

The other big task has been creating all the sound effects for the game. I relied quite heavily on synthesizers and VST effects for these new sounds. One of my lingering complaints about the original QBob was our heavy reliance on mouth sounds. The new game has a much more robust soundscape to back it up.

Adobe Audition was also a big help in the process. Because of its tie-in with their video editing suite, I was able to use video clips within the program to perfectly match the effects with my animations. It’s easy to forget that Audition began its life as a rebranded version of Cool Edit Pro−my sound editing software of choice in the late 90s.

The final major undertaking was to re-record all of John’s voice over work for the final level. We were able to get all that we needed recorded in-person and I spent two days processing and lip-syncing the audio. The final result is pretty great and I am exciting to have people see (and hear) it. I even edited this short video documenting my lip-syncing process:

Watch to the end to see a few seconds of final game play!

Up next is probably the most difficult part of making this game: marketing, promoting, and getting it hooked up with the various online game platforms. I really want to incorporate Steam Achievements and such, but this is all completely new to me.

As January comes to a close and despite my previous concerns, I am pleased to report that most of the new character sprites are in place. The player character was by far the most challenging character to animate, and technically I am still not done. I still need animations for using the paint gun and throwing grenades (two elements from the original game that I was hesitant to bring in to the new version). I also spent a good deal of time honing the final boss and his level’s unique game-play. I have to say the final level is looking pretty good, but it’s still seems too easy for me. That may just be a result of me having had to play it hundreds of times whilst in development.

There are still many many background elements that need to be created and animated, but I’m getting close to the next phase. Here is a brief preview of where the game it at now:

I might be going a little overboard with the particle effects, but right now I think they look great.

It’s been a couple of months since my last update, but my remake of QBob is continuing apace. I am in the middle of the most time consuming part of the project which is reworking all the graphics and animations. Many of the sprites will be fairly straightforward vectorizations of the original bitmaps, but there are several that are getting a complete overhaul.

I have become disenchanted with characters that were originally created as 3-D models using Caligari Truespace. The biggest culprit was Probe. His plastic texture and simple form seemed so out-of-place. You can see my new version above. I am quite happy with it. Faking movement in three dimensions using Flash kinda sucks, but I’ve managed to get this sprite animated quite nicely.

As I write this I am in the middle of a bit of a procrastination rut as I need to get the basic animation rig set up for the player character. I’m about seventy percent there but drawing this character from every angle is tricky. Let’s just say the original sprites fudged it a bit. I need to do this though. Once the basics are in place I will very quickly be able to reuse the source files to create XBob and be done with all the main player and enemy sprites. My goal is to be there by early next month. View the next update.

My goal for the month of October has been to covert the original MIDI based music from QBob into a more sonically robust modern format. I made a passing attempt to do this in the early 2000s when I thought Amiga tracking programs were the future of music. Madtracker was my go to program for creating sample-based techno songs and I managed to convert the track “Erie” but that was about it.

Cut to 2024 and I have actually expanded beyond the scope of shareware music software. My current DAW of choice is FL Studio. It has all the features necessary to directly convert .MID files into FL Studio’s file format. It actually comes bundled with a fairly good sounding general MIDI patch too. I could have just imported the files, used that patch and called it a day. Instead I took the time to hand craft various synths and samples to better match what I imagined these songs sounded like back in 1996 when they squeaked out of my old Soundblaster 16/Waveblaster card.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I also made lo-fi Waveblaster versions of all the songs too for posterity. That said, the new versions are sounding great. I have more-or-less finished the music ahead of schedule. The only thing left is give them a final mastering pass which is always a challenge since my PC speakers aren’t very accurate.

What is now going to follow is probably the most time-consuming part of this whole project. The goal is to completely redo all the game sprites to make them have smoother animation, alpha channels, and a more consistent style.

My plan would have been to use Adobe Flash to do all the animations, but then Adobe killed Flash in 2016. What I didn’t realize is that Flash was rebranded as Adobe Animate and now has a more video production focus. I have been (re) learning the software and I feel like this will work nicely. If this wasn’t an option I would probably have to buy Toon Boom Studio or some other program I am completely unfamiliar with.

So far I have completed two character make-overs and the game is already looking more slick and colorful.

Continued in QBob Progress Report #3.

Since the last QBob post, I have spent the past three weeks or so going through all the MIDI files we used in the original QBob, importing them into FL Studio, and reworking them to use VSTs and all sorts of modern production effects. This process includes converting the MIDI files to use a Waveblaster soundfont—replicating what I would have heard back in 1996 when I wrote these songs. I got the soundfont from a user named deemster on a the Vogons DOS appreciation Web forum. The soundfont file, as detailed as it is, contains tons of errors and poorly cropped samples so I have been modifying it as I find issues. I’d post a link to it here, but all the links that were originally posted are dead.

After making sure I had a mostly accurate Waveblaster version, I moved on to “remastered” versions. In most cases this involves lots of sound design and plenty of new arrangements. The tracks now have a much more meatier sound and more variety. The original arrangements were very repetitive. In the decades since, I have learned that you have to keep inserting small variations in your EDM compositions or else the music risks becoming a Lowrey Organ backing beat. Any moron can paste together a dance song in GarageBand, and I’m not just any moron!

This week I finished the soundtrack and tonight I have moved on to completing the final big piece of the game mechanics: the final boss level. My first goal is to get the end boss’s basic look and feel mechanics down. The eye now follows the player based on his relative x position. I have also added in the boss’s verbal taunts. It’s going to be better than the original because, using Gamemaker sequences, I can better sync the mouth movements to the samples. Next I will tackle the final enemy on my list, the fireball. More to come.

If you have ever clicked around this here Web site you will know that I helped create a 90s shareware game called QBob. It was basically a project started by my friend John to help him learn C++ object oriented programming. I created the art, much of the music and he and our professional programmer buddy Craig (he actually got paid to do computers!) programed the game. For about half a decade we were HUGE in South America! I dutifully mailed out 3.5″ floppies of the game and we we rollin’ in the green!

In the subsequent years we tried a few other things and never released anything else. We all got jobs and our lives went on, but we still would get a few orders for QBob every now and again. They were enough that we have maintained MoonRock Software Inc. as a company, and occasionally will have “meetings” regarding finances and whatnot. As the lone board member who didn’t have a cool tech job, I would occasionally suggest that we do an updated version of QBob using some of the animation and music skillz I had acquired over the years. Nothing ever got rolling.

Fast forward a decade or two and I discovered Gamemaker Studio. Now, with the power of paid software, I too can be a nerd programmer guy! As an experiment I took it upon myself to recreate QBob in Gamemaker. Turns out, I just might have unleashed my inner nerd. Gamemaker is awesome and makes it possible for a hack like me to program a respectable arcade game.

So, the big news is that QBob: Remastered (title TBD) is in the works. If I had it together, I would have made this an ongoing developer’s log of the project. Instead, I’m here to tell you that I think I will be able to pull this off and John and Craig are along for the ride. At the moment, I have about 70% of the core game-play in place and working. The game is faster and even more fun to play. My goals are to update all the media assets and possibly introduce some new features (and get rid of some crap ones like the paint gun). At the moment I am reworking all the music. If the project fails I will, at a minimum, release the soundtrack on Bandcamp. Let me tell you, some of these new versions are freakin’ cool as hell.

Anyway, stay tuned. More updates to come!

Also: I’m just now discovering that many of my beloved em-dashes were converted into curly-apostrophes when I migrated off of drupal. This will require a post-by-post search of the database with some clever regex tokens.

Good. You’ve done the work and have that perfectly composed drawing that’s going to put you in all the art history books. Mr. Picasso, the Louvre-er-rah is on live four. The problem now becomes: how do you get that drawing on to your end-grain engraving block?

The simplest method is to trace your design to the block placing some transfer paper between the drawing and the block. The biggest drawback to this is that it is repetitive and time-consuming. Welcome to the world of printmaking! I also find that the transferred lines will eventually rub off if you don’t spray them with fixatif. This problem doubles if you are using any sort of slippery plastic engraving material like resingrave or corian. Transfer paper is usually best if you want to get a general layout of your design without too much detail, allowing the detail to emerge through the engraving process.

If you want a very accurate transfer of your drawing I have found that the best method is to use heat to transfer a LASER printed scan of your drawing.

Let’s take a moment to ruminate on fact that LASER is an acronym for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.” What this has to do with the such-named printers and this post in general is beyond my understanding. All I know is that I, like the grammar pro that I am, am going to all-caps LASER whenever I use it.

Many sources on the ‘net will advise you to use acetone to transfer toner-based images. This sorta works, but in my experience it has a 70% failure rate. The key to getting a good toner transfer is heat. The source of that heat is a Wall Lenk L16TT Transfer Tool. It’s like a soldering iron with a disc attached to the end.

Print out your drawing (or photocopy it) and attach it, face-down, to your block. You want to be able to peek at the surface as you work, but it should be secure enough that it doesn’t shift around as you work. Heat up your transfer tool and then meticulously apply heat to the back of the printout. I drew a grid on the back of mine so that I could keep track of the areas I had worked on. You can lift the paper and peek at the results as you move across the block. It will take time and a lot more heat than you think. I was always hesitant to use this method on resingrave because I feared melting the epoxy.

Once you’ve covered the entire surface with burnished heat, you can start peeling back the paper. It will adhere more than you want and this is where acetone comes in handy. Don’t just rip the paper off, dab some acetone on the trouble spots and slowly work the paper off. If you are too hasty, paper scraps will be glued to your block. You will find that large areas of black adhere the most. For that reason, you should probably edit out large black areas on your image scan before attempting to transfer.

If all has gone well, your drawing will now appear in reverse on your block. Note that the toner will have a slight, raised texture. You can wash off the excess before printing with an acetone dampened swab if you want. Don’t let too much liquid get on the wood. You don’t want to raise the grain.

So here’s a quick video I made documenting the process:

Remember, the best wood engravings aren’t just mechanical reproductions of drawings. Let your tools and cutting guide the final appearance of your print. Get hip kids! Formschneider (cutting around a completed line drawing) is for losers and 16th century renaissance masters only!

If you have any questions, leave a comment and I will try to answer the best I can.

It’s been quite a while since I have engraved in proper end-grain wood blocks. Up until now I have been very happy using resingrave but, alas, that material is not being manufactured anymore. I’ve spent the past year or so trying to find a suitable alternative. Corian countertop material allows for very fine lines but is chalky and gross to cut into. Boxwood or lemonwood would be great, but they are not available here in the good old U.S.A. and can get very expensive to have them imported from England. I even started to consider making my own maple blocks but I fear table saws and really wouldn’t know what I was doing. Then, a few months ago, I found out that there has been a block maker right here in the Midwest for years. So, here we are, with a fresh stack of large end-grain maple blocks ready to go. I have a couple of ideas and will hopefully have something to show in a month or so. Stay tuned.

I just made a pretty significant update to the site’s main navigation. Finally, I am using a more mobile-friendly menu system in which the various depths slide left and right as you drill down. This article about WordPress menu walkers was extremely helpful in getting all this to work correctly.

I probably should add a bunch of accessibility attributes, but that is a bit much for now. I’m just shocked the thing works.