Creating High Quality GIFs in 2023

Since this always takes a little while to figure out, and as a reference for myself, here is how we are recording GIFs to share on Kickstarter, Discord, Mastodon and Twitter in 2023!Recording Setup Most importantly, your initial recordings need to be near lossless quality, and for this we are using OBS studio.  Here's a screenshot of the settings we went with: A few notes here: Due t...

January Devlog: Challenge Room + Vanish

Welcome to the January devlog for Helms of Fury!  This month we worked on break rooms, Kickstarter rewards, reorganized our project structure, and more updates & polish! More Break Rooms Here's a peek at a Challenge Room we worked on this month.  If you can sneak past the goblins you get to see what's in the cart - but wake the goblins and the cart zooms off, leaving you with nothin...

December Devlog: A Look Back at 2022

Welcome to the December devlog for Helms of Fury!  This year has been quite the adventure as we had some exciting developments with our game, got to chat with backers and fellow indie devs, and learned a lot in the process.  Here's a look back at what happened in 2022! January, February, March We started the year off fixing bugs and gameplay issues we encountered during the Kickstarte...

November Devlog: Boss + Stairs as Exits + Paths

Welcome to the November devlog for Helms of Fury!  Over these past two months we worked on the boss in Ghost Spire Castle, new level exits using stairs, better naming for attunements, new website designs, and updates and polish to our combat and AI. Boss of Ghost Spire CastleLast Halloween we shared an animated gif of one of our bosses, giving a spooky glimpse into the spirit realm.  Thi...

September Devlog: Level Exits + Rocksy Stone

Welcome to the September devlog for Helms of Fury!  This month we worked on level exits, Kickstarter rewards, and updates & polish! Level Exits This month we tried some new ideas with how our level exits work.  Before you would go through the same portal when travelling between stages and levels; now you take stairs when going between stages, and use themed portals when travelling t...

August Devlog: Godot 3.5, 2D Depth, Portal Rooms

Welcome to the August devlog for Helms of Fury!  This month we updated our game to the newly released Godot 3.5, worked on a depth system for 2D, and added new content to our starting portal room. Godot 3.5 Helms of Fury was updated to Godot 3.5, which was released this month.  This was an awesome release with a lot of improvements to the engine, many of which we worked to add into our ...

July Devlog: Trap Rooms + Dampe

Welcome to the July devlog for Helms of Fury!  This month we worked on adding new trap rooms, Kickstarter rewards, and gameplay improvements! Trap RoomsWe added 11 new trap rooms that you might encounter during your play-through.  These rooms contain new cannon traps that shoot bullets in a variety of sequences, which can divide up a room and be tricky obstacles to pass through! ...

June Devlog: Brew a Potion

Welcome to the June devlog for Helms of Fury!  This month we worked on improving our game with more bugfixes, polish, and content! Brew a PotionA new Break Room has been added to the game that lets you brew a potion!   Mix three drops of elixir into the cauldron, creating a special potion depending on your choices. Level Polish We continue to add more elements and polish to our g...

May Devlog: Bosses + Elite Enemies

Welcome to the May devlog for Helms of Fury!  This month we worked on the Skull Valley boss and elite enemies! Boss Here's a sneak peek of the boss from Skull Valley!  This crafty goblin is looking to put an end to the heroic knights as he races around the track in his cart.  Loaded with explosive attacks, you will be under a constant barrage of barrels, bombs and things that explode!...

April Devlog: Game Scaling, Char Select, Controls

Welcome to the April devlog for Helms of Fury!  This month we worked on scaling our game to multiple resolutions, the character select screen, start screen, loading screen, and customized controls. Game Resolutions One of the things we wanted to make sure we finished this month was scaling our game to multiple resolutions, all the way up to 4k.  Being a pixel art game, just stretching the...

March Devlog: Kickstarter Rewards + Char Select

Welcome to the March devlog for Helms of Fury!  This month we chatted with backers about their design rewards, started implementing these rewards, and worked on the char select process for the game.Planning Design Rewards We started chatting with many people who choose design rewards for Runes, Items and NPCs this month!  Many of the ideas seem like they will work great in Helms of Fur...

February Devlog: More Abilities + Level Content

Welcome to our Helms of Fury devlog for February!  This month we focused on adding more content to the game; more abilities, more rooms, and more things to find, discover and interact with during each run.More Abilities Our Mecha Knight has bombs, turrets and gadgets they can find and use during each run, and these all seem like fun abilities to use with.. fire!  So we spent some time ...

January Devlog: Bugfixes, Boss Fights and More!

Hey everyone!  Welcome to our first Helms of Fury devlog, hope your year is off to a great start!  We got a few things to cover this month, so let's jump right in! =)Kickstarter Surveys First a quick reminder, we sent out Kickstarter Surveys in December to help fulfill some Kickstarter rewards, such as which name you would like in the game credits.  If you haven't completed your survey...

Create a 2D Minimap with Fog of War in Godot

Want to add a minimap to your Godot game, with simple fog of war reveal?  Then this is the perfect tutorial for you! =)simple minimap with fogGetting StartedTo follow along and see how this works you can download the project files from the minimap folder in my github repo.  The project is for Godot 3.3.3.This project continues our prior tutorial on creating caves using cellular automata in Godo...

Helms of Fury Kickstarter date + trailer!

This blog has been quiet for a bit too long.. but that ends today, as we finally have some exciting news to share!After countless packs of ramen, pots of coffee and hours of development - Helms of Fury is coming to Kickstarter this month!  October 21st to be precise.https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/abitawake/helms-of-furyYou can follow our Kickstarter now for updates, and when the p...

Helms of Fury is coming to Kickstarter!

After a little more than 3 years in development, we are excited to announce that Helms of Fury is coming to Kickstarter!!This Kickstarter will be the biggest reveal of our game so far, with information on the knights, level design, progression systems, and much more.  The page will also include teases for some of the minibosses you will fight, items you can use, runes you can discover, and deta...

Enemy AI: chasing a player without Navigation2D or A* pathfinding

Making a game where your enemies need to chase the player?  This starts out easy, make the enemy run towards the player!  But what happens when they are behind a tree?  Or around the corner of a wall?  Well, now your enemy looks quite silly as it is stuck against the object, running in place.  Not good!To solve this, you could use the Navigation2D or AStar nodes built into Godot (here's a tutor...

Procedural generation with Godot: Create dungeons using a BSP Tree

A few months back we wrote an article showing how we created procedural caves in Godot using Cellular Automata.  Today we wanted to share a follow up, showing how to generate dungeons using a BSP Tree.What is a BSP Tree?  I like this articles explanation, so rather than writing a bunch of paragraphs, I'll refer you to that article and just focus on the generation code below.sample dungeon gener...

Announcing Helms of Fury!

To kick off our first post for 2020 we are happy to announce our upcoming indie game: Helms of Fury!About the GameHelms of Fury is a dungeon crawling rogue-lite with a focus on fast combat, discovering items and combining runes to create insanely powerful builds. Made to be replayed, you battle your way through procedural dungeons full of enemies, traps and treasures with new things to...

How we make GIFs for Twitter

Creating gameplay gifs that look decent on Twitter can be a bit of a challenge, so we thought we would share a few things we learned while making them for our own game.So first a quick note on the process of creating a gif:You record footage from your game, say a 5 minute video.You extract a 10 second clip to show.You convert this clip into a gif.You upload this gif to twitter.At each stage in ...