Destiny 2 - Akimbo Sidearms?

Will Guardians Be Dual Wielding Sidearms?

We got the strongest hint at Akimbo weapons from the Bungie Podcast released 9th June 2017.

Here's a direct link to the latest Bungie podcast on iTunes featuring @thislukesmith @sharkeatsman @UrkMcGurk https://t.co/V07PIqRCqc

— Mark Noseworthy (@knowsworthy) June 9, 2017

Here is a snippet from the podcast (starting from 35:22)

JON:
It's interesting because one of those hard questions we asked ourselves when we were putting this out there was like: "well there's sidearms... is there any reason to run sidearm, sidearm?"
That sounds really dumb. That sounds like a bad game *chuckles*

LUKE:
It's not. It's really fun! *more laughter*

JON:
And yeah! It's pretty cool.

LUKE:
And we won't... We won't talk about why...

What's interesting here is that:

• Simply having two sidearms which you switch between is deemed dumb
• There is some reason why that combination is really fun
• This reason is being kept secret from us

So what is the big surprise in store for us? Well let's take a look at what Mark Noseworthy said on an interview on Gamertag Radio (starts 1:07:22):

MARK: The first two slots, Kinetic and Energy, they can have the same weapon types. So, you can have a Handcannon in your Kinetic slot, and then like a solar Handcannon, if you want to rock two Handcannon, in the second slot. The reason we've done this is because it gives players more choice, right, you can play the way you want to play, and really change things up. You know, we might even have some interesting interactions between weapons sometimes.

Put this all together and it strongly implies that something "outside of the norm" happens with certain weapon pairings. My best guess is Destiny 2 is going to introduce dual wielding! Sidearms are an excellent candidate for this but there are things to consider though...

BattleStrats Vs Aksis - A Strategy Refined

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

As per the BattleStrats mantra, we have been honing our Aksis Phase 2 strategy. Collectively we have now got a very firm grasp of the fight and we can knock the Normal mode fight in one go!

BattleStrats Aksis Phase 2 - Strategy Overview & Kill

The most important points to consider here are:

• Jordy had NEVER even attempted this fight before
• We made a handful of mistakes but still succeeded
• Explaining the strategy and killing Aksis took us less than 20 minutes

Practice (or rather deliberate/perfect practice) has been the secret to our success. Let's look at how exactly we practiced...

Trimming Videos On YouTube

This is a really quick and simple method of cutting/cropping videos that you have uploaded to YouTube (from your PS4 or any source).

Trimming/Splitting Videos On YouTube - Uploaded From Your PS4  

I prefer editing videos this way rather than faffing around with other tools such as the SHAREfactory on PS4. By doing this directly you can always quickly share whole clips from your PS4 without getting completely dragged out of the game :)

Pokemon Go APK Install Instructions

For all those that can't officially download and play Pokemon Go on their Android devices, here is a quick video tutorial on how to get it up and running.

Download & Setup Pokemon Go On Android  

I've been having a load of nostalgic fun with it and I was inspired to start recording videos for it. After some quick searching I managed to stumble upon this absolutely awesome screen capture application: Shou

The app is meant for live streaming as well but I find that it is a very easy to use to record your screen to your local SD card.

Flappy Whale v1.3.0 (Animated Whale)

It has taken us this long but our Flappy Whale is now actually flapping when you tap :D Play the game and check it out yourself by clicking on the show button below!

Flappy Whale! v1.3.0 - ewry games

We toyed between the idea of having the Whale constantly flapping or having it flap only when you tapped. In the end we liked having it flap whenever you tapped as it provided extra positive feedback to the player. Note the Whale will remain stationary as it plummets, reinforcing the need to tap/flap.

Animating the Whale and the glowing rocks has really given me a profound respect for the intricacies involved in animation. It's fun to see how a handful of static images can produce motion but incredibly painful to tweak all the timings to produce the perfect effect.

Flappy Whale v1.2.0 (Pulsating Rocks! - ewry games)

We have decided to pivot and changed the flying obstacles to floating rocks :D. Try to enjoy the gentle pulsating glow of the rocks without crashing right into them! Click the show button below to launch the game.

Flappy Whale! v1.2.0 - ewry games

We're starting to wrap up the game now and there are only a few more visual items we need to tweak. Depending on feedback I may ramp up the difficulty for the Killer mode as well :P

Flappy Whale v1.1 - Animated Skyscrapers

We have just released a new alpha version which you can see a video of above. Alternatively give it a go and play it yourself here (https://goo.gl/eTFNZ7)!

Note that there are some visual artifacts and some bugs. Depending on how things go, we might start to port over to Unity very soon.

Flappy Whale v1.0.0 (ewry games)

 @RumziYousef and I are proud to present v1.0.0 of our very first game: Flappy Whale!

Flappy Whale! v1.0.0 - ewry games

Rumzi has been busy creating some awesome artwork to help put the finishing touches to our project. I've also added 3 difficulty modes to the game as well :D

• Checkout the great new background and our floating skyscrapers.
• Try out the Easy, Hard and Killer difficulty modes.

Hope you enjoy it!

Flappy Whale v0.3.0 (Graphics Update - ewry games)

We have finally started introducing proper graphics into the game :D You can know play as the "Sky Whale" and flap your way through the skies!

Flappy Whale! v0.3.0 - ewry games

Note that I've bumped the resolution and changed the aspect ratio to make the game better suited to modern displays :) The scrolling background is very simple but I was very pleased with how easy it was to put together. We are definitely going to start polishing everything a lot more, our current targets are:

• Introduce new difficulty modes
• Update the whale graphics
• Add new fonts

Flappy Cube v0.2.3 (Highscore - ewry games)

This small update to the game has cleaned up the HUD and introduced a Highscore!

Flappy Cube v0.2.3 - ewry games

I managed to uncover the "pipes don't spawn" bug in the Tutorial. This old bug was present in the spawning logic for the pipes. When I created Tutorial, I simply copy and pasted the code over. This bad practice came back to haunt me, code duplication is the devil! I've known killed the duplicated code and there is a single piece of spawning logic that is configurable now :)

There is a choice on spawning pipes/ships randomly or in a fixed position.

Sadly the Highscore doesn't persist if you refresh the game :( This will be something we look at once the game is more fully fledged!

Flappy Cube v0.2.2 (Bug Fixes - ewry games)

Fixed an issue where the game wasn't restarting properly after colliding with a pipe.

Flappy Cube v0.2.2 - ewry games

It seems unpausing may not work properly if you attempt it just before switching scene. Another "gotcha" to add to the list for Stencyl :(

Flappy Cube v0.2.1 (ewry games)

We have a minor version bump for Flappy Cube! Now we open off with a start menu and I've introduced a basic tutorial :)

Flappy Cube v0.2.1 - ewry games

I found that there was shared logic between all these buttons to switch the scene and draw the button text in the right place. Behaviours in Stencyl seem to be the best way to go when trying to encapsulate/share logic.

Switching Scenes Behaviour

Behaviours can expose configurable attributes and they really help in reducing the amount of duplicated code. Sadly there doesn't appear to be an easy to compose behaviours though.

Flappy Cube v0.1.2 (Scoring Added - ewry games)

This patch update introduced scoring.

Flappy Cube v0.1.2 - ewry games

I implemented this by firing an event every time one of the pipes left the screen, as that coincided with the player jumping paste them successfully.  The out of the box "actor has left the scene" event in Stencyl didn't seem to want to play ball with me at all though. It seemed to fire really inconsistently and I can only assume I did something wrong with regards to the scene boundaries. In the end I went with writing a custom event that the pipe would fire once it detected it was out of bounds itself.

To improve on this design, I would instead look to make a specialised collision zone/region on the pipe where the gap is. This would detect when the player successfully goes through the gap and increments the score. Doing it this way would remove the dependency on fixing the player's lateral position on the screen. I'd assume there would be some performance overheads for that solution though.

Speaking of which, I'd really like to find out more about performance testing and unit testing games more. Stencyl seems to have very poor support in both areas but Haxe does have a unit testing library within it...

Flappy Cube v0.1.1 (ewry games - Stencyl)

Very excited to have built this basic game completely from scratch!

Flappy Cube v0.1.1 - ewry games

This is a very raw version and the plan is:

• Fix bug where "pipe" appears too off the ground.
• Add Scoring
• Introduce theme
• Start the game on a separate menu screen

I'll go more into the implementation details and my experience with it all next time :)

Stencyl Crash Course 2 - Space Invaders

Followed the 2nd Stencyl Crash Course and created a flash version of Space Invaders.

Note that you use Z to fire! The game lacks polish but it is functional. I haven't done any proper play testing or balancing, right now it feels a little too difficult. Here is a short video demonstrating the different ways to lose and win:

"Space Invaders" In Action

Stencyl Crash Course

Spent a night messing around with Stencyl and managed to create a basic Flash game. Sadly all you can do right now is:

• Run/jump around
• Kill enemies Mario style. 
• Die by touching an enemy.
• Die from falling off.

(click to launch Flash game)

This was adapted from the 1st Crash Course on the Stencyl website. The tutorial is very interesting and it walks you through all the major components of the game engine in less than 30 minutes.

What is ace about Stencyl is that it has an incredibly low barrier to entry. I'd imagine it would be a great tool for teaching anyone about coding/games development as you can pick it up without any prior knowledge. This also makes it ideal for graphic designers to create games when previously they might not have had the programming skills to do so.

Stencyl Behaviour Editor (Coding without the code!)

Destiny: Nostalgia - Becoming Legend

The Taken King is just over a week away and the Destiny 2.0 patch is tomorrow!

One of the things I am really interested in experiencing is the entire "Nolandroid" version of the game. Bungie's decision to recast the Ghost from Peter Dinklage to Nolan North is great news for the story and I'm hoping that we are given more of a character to bond with.

Unfortunately, some of the original story content will most likely require creating a new character for you to be able to replay it (like the very first mission). Rather than delete an existing character (all three of which I have grown to love), I opted for rolling a new account! This has the added bonus of starting me off completely anew and returning the excitement of loot drops :D

So that the original Destiny experience was fresh in my mind, I decided to create a brand new Hunter. Whilst this was fun, all the uglier parts of Destiny niggled at me here and there. This game is very shallow as a solo experience, you really have to enjoy it socially to get the most of the limited content.

Even then, if you rely on matchmaking, there are the "AFKers" you need to worry about. When playing strikes, you will more often than not come across players who are actively doing nothing to contribute. There is little you can do about this, either you carry them or you leave.

Aside from the challenge of being matched with decent human beings to play with, I grabbed the Walking Tall bounty which tasked you with finishing a strike without dying. Being only level 8 at the time with basic gear, this was no easy feat.

When I finally found my first solid group, we blitzed through the The Devil's Lair strike on Earth. The final boss was a long battle of attrition but eventually we had this false deity: "Sepiks Prime", within an inch of it's life. My Hunter was weary from many non-quite lethal wounds but still had something saved for this exact moment...

Sepiks Prime Golden Gun Kill 

I'll treasure all these little miniature "Moments Of Triumph" as part of an ensemble of "Becoming Legend". Little things have held this game back but nevertheless this first year has been a blast. Hopefully The Taken King can live up to the hype this time around and find out what it really is to Become Legend.

Destiny - A Story Of Good Karma

I love it when a good deed pays off instantly, even if it is only by the blessing of the RNG :P One cold Saturday afternoon I helped my Level 29 brother and a friend through their first Crota's End Raid. We wiped a few times but eventually we made it through. At the very end, a member of the fireteam mentioned someone appeared to have been rewarded Gjallarhorn (the most sort after prize in Destiny). We went to orbit to see who it was...

Destiny - I Wonder Who Got Gjallarhorn? (Reaction - Crota's End Normal) 

Destiny - Awesomeness

3 months on from the full release of Destiny and despite all of its flaws, I am still very much enjoying this game. There is definitely fun to be had but it is very much dependent on how you approach the game. Finding a bunch of people that you can have a laugh with is invaluable, if you play alone you are missing out on some of the best content!

Moments of "awesomeness" await you, so long as you now how to find it. As I've mentioned before, there is a special move you can unlock that gives you the ability to soar through the air like Superman. This opens up the opportunity to play a hero that is fighting giant aliens to save the world, all the while pretending to be Kal-El... saucesome :D

Check out my channel for more Destiny awesomeness! https://www.youtube.com/user/arkangelofkaos

Destiny - The Titan Superman Move

The IGN First series have continued their coverage of Destiny and I am super excited about the high level Titan moves!

The aptly named "Death From Above" supercharge upgrade is simply bananas. You literally fly through the air like Superman, it is so great! :D The shoulder charge move looks like a lot of fun to use as well. I particularly enjoy the jumping version where you knee the poor victim in the face :)

Screenshots of all this along with the sweet gear/weapon Kinslayer was using can be found below (see full post) :)

Playing as a Titan during the Beta was incredibly fun (find all my PS4 Gameplay videos here), can't wait to try out all of this for myself!