Beta 1.0

When I first sat down 3.5 years ago with the idea of making a game I wasn’t sure where it would lead. I had an idea, and I decided to act upon it. Simple as that. With the benefit of hindsight, I think it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and certainly a philosophy towards challenges and ideas that I hope to use more often into the future. The philosophy of doing the thing.

A lot of the times, doing the thing won’t work out. I’ve been there first hand over and over and over again. But if you never try you never know if it will work out.

3.5 years of my life is a lot. A bit of quick math reveals that it’s roughly 1/5 of my life, which is ridiculous. As such, it’s one of the most rewarding things ever for me to play my game through from start to finish – to see the environments, stories, levels and scenes I’ve poured countless hours into come to life. It;s incredible, and I couldn’t be more proud of what I’ve managed to create. With Beta 1.0, I’ve introduced the most advanced AI features I’ve ever designed and written, the largest level in Fall Blau, the most complex weapon system, squashed countless bugs, fixed tons of small problems, and built a game that can be played from start to finish.

I’m nowhere near done with Fall Blau yet, but Beta 1.0 stands as a testament to the hard work and effort I’ve put in over the years, and the growth in my knowledge and confidence as a game developer.

I can’t wait to share more with you in the future as the pace of development continues to accelerate. For now, feel free to join the discord server at discord.gg/BtEmptj and get your key for the Fall Blau Beta 🙂

I’d love to hear your thoughts

Lukas

Mid-Development Hell

So we’re back. At long last, 0.6 is now out, and development has started on 0.7. It’s been a hell of a journey, let me tell you that much. 0.6 started out as just a patch to add Fall Blau’s 3rd level, ‘Highway to Hell’ to the game, and then move on to other updates (0.7, 0.8, 0.9) finish all the levels by the end of the school year. This then was pushed to finishing them all by the end of summer, and finally just finish it when I finish it.

It started with a simple AI rework, which lead to a bug which took a month and a half to solve, which ended with me re-writing the game from scratch. Not fun, but necessary, I’d argue. I think the game is better off because of it.

After that, it was a matter of re-building the first 3 levels from the game. While not fun, it helped make them a lot more fun and engaging, while integrating nicely with the new spawning and AI systems at play. The design of those first 3 levels is at this point basically final. If you’d like to play them, don’t hesitate to drop me a message on the discord server (you can find it on this website’s about page, fallblau.com/about), it’d mean a lot!

You can read the full changelog on itch.io. I’ll likely post it in the coming days.

It’s been a tough 5 months getting this update out of the door. It’s been an emotional journey for me. In the span of those 5 months I’ve grown a lot as a person, had family pass away, and new family be born. My opinions and perspectives on things changed, and I’m now facing the giant that is university, a choice that’s incredibly difficult, and a process that’s incredibly time consuming. Thanks to Fall Blau, I know what I want to study.

When I first started this hobby 3 years ago, I really didn’t know what to expect. It’s a pretty niche thing, and for good reason. It’s bloody difficult xD. When I last hit a roadblock like this with AI, I ended up dropping gamedev for 6 months while I learned how to be a better programmer thanks to Tom Looman (who, incidentally, now works at my dream university). 0.6 was the final update All Out got. I wasn’t able to go through mid-development hell then. I wasn’t good enough. I failed. This time, I’ve proven to myself that through hell or high water, I’m able to grit my teeth and make the game I want to make. I’ve proven to myself that this is something I’m good at and something that I like to do.

Onwards to 0.7 friends.

Thanks for sticking with me thus far,

Lukas.

Let’s Talk

Hi there!

I believe I owe you an apology for not posting a devlog at the beginning of this month, and I’d like to ‘justify’ that in a sense with this post. I know few people if anyone will ever read this, but regardless, these posts are as much for my peace of mind, relief and progress check as they are for promoting the game and informing you about it’s development. With that said, let me explain why there wasn’t a dev log for Fall Blau for March, why there won’t be one for April and possibly even June.

In the wonderful world of game development, there are typically 3 stages to building a game:

  1. Groundwork and early prototypes
  2. Mid development – level blockouts, polishing and bug fixing
  3. Final polish layer, final content and final asset pass

With 0.3 having shipped, Fall Blau is now in the second stage, mid development. Any game developer who’s gotten to this point already knows what’s coming. The best illustration of this is the nickname given to this point in gamedev: ‘mid development hell‘

This is the point in a project where nothing really seems to change, but fundamentally the project gets so, so much better through this period. You’ll stumble across all sorts of bugs here, rewrite half your game’s code and re-do a large amount of your content. This is exactly where Fall Blau is right now. It’s an intensely frustrating time full of random bugs, miscellaneous issues and my personal dissatisfaction with Fall Blau’s gameplay.

This leads to the reason that I haven’t posted dev logs recently – there’s nothing to post.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m rewriting AI for the third time (third time’s the charm!), producing all of Fall Blau’s levels, and working on creating a new rig for the hands, and then animating new FPS animations. But you can’t see any of this, it’s all invisible to someone who’s not intimately familiar with the game and it’s source code. For that reason, I won’t be posting anything about the project until I leave this frustrating point in the development cycle. You’re free to join the discord, where I share more information and offer participation in closed testing if you want to know more 🙂

Thanks so much for the support and for making it this far,

I’ll see you outside of mid-development hell,

-Lukas

Fall Blau Alpha 0.3 is now available!

Hi there!

It’s been a while since my last post, particularly on the website here, but after months and months of work I’m incredibly pleased to finally showcase Alpha 0.3. 0.3 means a lot to me personally, a lot of the mechanics were things that I’ve failed at in the past, and being able to overcome them is a really great feeling, and I’m super proud of my personal progress with code and AI over the last few months. Over the next few days i’ll re-work sections of the website to represent some of the changes that I’ve made internally to the story and the gameplay, but without further ado, I’m proud to present Alpha 0.3!

Read about the changes and download the update here!

Go play the update with it’s many changes, and please let me know what you think at https://discord.gg/BtEmptj 😀

Thanks so much for your continued support and interest,

Lukas Kelemen

Happy New Year!

Hi there! Welcome to this unusual dev log. Not only am i a few days early, this one is also going to be somewhat shorter than the usual dev logs that i write. Since i was away for christmas, i didn’t have access to my workstation or any of my files, making working actively on the project quite difficult. I also took a break from Fall Blau, work, and the internet in general for a few days. I played and finished The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (fantastic game) and spent some enjoyable moments with family. I did push update 0.2 (and a micropatch, 0.2.1) in the early weeks of December. There was a bit of a crunch to get there, almost 30 hours over the course of 2 weeks alongside school and other commitments, but it was well worth it and im happy to have pushed that update still last year. You can read more about it here.

I haven’t been completely absent from the project however. I’ve spent a decent amount of time working on an all new website, learning some photoshop (long overdue) and finalizing Fall Blau’s narrative and missions, along with some level layouts. Unfortunately, i can’t share any of this stuff quite yet, but keep an eye on the website and the Dev Logs  over the next couple of months for more updates on this sort of stuff.

With that said, i wish you a fantastic 2020, and i’ll sign of for now. Once again, apologies for the short dev log this month :/

Happy New Year!

Lukas

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