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Capcom is set to re-release one of the most influential video games of all time, not to mention an arcade cabinet that used to live in my house, but it wasn’t mine. Oh, and the new one might burn your house down. Here’s a look at Street Fighter II, past and present.
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It’s the weekend! A guest from the Next-Gen Nerds podcast stops by to talk gaming news, share ideas, and hear why Todd was nervous around animatronic robots way before it was cool.
A version of this article was also submitted to the go-to game industry shop talk site, Gamasutra.
If you’re not familiar with the tradition of postmortem write-ups in the game industry, it’s not a negative term. It’s the practice of writing about the design, development, and the launch of a game, including reflection on what went right, and what lessons you learned along the way. What follows is the official postmortem for my educational indie game, Letter Taps.Â
If it isn’t obvious from the gap between this post and the last one, many things are happening!
My indie educational game, Letter Taps is available in the Google Play and iOS App Store now! This is the product of my last six months and I can’t tell you how good it feels to have it up for download and receiving positive feedback. Beside some very kind reviews and personal messages, one endorsement in particular really made my day (and many days since).
This super cool new app for kids does simple things beautifully! Engaging-by a guy who grew up inspired by Clarissa! https://t.co/3S4xsViwnS
— Mitchell Kriegman (@mkfresh1) February 21, 2017
Yes. That’s Mitchell Kriegman of Clarissa Explains It All and Bear in the Big Blue House fame, and too many other accomplishments to list here. I wrote last year about all the hilarious homebrew PC games Clarissa made on her show in the 90s and Mitchell liked it enough to share it around. When I reached out about what I’d been up to since, he couldn’t have been more gracious.
Seriously, go support everything Mitchell Kriegman does.
As part of launching an educational indie game and product line, I searched high and low for opportunities to gain insight and feedback on what I was doing. I knew my game helped teach my son to count and recite the alphabet quickly, but I wanted to go further in the play testing department.
Luckily for me, certain schools here in the Greater St. Louis region have unprecedented levels of commitment to getting kids interested in and excited about technology, and software development specifically.
I was blown away when the Francis Howell school district invited me to be a guest speaker for students and parents just as I was preparing to release the game. My wife got to join me and grabbed some great photos. We had a blast! Sure enough, kids and teachers alike expressed enthusiasm about Letter Taps as a learning tool. I was sure to set up the app for optional bulk licensing for registered educational organizations in both app stores.
Great thanks to all those involved in those phenomenal two days at the Francis Howell school district. I will not forget it!
Finally, I put together some thoughts about launching a studio, carrying out a game development project, and launching a product line revolving around young kids over at Gamasutra. The post falls squarely within the “shop talk” category but it’s the kind of stuff I love reading from other studio heads. I hope it’s of use–or at least some entertainment–to other newcomers working their way into the game. Please feel free to comment or even share it around if you find it useful!
More soon! CodeWritePlay is still designated as “home” for keeping up with my appearances and work around the web. Hoping to do some more development blogging in the very near future as things start hopping again.
Drop me a line and check out Letter Taps!
If you happen to follow me on Twitter, you may have caught me sprucing up my “developer art” during a coding break, thrilled with myself for very quickly improving the backdrop of my card game prototype. If not, here was the tweet:
I combined a couple of incredibly lame tricks to get this background and I could not be happier. #indieGameDev pic.twitter.com/11Yj1yJQle
— Todd Mitchell (@mechatodzilla) July 7, 2016
Now, clearly this is not game-changing artwork–though I like the Contra level 1 thing it has going on–but the speed with which I created something appropriate was a huge win. I thought I would share a couple of tricks for anyone interested. You may or may not consider this technique production-quality, but it may be a lifesaver during your next game jam weekend.
For demonstration purposes, let’s say I need to come up with three materials to use, yesterday. I’m going to quickly create ground, water, and rock textures that won’t look out of place in a retro-style 2D game. To follow along as closely as possible, you will need just about any version of GIMP.
Quick note: I will not go into TONS of detail about the individual steps. These are all pretty routine tasks, and if you’re unfamiliar with them, they’ll be easy to look up.
Note: There are good tutorials out there for adding patterns to GIMP if you need more to work with.
Don’t worry if you’re not quite loving the look yet, we haven’t yet applied the dirtiest shortcut of all…
You’re done!
There are any number of tweaks you can make to this recipe, including gradients on the base color layer, scaling up the pattern layer for an even more pronounced retro/pixelated look, etc.
Here are my other two patterns and their ingredients:
Pattern: Leopard
Pattern Layer Mode: Burn
Opacity: 20%
Pixellization: Around 4 Height/Width
Other Tweaks: Pattern scaled up to 250% height/width
Pattern:Â Burlwood (Whatever that is)
Pattern Layer Mode:Â Difference
Opacity: 50%
Pixellization:Â Up around 10 Height/Width
Other Tweaks: Pattern scaled way up, saturation reduced, contrast increased
Now go make some textures, and let me know if this kind of post helps!