Hoping to have a stark little hub room with a couple of portals you can enter to fight some demons by the end of this month. The “Bachelor Trip” deadline looms, and I’ve got most of the combat for my prototype squared away. Six enemy types are ready (if you count a turret), each with different behaviors/speed per difficulty. And they can handle stairs and pits now!

I redid a lot of my ugly, early scripts and converted all my AI over to behavior trees (which are super flexible, definitely worth taking the time to learn). Still need to get some basic menu flow up and running: Title Screen, Hub World, Mission Accept, that kind of stuff.

Support This Insane Endeavor

Adam is making a game with visual scripting! Follow @oneadamleft on Twitter, sign up for our mailing list, and check this feed to see what happens next. I won’t beg you for free money, but buying any of our games or game soundtracks gives me more time to work on this.

I have almost five enemy types working now, and have spent the last few days trying to design a smarter ranged attacker. I’d like the game to be top down, but not flat, so they need to be able to figure out pits and stairs. I made great progress on an enemy that could chase me around a flat level without getting stuck on walls or corners, but they went nuts when they saw stairs for the first time. Just went up and down them over and over. Close to cracking this now, though.

Of course, I could always just make a flat game with no stairs, but I like the challenge of trying this the hard way… For the time being.

And that’s the phase I’m in: make as many enemies as possible, so later I can just build some levels and mix them into interesting encounters. I figure 8-10 enemy types is a decent variety for the size of game I’m shooting for.

I’m going on a bachelor party road trip at the end of the month, and hoping to have some kind of a highscore level ready with a PS4 controller to get some early feedback.

Support This Insane Endeavor

Adam is making a game with visual scripting! Follow @oneadamleft on Twitter, sign up for our mailing list, and check this feed to see what happens next. I won’t beg you for free money, but buying any of our games or game soundtracks gives me more time to work on this.

So Alex is happy at his new full time gig, and he lets me pick his brain every so often. In one such brain-picking session, I asked him whether it was feasible to make an entire game in Unreal’s visual scripting system, Blueprints. He said yes, then he probably qualified it with some important information, but my mind started wandering at yes.

Could I, with 9 years of game design and game art experience, but VERY little coding experience really ship a whole game all by my damn self? And even if I’m capable of it, do I actually have the determination and savings to finish what I’m starting? I think so?

I’ve been learning Blueprint full time with YouTube and books since November, and started working on a game in December. I’m accepting contract work where it pops up, but I work better when I’m focused, so I’m not really “hunting” very hard for it (here’s my portfolio if you’re interested).

I don’t really know where this will end, but I’m hoping to at least become a lot smarter, or at best be able to continue making games full time.

So What’s the Game?

It’s a dual-stick action RPG, a bit heavier on the action side than the RPG side, from one of the makers of Tilt to Live.

Tonally, I want the writing to be something along the lines of Adventure Time or Undertale, goofy at times, but not hollow. I wrote a whole scenario for it, decided that would take too long to make, so I came up with a shorter “Prologue” to start with. I’ve got a general timeline roughed out, and I’m trying to keep the art style impressionistic, so I can make more assets with the limited time I have.

Rather than crowdfunding and all the promises and pressure that entails, this’ll be a finished, low-price, 2-ish hour single player game that you can buy and play and enjoy. And if enough people buy it, maybe I can build the larger, original scenario.

So far I’ve got three bad guys and a hero, I’ve got controller support working, and I’ve got multiple difficulties with interesting differences in enemy speeds/attacks. Let’s see what happens.

Support This Insane Endeavor

Follow @oneadamleft on Twitter, sign up for our mailing list, and check this feed to see what happens next! Nobody knows! I won’t beg you for free money, but buying any of our games or game soundtracks gives me more time to work on this.

From the Desk of Alex Okafor

Hi OML fans!

Just wanted to start off this post with a huge thanks to our entire community of fans, players, and supporters! We wouldn’t have made it this far without you guys. It’s been a minute since our last update, and I wish this was more of an uplifting “bringing in the new year” post. Unfortunately, the last few years haven’t been the kindest to our studio, and to the indie game development scene at large. The combination of difficult market realities, and having burned the midnight oil for years on end is finally catching up with me (oh, to be young).

Going forward, OML is no longer a full-time endeavor for me. I’m currently happily in a new full-time position at another company.  When I think back on the years of development, the thing that sticks with me is the encouragement and excitement from our fans on what we were working on. You guys made it worth all the effort. I’m still in awe at the fan art, tools, community led tournaments, and support our fan base had shown over the years.

• So what does this mean for our online games? Our current game servers will continue to operate. If the situation changes with any of them, we’ll notify players on appropriate channels (this blog included).
• What does this mean for the Hex Gambit Switch port? It’s still in development, but at a much slower pace after hours. As such, I can’t really give an estimate on when it’ll be ready.

Again, I can’t emphasize enough how great these last 9+ years have been, and can’t thank you all you enough for that awesome opportunity.

What About Adam?

First of all, I’m grateful to Alex for taking me on this adventure in the first place, and I wish him the best.

We’d both like to offer a sincere apology to our Switch backers for all of the delays you guys have endured. After a rougher-than-expected Steam launch, we just found ourselves without any options to continue HG development full time. We over-promised, and we’re doing everything we can to make it right. Thank you all for your support and your patience.

While (as an artist) I can’t help Alex finish Hex Gambit any faster, I’m exploring my options for working on another game (don’t worry, there won’t be another Kickstarter) while taking on some contract work. If you’d like to see whatever might come next from me, make sure you subscribe to our mailing list and follow me on Twitter @oneadamleft. I have literally no idea what will happen!

If you’d like to contract me to help out with your project, I do all kinds of art with a specialty in UE4, and you can check out my portfolio right here.

Now available to stream on Bandcamp: the excellent Hex Gambit Soundtrack by Mike Reagan (of Outwitters fame)! This Kickstarter reward will be coming to our Deluxe Edition backers and higher early next week.

October 23rd would have been the fourth birthday of Tilt to Live: Gauntlet’s Revenge. This insanely difficult, red-headed step child of the Tilt to Live series was unfortunately discontinued when it stopped working on modern phone operating systems. Today I’m going to finally do something I’ve been meaning to do for the better part of a year: preserve the absolutely bonkers final level of the game, the Dot Bot Fortress, for posterity. I think I can count on two hands the number of people that were able to unlock this gauntlet and defeat the Dot King. We worked super hard to make a satisfying final boss for GR, and barely anyone got to play it! So here’s a video to show you what you missed.

Using tools that Alex would make for me, I (the artist) painstakingly crafted all of the obstacle variations and boss patterns for this gauntlet myself. I knew it all inside and out. But this level was so nuts, even I couldn’t earn the game’s toughest medal: finishing this in one try on hard. Hard mode in Gauntlet’s Revenge meant you couldn’t take a single hit, and the one try medal was for surviving the whole thing without using the checkpoints to respawn. I could do the three sections individually without taking damage, so I knew One Try was technically possible, but to my knowledge no one ever earned that medal. AND THEY NEVER WILL.

RIP Gauntlet’s Revenge. You were bananas.

Around the start of 2017, Alex and I set out to make Hex Gambit, the culmination of all of our post-Outwitters turn-based strategy experiments. Almost 2 years and a Kickstarter campaign later, what a beast this thing has become!

It’s got 2v2, 21 team combinations, a huge territory control game for the league, a single player mode with AI, trophies and ranks to earn for your profile, and it’s playable in four languages. And when the dust settles on today’s launch, we’ll be optimizing it for our first console release on the Nintendo Switch™! If you want a reminder email when the Switch version is ready, sign up right here.

Whether you’ve been an owner since Early Access or you’re just picking up your copy today, the inaugural season of the Apex Cup has begun! Come join a faction, meet some other players on discord, and leave your mark on the Summit in our most ambitious project yet.

Here’s a list of fixes in today’s Launch Update:

• Fixed bug with Flametraps causing selection of units to stop working after triggering it.
• Flametraps no longer trigger if a friendly unit is on top of their own flametrap.
• Flametraps no longer cause a crash when trying to surf through a flametrap.
• Fixed some localization errors.
• Fixed a few animation bugs with minion deaths on lower end hardware.
• Fixed several bugs in tutorials where players could get stuck.
• Replays and in-game UI handle crowd surfing animations better.
• Fixed UI and AI bug showing incorrect ability status.
• Fixed a few visual bugs involving AI doing a sequence of moves.
• Fixed bug with looping spawn audio.
• Fixed bug with looping blizzard audio.
• Added more SFX.
• All Captains now available in Blitz Royale only.
• Updated visual FX for Flamespaces and shout.
• Fixed tutorial animations stopping mid-dialogue.
• Update minion and captain ability in-game text to reflect latest balance changes.

We’ve got plenty of stuff we wish to add in the coming weeks, and as players pile into the Apex Cup we’ll be monitoring any issues on the hub or our discord.

We’re just 2 days away from PC launch of Hex Gambit, and we’re still working hard to squeeze in as many finishing touches and bug fixes as possible! Here’s a fresh batch of polish for you.

New

• New Apex Summit scenery and faction victory cinematics!
• New Blitz Royale Completion screen
• Updated Captain selection screen

Improved/Changed

• Added better support for offline mode
• There is now a soft cap of 30 games per account simultaneously
• Brutes can no longer toss characters into a crowdsurf.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug where hypnotizing a runner would damage them upon movement.
• Fixed a crashing bug with Motivator AI in Blitz Royale
• Fixed a bug with Runner’s Hard Surf not unlocking at correct VP on servers.
• Fixed ranking bug where the profile screen always showed ‘contender’
• Fixed a bug that allowed players to delay game timeouts indefinitely.
• Fixed an occasional crashing bug in the placement phase
• Fixed an AI bug where some Captains would attempt to target recently spawned units

We’re closing in on launch day, but we’re still not done improving the game! We’re trying to squeeze in as much polish as we can in the coming days, as well as get to the bugs and usability requests that have been lingering on our to-dos for far too long. Hex Gambit launches on Steam October 15th, so tell your friends and get ready for the first real season of Apex Cup! Be sure to drop by our Discord servers and network with other players.

New:

• Integrated the pillar tapping UI into your action bar. The in-game iconography is now a 3D icon that doesn’t obstruct your other action buttons.
• Pathfinding has been re-worked from the ground up. Resolves a lot of edge cases where runners and other units would take longer routes rather than favoring crowdsurfing.
• As a result of new pathfinding, movement highlights now show every space you can move to rather than just your range +1 crowd surf.

Improved:

• You can now deselect units by clicking anywhere (!)
• Updated Stadium Visuals

Fixed:

• Inspire Visualizations now correctly remove themselves in replays
• Fixed Match History not remembering dismissed games.
• Intimidate Visuals now disappear correctly if you’ve targeted multiple enemies.
• Doubletime passive ability now becomes active mid-turn for Brutes if you cross the required VP threshold

Alex and I emerge from our dev bunkers to stream a match in the latest build of Hex Gambit for PC, launching October 15th! Can Alex turn his losing streak around after months of intense coding?