Max!
@xewlupus
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Indie Game Programmer @tinygalactic making NIGHTSHIFT GALAXY Formerly @YachtClubGames @HeartMachineHQ @AbzuGame @Sifteo 🌹 opinions are my own. he/him 🌹
Los Angeles, CA
Joined December 2007
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NIGHTSHIFT GALAXY is an 80s mecha-anime inspired arcade-style shooter.
Wishlist:
Discord:
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feeding our anime-ass mecha game to t̵̙̔h̶̾ͅė̴̹ ̶̱͆ā̵̳l̷̟̏g̴̳̋ô̵̞ȑ̸̗į̸́t̵̲͛h̷̀ͅm̴̲̉
Twitter has updated their algorithm to allow users to see more posts from smaller accounts
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Welcome new followers! A little context on our game, Nightshift Galaxy!
I've developed it part-time for a year, solo, but we're in the process of forming a development team. Official updates
@tinygalactic
(discord link-in-bio)...
#indiegamedev
🎶 Dogfight (Macross OST) 🎶
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There's a baseline drift developing action games where you get used to it in waves and have this tendency to want to make things faster. Whenever I get those thoughts, I load up generic FPS maps to remind myself, no, like, our movement is already insane.
#indiegamedev
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Working on flying in tight spaces & over/under bridges. Remove some of my overly-cinematic camera moves, and also added an "air cushion" so you don't have to micro-adjust to avoid walls (not strong enough to prevent a head-on collision)
#screenshotsaturday
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Actually dogfighting in my dogfighting game!!!
To avoid "shooting wee pixels on the distant horizon" style of play, I'm working on enemies making more dynamic high-speed close-passes.
#IndieGameDev
🎶緊急事件発生! (Kenji Kawai)🎶
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Testing out "metal slug"-esque kit-pieces on enemy dogfighter jets.
#ScreenshotSunday
🎵 Theme of Metal Slug (Stage 1-1) 🎵
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Updated spider-controls to the new aiming system & stabilized the camera a bunch.
#screenshotsunday
🎶 Moxy Früvous 🎶
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Gravity Rush is an underrated gem. The "PSP Original" Curse.
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"Rough Draft" sketch of Tachikoma-like wall-crawling moveset for the tank fighter.
#indiegamedev
🎶 Gall Force Suite 🎶
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Missile Target "painting" & improved Barrel-Roll control
#screenshotsunday
#gamedevelopment
#indiegamedev
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✨ What a difference a year makes. ✨
Missile Target "painting" & improved Barrel-Roll control
#screenshotsunday
#gamedevelopment
#indiegamedev
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Out of curiosity, I checked how the Tank's wall-crawling physics handle the dense geo. Not too bad!
@xewlupus
I actually think an FPS map is a perfect testbed for that stuff because it catches all of the necessary terrain to test movement. Sharp corners, swooping corners, long lanes, verticality.
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✨ Added cel-style sharp-shadows & gloss, to really push the classic-anime look. ✨
This is with a custom lighting model, not a post-process filter, so it's cheaper, handles multiple colored lights, etc.
#indiegamedev
🎶 Heroic Gundam 🎶
More refinement (still a few artifacts with the shell to sort-out, and I'm improving the SDF-preprocessor still). Handles zoom out/in legibly. Next step is probably to add a cell-shaded gloss?
#indiegamedev
#techart
#anime
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Still in "vacation mode" and just goofing around. Went a bit daffy with the copy-paste key and made a big centipede?
#ScreenshotSaturday
🎶 CROSS FIGHT! (Haja Taisei Dangaioh OST) 🎶
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Spider Tank heavy-artillery gameplay.
#ScreenShotSaturday
🎶 Blinding Waves (Ghost in the Shell PSX OST) 🎶
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We got goop!
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Extremely petty pet-peeve about retro-style rendering. The vertex-wobble on PSX was due to fixed-point quantization + error; it wouldn't happen on static objects when the camera isn't moving.
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Great stream! A lot of progress considering we started the new hovering enemy units from scratch!!
#indiegamedev
VOD:
WISHLIST:
Going on a lunch-break, but i think I'll be back for more angry placeholder-art teapots at... 430 PST maybe?
#indiegamedev
#streaming
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Missile Circus Prototype
Armored Core bosses too hard; going back to making easy bosses for my easy baby game.
#ScreenShotSaturday
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Experimenting with posting MP4s instead of GIFs. Anyway, did a polish pass on the Spider Tank 🕷️
#indiedev
#gamedevelopment
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TOMORROW! 2PM!!
🌌NIGHTSHIFT GALAXY DEVSTREAM 003 🌌
Giant Mecha spider combat! Let's gooo!
#IndieGameDev
🎶 Time for L-GAIM (MIO) 🎶
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Last little update of 2023 -- starting plumbing for a system to add reactive environmental vfx. First sample: splashes when you fly close to the water.
#ScreenShotSunday
🎶 Port Town (F-Zero OST) 🎶
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Working on mecha-shooter again. Have a drift + roll control-scheme that I think is going to work, finally.
#gamedev
#screenshotsunday
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Spider Tank in the combat gym
#indiegamedev
Updated FX and poses for the Spider Tank. Goes tippy-toes when clinging to differentiate it from normal walking, and to handle uneven wall-geometry a little more nicely.
#indiegamedev
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Optimized the sh*t out of pathfinding in order to enable realtime path-tracking from multiple aggro units. Notice also how I have two NavAgents on the player now -- one on her position and another projected on the ground, for when she's flying.
#screenshotsunday
Pathfinder prefers zig-zagging because it can cut corners at intersections and save a little distance, lol.
#screenshotsaturday
🎶 Sim City (SNES) 🎶
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If anyone in LA wants to try the Starfighter prototype, I'll be at
@GlitchCityLA
's BYOG Playtest this evening.
#ScreenShotSaturday
🎶ドッグ·ファイター (Macross OST)🎶
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Updated FX and poses for the Spider Tank. Goes tippy-toes when clinging to differentiate it from normal walking, and to handle uneven wall-geometry a little more nicely.
#indiegamedev
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Wild how far Nightshift Galaxy has come in a year. Last January I wasn't thinking about it as anything other than a hobby.
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"What's the point of the robot, why wouldn't I just stay a jet?"
Idea: the robot has a guard/shield action. Not sure if it's better on an explicit button, or auto-activated whenever you're a robot and not shooting or dashing?
#indiegamedev
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Working on the Spider Tank yesterday, working on the airbreak for the hi-speed Falcon Fighter today.
#ScreenShotSunday
🎶 Corneria (Starfox OST) 🎶
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Playing with a dynamic camera lock for minibosses (to make 3D bullet hell more legible). There's a few character control wrinkles to iron-out, but it's working much better than I expected 🔥🔥🔥
#gamedev
#indiegame
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Have all the basic melee combat/collision plumbing in
#screenshotsunday
Overdue prototype from the checklist: slashing weapon. Thinking each fighter might have their own special attack, and this is unique to Kit's Rabbit?
#ScreenShotSaturday
🎶 Zero (Megaman X) 🎶
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Feeling pretty good about this blockout for the city arena. Time to start adding bullet-hell and combat-spawners to really kick the tires.
#indiegamedev
WISHLIST NIGHTSHIFT GALAXY:
🎶 Boss Appears (Bulk Slash OST) 🎶
Quick sewer-drain mockup. Doing the tunnel is relatively easy in
#Blender
using curve bevels w/ a custom profile + the solidify modifier, but cutting holes in the terrain and chambers with the knife tool is a PITA, is there a better way?
🎶 Technodrome (TMNT Arcade) 🎶
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SDF rendering in-game, crisp lineart with depth-modulated thickness (inner lines thin-out, outer line thicken).
🎶 Gray Side Emmie (Project A-KO) 🎶
Sorry it was a little boring/code-heavy this week. But as a follow-up, here's what we accomplished at least: signed distance field generation! pink = white pixel's distance to closest black pixel, green = black pixels distance to closest white pixel.
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Doing maintenance on the enemy system before adding new types. Improvement: running the state machine for a bit after health expires, for custom death behavior. Seen here: jets crashing before they explode. There's AOE on impact, so they'll destroy tanks if they crash into them!
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Setup a "classic" arcade scene in which to start developing Eden's moveset
#indiegame
#gamedev
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A little improvement on the rail camera/control -- orienting to the spline's direction slightly ahead of you, for natural look-ahead and early-steering.
#indiegamedev
🎶 Gall Force Suite 🎶
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Robot Pants has evolved into... Crab Tank! [Less Friendly]
#indiegamedev
🎶 Project A-Ko Versus Blue Side 🎶
WISHLIST NIGHTSHIFT GALAXY:
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Some "Itano Missile Circus" Polish:
- Added path wiggle (octave of perlin noise)
- Cooldown before despawn to give trail time to fade
- Arm-aiming in robot form.
#indiedev
#gamedevelopment
#マクロス
Missile Target "painting" & improved Barrel-Roll control
#screenshotsunday
#gamedevelopment
#indiegamedev
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More refinement (still a few artifacts with the shell to sort-out, and I'm improving the SDF-preprocessor still). Handles zoom out/in legibly. Next step is probably to add a cell-shaded gloss?
#indiegamedev
#techart
#anime
SDF rendering in-game, crisp lineart with depth-modulated thickness (inner lines thin-out, outer line thicken).
🎶 Gray Side Emmie (Project A-KO) 🎶
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Gamedevs will be forever vexed that for every feature we ship with a game there's a half dozen more which don't make it, and players never see. Getting to pull back the curtain a little and show some of those explorations yesterday was gratifying.
#solarash
Hudis?
@xewlupus
discusses all the early evolutions / locomotion tricks over the course of Solar Ash's development.
#SolarAsh
#programming
#gamedev
#indiedev
#3d
#3Danimation
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Findable comics in-action.
#indiegamedev
Been developing a better workflow for in-game motion-comics. I like this method because it involves minimal export-markup from illustrators, and mostly renders through the shader at runtime.
#indiegamedev
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Sewer Surfin'
#indiegamedev
#screenshotsunday
🎶 Turtles in Time (Arcade Ver)🎶
WISHLIST NIGHTSHIFT GALAXY:
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Between auto-aim and thumbstick-aiming accuracy, the zipline controls were challenging with gamepad, so I added our trigger-hold mechanic from Solar Ash where it enters bullet-time and disables auto-aim to let you pick the target.
#screenshotsunday
#indiegamedev
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Indulging in some action design after working on hub menus for a week: playing with a framing bias to avoid the fighter overlapping the reticle.
Notice how it scoots over whenever you try to cover it up, so you always see what you're shooting.
#indiegame
🎶 Dirty Pair ED 🎶
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Environment reactions to damage really adds drama (CW:flashing)
#indiegamedev
🎶 Uijin! Dangaioh 🎶
WISHLIST NIGHTSHIFT GALAXY:
Total count: 202 buildings on the main island (two smaller islands still to go 😭)
#ScreenshotSunday
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Overdue prototype from the checklist: slashing weapon. Thinking each fighter might have their own special attack, and this is unique to Kit's Rabbit?
#ScreenShotSaturday
🎶 Zero (Megaman X) 🎶
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Better render (I really should look before I post, LOL) 🫖
Mostly done adding "IsZeroGravity()" branches throughout the movement code to support deep-space scenes where there's no horizon / "up" -- getting strong "Omega Boost" vibes.
#indiegamedev
🫖Utah Teapot for orientation reference 🫖
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Illumination from fire effects looking a lot better now that the building's normals are correct, lol
#ScreenShotSunday
Ported the window smear effects from the old instance static mesh system to the new geometry script buildings. Plus side, it's way more optimized; downside I need to redesign how enviro damage works since the baked result isn't modular at runtime...
#screenshotsaturday
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Quick 3D run-through of the layout before moving on to blocking out the sewer and subway tunnels. (Took a few iteration adjustments -- was feeling too cramped at first)
#indiegamedev
🎶 Rush Hour (Sim City 4 OST) 🎶
Working on how we author buildings -- toying with the idea of placing boxes into a single object in blender, and then using a geometry node to scatter kit pieces for each with a random seed.
#indiegamedev
WISHLIST NIGHTSHIFT GALAXY:
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I'm not actively designing for online multiplayer yet, but I do poke my code from time to time to validate it isn't so painted-into-a-corner that it would require a full rewrite.
#indiegame
#netcode
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Gameplay test footage from yesterday's stream, after enabling all the enemy spawners at the same time. Real "chaotic battle" vibes, haha.
#screenshotsaturday
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Quick sewer-drain mockup. Doing the tunnel is relatively easy in
#Blender
using curve bevels w/ a custom profile + the solidify modifier, but cutting holes in the terrain and chambers with the knife tool is a PITA, is there a better way?
🎶 Technodrome (TMNT Arcade) 🎶
Quick 3D run-through of the layout before moving on to blocking out the sewer and subway tunnels. (Took a few iteration adjustments -- was feeling too cramped at first)
#indiegamedev
🎶 Rush Hour (Sim City 4 OST) 🎶
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Mostly done adding "IsZeroGravity()" branches throughout the movement code to support deep-space scenes where there's no horizon / "up" -- getting strong "Omega Boost" vibes.
#indiegamedev
🫖Utah Teapot for orientation reference 🫖
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Spider Tank integration test. (Royalty-Free music all from an old Ovani Humble Bundle, BTW)
#indiegamedev
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Did quick skin with the new model on our current rig and it's already looking so good!! Here's a test in the moonbase scene I've been devstreaming the last few weeks.
🎶 Bulk Slash OST // Boss Theme 🎶 (for action-tempo testing)
#IndieGameDev
We're so excited to share the updated model of Kit's mech, the Rabbit!
Credit to
@Jack_Covell
for his amazing work! 🌌💜
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Spider Tank got a lot of love yesterday, updated the high-speed Falcon today. Better auto-leveling, better bank-strafing, better drift-recovery, and juice the hell out of the missile circus.
#indiegamedev
🎶 Megaman X4 (Slash Beast) 🎶
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Multi-way intersections added; think I have about everything I need to make "sewer" gameplay 😎
#ScreenShotSunday
#Indiegamedev
🎶 OP Kamen Rider BLACK 🎶
I extended my fillet-style corner generator to handle arbitrary cross-sections and I have an *okay* tunnel tool, but it still uses too much fine-tuning for my taste, so I want to experiment some more...
#ScreenShotSunday
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Shield Projector, in 3D
#indiegamedev
🎶 Holy Lonely Night (duet version), Macross 7 OST 🎶
Blast from the past: the original prototype for Starfighter, before the devil cursed me with ambition. I'm reminded, now, as I redesign the "Shield Projector" from this version for 3D.
#IndieGameDev
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Added "Moving Ground Contact" support (long overdue), and an "Enemy Cruiser" blockout (which keeps reminding me of the Planet Express rocket?? LOL ??).
#ScreenShotSunday
🎶Uijin ! Dangaioh 🎶
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Camera Lock-On Progress
- handles edge-cases (far-away, directly above/below, etc)
- alternate soft-locked jet camera (for steering), but hard-lock again on midair drift
- procedural UI system for heads-up reticle
🎵 Gallant Char from MS Gundam 0079
#gamedev
#indiegame
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After some prototyping I've landed on the explicit button, so that it can interact with a new "heat" system where boosting, guarding, and heavy-weapons fill up a heat-meter, which staggers you on overflow, to rein in button-mashing dodge and turtling.
#indiegamedev
"What's the point of the robot, why wouldn't I just stay a jet?"
Idea: the robot has a guard/shield action. Not sure if it's better on an explicit button, or auto-activated whenever you're a robot and not shooting or dashing?
#indiegamedev
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corrected train-car math handling a 90-degree turn
#gamedev
I actually really flubbed this math, by mistakenly thinking that (U⋅V)² = U²V² = (U⋅U)(V⋅V) (WRONG, oops). It introduced a small error that I didn't notice until I made the chain long and it compounded. Here's the correct line/sphere intersection formula.
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Show me your water art! 🌊
FX I've been working on lately:
- Skyline Planar Reflection
- Color-Transition from Drainage-to-Sewage
- Knee-High Fade/Refraction
- Waterfall/Stream flow (with forking!)
Water
in various unfinished projects 💀
Show me your water art!
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Last ingredient to lock in the Descent homage -- enabling zero-g and unlocking the camera horizon. Let's gooo!
Wishlist:
🎶 Outerlimits (Descent OST) 🎶
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Sorting out giant mecha city street navigation.
#indiegamedev
🎶 Project A-KO Vs. Battle Gray Side OST 🎶
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Testing an "Aim Assist" system when playing with a gamepad, which uses the right stick and is significantly less precise that mouse-aiming
#IndieGameDev
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#SolarAsh
is out today (PS + EGS). I'm very emotional, having seen this through all the way from the first prototypes five years ago (!!!) through testing/final-polishing on the day before release. It wouldn't have been possible without the incredible team at Heart Machine.
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Added the Pirate fighter, as well. Took longer than expected to coerce particle trails to actually touch their emitters at high-speed 🚀🚀🚀
#UnrealEngine
Experimenting with posting MP4s instead of GIFs. Anyway, did a polish pass on the Spider Tank 🕷️
#indiedev
#gamedevelopment
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Wild character control is fun, but play emerges from harmonizing it with the setup.
- reworked movement to conform to the arena scale
- dialed-down field-of-view to limit aiming
- stabilized camera pitch & added dynamic framing on ascent/descent
#IndieDev
#GameDevelopment
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I like the fight choreography in the new Ranma½ adaptation. It's modernized, but it still uses a steady camera, like a Jackie Chan fight, rather than the now-ubiquitous hyperactive/flying Dragonball/Naruto-style crane camera.
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Messing around with warp FX. Here's a two-layer idea: a ProceduralMeshComponent tube w/ depth falloff + a SplineMeshComponent leading you and matching the local neighborhood ahead of you.
#ScreenShotSaturday
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1 hour!
#indiegamedev
#stream
This afternoon: Rail Shooter Stream part 3! Gonna add an wasp-mesh and write some combat AI.
#indiegamedev
#stream
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Today's Aiming Adventure(tm) -- I added automatic dead-reckoning. Bullets automatically shoot in front of moving targets, not directly at them.
The alternative was to always see an offset between the reticle and the impact explosions, which felt wrong.
#indiegame
#gamedev
Interesting demonstration of
#gamedesign
trade-offs: open-world impose inherent limitations that opinionated arcade-action don't share, because we can curate the arena.
Not only can we play with extreme character framing & distance, but we can even shoot out of the screen!
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Procedural Locomotion (Part 2):
Actually taking steps! Handling foot sliding! Contact prediction! Step arcs!
#indiedev
#gamedevelopment
#unrealengine
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I've been capturing footage of all the movesets in our game, Nightshift Galaxy, and was compelled to edit a quick sizzle reel. Enjoy!
🎶
@troupegammage
🎶
#indiegame
#gamedev
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