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"Oh hey, just remembered I haven't gotten my article in for this month!"
looks at clock
8:30 PM, September 30
"Oh poop"
Hi. It's koola. You may know me from "wow this game is good" and "wow Toby Fox is amazing" and "something something music".
I made a game called OMNIFATE. Originally, I wanted to document the game's entire development on my blog page, but that did not end up happening, sadly.
I released OMNIFATE on September 9, 2023. If you want, you can pick it up right now from this link: https://store.steampowere...com/app/2521970/OMNIFATE/
I just wanted to spend some time going over its development history. Originally started as a companion project to a cancelled Game Builder Garage game, OMNIFATE's first playable version was a puzzle platformer. At the time, I was very proud of it. Looking back at it now, frankly that prototype sucked: it showed very little signs of polish (even though I had promised polish from it online), lack of originality (the first couple prototypes did not use original music), and you couldn't even die.
I worked on that version of the game for about two months, most of which was spent fine-tuning the physics. Honestly, at some point, I do want to make a platformer game, although I don't think that will happen any time soon.
That version of OMNIFATE was made in Unity. Unity is supposed to be an easy engine for newcomers to the field to learn, however nothing I wrote ever ended up working. I don't think that was the engine's fault; rather, I think it was the raw difficulty of C# for amateurs.
After about two months of development and the release of a demo publicly available prototype, I had felt like I was just growing overly tired of the project. I wanted to call it quits, and was thinking that this sort of thing is just not something a person of my age could come up with.
Fast forward a month. I was deciding what to do with the project. At the time, I had not fully realized what my favorite genre of video game is, but I had known that I had a fun time with many a turn-based RPG, so I decided to go with that. I could not find a single tutorial for RPGs in Unity, so I gave up.
In September 2021, I was considering my options. I could abandon the project directly, or start in a new engine. I looked into several options, but the one I ended up using was GameMaker Studio 2, which later officially changed its name to just GameMaker.
GameMaker seemed like a breath of fresh air. A unique workspace, tabs, no switching windows, and I could kind of understand the code! I followed a tutorial on top-down movement in GameMaker and understood about 81% of what was going on. The way the tutorial's code was structured meant that I had to have a walking animation.
I asked my friend Rain if she could draw a walking animation for the player character, and waited. And waited. And waited. She was procrastinating, but so was I. I could have just made the walking animation, but I wanted it to look nice.
I ended up waiting for seven months. I regret that timespan the most out of anything I regret throughout the development cycle, because at any point I could have just slapped up a prototype walking animation.
On one day in June 2022, I finally snapped out of it and made the dang walking animation. After that, things finally started to look up. Throughout the rest of that summer, every day I worked wholeheartedly on every aspect of the game, with the goal of releasing a demo by the end of it. I succeeded. I released a demo of OMNIFATE on GX.games on August 30, 2022, two days before my deadline. After that, I worked on the rest of the game, and completed it in March 2023.
After that, I released a trailer, and sat my butt down. I relaxed. I playtested the game multiple times, noticed several bugs, but patched only a few. (I caught the mind disease known as "procrastination" again.) I also got several other people to playtest, and promised them the bugs that they found would be fixed. (I didn't fix them.)
In one day in July, I finally saved up money for publishing on Steam. I got everything ready, and asked my parents for playtesting. They proceeded to lovingly and caringly point out every bug they saw, while I wrote them down all while crying and telling them that I couldn't fix the bugs. Looking back on it, I was being a brat to my loving and caring parents who only wanted to see a quality game released.
So I fixed every bug that was written down, and they found more. This process repeated twice before I finally felt that a genuine, final, quality product was ready. I submitted everything, and relaxed again. It was like a burden had been lifted off my shoulders.
That's where we are today. The game has released, and I'm currently working on another project, in a different genre. (*It's not the platformer.)
Thanks for reading this, and hopefully you enjoy the fruit of my (mostly) hard work.
I've been koola, and, why are some letters bolded? Those weren't bolded when I was writing the article...?
(I'm sorry for the lack of a quickly written article this month. I was mostly focusing on school and family.)
In my article "The Development of OMNIFATE", I (for about a paragraph) talked about my relatively newfound appreciation for music as a whole. So, I figured I, as a composer, would do this topic justice and give it its own article. (Also, yes, I know I already wrote an article this month, but to be honest, I'm not really proud of how that one turned out.)
(I was gonna start of this paragraph by mentioning the date when I made Wurly, but I can't remember the actual date, and my computer is literally giving me no help with that. Case and point:
Isn't technology amazing?)
When I made Wurly on [see above brackets for more information] about June 2021, I gained more of an appreciation for the true effort that goes into producing a song. Sure, there had been music I had appreciated before then, but it was mostly just Toby Fox and Jackbox soundtracks. Pretty much every game I've played since then I've had an ear for hearing the music for what it is: actual really good music.
It also helps that around 2021 I was able to create a Spotify account. I joke about having a lot of hours on YouTube, but Spotify is the service I by far have the most time on, even in just the two years I've had it. Most of my playlists on it are comprised of video game soundtracks, although recently I've added some songs from movies as well (including the Super Mario Bros Movie, which I will rewatch soon and write an article about probably next month).
Here are some of the most recent games I've played, here are my thoughts on their music.
Super Mario Land 2: Just like the rest of this game, the music has a really unique vibe to it.
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe: AMAZING soundtrack, with pretty much no song in it having less than a 7/10 for me. Unfortunately, it is exclusive to Bandcamp, YouTube, and Steam right now, but the developers have confirmed that the soundtrack will be coming to other streaming services later this year (...the same as 2022...).
UNDERTALE: I mentioned this in the DELTARUNE article, but Toby Fox is probably my favorite video game composer. Also, yes, I did recently replay UNDERTALE.
ARK: Survival Evolved: The music gets repetitive, but in and of themselves the songs are good.
The last part of this is being a composer myself. I'm biased against my own works (which seems counterintuitive but think about the last time you went up on stage and didn't critique yourself at least once), but I have been told by early playtesters of OMNIFATE and people I've shown my music to in general that it is very well made. I myself can't wait to release the soundtrack to OMNIFATE, but of course I do have to wait until the game is out before I can. Attempting to throw away all biases, I find my music nice to listen to and better than average, but not as good as Toby Fox or Nightmargin.
Anyway, that's enough nerding out. 
I've been koola, and go buy the OneShot Soundtrack from Bandcamp. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. DO IT, OR ELSE I'LL---[/i][/u] <- Whoopsy! This is an RF Generation glitch, not my fault. The tags are written and workiong as intended on my part.
(I just described music in a written form for a dozen-ish paragraphs. If you're feeling tired of reading about music and want to hear some, here's a gift from me to you. )
Omnifate has officially been my longest project.
The amount of hours I've poured into this project has almost outshined my amount of hours on YouTube on Switch.
All jokes aside, I've been hard at work on this for about 4 months now. Although the work on the RPG technically started a year ago, I hadn't really been actually doing anything 'til June 2022 due to various reasons.
Making a game isn't hard, honestly; the biggest problem that I've fixed has only took me 2 weeks.
What I find harder is telling the story you actually want to tell. I've had the idea for making a game since about 2020; it started taking shape in 2021; and now here we are with a demo of the game.
When I've watched interviews with game developers, the number one thing I hear is to keep it small. It is incredibly hard to control your excitement about such a project, so you'll often get carried away doing things related to the game, but not working on the actual game.
OMNIFATE has been a big passion project. I'm not really intending to profit off of it. My goal here is to create a game that I would want to play. I want to see more Earthbound-style games, so I'm making one. If anybody disagrees, that's fine.
So far, development has had its hurdles, but I'm really liking how it's coming along.
Composing the music for OMNIFATE has been really fun, too. In my head, before July 2021, I thought that if anything were to be completed and music was to be done, I would have music commissioned by someone like C418. But since I composed Wurly, I've been composing my own music and had a better appreciation of video game soundtracks. I've been told by a lot of people that my music is really well done. (Shameless plug but check out my music on Spotify or wherever you stream your music.)
I've been koola, and I know. I made this article way too late.
(Number of bugs: 348,973 and counting...)
So I was lingering around RFGeneration not really doing anything, and I realized that I had not shared anything about Omnifate with RFGeneration since August. A lot has happened since then.
Let's start with some of the more influential stuff. I switched to making Omnifate an RPG, as I noticed that most of the story elements I wanted to have would fit better in one. I've been composing music as I come up with the story, and just overall composing for fun sometimes.
I have acquired the services of an artist. Her pen name is Raini, so that's what I'll call her for the rest of this. Raini is very helpful for Omnifate and makes anything I draw look 10x better. She draws in this anime art style that just oozes joy out of me when I see it. Seriously, I hope she pursues this as more of a career.
Next, I'm working on getting a demo with at least the first bit of the game in it in the summer months.
Coming up with a good story is a really hard thing to do. I don't want to plagiarize, but I also don't want to include no standard RPG tropes, so I've just been working out the story in my head as I go.
Overall, development is coming along better.
I've been koola, and Omnifate is coming as soon as I can finish it. Please stay tuned.
(I really have to fight procrastination.)
Ok, well, I've stopped thinking of creative ways to talk about the delays of my blog posts. I'm supposed to have one every month, right? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
Well, anyways, I've been coding and Arting(tm) lately as well as have been making more than my fair share of music. Development is going along well.
In my time not spent developing I have been mostly watching YouTube videos; however I have also been replaying through some games including Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Super Mario 3D World, and Super Mario Bros. 3. I'm making my way through OneShot and will hopefully have an article about it in at least 83 years.
I've even started my own game collection as well.
And I'm making it my goal to have learnt toki pona (it's a conlang. That's cool but I won't get into it here) by February 2022.
Wait this article is about Baba Is You?
The game I find my self coming back to the most now that I've coped with the fact that I can't beat every game is Baba Is You. As previously described like a year ago, it is a block pushing puzzle game where the rules themselves are present on the screen as blocks that can be pushed around.
It recently recieved a level editor update, which piqued my interest. Now, the level editor isn't exactly new, as it has been around in the PC version for a year now.
Unfortunately I have no way of buying stuff on my PC so this has been unreachable for me until now.
I must say the controls for the level editor are rather weird; I think that since it's been on PC so long, the developer had to make a way for it to work on Switch. It literally uses all the buttons on the controller for different functions.
Now, the level editor is extremely versatile. It contains every word in the game. Because this game is essentially a programming language in and of itself, this allows you to take the Minecraft Redstone approach and build computers, so long as they fit into 64 x 32 squares.
This means that you can make music, games, and other stuff really easily.
Also, part of the level editor itself is the existence of levelpacks, which are essentially entire games made with levels from the level editor. In simpler terms, the entire original release of the game is a levelpack, and you can make games that big using levelpacks.
Now, the developer has added 2 whole new games' worth of content into Baba is You.
This is the type of developer support I want to see in more games. I (as a developer) want to do that, and I hope more games can learn from Baba Is You, to make more games finished, and then add content down the line if they ever want to.
You simply don't see that in AAA games, from my point of view. EA gets bashed so many times for this, and rightfully so, in my opinion.
If you're a aspiring game developer, heed my advice.
This has been koola, and I just thought of ending my articles like this.
(Baba Is You has influenced my music so much, so that's another reason.)
So I figured that instead of using my Instagram to post devlogs (never do that sort of thing on any social), I would just use RFGeneration since I've been on there a few years, and you guys are listed in the opening splashes after all; truly, after putting some time into actual developing. amazing job bickman how do you do it so good*
So, recap, I've been working on this thing for a few months. It's been...
..
interesting, to say the least.
but rewarding when you actually get something working.
As of this week, I have made a grand total of 4 whole songs for it and added a title screen and tutorial.
I want to add a dialogue box soon, and actual dialogue.
*Shadow Kisuragi, you are good too. To all the developers who may be reading this, good job.
It's been a while since my P5R article, so I felt like I should give a bit of an update. I'm making my own game!!! It's being made in Unity using C#, and, while I do not enjoy developing it, I do enjoy the satisfaction I get from completing a feature. I've started a group to help me make it, namely Lekooliatris Games, however, I make the game for the most part. One member helps with debugging my code, which is very nice. I've even made some music for it! You can listen to it on Spotify and YouTube, in a week from when this is being posted, (will update when it goes live), and...
...Well. I got a bit too excited there, didn't I? Let's rewind a bit. This all started upon the reveal of Game Builder Garage, (which I'm going to make an article about sometime) which kind of got me excited to make a game in it. I started thinking, "How would I go about this without some sort of group?" and that's when I got to work on setting stuff up for Lekooliatris Games. I came up with the name for the group randomly in my head, funnily enough. After everything was said and done, I wondered, "What's this sort of thing without any games?" So I started it. Not in Game Builder Garage, but in Unity.
I've added and added to that project, until I remade it with less hardcoding and better code.
So, "what is this? How do I get it? When is this release date? Tell me the name of the game already!"
Well, I'll answer those questions individually.
"what is this?" It is a 2D, pixel-art, indie, New Super Mario Bros - style platformer.
"How do I get it?" It's not released yet, so you can't get it yet. However, you can download the PC and Android prototypes right now! https://omnifate.fandom.com/wiki/Prototypes
And finally, "Tell me the name of the game already!" Another thing I came up off of the top of my head, Omnifate.
*probably spoilers, I do not know yet, read at your own risk*
I plan to have a sort of multi-ending system, and at the end of the game someone reviews all of your actions and gives you your "Omnifate"; you also earn a fitting achievement for that ending.
(Yes, NieR already took that. I know.)
*you are good now*
This is going to take an extremely long time to come out, probably more than a couple years, but I will be releasing prototypes and alphas and betas for it.
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This is koola6's Blog.
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Welcome to my little side of the internet! This is where I post game reviews, video-game related things, and stuff about MY game, OMNIFATE. Expect a new article about every month; sometimes I post more than once in a month or take five-month long breaks.
(The schedule is a guideline.)
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