Archives January 2022

If you want to see the full size banner click the thumbnail. Or, scroll down and I will have the full size banner posted below.

I am learning just how large of a projecting making a simple, simple, SIMPLE GAME is. Of course one would think there is the artwork to consider. Sure, nice polished, professional artwork is obvious. Good looking artwork, “should” help sell your game, and I get that. For me, Brian Lindahl, doing the artwork is the fun part. Should I even say the relaxing part. I would even say it is the whole reason I even considered taking on making a game.

How wonderful to get to make your own character. Concept your own characters and then watch them come to life on the screen. Wow, that would be amazing! And I have over 20 years of experience in Advertising, Branding, and Marketing. I have also illustrated comics, kids books, painted portraits, and concept characters for books, toys, video games and their environment, props.

So making a simple, SIMPLE GAME shouldn’t be to hard since I have the aspect and confidence of the ArtWork Covered… Right!?!?

Ugh… Then comes the business side of development side of Game Development.

As I promised here is the Banner that I am working on for the Google Play Console AND there is good news. This Google Play Banner is the exact same size as the banner size need for a Kickstarter… Weeping, weeping, weeping happy tears love pure liquid unadulterated golden streams of joyful bliss.

Please look at this image. Love it or hate it I would love to hear your feedback on at our Amazingly Strange Twitter stream.

I would let you leave a comment here but I get flooded with spam comments and I don’t have the time or brilliance yet acquired to put that together yet. Weeping, weeping, weeping acidic painful resentful disparaging tears of hope lost!

Best wishes everyone!
Brian Lindahl

Running your own blog site comes with a variety of challenges. There are so many details that have to be tracked and noted and followed up with.

Amazingly Strange currently uses Godaddy to host our this business webpage. Is the Godaddy the best for doing what we are trying to do? Maybe not. But we really want to spend more time make fun video games and artwork.

I am actually going to post many elements that I have to keep track of right here in this blog. This way I can keep track of it and you can hopefully learn from my mistakes. Even better, if you are reading this post you can follow us on twitter and start a dialogue. There we can share ideas that hopefully benefit everyone.

block editor

Maybe you have been putting learning GitHub Terminal commands like I have. Now that I am running my own Indie Game Studio it is time to learn GitHub better.

I love the good old days when I could just ask a game engineer to fix all my GitHub issues. Unfortunately backing up my indie game rest solely y on my shoulder.

If you are needing a good resource to get started learning GitHub through the iOS Mac terminal then check out kbroman.org’s link here.

Also be sure to look at this list of helpful GitHub Commands.

One aspect of making a simple indie game that feels incredibly relevant is the ability to examine how well one is playing and whether or not they are improving as the play your awesome Indie game. An obvious way to understand one improvement would be to add a scoring mechanism in your indie game. Not only including a score but also include a high score give your user a base level for which they can complete.

Everything about scoring

GameGorillaz.com

I have known I have wanted to make games ever since I was a kid. I love puzzles and when a puzzle can take on a story of mystery and imagination I am one hundred percent enthralled.

After much time and attempts at working on projects with other friends and groups I finally decided to take on the challenge of learning to program in C sharp.

Programming was nothing new to me as I was a web developer in the late 1990’s working with Active Server Pages, Java Scripts, and PHP.

When deciding which software engine to develop in I looked at mainly just two, Unreal Engine and Unity 3D. Through my work at Playful Studio’s I had the privilege of have experience with both.

However in the end I had much more experiences with Unity 3D. Lucky’s Tale, a game in which we developed at Playful used Unity 3D exclusively.

Many descisions have to be made in order to start a video game, especially if you are new to Object-oriented programming (OOP). However I have far more experience in the realm of artwork.

In this grayscale image, my first step was to have some fun playing with shapes and light and dark values. The goal for this piece of artwork was to establish the a foundation for the rest of the artwork and assets for this simple indie game to build from.

As I was blocking in these shapes, I had already established the candy corn stickers which I was wanting carry over into this project. Candy Corn is a great reminder to days past of Halloween. Along with Halloween comes so many wonderful and magic environments, even though they may be a bit creepy.

Keeping the artwork simple is always important when pulling together and new idea that you are wanting to share with others.

Today was a super large milestone for Amazingly Strange. Candy Corn Critters our first indie Mobile Video Game has been approved by Apple to be Test Flighted. This build definitely requires a lot of polish however it tells me as a game developer that this initial build has at least passed the initial round of requirements need to eventually be approved for sale in the Apple App Store.

This early working version of the game has only been released to our family members. Still at this stage and with the feedback I have already received our little iOS video game still requires a lot programming development however this build is a huge indie game developer success for our small group of Beta Testers to sink their teeth into.

When I began what was to eventually become Candy Corn Critters I had zero clue to what this mobile video game was to look like.

Most of the time I start any concept sketch on top of a 50 percent gray back ground. I then place several small rectangular boxes on my Clip Studio art board