Category: General

It’s time for our July post! At this time of year we have a lot of admin to deal with, but we’re still making steady progress on both of our current projects! We’ll talk a bit about both of them; if you missed our post last month, definitely give that a read for more information on what we’ve been up to.

For our main project, we’re continuing to work mostly on networking code. A large chunk of our overhaul is now done, but there’s still a few bugs that need ironing out, as well as some more features to keep everything properly in sync. We’ll carry on with this throughout July, as well as working on some smaller features and fixes if we have time.

Progress on our second project is also going well, with both of us spending lots of time on all aspects of this project; this includes finalising several of our level designs, as well as continuing to replace our developer assets (as we mentioned in May). We’re hoping to have something more interesting to say within the next couple of months, so be sure to keep an eye out for more news!

Thanks for reading – see you again next month!

It’s the third of the month, which means it’s monthly update time!

On the programming side, we’ve carried on with the network improvements we’ve mentioned in previous months; in particular, we’re working on keeping both players in sync especially when randomness is involved, or when something can only be done by one player but both try to do it at the same time. There’s not really any interesting stuff to talk about yet, but it’s going well so far and we’ll keep you updated as we work on it. It’s a pretty tough and boring job though, so we’ve also been doing a few other tasks to keep things interesting, such as finishing implementing some of the weirder enemy attacks in the game.

Similar to last month, we can’t talk much about the art side yet, but our work has been very similar. We have a few big-but-important UI assets that we’ve been working on, which has taken up most of our time, but we’re continuing to work on a few other things where we can. We’re really hoping we’ll be able to talk about it more soon – we don’t want to leave you hanging any longer than we have to!

That’s all for now – things should be getting a bit more interesting in the coming months, so be sure to stay tuned!

Hi all – if you’ve read our recent monthly update posts, you’ll know that we’ve been working on Blockhead, a puzzle-platformer based on our old college and school projects. We’ve got good news: the Steam store page for Blockhead is now live!

You can find the store page here! You might have noticed on the Steam page that we now have a release date: September 3rd, exactly 4 years after 86 was released! As previously mentioned, Blockhead will be completely free of charge – you can follow or wishlist the game to be notified when it releases.

But that’s not all – we’ve been working on improvements to the blog too! You’ll now see a “Games” link in the top-right, which will take you to pages for both 86 and Blockhead, including links, screenshots and trivia!

Thanks for reading! We’ll be back for our usual monthly update post on the 3rd – Blockhead’s release day!

Sup, it’s time for our May post! As usual, we’ve been hard at work in a bunch of different areas, so let’s go into more detail!

Most of our development work this month has been the hodgepodge of random tasks that has been the norm for us recently. Among those tasks were getting more animations in, improving our custom map editor tool, and improving the functionality of our in-game text boxes. We’ve also been squashing our fair share of bugs, getting a couple of annoying ones fixed throughout the month.

We also made a start on our main job for the coming weeks: moving platforms! Any respectable platformer needs to have land that moves, but our engine hasn’t supported that so far. Over the next month, we’ll be working on platforms that move in different ways, or toggle between enabled and disabled states. We’ll also be adding some basic scripting support to these, so that we can have some on timers, some synched to the music, and others activated by buttons.

Now, onto the art side of things! You’ve probably already guessed what we’re going to say: we’ve been working on more player attacks! We’ve got a bunch more done (each of which consists of several separate animations), the most interesting of which is the breakdance! This attack allows the player to do steady damage to nearby enemies without giving them time to get their own attacks in, but holding the attack for too long will make them dizzy and vulnerable.

We’ve got one more attack we want to get done this month; we’ll share some more info about that attack in the next update. After that, we’ll start thinking about what other animations and assets we want to add.

Thanks for reading this month’s post – see you in the next one!

In this post, we’ll talk a bit about the various topics – aside from company updates – that we’ll cover on this blog. When we set up this blog, our plan was to offer something to anyone that’s interested in any aspect of game development, from ideas (such as design plans and concept art) to execution (such as programming and animation). Hopefully this post will give you a better idea of what we’ll be posting, and which topics you might want to keep any eye on.

Just as a heads-up: unlike our monthly updates, these posts aren’t going to have any particular schedule. We’re planning to work on blog posts on the side of our main projects, so we’ll be writing a bit at a time, then posting once we have something complete. That said, we do have one upcoming post in progress, and we have a dozen other ideas for blog posts, so you can definitely expect more in the near future.

Now, onto the topics that we’ll cover:

Game Design

In what will probably be our most common topic of discussion, we’ll use this category to talk about various aspects of designing games. The focus here will be on the things we do or don’t like in various games, how other games do it better or worse, and a few ideas that we think would improve it. We have a few design post ideas already, so expect posts on crafting, crowd control, choices, and many more! (Including some things that don’t start with C…)

Programming

If you’re interested in software engineering of any kind, this is the topic for you! We’ll use this category for any posts where we talk about any neat coding tricks we’ve learnt, any interesting programming problems we’ve solved, and any standards we follow that we think aren’t talked about enough. While we’re mostly fans of the C♯ language, most of what we post here should be applicable to other languages too.

Art

Given the kinds of games we make, art is just as important as programming! This topic will mainly focus on various aspects of animation and images, and how to fill them with personality. However, we’ll use this category for other creative aspects of game design too, such as music and story writing.

Business

Finally, there might be the occasional business post, describing some aspects of how Loony Code is run. This will probably be the smallest category by far (let’s be honest, there’s not much interesting business stuff to talk about). But there’s a few things regarding the founding of Loony Code that we think are worth talking about, so expect a post about that in the future.

That’s all for now – hopefully one of the topics above is something that you’ll find interesting. We’ll keep all our posts categorised appropriately, so you can filter based on what you’re interested in. We hope to see you again soon in our next monthly update, and any future posts!

If you’re reading this, it means you’ve come across our blog! Chances are you came from our Steam profile or one of our posts there, or maybe found one of our posts in a web search. Either way, welcome!

As of the launching of this blog, Loony Code was founded one year ago. We’re a UK-based indie game development company, with a focus on cartoony games – in every sense of the word. Our first game, 86, was released on September 3rd last year. If you want to learn more about us, check out our About Us page.

There’s a few things we’re planning to do on here, but most important is our monthly updates. In the first week of each month, we’ll post a recap of what we’ve been working on and what you can expect to see from us in the near future.

But that’s not all – we’ve got several other topics that we want to talk about that won’t fit into that monthly update. Our posts will cover a number of topics including game design, coding, animation, and maybe a bit of business-related stuff as well.

As you can probably tell, this blog is still in its infancy; we’ll be updating a few things and making it look nicer in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading – we’ll see you in future posts!