Batteries Included Dev Blog

Dear Readers, It's me, Sebastian, game designer at Shadow Shrimp Studios. Today I wanted to talk about a very important topic, How to handle crunch time stress. Crunch time stress is the stress that builds up as life swirls around you as deadlines loom even closer and closer. Crunch time can be very stressful and everyone has different coping mechanisms for it. While alcohol isn’t always bad (please drink responsibly), too much alcohol can be dangerous for you and those around you. In this post, I thought it would be nice to explore some of my approaches that DON'T involve alcohol. "When I get stressed, I like to turn to one of four ways of decompressing. They may not be for everyone, but hopefully this might give you some ideas you might not have considered before." Cooking Personally cooking is one of my favorite ways to unwind. It lets you blow off steam and learn new recipes. Plus, you get to eat what you make! Hobbies Hobbies can range from painting gunpla mode...

I am a gameplay programmer on Batteries Included, however I also volunteered handle setting up all the animations. In a studio as small as ours, the person that has the most knowledge about a subject typically ends up assigned the work associated with that task.  That is not to say I know anything about creating animations, but I do have experience with importing them and using them in engine. Working with the animations meant that I worked directly with our external art team. At first, working with the art team was fine, they gave us work when they said they would and it was of good quality. However, things began to change when they started working on the animations.  At the beginning of May 2018, the art team told us they were having some technical problems with their motion capture studio, and it would be a few months before we would receive any animations. We understood and just asked to keep us updated. Over the next 2 months there would be stretches of rad...

As a fan of the show Project Blue Book, I was keen to implement the UFO unit for the alien toys in Batteries Included. The role of the UFO is to harass the player's goons. It does this by abducting individual goblins via a tractor beam. The player can stop this by grabbing the UFO (and tossing it away like the bad toy it is). However, the UFO will return to continue abducting goons if the player fails to keep track of it. Another mechanic of the UFO is the ability to escape: if the player has held on to the UFO for several seconds, it can escape out of the player's hand, becoming holographic (which temporarily makes the UFO intangible). This triggers a haptic vibration in the player's hand holding the UFO, and the UFO takes on a hologram shader. The purpose of the escape ability is to prevent the player from simply holding on to the UFO indefinitely; the UFO has a mind of its own, after all! There are two qualities of the UFO's programmatic design that I wo...

Devin Good The Story of Shadow Shrimp Studio LLC. For those of you that have been diligently reading each of our blog posts, thank you. This may be a little bit review for you, for the new people, welcome! As we are now 4 weeks from release I wanted to do a brief recap of the development history for us and touch on some of the more business side of how we handled things here are Shadow Shrimp Studio. Our history starts in October of 2017. We are all students finishing our degrees at Indiana University this month, so we were Juniors when we began this undertaking. Young pups in the game design world with extravagant ideas of what was possible to make with a team of 8 students who have other classes, jobs, and obligations. The amount of growth I have seen out of my now coworkers makes me proud every day. Before I go down that rabbit trail, lets get back to how we designed our game and formed our company. As part of the IU game design program, during our Junior year every stu...