Wow. December: a blur of turkeys, cracker bangs and sprouts. Before you know it you emerge into January realising that you’ve been silent for two months.

Despite the jollities, we have been getting on with IPS. We’re getting closer and closer to getting the game into a state where we are happy to release it. It’s been playable, and fun, for a while now, but we’re trying to get it right first time. The stuff we’re working on at the moment is a bit too boring to tell you about, but we’re paid by the word here in Nimmles Towers, so we’re going to tell you about it anyway.

The code for the base game is completely done, but there are still a few features we want to add. One of our big projects is to add unlockables to the game (armour to help you survive longer, etc).

Another area which is taking up a lot of our time is the development and testing of a variety of new enemies. As mentioned before, we design every creature and enemy by hand and then have to go through a number of processes to digitise them. This can be a time consuming task but the results are worth it.

When this is done, we can then create their file as part of the game (called a “scene” in the Godot Engine). The collision shape for the creature or obstacle is then added, and finally the animation as the object comes across the screen is included. There are about 35 objects to include and we have the bulk of them still to do!

One of our more recent additions is a new owl enemy. Look at his cute little face. Vicious little bugger though.

Once all the enemies are created, we can start testing, and then once we’re happy we’ll release.

We’ll get back to work now 🙂

Things are ticking along very well here at Nimmles. The mechanics for IPS are all done, and we’re starting to get happy with the visuals. One thing we are getting excited about is our sound design.

As IPS is a relatively small game designed for mobiles and tablets we’ve had a few interesting decisions to make. Firstly, does the game need sound at all? We can imagine people sitting on a bus or a train with IPS as their only ally to save them from a tedious commute on their way to work or school. They might have their headphones in listening to their own music, or a podcast, or they might not have any sound on at all. Would these people care if there was any sound in the game? Would they even notice?

But then we thought of the games we’ve loved playing in the past – almost all of them have great sound design which really adds something to the game. Also, we wanted to get the experience of making as immersive a game as possible. All or nothing, that’s the Nimmles way. So despite the extra time and effort it will take, we decided that sound would be an important part of the game – all the while remembering that it needs to be just as fun, sound or no sound, for all those people on the tube.

To include different types of sound, we needed access to a sound library. One such library we are currently looking to use FreeSound. FreeSound has gazillions* of sounds all categorised and searchable – everything from a boing to a zok, and everything in between. We haven’t yet found the right place in the game for a Wilhelm Scream.

For the background music, the only real source at the moment is MusOpen.This site has a whole bunch of royalty free music that game designers, video editors and powerpoint enthusiasts can use for free in their projects. Check the royalty situation first, though, track by track, as not all of it is free.

We haven’t yet finalised the sound. We’re trying to achieve a delicate balance between the right atmosphere and the right mix. It’s been bizarrely fun trying to pit the sound effects against the music, working out what works best without putting too much emphasis on one area or the other. We also don’t want to bother you all too much – we all know how irritating overly-repetitive, badly sampled noises can be in some of the games out there.

Nimmles puts user experience above everything else, and so if the sound isn’t working, we’ll simply take it out. However, from what we’re seeing and hearing already, we’re pretty certain you’ll like it.

Every developer in the world will arrogantly and self-servingly let you know about their progress. As we’ve been been working towards the launch of our games, we arrogantly and self-servingly thought that some of you might also be interested in process.

We’ve previously mentioned our use of GODOT for creating our games. In addition to GODOT, there have been a few other tools that have come in handy.

To start with, a bit of a confession. As much as we love our artwork, our process is currently a touch inefficient.

First up, preliminary sketches are done with paper and pencil. Then, on a tablet, we use the app SketchClub to digitize the designs. The app and tablet is a handy, cheaper alternative to getting a Wacom tablet! With the art done in SketchClub, it is then transferred from the tablet to computer, where it is sized and cropped using GIMP. We’re also interested in trying out some of the other tools out there, so for some of the art we’ve given Krita a go instead of SketchClub.

Next up, the art files are saved as PNGs. As we want the game to load as quickly as possible and for the game size to be as small as possible, we’re optimizing as much as we can to ensure the PNG files are as small as possible too. The website TingPNG is a great tool for reducing the PNG file size and keeping the quality. The whole process can take a while, but we love the hand drawn aesthetics of our artwork and we think it really adds something to the game.

We are very happy to be able to show you a screenshot of the title page of our first game: Icarus Postal Service!

The game will be a side scrolling game on Android. You are a postal worker for the ancient Greek postal company Icarus Postal Service (IPS), a company more affordable than Hermes. If you fly too high, you start to lose feathers as the sun melts the wax holding them together. As you fly around Greece and the surrounding area, you must avoid creatures in your way (including mythical ones) and go through delivery towers to drop off post.

We are currently in alpha as we add some more features and sort out performance issues. In the next post we will want to show screenshots of the game play as the art work is finalised.

We at Nimmles have no real experience at making games, but have always wanted to make them. We don’t intend on making AAA games, instead we want to make games inspired by the ones we enjoyed growing up: Games like Monkey Island, Theme Hospital, Sonic the Hedgehog, Cannon Fodder, R-Type …. The list goes on.

Discovering the game engine GODOT has been a huge step forward in us to realising our goal. GODOT is free to use and open source. GODOT is fairly new and as such is still evolving. We started playing with it at the beginning of 2015 just after the first stable release of GODOT (1.0) became available, as of writing the most current release is 2.0 Alpha.

One of the advantages of building games in GODOT is the growing, active community surrounding it. There are good tutorials provided by them, demos available to download and a growing number of YouTube tutorials. If you are intending to try GODOT, the two tutorial channels I would suggest are: Andreas Esau and Gamefromscratch. Another good source of help is the Facebook page and forums.

As with anything under active development there have been some interesting moments: for example finding one method of path creation for moving a player from one position to another, only to find it was depreciated, then making a new way, and finally finding that the next stable release of GODOT had solved the problem for us!

We have a couple of projects in the pipeline right now and are really enjoyed the learning process with GODOT, we hope to be able to show you some of our work soon.

So. We’re off the ground. We’ve got a website and everything. You knew that already.

We can’t wait to show you the stuff we’ve been working on – bear with us while we get things ready behind the scenes.