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BoMToons
So many times, it happens too fast...you trade your passion for glory. Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past, you must fight just to keep them alive.

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Super Chibi Knight Official Launch!

Posted by BoMToons - June 24th, 2015


Yep, it's done!

Super Chibi Knight is officially launched into the world of Steam games! <confetti!>

First order of business - Please help spread the word by sharing this link:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/283080

The game is on sale for 10% off as a "launch discount" so take advantage of that :-D

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Where to begin as a review of the long journey?

CCTB

1405066_143515300971_CCTB.jpg

I think I have to trace the real "root" of this game back to Castle Crashing the Beard (which was somewhat inspired by a game I made way back in 2007 called Boss Bash) It was a silly idea I had in 2008 while Tom was still working on completing Castle Crashers. Of course, @Luis helped turn it into something way more impressive than I originally intended. The pink knight was all his idea :-D

But you can see similarities between Super Chibi Knight and CCTB... it's a side-scrolling simple platformer/beatemup, the character's armor and weapon gets better and better as you level up, fast-paced action, big boss battles, and cute voice acting... the toolkit is all there. @Luis @Coaly and I finished that game in 2 weeks and it's been one of my most played games ever.


CHIBI KNIGHT ORIGINAL

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Enough people contacted me and suggested I expand on CCTB, that I decided to do it and eventually, in 2010, made the original Chibi Knight. It was heavily inspired by  Zelda II (my favorite Zelda game growing up) and in a kind of fortuitous way, I ended up with my, then, 4 year-old daughter as the voice actress (which is what MADE the game imo). I wrote a post-mortem about making the original Chibi Knight a while back. You can still read it here.


THE SLOG

So, the next few years (2010 to 2015) were full of ups and downs, normal life challenges I think for most people, and especially normal for those who are trying to do creative (synonymous with "risky") things. One of the highlights of that time period was releasing Abobo's Big Adventure in 2012 with @mockery and @poxpower and Newgrounds. You can read my postmortem of that grueling experience here.

1405066_143515675711_abobones.png

The kids' educational game company I was working for imploded in 2013 and I was left without much recourse except to buckle down and get my freelance/indie thing going. I had been working on the Chibi Knight sequel in my spare time, but decided to get more serious about it and ran a Kickstarter campaign in February of 2014 which was successfully funded in large part thanks to generous pledges from people like YOU!

Super Chibi Knight was originally supposed to be a web game (you can tell by the weird resolution I originally chose and got locked into) But in 2013-2014 the appeal of web-games was largely wearing off and there was (and still is) a lot of anti-Flash sentiment. People like Ed McMillen ( @bluebaby ) and Tom Brien ( @i-smel ) had recently found success with releasing "Flash" games on Steam (The Binding of Isaac and No Time To Explain) so I decided to make the shift (without really knowing what I was getting into) and launched a Steam Greenlight campaign for SCK. At the time, I was still developing in the Flash IDE outputting .swf files and had no idea how I would ever tackle things like Gamepad Support, Steam Achievements, using the Steam Client, Multi-Platform support (CURSE YOU MAC AND LINUX!), or even Adobe AIR. So yeah, I learned a ton along the way.

It took me 6 months longer than promised in the Kickstarter campaign to finish the game, but it had to be done. I was juggling a lot of stuff: family, freelance work, school, exercise (rarely), and lots of other things too. It has been a whirlwind!


CURRENT STATUS: BUTTERFLIES CHURNING

I'm glad it's over and I can move on to new things, but I am still extremely nervous that it will flop and make the whole experience have a bitter taste or give me some feeling of wasted time/regret/failure.

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THE FUTURE

I would prefer (of course) to have a steady income with a "regular" paycheck. The stress of being freelance and not knowing where next month's mortgage payment is coming from and not being able to save money for the future has been a major strain on me and my family. We've pulled together in solidarity, but I really miss being able to plan further ahead. 

That said, I want to keep making games. I feel like it's something I'm meant to do in life, so I'm going to keep pursuing that. I have some ideas about revisiting some of my past hits and re-doing art and code (to be compatible with high-def standards) and releasing them on mobile. It could be PRETTY FUN!

Roger from i-Mockery, Poxpower, and I also have some other plans in the works for a NEW IP that could turn out to be really fun.

I have a .txt file full of game ideas too... so we'll see what happens in the long term with all of those things.

Generally, I feel optimistic and positive. I definitely turned a corner, but need to keep up to speed with tech better. I plan to invest some time into learning Unity and also researching Open FL + Haxe. If Open FL is new to you, you should really check out this article: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20150603/245099/HaxeOpenFL_for_home_game_consoles.php


There are so many people who pitched in to help along the way and saved my bacon. Most notably: @the-exp, @joeybetz, @johnnyutah, @tomfulp, @mike, @luis, @ansel and MANY OTHERS! Huge thanks to everyone who supported this adventure, onward and upward!!!

--Nick


Comments

Congrats on the release!!!

Thanks Tom!

Congrats again, man! Never look at a game release as a waste of time. It's an accomplishment! Really happy you saw it through.

And now, onward and upward to more game projects. Really excited about our new IP!

Yeah, looking forward to new stuff!

Congrats, game looks really good.

Thanks, and THANKS! :-D

I've been following these posts for a while now and finally caved. Just purchased the game and it's downloading now. Congrats on the release and I can't wait to play it!

Hooray! I'm curious to know what you think!

Awww man. So excited! Congratulations!

Thanks tone-loc!

Hey BomToons congrats!

is there any way i can speak to you in private ... skype maybe?
im just wondering as i have something you might be interested in. If you are not interested you can delete me, i just want you to hear me out :P

Drop me a pm to tell me if you want to speak or not :)

You're welcome to PM me and fill me in. You never know! And thanks for the congrats!

It was a really fun game. I hope it becomes wildly successful and allows you to keep pursuing game development full time. Congratulations.

Thanks man! Glad you enjoyed! I have the same hopes :-D

nice

*high five*

Great to hear! Time to update my game.

:-D

So glad to see it is finally released. Haven't played it yet, but trailers look pretty amazing. Good luck with your next projects. So far I've enjoyed every game you uploaded here :D

Nice! If you like my other stuff, you'll probably like this too! :-D

Congrats on the release! Pretty much what Rog said. I enjoyed the transparency of your progress

Thanks Luis, and thanks for your contributions along the way. Don't know if you saw, but you're enshrined in the NG blimp in the game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KxjBHu7XNU

meanwhile im still camping your account waiting for more free steam keys

you know id buy the game if i wasnt chronicly broke

Broke? How so?

OpenFL yesssss do itt

Definitely gonna look into it :-D

Congrats on getting this beast out in the wild! I've enjoyed reading about all the hurdles and milestones you hit along the way. Now I just need to find a solid block of time and play SCK through!

Thanks Josh, looking forward to hearing what you think!

Exciting!!
I'll be slotting this into my play list very soon!
OpenFL is very nice, I can try to help out if you run into any issues. Although honestly I think I may move to Unity for my next project. Hard to say at this point...

Nice, why Unity over Open FL?

it's that time of the year after the steam sale, everyone's broke

Ha ha, yeah, maybe.

Unity is a more mature platform at this point- Unity has direct support for next gen consoles whereas OpenFL is still in the early stages. Unity is also more powerful, offering built in support for 3d rendering and shaders. OpenFL is working on this too but it's not quite there. From what I can tell Unity also has more support in general. I've been able to do everything I've needed in OpenFL so far but sometimes it requires hacked together extensions that are ugly and mystifying.

That being said, the framework of OpenFL will be a much easier transition from an actionscript background (assuming you're ok with the lack of any visual IDE)

Yeah, I think, if I'm gonna do Unity, I should prob just jump in and bite the bullet. OpenFL sounds like an easier transition for me personally, but I think I can handle Unity's language (I messed with c# a bit already and it seemed do-able)

I love Unity. When I moved my game over from Flash to Unity it just made things so much easier. But I just played through the first chapter of Super Chibi Knight, and am loving it so far. I will drop a review on Steam once I complete the game. Also I love the Blacksmith's name. Great game, can't wait to see what you cook up next.

Nice man! Are you using Unity's 2D tools?

Thanks for the note.

The only Unity specific tool I use is their scene creator. Everything else I just do through code. I ported my old state machine from flash, because I didn't care about learning their system (plus I hate graphic systems). Also I was not a fan of their physics system, so I just use ray casting, along with my own physics.

It's great though, because with Flash/Starling was limited with video ram, and I had to create a pretty complicated system that would discard animation sprite sheets on the fly. Unity handles all of that garbage collection for you. Also the ability to add scripts to objects is really cool, and has saved me quite a bit of time not having to rewrite code for objects in the game that all act the same, or follow similar principles.

Nice, sounds like a good setup you've got going. Do you still do art in flash?

For this game @cartoonCoffee is handling all of that stuff, but yea he is still using flash for the animations. He exports them as sprite sheets after, and I import them in unity as animations. He uses Photoshop for the backgrounds.

Cool cool!

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