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"Oh hey, just remembered I haven't gotten my article in for this month!"
looks at clock
8:30 PM, September 30
"Oh poop"
Hi. It's koola. You may know me from "wow this game is good" and "wow Toby Fox is amazing" and "something something music".
I made a game called OMNIFATE. Originally, I wanted to document the game's entire development on my blog page, but that did not end up happening, sadly.
I released OMNIFATE on September 9, 2023. If you want, you can pick it up right now from this link: https://store.steampowere...com/app/2521970/OMNIFATE/
I just wanted to spend some time going over its development history. Originally started as a companion project to a cancelled Game Builder Garage game, OMNIFATE's first playable version was a puzzle platformer. At the time, I was very proud of it. Looking back at it now, frankly that prototype sucked: it showed very little signs of polish (even though I had promised polish from it online), lack of originality (the first couple prototypes did not use original music), and you couldn't even die.
I worked on that version of the game for about two months, most of which was spent fine-tuning the physics. Honestly, at some point, I do want to make a platformer game, although I don't think that will happen any time soon.
That version of OMNIFATE was made in Unity. Unity is supposed to be an easy engine for newcomers to the field to learn, however nothing I wrote ever ended up working. I don't think that was the engine's fault; rather, I think it was the raw difficulty of C# for amateurs.
After about two months of development and the release of a demo publicly available prototype, I had felt like I was just growing overly tired of the project. I wanted to call it quits, and was thinking that this sort of thing is just not something a person of my age could come up with.
Fast forward a month. I was deciding what to do with the project. At the time, I had not fully realized what my favorite genre of video game is, but I had known that I had a fun time with many a turn-based RPG, so I decided to go with that. I could not find a single tutorial for RPGs in Unity, so I gave up.
In September 2021, I was considering my options. I could abandon the project directly, or start in a new engine. I looked into several options, but the one I ended up using was GameMaker Studio 2, which later officially changed its name to just GameMaker.
GameMaker seemed like a breath of fresh air. A unique workspace, tabs, no switching windows, and I could kind of understand the code! I followed a tutorial on top-down movement in GameMaker and understood about 81% of what was going on. The way the tutorial's code was structured meant that I had to have a walking animation.
I asked my friend Rain if she could draw a walking animation for the player character, and waited. And waited. And waited. She was procrastinating, but so was I. I could have just made the walking animation, but I wanted it to look nice.
I ended up waiting for seven months. I regret that timespan the most out of anything I regret throughout the development cycle, because at any point I could have just slapped up a prototype walking animation.
On one day in June 2022, I finally snapped out of it and made the dang walking animation. After that, things finally started to look up. Throughout the rest of that summer, every day I worked wholeheartedly on every aspect of the game, with the goal of releasing a demo by the end of it. I succeeded. I released a demo of OMNIFATE on GX.games on August 30, 2022, two days before my deadline. After that, I worked on the rest of the game, and completed it in March 2023.
After that, I released a trailer, and sat my butt down. I relaxed. I playtested the game multiple times, noticed several bugs, but patched only a few. (I caught the mind disease known as "procrastination" again.) I also got several other people to playtest, and promised them the bugs that they found would be fixed. (I didn't fix them.)
In one day in July, I finally saved up money for publishing on Steam. I got everything ready, and asked my parents for playtesting. They proceeded to lovingly and caringly point out every bug they saw, while I wrote them down all while crying and telling them that I couldn't fix the bugs. Looking back on it, I was being a brat to my loving and caring parents who only wanted to see a quality game released.
So I fixed every bug that was written down, and they found more. This process repeated twice before I finally felt that a genuine, final, quality product was ready. I submitted everything, and relaxed again. It was like a burden had been lifted off my shoulders.
That's where we are today. The game has released, and I'm currently working on another project, in a different genre. (*It's not the platformer.)
Thanks for reading this, and hopefully you enjoy the fruit of my (mostly) hard work.
I've been koola, and, why are some letters bolded? Those weren't bolded when I was writing the article...?
(I'm sorry for the lack of a quickly written article this month. I was mostly focusing on school and family.)
Omnifate has officially been my longest project.
The amount of hours I've poured into this project has almost outshined my amount of hours on YouTube on Switch.
All jokes aside, I've been hard at work on this for about 4 months now. Although the work on the RPG technically started a year ago, I hadn't really been actually doing anything 'til June 2022 due to various reasons.
Making a game isn't hard, honestly; the biggest problem that I've fixed has only took me 2 weeks.
What I find harder is telling the story you actually want to tell. I've had the idea for making a game since about 2020; it started taking shape in 2021; and now here we are with a demo of the game.
When I've watched interviews with game developers, the number one thing I hear is to keep it small. It is incredibly hard to control your excitement about such a project, so you'll often get carried away doing things related to the game, but not working on the actual game.
OMNIFATE has been a big passion project. I'm not really intending to profit off of it. My goal here is to create a game that I would want to play. I want to see more Earthbound-style games, so I'm making one. If anybody disagrees, that's fine.
So far, development has had its hurdles, but I'm really liking how it's coming along.
Composing the music for OMNIFATE has been really fun, too. In my head, before July 2021, I thought that if anything were to be completed and music was to be done, I would have music commissioned by someone like C418. But since I composed Wurly, I've been composing my own music and had a better appreciation of video game soundtracks. I've been told by a lot of people that my music is really well done. (Shameless plug but check out my music on Spotify or wherever you stream your music.)
I've been koola, and I know. I made this article way too late.
(Number of bugs: 348,973 and counting...)
So I was lingering around RFGeneration not really doing anything, and I realized that I had not shared anything about Omnifate with RFGeneration since August. A lot has happened since then.
Let's start with some of the more influential stuff. I switched to making Omnifate an RPG, as I noticed that most of the story elements I wanted to have would fit better in one. I've been composing music as I come up with the story, and just overall composing for fun sometimes.
I have acquired the services of an artist. Her pen name is Raini, so that's what I'll call her for the rest of this. Raini is very helpful for Omnifate and makes anything I draw look 10x better. She draws in this anime art style that just oozes joy out of me when I see it. Seriously, I hope she pursues this as more of a career.
Next, I'm working on getting a demo with at least the first bit of the game in it in the summer months.
Coming up with a good story is a really hard thing to do. I don't want to plagiarize, but I also don't want to include no standard RPG tropes, so I've just been working out the story in my head as I go.
Overall, development is coming along better.
I've been koola, and Omnifate is coming as soon as I can finish it. Please stay tuned.
(I really have to fight procrastination.)
It's been a while since my P5R article, so I felt like I should give a bit of an update. I'm making my own game!!! It's being made in Unity using C#, and, while I do not enjoy developing it, I do enjoy the satisfaction I get from completing a feature. I've started a group to help me make it, namely Lekooliatris Games, however, I make the game for the most part. One member helps with debugging my code, which is very nice. I've even made some music for it! You can listen to it on Spotify and YouTube, in a week from when this is being posted, (will update when it goes live), and...
...Well. I got a bit too excited there, didn't I? Let's rewind a bit. This all started upon the reveal of Game Builder Garage, (which I'm going to make an article about sometime) which kind of got me excited to make a game in it. I started thinking, "How would I go about this without some sort of group?" and that's when I got to work on setting stuff up for Lekooliatris Games. I came up with the name for the group randomly in my head, funnily enough. After everything was said and done, I wondered, "What's this sort of thing without any games?" So I started it. Not in Game Builder Garage, but in Unity.
I've added and added to that project, until I remade it with less hardcoding and better code.
So, "what is this? How do I get it? When is this release date? Tell me the name of the game already!"
Well, I'll answer those questions individually.
"what is this?" It is a 2D, pixel-art, indie, New Super Mario Bros - style platformer.
"How do I get it?" It's not released yet, so you can't get it yet. However, you can download the PC and Android prototypes right now! https://omnifate.fandom.com/wiki/Prototypes
And finally, "Tell me the name of the game already!" Another thing I came up off of the top of my head, Omnifate.
*probably spoilers, I do not know yet, read at your own risk*
I plan to have a sort of multi-ending system, and at the end of the game someone reviews all of your actions and gives you your "Omnifate"; you also earn a fitting achievement for that ending.
(Yes, NieR already took that. I know.)
*you are good now*
This is going to take an extremely long time to come out, probably more than a couple years, but I will be releasing prototypes and alphas and betas for it.
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This is koola6's Blog.
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Welcome to my little side of the internet! This is where I post game reviews, video-game related things, and stuff about MY game, OMNIFATE. Expect a new article about every month; sometimes I post more than once in a month or take five-month long breaks.
(The schedule is a guideline.)
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