It’s been about 8 weeks since we released “Something Ate My Alien” and we have had a positive reception to our game. People playing it have a fun experience and for those who like mining and finding lots of loot, this game has been a dream which is nice to hear.

We have also listened to all feedback, to try and pinpoint things we could enhance or make more engaging for all our players and a few things have got our attention. We’ve been ongoing with updating bug fixes and smaller enhancements and adjustments to the game as players found things that they commented on. For example, we added twin-stick controller set-up, tweaked enemies to stop falling on the player, planet storm rates decreased, removed fall damage in puzzle rooms etc etc. However, two of the bigger issues required a bit more thought and work to pull off.

One of our biggest requests was to be able to change difficulty level mid-game. This was mostly due to players who started on a specific level, then played on for a good hour or 2,3 or even 4, only to realise that they struggled to finish a level or had to fight too much for them to enjoy playing further. With that amount of time invested, these players also felt that starting over from the beginning on a lower difficulty was too much of a chore, and they would choose to not continue playing instead.

We listened and agreed, and we decided to enable players to swap to any other difficulty level at any time during game play. If a certain battle is too hard or too easy, or if you struggle with general gameplay, you can now swap difficulty level from the main menu when loading up your saved game. Since our game is single-player and all achievements are based on gameplay and not difficulty, it was not too much that could get lost making this feature available.

The second biggest issue a group of players had was the overall difficulty of the game, despite playing on the easiest mode. These players really just wanted a chilled game with basically no enemies at all and very little fighting at any time during the gameplay. They would enjoy the game much more being able to just dig, explore, solve puzzles and collect things without having to worry about battles and fighting.

For this group of players, we are now happy to introduce Zen-mode! Again, this feature is added based on feedback and are for those who wants to play without hardly any shooting. Gameplay is focused on as little battle as possible and more on collecting, exploring and solving puzzles. Enemies are few and extremely easy to kill with one shot only, so weapon upgrades play a small role in this mode. Bosses are still here but are quite easy to take out. Code-wise we couldn’t remove them completely from the gameplay since we got achievements and the main-story itself connected to them.

We hope that with these latest features we’ve added something that would entice both new and existing players who might have been a bit hesitant to play on the previous difficulty-levels in SAMA. Now you can choose a whole new level with Zen-mode if you wish, or change any current game save you have to a different difficulty…and change it back over and over as many times as you like.

To celebrate this improvement release we have a 25% discount for 2 weeks starting today 20^th Aug 2020. If you like mining and puzzle games with the additional bonus of chilled music, beautiful graphics and a fun little Alien to look after, then give SAMA a try!

Introduction

Our game “Something Ate My Alien” has a pretty unique mix of several genres combined. It is foremost a platforming style game where you dig your way through the levels in a search for a wide variety of minerals, gems, gases, fossils and artefacts to satisfy the ransom demand and to be able to upgrade the equipment for the Alien you control.

Then we have the puzzle rooms, which are small chambers with locked doors that you need to open to access the inside. Inside these rooms time stands still in effect; Enemies don’t spawn here, oxygen does not deplete and injury from falling too far does not exist. It’s all about taking your time without any stress to think through and try to solve the puzzle at hand.

The last one of the major genres of SAMA is the combat with enemies, but this part is greatly simplified by them being pesky things that tries to trip you up while you explore each world. If you upgrade to better weapons along the way, you should be able to take them out quite easily.

Puzzle mechanics

For this blog post, let’s focus on the puzzles in SAMA.

The structure of the puzzles is based on differently coloured blocks that need to be placed into slots with their corresponding colours matching. The basic idea is simple and is like that used in the classic “Sokoban” puzzle games.

The blocks can be pushed or pulled. There is a mix of diggable blocks, undiggable blocks and empty areas in each puzzle room, leaving the player to figure out which blocks needs to be dug out or left as is to be able to slide the coloured stone blocks to where they need to be.

In the beginning the puzzle set-up is kept simple and with few steps needed to complete it. As the game moves forward the complexity of the puzzles are stepped up, so each puzzle room will require different tactics to fulfill.

If a player gets stuck in a puzzle, or moves a block incorrectly and wants to redo it, we’ve implemented a “Reset” action ( R on keyboard ) which allows the player to try again.

We wanted all the puzzles to feel a bit unique and fun and at the same time get more and more complex as the game went along to challenge the player. The design was based on:

1. Each planet from 1-4 (Metis, Tartarus, Lelantos and Aura) would have different puzzle types starting simplified in the first world to the most complex style in the last world.
2. Each puzzle room on each planet would escalate in complexity/difficulty from 1-10 with room number 1 being very simple to room number 10 being quite complex.

Planet differences

So let’s take a look how this works for each planet and the resulting puzzle designs.

Metis is the first planet and it has the simplest puzzle design. All puzzles here are based on single, coloured blocks that need to be pushed into specific openings with corresponding colours matching.

At one point you start getting uncoloured blocks obscuring or blocking the path of the coloured blocks you need to get to, and the player now has to try to move these blocks out of the way so that the puzzle blocks can get into place.

Moving onto the next planet Tartarus the puzzles have now shifted to blocks that can be more than 1×1 in size, and they need to fit into slots with several colours needing to match together. Here the puzzles need to be considered in 2 ways before trying to move any block into place. First the player needs to figure out how the blocks in each room would fit together with the other blocks in there to make the final shape needed to fit into the allocated spots. Then the player needs to figure out in what order to move the blocks to get them all in place.

Lelantos is the third world and here magnets are introduced to the puzzle mechanics. The two types of magnets introduced will either attract or repel the coloured blocks, but they have no effect on the uncoloured ones.

Each magnet will show beams that stretches out the same number of blocks that it’s force affects and in the direction/s that force will interact with the coloured block that crosses it’s path. Magnet forces that goes out horizontally are weaker than the force going vertically, meaning that a block that is being pulled or pushed by the magnets along a flat plane will fall downwards if there is a gap in that plane.

The complexity of the puzzle design across this level starts with simple magnet placements and single blocks placements to more difficult ones where you need to try to get around the magnets or use them to move the coloured blocks around and fit several blocks together to create complex shapes.

In the last world Aura the puzzles all come together in a mixed form where the player now needs to use all the skills learnt up to this point to solve these. All things are implemented here in different combinations, single blocks, different shaped blocks, uncoloured blocks and magnets.

Here the difficulty increases by having more and more complex solutions for each puzzle where multiple uncoloured blocks is in the way for getting the coloured ones into their slots. Several magnets are placed to interfere or help with the path of the coloured blocks and blocks themselves being in weird positions needing to get around other blocks in a correct order.

Conclusion

Most people finding the puzzles tricky but fun and it seems the majority can solve them all even if it takes some time once they get more complex. We seem to have hit on point when it comes to a design that is giving people just the right amount of challenge without being exceedingly hard or too easy.

If you are a person who enjoys puzzles, then definitely give SAMA a try. If you happen to be one of those players who just want a very chilled puzzle game, then chose “easy” mode where the enemies are few and easy to kill and the focus lies more on the exploring and finding loot and solving the puzzles.

After 3.5 years of intense development from our 2-person team, the day where our game “Something Ate My Alien” finally launches is here!!

Get it on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1047870

This 2D digging and puzzle adventure game, started off being a smallish, fun, indie game. Easy enough for 2 people to pull off and with a somewhat simple concept of digging and solving puzzles.

Today, 18th June 2020 it hits the store fronts at Steam, Humble and Green Man Gaming and will be available for the world to purchase and play.

Looking back to when it all started almost 4 years ago we could never have imagined just how large the game would become, how many hours of hard work we would put in, how many changes and tweaks would be done, and how many people would be involved with testing and feedback. Neither did we understand just how absolutely thrilling it would be to see your built from scratch project finally take on it’s final form after all that hard work.

Working together for all this time, and managing to create a whole game together, gives a sense of accomplishment that is huge. And despite not knowing just how successful or not the game will be, it is still something we are feeling immensely proud over.

So with this we hope that you will play and enjoy our game, and if nothing else, we hope that we can inspire someone who is thinking of developing their own game to give it a go. As long as you love sitting down and working on your project, and you have the passion for it, anything is possible!

Get it on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1047870

We are extremely excited to announce that our 2D puzzle and digging adventure game “Something Ate My Alien” is finally in a complete state and will be released 18th June 2020 on Steam, GMG and other store fronts!

If you have not yet added SAMA to your wishlist on Steam, now is the time to do it so you get notified when it launches.

After 3,5 years development and basically working around the clock, we have almost achieved our goal of finishing SAMA. Another month of polishing and bug fixing before the big day, and we are more than ready to make this happen.

We promise a chill game with a slight strategy tone where you will explore big levels full of things to collect, puzzles to solve and a fair amount of shooting action occuring, while listening to a lovely mix of music tracks suited for this type of game. The most used word testers seem to use describing SAMA is the words “chilled explorer game”.

SAMA will be available on Windows, Linux and Mac and it also has controller support if you prefer to play with that rather than the keyboard. We also offer visual aid for the puzzle rooms for those who struggle seeing different colours which can be toggled on/off in the settings menu.

If you can’t wait till June 18th, or if you just have to give our game a try before committing to buying yourself a copy, you can try out the DEMO on GameJolt right now!

As a 2 person dev team we have learnt a lot during this time, and feedback from testers has been invaluable to us. Reflecting on the time that has gone by since the first story line of SAMA was written down, and seeing where we are now is quite a satisfying feeling. Not only have we proven that if you really love what you’re doing and put your mind to it, you can make it happen, but we have also proven to ourselves that we make a good team which bodes well for future endeavours.

We hope you are as excited for SAMA as we are, and that you will enjoy playing it once it is out. Go check it out and if you can see all the hard work and love we have put into this game, please consider adding us to your wish-list on Steam to help us out!

It’s official, we are nearing the end of development of our game “Something Ate My Alien” and we will be releasing it on the Steam platform in April 2020!

Reaching this milestone and being able to set a date for release is extremely exciting and a bit scary for us. When we started developing this game all the way back in 2016, we had no idea just how much work we signed up for and just how long it takes to develop a game when you are only 2 people doing it. Reflecting on that makes this day feel even sweeter, to finally start seeing the result of all that hard work.

So, in this blog we’d like to give you all a quick breakdown to let you know how SAMA developed since our last dev blog back in August 2019.

1. Level design

Changing the level design to be more linear in the beginning of the game has been a good move with our Alpha testers. We continued following this path and doing some more tweaking on the remaining levels and trying to add certain design aspects to each level making each one more unique.

The puzzle rooms are now sorted in difficulty order from 1 to 10 in each level. If a player finds one tricky they will now know which ones should be good to start with and which ones are better to leave to the end.

2. Enemy enhancements

2-block enemies now stay in specific areas specifically designed for them rather than being spawned randomly across the levels. We kept getting a lot of weird behaviour and bugs with the bigger ones moving across areas where they’d get stuck on 1 block ledges. This way they not only work as intended; they are now a bigger part of the level design in acting like smaller mini bosses with specific traits that will make it harder to get through certain areas.

Several enemies have got an upgrade in looks, how they act and what they can do to add more diversity in enemy encounters and battles.

The Oyse bulbous plant creature starts pulsating and will blow up and multiply if you approach too close to it. The Phantus can now both fly and walk moving up and down to ledges it previously could not reach, making it hard for you to avoid it or even hide. Oh yes, it also shoots projectiles through it’s tail, making it a very dangerous enemy.

The Draker lay eggs that explodes and expels a powerful missile seed that can go through blocks to find you. The Guld leaves trails of little bombs that are deadly and the Murderia shoots out single projectiles in all directions like an automatic weapon. The Bagice can now grow its sharp crystal tendrils from the ceiling as well as the floor and the Kator does a roll at high speed to try and hit you like a bowling ball.

We have added a new Enemy to Aura called Jaxer. It hides in blocks and shoots out as some speed when the player gets near. Around the floor and ceiling near the Jaxer nests we added icy spikes that will warn of this enemy hiding nearby but also to add some difficulty in trying to pass these nests without taking damage.

The Bosses have all been given an overhaul in movement tracks and the speed and variation within those tracks. Some extra things were added to make them feel more unique such as projectile impacts spawning enemies. The final boss scene has an environmental mechanic to help with the fighting. The bosses now also drops higher ratio of health and oxygen boosts so the player has a fairer chance of fighting without running out of oxygen before fight is over for example.

3. GUI changes

We changed the name “Inventory” to “Cargo Bay” in the menu to make it clearer this is the content you have collected and have stored in the ship, not what you are carrying on you.

We have done some major work on the GUI part of the game, with the Customization screen getting the bulk of these changes. We have moved around the different upgrade areas and put the weapon selection in a way so the player can view and decide on the weapons independently of setting the Primary and Secondary choices. This solves the issue with players having to manually reset the equipped weapon choice to the one they want after viewing other weapons which was quite frustrating.

The way the numbers are displayed in the materials needed section has now changed to show how many you got and how many are needed so you can compare and choose where to use your items in a more calculated manner.

Overall, we have added lots of more sounds both to the levels and animals there, but also to the GUI end cut scenes. We have tweaked and added a bunch more messages popping up from the pirate and Antalasia when the player is teleported back to the ship with (or without) loot to make the player feel more engaged with the protagonists of the story.

4. Steam connection

We have moved over our game to the Steam platform so new testers now access the game from there. We chose this quite recently to see how that would work for the actual release further on, making us familiar with all those procedures before the live release.

Being on Steam we’ve also been able to add achievements to our game. Not only are achievements good for little rewards as you play the game, but it also creates a competitive part for those players enjoying getting all achievements and seeing their progress both within the game and from the Steam library.

So with a few more months left until “Something Ate My Alien” hits the store front on Steam, we will continue tweaking and testing so the game will be the best it can be.

If you haven’t already, consider adding SAMA to your wish-list on Steam so you don’t miss out once it is released in April: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1047870/

As the solo and lead artist for the indie studio RoKabium Games and working on the first game of the studio called “Something Ate My Alien”, the amount of different images I’ve created and modified for this game goes well into the many thousands.  As I’m writing this blog my file number of different assets, concepts, backgrounds, logos and promotional artworks is just over 6000 files. For anyone that does not know what goes into making a game it is easy enough to not fully grasp the amount of content needed to make even a smaller but full, visually pleasing and fun to play game that has all the mechanics needed to function properly and look good.

We have been developing this game for the last 2 years and have finally come to the stage where we’ve let a few people try out the game and give us feedback during a private alpha release. At this stage of development most of the game is finished and we are tweaking, adding and changing things to make for clearer and smoother game play before releasing it as general alpha where more players are needed to test the game. Since we have reached this point I thought it would make for an interesting read to visually see the development of the game up until this point.

The overall art style

I was so in love with the art style of games such as “No Man’s Sky” and “Firewatch” and wanted to create something similar for this game with a retro-feel to the palette and style. This game was to be a reminder of the early classics such as “Boulder Dash” and “Spelunky” but with some more exploration/adventure  tossed into it slightly reminiscent of the first Zelda games. We wanted  future players of SAMA to feel a connection to these earlier classics but with a smooth, painted, beautiful style that had a “hand painted stroke by stroke” look. Very early on we knew we wanted to create a game with keywords such as fun, classic, hand painted, quality, beautiful.

The GUI and HUD

Despite the brush painted style on the different worlds, I did want to keep the retro palette and clean interface without too many fillers or decorations that could cause distraction on the GUI. You as the player are the main AI running the mining ship that in turn sends down the Aliens to dig on the planets, so the AI part of the game play needed to have a distinct and more simplistic look than the dynamic, living world the Aliens would move around in.

At some point we did add a bit more of the painted backgrounds used for the Menu and loading screens into the back of the GUI since the difference between the very bare GUI and the planet game play seemed too different and the merged result from combining the two extremes is what made the most visual sense.

The main concern with the HUD was to display all the info you need while mining, such as health, oxygen levels, inventory, messages that the AI need to relay to you, mini-map etc without interfering or covering too much of the game play area of the screen. This itself proved tricky and we made lots of changes to this, testing out different ideas during the last 2 years. Finally the layout we have currently is the one we find the most pleasing but even so we’ve made it re-sizable so that players who want more or less game play area outside the HUD can set that.

The Aliens

In the beginning as the game idea was merely some sentences and points on a few pieces of paper I started sketching what we thought would be the main character which was the Alien. The first concepts were made to decide which idea to build on.

As you can see below the first idea was an actual retro style human-like astronaut and it was not until a bit into development once the story was fleshed out properly that we wanted a more unfamiliar and not too realistic (since the Alien would be the second character and be disposable) look. We wanted something unknown but appealing, something more simplified that would speak to people of all ages but that you as a player wouldn’t get too attached to.

This is when the current Alien was born.

The Levels

The ground on each planet in SAMA is supposed to be bedrock that can be mined by the Aliens, and early on we decided we wanted seamless tiles to build up this bedrock rather than individual blocks that was more prominent in the early classics. The first tiles were extremely simple, but we decided to move towards more of a hand painted style for the whole game quite quickly and looking back I’m really glad we did that. This style makes the game feel so much more immersive and gives a sense of quality in my opinion.

Each planet has a specific colour theme and environment and these were set quite early on in development. The far backgrounds behind all the front tiles were to set a nice, ambient parallax look to the underground, and the very first and rough paintings of the back is very different from the final, meticulously painted ones we have today.

The resources and puzzle chambers were the only things I designed that would not be unique to any one world. These things needed to be uniform all over the game play areas since as a player you need to recognize these things across the planets. The look for the various resources was developed very early on and has more or less stayed the same throughout development and pretty much the same goes for the puzzle blocks.

The Wildlife

We wanted to use the environment itself against the player such as the need for filling up oxygen, emptying the backpack when full, falls or ending up in liquids etc. But we also needed dangerous wildlife that would be more interactive and seek the player out.

Some of the first concepts of animals were a bit wild, but after realizing the amount of animations needed for each animal and for me to make those animations without having much experience at all in animation work before this, we had to settle for creatures that had somewhat easier or easily referenced movements. Based on that I came up with a range of wildlife (enemies) that has been added to more recently to get between 8-10 different ones for each planet.

Each planet would also be guarded by something huge, a part of the wildlife that would be so dangerous it would possibly be able to eat the Alien whole. Something that would appear from time to time and then inevitably lead to some kind of confrontation/battle and so the “Somethings” or monsters/dragons/terrators/bosses were born.

The evolution of the Something has been pretty significant as you can see in these images. We had some problems coming up with how these big things would move on the screen. At one point the idea was that the big bosses would come out from the back wall and eat the Alien that way, but it just looked terrible. We weren’t sure how something going across the screen would look since really there is bedrock in the way, but in the end the visually pleasing and game play aspect of that kind of movement won over “realism”. Hey, it is a fantasy game set in a fantasy world with the bedrock depicted in a 2D platform style on the screen, who says a huge creature can’t move through it all as it pleases?

Hope you have enjoyed this look at how the art within the game SAMA has developed over the last 2 years.

As the AI of the mining ship Antalasia you are stuck in the Bitiax solar system while a pirate ship has taken control of your ship. To find all the items they demand you have to send down your diligent aliens to search the planets in this system for these items. Lets have a closer look at what the scanner says about the different planets that you can visit.

Tartarus
Underground conditions: Porous rock, lava flows, high temperature
Bedrock: 60% solid, 28% liquid, 12% gas
Civilization: Oris – advanced life form, emigrated into space
Items of significance: Rosium (gas), Wunderbat (gem), Hellium (mineral)
Advisory outfit: High performance, thermal suit and standard laser

Metis
Underground conditions: Metal rich ores, clay and alkaline water
Bedrock: 90% solid, 9% liquid, 1% gas
Civilization: Parpiuns – early development life forms, extinct
Items of significance: Fossils, Misty (gem), Inkium (mineral)
Advisory outfit: Standard suit and standard laser

Lelantos
Underground conditions: Hard rock, gas pockets, corrosive liquids
Bedrock: 54% solid, 2% liquid, 44% gas
Civilization: Mitania – colonization of life forms, abandoned
Items of significance: Rare artifacts, Eggium (gas), Lightium (gas), Whyium (mineral)
Advisory outfit: High pressure performance suit and advanced laser

Aura
Underground conditions: Hard rock, permafrost, super-cool liquids
Bedrock: 94% solid, 6% liquid, 0% gas
Civilization: Junits – advanced life forms, extinct
Items of significance: Rare fossils, Pale (gem), Lemoni (gem), Firmium (mineral)
Advisory outfit: High performance, thermal suit and advanced laser

You are the AI of a very skilled mining ship called Antalasia currently cruising the remote solar system Bitiax looking for mining opportunities. Trading is the cornerstone of the galaxy and some rare items can fetch large sums on the open market.

On board you have a cargo hold full of sluglike Aliens which are quite small, drooly and clumsy but also very efficient creatures that are excellent at burrowing through mines seeking out valuables. For every AI mining ship in this quadrant of the galaxy these charming Aliens are a vital part of the crew.

While peacefully scanning for elements on the nearest planet Metis, Antalasias systems are suddenly taken offline and the ship turns dark for a second before being booted up again with all computer screens flashing “Intrusion detected”.

A big, dark looting ship suddenly appears out of nowhere and a demand of takeover is distributed across all screens on Antalasia. It is an AI pirate ship that has infiltrated your computer system and it is now controlling your ship!

The pirate displays a list of valuable loot that has to be collected and turned over to the hostile ship for it to release Antalasia. The pirate gives you limited control back over your cargo hold, scanners and teleportation terminal so that you can get the items it demands. You have no choice but to send down your diligent Aliens to the various planets in the system to search out the minerals, gems, gases, fossils and artefacts the pirate wants so that you can get your ship back. Your Alien will face all kinds of hardships down there having to endure extreme and hazardous environments, hostile fauna and flora, hidden traps and areas only accessible by figuring out the ancient civilizations puzzles left behind in the tunnels.

Will you succeed?