Intro #
Hey friends! We’re back with another newsletter! Some exciting things happened this month. To summarize:
- We released SPEEDCAT!
- We hit affiliate and grew to 150+ followers!
- My wife and I started putting in offers on houses!
There’s a lot to get to so let’s just hop into it!
SPEEDCAT Release #
SPEEDCAT was released on 04/25/2022! And oh boy, I did not expect so much hype and love for our speedy little friend!
First of all, we wrapped up the development of the game on stream. The final level design and playtesting, as well as drafting the itch.io page all happened with my Twitch community collaborating with me! I cannot say enough how much it has helped to have my stream schedule hold me accountable to continue working on my game development projects. It keeps the projects fresh, fun, and guarantees that I have a time throughout the week to dedicate to them.
For the week before releasing the game, I leaned heavily into marketing. I did my best to keep tweets (and the occasional Instagram post) upbeat, funny, and attractive to draw in new people! Hopefully the marketing spam hasn’t been too tiresome!
On release day, I was actually making an 8-hour cross-country drive while returning from a small vacation. The drive was long, but seeing periodic notifications appear on my phone as people experienced SPEEDCAT for the very first time made the trip so much better!
At the time of writing, SPEEDCAT has over 1,000 plays in browser! That doesn’t count the times players have opened the desktop apps. Needless to say, I am absolutely stunned at the game’s reception and I couldn’t have asked for anything better! It has deeply motivated me to continue making small but adorable games!
Twitch Affiliate #
We technically hit Twitch Affiliate in March, but the true weight of that is only just now being discovered. The Affiliate benefits have greatly enhanced the streaming experience, in my opinion! It has been so fun to interact with channel point redeems and have more unique ways to engage with viewers. It is becoming clear to me that streaming is one of my favorite hobbies and engaging with viewers is deeply important to me!
My viewers have also been much more generous than I could have ever expected. Knowing that there are people out there who want to financially support my content creation - either through Twitch or Ko-Fi - has been so encouraging to me, and affirming that I must be doing something right.
House Hunting #
On a personal note, as many of you know my wife and I have been hunting for a new house! This has added a lot of personal exhaustion, on top of work stress and other personal life things.
The housing market is absolutely NUTS right now. We visit houses within 24 hours of them appearing on the market and sometimes they even go into a pending status before we have a chance to put in our own offer. Making a decision on a house in a matter of minutes rather than months, as our parents could, has added to the anxiety.
For those of you who follow my YouTube channel - the reason for the inactivity is honestly that the house search has replaced the free time I once had for YouTube content creation. I hope to resume the YouTube schedule more consistently once personal life stuff slows down. Thank you for your patience.
SPEEDCAT Design Decisions #
I wanted to take some time to explain how I came to certain decisions when approaching SPEEDCAT! It’s an interesting but small game. I couldn’t explain it better than this Twitch chatter I found in the wild while watching a streamer play the game for the first time:
“speedy kitty go jump”
And while that 4 word phrase sums up quite a lot, there was a lot of thought that I put into why I specifically crafted the SPEEDCAT experience the way it is today.
No Character Abilities #
Many games nowadays see the protagonist slowly unlock new powers - or at least collect powerups - to make the gameplay feel fresh, interesting, and new with every level. However, I knew that SPEEDCAT would be able to be played within one hour, and the creative constraint of limiting the protagonist’s actions to just “run” and “jump” was intriguing to me.
Could I make an interesting and compelling game with the player’s level of control so limited? I certainly hoped so! It also eased the coding effort - I spent less time working out bugs with different game mechanics interacting with one another.
Collisions #
SPEEDCAT was originally a personal project to learn more about how 2D collisions work in games - and no more! When I started, I had no intentions of publishing the game. I simply wanted to know more about how collision detection worked in two-dimensional games.
And OH BOY did I learn! The collision code was easily the most visited, most re-worked, and most agonizing set of code that I interacted with. I vow to always use a collision library from now on. If you know, you know, but to keep a long story short, collisions are complex. Now that I’ve done the self-learning, I feel comfortable relying on someone else’s code!
Stretching Simple Mechanics #
To limit both the scope of the code needed and the mental fatigue of the player learning new game mechanics, I tried to keep everything very simple:
- The player can push blocks
- The player can interact with buttons or levers which turns blocks on and off
- The player can collect keys to open doors
- The player can get extra jump height by touching springs
- The player can use teleporters to get from place to place
- The player will respawn if they touch spikes
And that’s it! While it might seem like a sizeable list, it’s honestly pretty limited when compared to other games. Add in the fact that the player’s movement is “run” and “jump”, and you have a much more limited game than say Celeste or other platformers.
That was okay with me, however, because I wanted to see how far I could stretch these features. It was more important to me to give the player new opportunities to interact with the same old mechanics in new ways, rather than introduce more novel mechanics.
For example, instead of introducing moving platforms, I introduced teleporters - they provided more ways to create and solve puzzles than moving platforms could. And I didn’t add both because that would have been too many things for the small experience I was trying to create.
Self-Imposed Restrictions #
Finally, to make coding easier, I actually took a lot of shortcuts. These would reduce the flexibility of map editing and level design, but in the final product, you wouldn’t even noticed. Here are some examples of these restrictions that reduced the amount of code I had to write:
- All switch blocks needed a “trigger” present in the room.
- This trigger could either be a button, a lever, or a timer, but must not exceed ONE trigger per screen.
- Switch blocks have a soft limit on their quantity per-screen. My switch-block code is unoptimized, and they will cause frame lags if there are too many on screen. Instead of optimizing the code, I just chose to limit the number of switch blocks I put on screen.
- Teleporters are paired by sprite. By observing which sprite was used on the screen, I simply save the position of both teleporters. However, you cannot place any number of teleporters on the screen than 0 or 2 of the same sprite. Removing the “sanity checks” from the code makes it brittle - but also simpler.
Conclusion #
If you made it this far - thank you! I hope these updates prove helpful and interesting. Any feedback is welcome; I want to make these an experience worth the generous donations you give, which makes all of this exciting stuff possible!
