Tag: game development

QBob Progress Report #5

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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.

QBob Roswell Sound Design
Editing sounds in Adobe Audition

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.

QBob Progress Report #4

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As January comes to a close, 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:

QBob Remastered Development Build – Level 1 Ending

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

QBob Progress Report #3

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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.

QBob Progress Report #2

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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.

QBob UFO character animation

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.

QBob Progress Report #1

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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.

Haunted House: Remastered

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Followers of this site (ed. yeah like that’s a thing) will remember a few years ago I created a in-browser playable version of the Applesoft BASIC game Haunted House for this site. Over the past month or so I got it in my head to push my skills as a programmer and make a much more fully realized version of the game. Today I am releasing my new version of the game, Haunted House: Remastered! It’s a vast improvement on the original in almost every way possible. In other words, it’s actually fun to play.

While it’s nowhere near the level of sophistication of an Infocom game, I think it does some pretty impressive stuff (for my skill level as a programmer). It’s still a two word parser, but the vocabulary is increased. There are full-page help screens, triggered story events, a retro-styled monochrome monitor look, and a bunch of scary sound effects! Please take a few minutes and give the game a try. It’s not too long and I try to keep the puzzle reasonably fair.