Level Editor update, questions about early access, Kickstarter failed

As you may have heard (probably not because no one reads this anyways) my Kickstarter failed!

I had a particular roadmap planned out to reach video production gameplay goals for the Kickstarter campaign but now that the campaign has failed I have had to re-evaluate what features I need and in what particular order.

Had I been able to fund my project I would have proceeding in particular direction and had considerably more resources available to me.

Now that those resources are off the table the question at hand is given this is a single player RPG can I go to early access?

I feel that going to early access with part of my single player campaign is a fairly bad move - players will grind through that rather quickly and then be crying out for more content that is going to take a considerable amount of time for me to produce by myself.

Doing that would hypothetically result in an initial good release but would be followed by a lot of negative feedback/reviews from customers who might not be happy with my pace of updates.

User created content can far outstrip my personal ability to produce content ; but without a level editor there will be no user created content!  Given this I felt the best way to proceed forward would be to pivot my focus towards the level editor.

The first step of doing this was to tackle a task I had been putting off which is to "refactor" the level editor into a much more manageable architecture.

I had designed it on a 'as I need' basis and literally thrown functionality in anywhere I could to get things moving for the Kickstarter.

But now I need the Editor code to be solid and easy to work with in the sense of extending it and adding new features, but also in the sense of troubleshooting/debugging any issues that come up.

So I spent approximately the first 30 days after the Kickstarter refactoring all the core level editing functionality to point at the Level Loader class.

The Level Loader of course .. was meant to load saved levels in to the game.  But as you can imagine as you are editing - you are literally loading a level ... on the fly!

Previously I had "on the fly" editing being done in an Editor class, and final "in game" loading only in the Level Loader.

There was also another type of loading which was "inspector based loading" where you get into the individual details of any one grid square and change those details.  This represented a 3rd place code lived to load elements of a level.

So after refactoring all this - all loading is done in the LevelLoader now!

Having achieved this I then added several new features which I demonstrate in this video:

- ability to have an in-game preview window
- ability to toggle to a full screen gameplay mode
- ability to drag & drop monsters in to the game
- ability to toggle a skylight for ease of editing or previewing actual dungeon lighting conditions
- new create level dialogue with configurable elements
- a new player arrow icon - with a emissive texture to make it easy to see regardless of lighting conditions

Other work I did that is not shown:

- refactored the save/store/loading of levels into the local users directory structure ; this ensures users can save their levels to disk where they have permission ; it also gives a default place where I can look for levels to load that the user has created
- added ability to set custom save level names
- added loading dialogue that presents a drop down list of all levels available to load
- fixed quite a few bugs
- refactored the GUI to be more streamlined/minimalistic (more work to do here in the future)

So my next set of goals is to add even more functionality to the level editor; some of these additions should happen pretty quickly because they are just similar to functionality that I've already demonstrated here.  Other items of course are more unique and will require specific work to implement.

Thanks for reading, see you next time!

So a very kind person shared my game on facebook, but then this happened..

So if you've tried marketing a game these days you know just how hard it is to break through to people - especially with all the noise and advertisements - and yes even other great games competing for everyone's attention.

So I get lucky .. and a very kind person I don't even know  shared my game on Facebook ; but Facebook scraped my webpage and picked the icon for one of my mobile games from 3 years ago instead of the correct one.

So now all this person's friends think The Rise of Dagon is a game about a chicken with an astronaut helmet!

And that pretty much summarizes exactly how good my first day of my Kickstarter campaign has gone also!

The actual icon is:

You can check the campaign out on Kickstarter here as well.

Oh well tomorrow is another day!

4th Year Indie Retrospective - From not even knowing how to program to taking my biggest risk yet on 8th game.

Four years ago I decided I was going to become an independent game developer. At the time, I didn't even know how to program.

"Sure sounds unrealistic!" , you say.  And you'd be right.

The Rise of Dagon after 18 months of work.

I did have an ace in the hole though: I have a rich history in doing other things like art, design, and project management over the past twenty years to bolster me and as you will see I leveraged those fully.

So I was fortunate in that becoming an indie developer was really a matter of could I learn to program/develop the game myself.  Again no small order; but perhaps a bit more realistic.

For more backstory to my history and how I learned to program I've covered each year of my Indie journey separately and you can read much more detail about those here in Year 1 Retro, Year 2 Retro, Year 3 Retro so I won't go too deeply on those at this time.

My first iOS / Android game Pirates Jewels

The first three years I shipped multiple games.  I shipped and iOS title first, then quickly thereafter on Google Play Android.


Within the first year, I also shipped a title on Wildtangent for PC Desktop which has been my biggest success as of yet, but sadly Wildtangent just pulled it (probably fair the sales had gone down over the past 3 years).

Oddly enough Holiday Cheer was a game that I never intended to make but my wife told me in October that I should make a holiday themed game because it might sell well!

So I took her up on her advice and re-skinned Pirates Jewels (my first game) in just under 30 days and fired off emails to various websites like BigFish and Wildtangent.  I sincerely expected to NOT hear back from them but my to my surprise they were excited and wanted to push to get it in the December update on their site.

Much to my surprise, they actually plan titles well in advance so I was actually late to the party when I emailed them in early November!


I went on to make a few other match-3 related games but over time I came to the conclusion that I was doing the wrong thing.

My first game accepted by a publisher was Holiday Cheer.

You see I was making Match 3 games for a couple of reasons - the first was because I was trying to make a 'simple' game that wouldn't undermine my chances of success.

In that goal I totally succeeded as you see I was able to make several games in the genre and even make a bit of money!

The other reason was because marketing research I had done told me it would be profitable to do so as its the one of the top 3 game types in the casual genre.

In the end, though I lacked many things needed to compete in the casual market nor was it personally satisfying to me either.

You see making a few thousand dollars is certainly nice - but it doesn't pay my rent and it doesn't even actually pay for all the time I invested in making these games either.

So I did what many game developers want to do .. I started on a passion project.

In my case, role-playing games are where it is at.  I've loved RPG's since about 10 years old when I found out about pen and paper D&D.  I moved on to classic computer RPG's like the AD&D Gold Box games and then games like Eye of the Beholder, Baldur's Gate series and on and on from there!

It really didn't take long to decide at that point - in fact, I had something (as most of us do) in my "games I want to make one day" list!

Eye of the Beholder a classic dungeon crawl RPG.

You may  or may not have heard of Eye of The Beholder but if not you certainly will have heard of Legend of Grimrock.

These games represent the quintessential dungeon experience in my mind.  They put you in the game in first person perspective and make you feel like you are really there.

So 18 months ago I began this project, having never made an RPG before, but determined that I was going to make a game that I really loved and cared about this time!

What many indie's who finished games know is that often when you ship a game - no one cares. As often as not you will ship a game to the sound of resounding silence.

Maybe your mom and dad care, "Good job son! I'm glad you finally stuck through and finished something.  Now when are you going to get that job flipping burgers and pay for your own car insurance?"

But if when you're done no one actually cares then you have to question: what is it you are actually getting out of the game? Certainly not money or recognition?

Certainly one can argue then that you did not market your game properly - and maybe that is true.  But a very valid counter argument is maybe you did market your game to the fullest of your current extent which includes lack of finances to push out paid-for marketing.  You can send emails to Youtuber's  and gaming websites and such - but if they just delete the email then the net effect is "you haven't done any marketing!".


So you have to ask yourself what is it you actually want to get out of making your game?

It's happened to me more than once so I've had to ask myself and the answer I've come up with is: I want to make games I'm passionate about so when I'm done I'll have fulfilled my dreams and what I'll have is something I really care about that rewards my urge to create something I really love.

Ultimately I think many of us know this is the right answer; but it's incredibly difficult to reconcile with  the advice we get in the indie game dev community which is  "make something small, cut it in half, and then make it smaller yet!"  or "don't make an RPG! first!".

Those pieces of advice are good; I have no beef with them.  But they don't deal with the passion side of things very well. Those gems of indie advice ask us to invest ourselves in things that don't inspire and the truth is it takes a very dedicated hearty person to persist and create when they are not inspired.

For me the takeaway is: you should follow that advice to learn the basics, but at some point you're going to have to follow your muse when it calls!

 If not you will end up going in circles making things just for the brief rush of saying "hey look I made this voxel clone prototype" or "hey look I made a sidescroller prototype" but you might find yourself with the lack of drive to actually finish because there's no vision of what this game really is in the end.

Very early on I considered changing to UE4 over Unity 3D

So I took off - I just started doing what I do:  I made lists of things I needed to figure out!

My first list looked something like:

• what kind of level format will I have?
• what is the best way to implement a class system?
• what is the best way to implement items?
• how do I handle monster's? do they get their own classes?
• what engine should I use?
• what art level should I shoot for ?

There were many more questions but each one became a truly engaging and interesting topic to me and that drove me forward!

I'm not convinced that I know everything that I would like to know about all of those topics yet - but I at least have a solid understand of them and can implement them in my game now.

The Struggle is Real

I have struggled with producing this game in many ways such as creating 3D models is very time-consuming.

I'm very lucky to have a background of 20+ years of indie art production so I can make quality artwork like this Servant of Dagon model I did in Silo 3D and Mudbox:

Servant of Dagon model I worked on for The Rise of Dagon

But doing so takes a lot of time!  Yes I know many people reading this are indie programmers with no artistic skills at all and this really sounds like a stupid complaint but the real fact of the matter is spending 3 weeks making one 3D model for your game is 3 weeks you are not coding your game!

It became painfully apparent over time that I was going to need help to make The Rise of Dagon so I decided to take it to Kickstarter.

I have spent almost the past 6  months researching Kickstarter and learning about what to do, and what not to do.

One really good resource was the Funding The Dream podcast series by Richard Bliss.  He invites many experienced Kickstarter project's members on his show and goes over every topic imaginable.

I learned more about fulfillment of rewards, building a good campaign, video tips, and most importantly critical tips about Taxes that could completely derail your project if not handled correctly!

In short if you fund very late in the year you will have to pay taxes on that income in the year you earned it. So if you funded very late in 2015 such as December - you will need most of that money in 2016 !

But your taxes will be due in 2015 because the income was earned in 2015!

Some people's projects have been completely destroyed by risks like this that they never saw coming so I highly recommend you do proper research if you're going to do a Kickstarter.

So here I am 18 months into this project and finally ready to pitch out to the world and ask my family, my friends, and hopefully a gamer community who loves RPG's to back me and help make this project a reality.


I was lucky enough to be recognized by Highsight on Twitch as one of the top 10 indie games of 2015, which was a really amazing recognition and really inspiring to me! It does make me feel like I just have to get my game out in front of people and it gives me hope!

But still, I fear that I'll fall flat on my face. I've done blogging for almost two years on this project , but I still feel like I have no community.

They say you have to bring your audience to Kickstarter - do not expect Kickstarter to have one for you and the fact is before this game all my products have been on other people's portals for casual gamers.

I may have sold a few thousand games but I doubt even one of them could name my game studio or even cares.

So I have very little "crowd" to bring to my crowd funding campaign.  its my biggest risk yet as an indie game dev.

Failing at this point will be big and hurt.  But you have to put yourself out there if you are passionate and believe in your self and your project. And the thing is .. I really do believe. I'm making this game no matter what because I'm truly passionate about it!

I sincerely hope that I find a community and they back my game - but even if they don't I'll be here next year hopefully about to ship this game in my next post mortem.

Until then thanks for reading and good luck in your game developing!

Drop me a comment and let me know if you have any questions or feedback about my campaign as I really would love to hear from you!

And if I may ask you ; please consider backing my project.

Thank you!

Unity 5.3 vs 5.4 beta lighting differences

I've recently tried upgrading my project, The Rise of Dagon, to Unity 5.4 beta 3 and it was such a disaster I lost a complete day of productivity and I had to revert my backups and go back to Unity 5.3.

The biggest problem was Substance support seemed to have gone completely out the window with the normal maps of substances not compiling at all and the metal/specular side of things gone completely through the roof so everything looked 100% shiny/metallic and therefore almost black with shiny reflectivity.

Despite that I did want to see what screenspace reflections might do for my project so I went ahead and gave this another upgrade try this weekend and things went a little bit better.

Substances still do not upgrade correctly - although the normal maps are compiling.  I had to bake the substance texture out and create my own material for the material to work in the game.

While I have not had a chance to really play with screenspace reflection feature yet I did notice some really dramatic (and good) differences in the lighting and shadowing that's going on.(Check out my comparison screenshot at the top.)


The Rise of dagon  uses almost completely real time lighting because the level is built at run time and therefore can not be baked. The reason for this is to eventually permit my players to have a level editor and built their own levels while in game - so they do not have to download Unity and build a level out and bake the lighting themselves.

This image shows more 5.3 lighting problems with the odd rim of light on the floor  where it shouldn't be.

For some reason in 5.3 real time lighting has consistently had problems with drawing good shadows, and spotty results in lighting where things would get washed out .. almost blurry.

In 5.4 beta things are looking really sharp and good - almost exactly the way I would like them to so fortunately this time it was worth the work of upgrading to the beta.

This is particularly fortuitous for me because I'm hoping to start working on my kickstarter video in the next week or so and having really shoddy lighting and shadows was going to be a complete nightmare from my perspective.

I had really hoped the lighting in Unity 5 would be a slam dunk out of the gates but it's been a real roller coaster ride, trying to get some level of consistency  and it seems each .x release has made significant changes - but never really 'getting it right'.  Many of those changes really seemed focused on the GI baked problems - particularly trying to bake lighting can take an exorbitant amount of time!

I had considered a hybrid approach where I would build my levels one way with baked lighting, and permit my customers to build it at runtime and use only realtime lighting but I realized this approach would cause me to let the realtime side of things slide out of sight while I focused on the baked approach.  The fact that baked lighting has been almost impossible to work with made that decision much easier though.

At this point I truly fear Unity won't get lighting 'right' until the 6.x cycle - I'm hoping I can get my game on some build like this 5.4 where it gets it close enough to the look and feel I need and then lock in and finish the game up.

Second Level Set shaping up & various progress news

So my first post of the year comes rather late ; but I have lots of great things that have been going on!

Firstly I have been integrating a new dungeon set into the game!  I purchased this level set and I was very surprised to find something of this quality level that suited my game so well!

Here we have an example of the new level set with the Servant of Dagon meeting his end by the Cemetery Gates spell:

As you see it looks just brilliant! The materials are well done and high resolution and as you see the lighting and shadows from the spell really show off nicely against the rich texture set.

Furthermore I've been spending quite a bit of time polishing the lighting in many different respects. 

One thing I've been working on is getting the right mix of dark and light in the dungeon.  This shot shows off something close to what I want when the player has no light :

As you see the dark is truly rich and foreboding ; the player has very little ability to see outside of the given light sources and would create a good level of suspense forcing the player to stick to the lit areas in fear of what lies in the dark!

What you can't see in these stills is the work I've been doing on the lights to make them softly glow and pulse to simulate an actual fire. Each light source has 2-3 point lights that are colored and animated different giving different yellow/orange highlights and pulse/flicker at different rates as well as cast shadows that move.

All together its looking really good !  There is some difficulty of maintaining perfect lighting when swapping level sets though ; supposedly PBR materials are supposed to help solve this problem but at this time I still find it tough with my 2 level sets to get a lighting level that makes them both look absolutely perfect..

Its a tough decision that I'm putting off right now but I could hypothetically create some "per level" kind of lighting variables that get updated when you load between level sets.  This would allow me to really nail the lighting levels of course but I'm being stubborn and working with the materials and the light settings themselves right now to try and achieve that rather than resorting to this shortcut.

While there are still many other items to show off  I'm going to swap gears and discuss what's really been keeping my head down for the last month or so and that is I've been working very hard on composing my Kickstarter.

I've run into enough surprises and challenges while working on it I'm considering writing a few blog entries on those challenges.

Some areas of interest that I think might be interesting is Taxes (yeah ugly topic but very important!), Rewards & Fulfillment (slightly more exciting but risky and complex), and the Fine Art of Estimating Your Project Goal.

The actual project goal has been incredibly enlightening to me - I really always thought it was just a matter of filling in blanks on a spreadsheet but I've now done 5 different sets of spreadsheet calculations based off of different assumptions and come up with different numbers.  Each set of assumptions could be totally legitimate or completely wrong!

Anyways.. I'm unclear on who reads the posts or what interest level there would be on these kickstarter articles ; I know a lot of people see the word Kickstarter and close the page right away so please leave a note or drop me a line if your interested in such material!