you guys see that new philip game?
i struggled at first because the puzzles in the jam version were very, very bad. i made a level editor with some more puzzle elements and still couldnt come up with good levels
one day i had the realization that it doesnt need to be a puzzle game! i made guns and enemies and whoops those were all puzzle elements. i made a puzzle game.
oh well, i think most of the levels are alright and there are a few pretty good ones
also it took way longer to come out than it shouldve! making it was very on and off, plus over a month waiting for the music
but its out now, and it feels good. i learned a lot and christ im glad to be able to move on.
that games backend is a rats nest, it needed refactored so badly but i didnt want to do it. sue me! noone knows who i am nothing i do right now has any stakes!
screenshot i found of the old level editor:
what i had made at this point were buttons you stand on and are active til you step off, switches you stand over and click to toggle, and wall flippers that change the walls polarity
if i kept at it for a while i think i couldve made an alright game but it wouldve had way less soul than what it ended as. trapper enemy carried the game
there was a weird transitional period (liminal!!!! philipgame is liminal!!!!) where i had no idea what i was gonna do and i didnt think the game would be anything
it was after i tried to ditch puzzle game and gave philip a gun and knife. i was feeling pretty good about it but the movement was too janky and camera was too stiff
i fixed both of those and it made the game feel a million times better, but what i imagined was running around huge spaces killing things and staying in motion. i never got that feeling down good
the trapper was the turning point that brought me back to puzzle game, after him i designed a moving enemy but never actually made it. heres concept art:
even after making a bunch of levels the game didnt feel like a game. i figured i didnt have enough levels and id spend my time making something else because i was bored of making levels
something else ended up being the wesley fight and that made the game feel like a game. wow!
when i was coming up with it i thought itd be fun for the player to have unlimited guns to pump lead into something, and wesley had been floating around in my head since the first post jam version
at first it had everything contained within 1 level and youd just do a loop around shooting turrets before drilling into his room. old level i made:
it was sorta like a stealthy thing? by stealthy i mean you hide between flippable walls and shoot turrets. which was lame.
also it didnt all fit on one non fullscreen screen which bugged me
i squished the area down and replaced the guns with something that could soak more damage, there were originally a bunch of different stuff but it all turned into vents at the end
heres something juicy: cut content!
there isnt much
lots of things used to turn black and white in the void but it was inconsistent and at the last minute i decided it all looked better if nothing changed
i wanted more story type stuff throughout but couldnt figure out a good way to implement it that wasnt cutscenes, and i reckon itd be frustrating to play 3 levels and be stopped for 30 seconds
originally philip would be chasing down this evil monkey bank robber (prinmate) and when he had him cornered wesley would appear and shoot prinmate to take the bounty for himself, then him and philip would start fighting. prinmate was cut to simplify things
if i had more levels i probably would have stuck more wesley like sequences throughout the game, but that isnt really cut content since no content was made in the first place
i shouldve expected this, but i released it to no established audience and it got no traction
incredibly disheartening, but not world ending. if i can work up the guts ill post whatever i work on to twitter as i make it to try to get eyes on my name
some extra, i sent these to saltoons to do the drawrings:
thats all i have about philipgame
i had a good time working on it and got useful experience. expect whatever comes next to be a cleaner experience
i struggled at first because the puzzles in the jam version were very, very bad. i made a level editor with some more puzzle elements and still couldnt come up with good levels
one day i had the realization that it doesnt need to be a puzzle game! i made guns and enemies and whoops those were all puzzle elements. i made a puzzle game.
oh well, i think most of the levels are alright and there are a few pretty good ones
also it took way longer to come out than it shouldve! making it was very on and off, plus over a month waiting for the music
but its out now, and it feels good. i learned a lot and christ im glad to be able to move on.
that games backend is a rats nest, it needed refactored so badly but i didnt want to do it. sue me! noone knows who i am nothing i do right now has any stakes!
screenshot i found of the old level editor:
what i had made at this point were buttons you stand on and are active til you step off, switches you stand over and click to toggle, and wall flippers that change the walls polarity
if i kept at it for a while i think i couldve made an alright game but it wouldve had way less soul than what it ended as. trapper enemy carried the game
there was a weird transitional period (liminal!!!! philipgame is liminal!!!!) where i had no idea what i was gonna do and i didnt think the game would be anything
it was after i tried to ditch puzzle game and gave philip a gun and knife. i was feeling pretty good about it but the movement was too janky and camera was too stiff
i fixed both of those and it made the game feel a million times better, but what i imagined was running around huge spaces killing things and staying in motion. i never got that feeling down good
the trapper was the turning point that brought me back to puzzle game, after him i designed a moving enemy but never actually made it. heres concept art:
even after making a bunch of levels the game didnt feel like a game. i figured i didnt have enough levels and id spend my time making something else because i was bored of making levels
something else ended up being the wesley fight and that made the game feel like a game. wow!
when i was coming up with it i thought itd be fun for the player to have unlimited guns to pump lead into something, and wesley had been floating around in my head since the first post jam version
at first it had everything contained within 1 level and youd just do a loop around shooting turrets before drilling into his room. old level i made:
it was sorta like a stealthy thing? by stealthy i mean you hide between flippable walls and shoot turrets. which was lame.
also it didnt all fit on one non fullscreen screen which bugged me
i squished the area down and replaced the guns with something that could soak more damage, there were originally a bunch of different stuff but it all turned into vents at the end
heres something juicy: cut content!
there isnt much
lots of things used to turn black and white in the void but it was inconsistent and at the last minute i decided it all looked better if nothing changed
i wanted more story type stuff throughout but couldnt figure out a good way to implement it that wasnt cutscenes, and i reckon itd be frustrating to play 3 levels and be stopped for 30 seconds
originally philip would be chasing down this evil monkey bank robber (prinmate) and when he had him cornered wesley would appear and shoot prinmate to take the bounty for himself, then him and philip would start fighting. prinmate was cut to simplify things
if i had more levels i probably would have stuck more wesley like sequences throughout the game, but that isnt really cut content since no content was made in the first place
i shouldve expected this, but i released it to no established audience and it got no traction
incredibly disheartening, but not world ending. if i can work up the guts ill post whatever i work on to twitter as i make it to try to get eyes on my name
some extra, i sent these to saltoons to do the drawrings:
thats all i have about philipgame
i had a good time working on it and got useful experience. expect whatever comes next to be a cleaner experience
the internet archive has this funny little offshoot where you can search through old gifs from old geocities cites
its fun, check it out at gifcities.org
thats pretty cool itself, ive used some of those gifs. but if you click on any of the gifs you can go to the archive of where they come from!
maybe theres a better way to crawl around geocities archives, but this is the only way ive found. its pretty fun
its fun, check it out at gifcities.org
thats pretty cool itself, ive used some of those gifs. but if you click on any of the gifs you can go to the archive of where they come from!
maybe theres a better way to crawl around geocities archives, but this is the only way ive found. its pretty fun
whaaaats the deaaaaaal with names?
like, why is it so hard to come up with a catchy, brief, and descriptive title for something?
[wait for applause]
i like making abstract names for nothing in particular, but i hate naming specific things
for example, all of my gmod addons are named after what it is directly. otherwise no one would click on them
my username (freefiles virus, also antkeeper sorta) is just a thing that came to me one day and i thought was funny
for my games i want to try naming them somewhere in the middle of that range,
something thats weird and sticks with you but also describes the game. and how did i do with my two released games?
philip starwalker. thats nothing related to the game, thats just the main characters name
i think its reasonable because there is no pre existing name for the genre/mechanic used in it
(if you dont know what im talking about go play it, its at the bottom of the games tab and you can run it on your browser for free!)
amateur juggling act is slightly better. better than juggling simulator
the name i had bouncing around in my head during development was "open stage act 4" but then no one would know it had anything to do with juggling
neither of them i really think are great though. and the gmod addon names are so boring.
is it better to just name them ridiculous things like my username? i dunno.
what, did you expect a moral or something?
EDIT FROM THE FUTURE! full philip games out. and its got a way better name
dropped starwalker, it was nabbed from deltarune and i didnt want people to make that association, so i was left with philip: tagline
to the wall was the most fitting common phrase, twisted it into through the wall because thats what most good taglines do
later, showing it off to my friend samuel, he said something like "i see what you did there". i asked what he meant. "philip, like flip"
philip was chosen at complete random. what are the odds it all worked out like that?
like, why is it so hard to come up with a catchy, brief, and descriptive title for something?
[wait for applause]
i like making abstract names for nothing in particular, but i hate naming specific things
for example, all of my gmod addons are named after what it is directly. otherwise no one would click on them
my username (freefiles virus, also antkeeper sorta) is just a thing that came to me one day and i thought was funny
for my games i want to try naming them somewhere in the middle of that range,
something thats weird and sticks with you but also describes the game. and how did i do with my two released games?
philip starwalker. thats nothing related to the game, thats just the main characters name
i think its reasonable because there is no pre existing name for the genre/mechanic used in it
(if you dont know what im talking about go play it, its at the bottom of the games tab and you can run it on your browser for free!)
amateur juggling act is slightly better. better than juggling simulator
the name i had bouncing around in my head during development was "open stage act 4" but then no one would know it had anything to do with juggling
neither of them i really think are great though. and the gmod addon names are so boring.
is it better to just name them ridiculous things like my username? i dunno.
what, did you expect a moral or something?
EDIT FROM THE FUTURE! full philip games out. and its got a way better name
dropped starwalker, it was nabbed from deltarune and i didnt want people to make that association, so i was left with philip: tagline
to the wall was the most fitting common phrase, twisted it into through the wall because thats what most good taglines do
later, showing it off to my friend samuel, he said something like "i see what you did there". i asked what he meant. "philip, like flip"
philip was chosen at complete random. what are the odds it all worked out like that?