Situation Normal: afu

A Platform Shooter

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Join our mischievous, yet lovable agent on a cool and funny mission to save the world! In this gun-heavy platformer, you’ll navigate through hilarious challenges, hone your skills, and enjoy a side-splitting story. Get ready for an unforgettable adventure where the fate of the world rests in your hands!

Please note that the current look and feel are in the early stages and will evolve into something even more amazing in the final version.

Gear Up and Win: Join the Ultimate Action Platformer Study for a Chance to Score a $25 Gift Card!

Hey there, fellow gamers aged 14-16! We’re conducting a research study for an upcoming platform shooter game, and we need your help! If you’re into platform shooters and enjoy funny moments, this might be for you!

Picture this: a gun-heavy game with an epic story that will blow your mind! We want to create a game that rocks your socks off with exciting gameplay and hilarious storytelling. But here’s the best part: you can be part of shaping this game and making it even more awesome!

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Ready to jump into the action? Complete this quick screener to apply for the study:

Quick Screener

We can’t wait to hear from you and make this game truly epic!

Artificials Game Studio

Juice Up Your Game

Jan Willem Nijman – Vlambeer – “The art of screenshake”

“Just fill your game with love and tiny details.”

Jan Willem Nijman

The 30 little Tricks from Jan Willem Nijman to Juice up your Game

I collected all the 30 tricks on the youtube video from Jan Willem Nijman in this article. Basically the trick name and a little tiny explanation. It’s actually just for my own convenience. But hey if it’s helpful for you, you are welcome.

1. Basic Animations & Sounds

Makes walking, jumping, picking up things, and shooting more fun. It doesn’t really matter if it’s high quality or simple. It makes it alive.

2. Lower Enemy HP

It’s more fun. It’s super frustrating if you need to shoot ten times on an enemy before he dies, makes your weapon feel feeble and boring.

3. Higher Rate of Fire

It’s a video game about shooting so put more bullets in there. You hardly can overdo it. Really. Just add more bullets. Give your weapon a higher fire rate.

4. More Enemies

Because of juice number 2 you need more enemies to shoot. It’s satisfying if they pop like popcorn.

5. Bigger Bullets

Don’t use realistically sized bullets as it looks so silly, make them big. The player wants to see those badass killer bullets. The weapon feels much more powerful.

6. Muzzle Flash

Just make the first bullet frame a circle. Very simple, very effective.

7. Faster Bullets

Slow bullets are lame, make it faster.

8. Less Accuracy

If your gun is not too accurate it looks more realistic and is more fun.

9. Impact Effects

Let the player know he hit something, don’t just remove the bullets. Like fragments falling off the wall if a bullet hits it or blood strains if a character gets hit by a bullet.

10. Hit Animation

Let the player know that he damaged the enemies. The simplest trick is to make the enemy flat white for a fraction of a second.

11. Enemy Knockback

But knockback force if you hit enemies. Your weapon feels so much more powerful and makes it more realistic from a physical point of view.

12. Permanence

Don’t remove dead bodies, it helps you remember if you come back in a room with a huge pile of dead bodies in it.

13. Camera Lerp

Smoother cameras make the character feel more in motion.

14. Camera Position

Your camera focus on important things in your video game. This is one of the hardest part and takes a lot of trials and testing.

15. Screen Shake

This is an important rule add screen shake on explosions it looks so much more powerful than without.

16. Player recoil

Shooting feels much more powerful with recoil on the player and you can use it to avoid that player do not shoot all the time as it has a drawback.

17. Sleep

If you set a deadly hit sleep for 100 or 200 ms, it puts more meaning in that action. Brawl games do that a lot.

18. Gun Delay

Make the character and its props look like they have weight/momentum when moving.

19. Gun Kick

Add recoil to things that would have it.

20. Strafing

If you shoot and change the direction the shooting will be still in the same direction until you stop shooting to turn around the gun.

21. More Permanence

Put ejecting shells in your game and make them permanent. It also helps to remember that you were in that room and that you did shoot a lot.

22. More Bass

Add bass to your shooting and explosions they get much more meaning and power.

23. Super Machinegun

Try ridiculous variations on how shooting performs, maybe three bullets a time, go crazy.

24. Random Explosions

That is a funny one but it puts more action in your game if you put some random explosions to your game when you shoot enemies, don’t overdo it.

25. More Enemies

You tuned up your gameplay so that you got the feeling you do have not enough to shoot at.

26. Even Higher Rate of Fire

Because it is more fun to shoot

27. Even Higher Rate of Camera Kick

Make your camera kick in the direction of the action/shooting.

28. Bigger Explosions

Seriously, who doesn’t like explosions?

29. Even More Permanence

Put some dust after your gigantic explosions and let it fade slowly.

30. Meaning

Let your player win or loos. It’s an obvious one.

Shoot in All Directions

I can now shoot in all directions with my little cute hero. And you can see he enjoys it a lot! My game goes now the action game path with a very simple level design. The idea is to improve the visuals with small little details. The ejected shells are one sample, the hearth if he collects new ammo, and the funny lauthter if he shoots like crazy. I plan to add more things which interacts with the hero or any NPC, like crickets which fly aroung and get disturbed in the the bullet hell.

I think it’s now quite hard to aim on something and as ammo is a limited resource I probably need kind of an automatic aim. The idea is that if there is something to shoot and I aim in a directions the automatic aim to the next shootable thing in that direction if it is in range. But I need to do first game testing. This is actually the next step any way to have a set of simple levels and let people play them so I can collect feedback. In the past I did that with steam, I probably also will look into itch.io as well.


I get commissions for purchases made through the following links, I only put stuff in this section I also would buy or I already bought

Twitch Channel ia97lies

I have a twitch channel and I plan to develop my game from time to time life on this channel. I will not comment on what I’m doing but rather would like to interact with you, just write on the chat all the questions you have and I try to explain in the lifestream. As well as suggestions or improvements are welcome. Just to talk my self or to hidden people isn’t a too nice experience and feels a bit unnatural.

https://www.twitch.tv/ia97lies

I’m looking forward to this out-of-my-comfort-zone experience.

One more thing, I do this game in Java, jMonkeyEngine, Zay-es, Lemur,libgdx-ai, dyn4j and feather. Of course for the models I use blender.

I offer as well test driven development sessions, just let me know down in the comments if you would be interested. Or directly on my twitch channel. I don’t do test driven development for my personal stuff as I’m a one-man-show-game-developer, and I have a different focus than at work. But it would be a completely different story if I work with someone together. If there is interest I prepare something or do it while developing my game All Fucked Up.

I do it in Swiss-German, German and English, depends on the people joining. I’ll see it in the chat 🙂

I’ll be streaming between 8-9 PM CEST on Sunday eve.