Welcome to the very first blog post from the official Technomancy Studios website! This website is still a work in progress and I (MAL_Ware) am the only one working on it, for now. If you have been following us for the past few months, you would know that we have been working on porting Gamma 19 from the Gamemaker Studio 2 engine to the Godot engine. We were pushing the Gamemaker engine to its limits with Suits 2 and when development of Gamma 19 started we were already running into performance issues. I chose Godot for the fact that it is free and open-source, but I also learned how much better it is for developing games. It has been a few months since we started working on this and we are very close to finishing the recreation of the Chapter 0 Demo. We will release this version on itch.io when it's ready.

To start the new year off, my first task was to implement Green Bean (ɡrēn bēn) into the game. In the current version of the demo she is useless, but in this new version... she is still useless. However, we have plans to make her a more valuable partner later in the game. For now you can just admire Green Bean in all her glory.

One of the biggest challenges for any game is to make the visuals appealing. While our artist (Urban) can make some awesome animations, those alone aren't going to push the visuals to the next level. We have implemented an amazing lighting system, but sometimes you need to add some extra pop to the scene. Using shaders, I was able to create a heatwave effect. This shader blurs and distorts the background which gives it a nice depth of field look. Of course we can do a lot more than just that.

Godot makes it easy to create a frosted glass effect.

Who could this mysterious character be?

We spent the past few years researching and engineering the perfect hat grabbing mechanics for video games. We have made some major breakthroughs in this field of study and are soon to win a Nobel Prize for this.

He's dead...

The biggest task I had left to do was to create the first boss, Sandy. Bosses in this game work differently from the regular enemies that you will encounter. I have to write a lot of custom code for the boss logic, but thanks to the power of code inheritance I didn't have to rewrite some of the base enemy code. It still took me some time to get her to work right since some of her code was conflicting with the base enemy code.

Here is a part of the cutscene when you encounter Sandy. Normally the player would take damage and flinch, but I have yet to add the code for the player to process damage.

Sandy is still going to have 3 attacks:

1. Slime Shot
2. Digging Charge
3. Big Bite

When she is out of the ground and in her slime shot phase, you can inflict damage to her.

Chapter 1 will take place in a junkyard with an old abandoned factory. The player will meet the first friendly bot, H0-17. He's quite forgetful and is slowly going insane in a goofy way. The junkyard is littered with dead bots from an era long forgotten, but your presence has awoken them from their ancient slumber.

This one's got a few screws loose it seems.

I would try to get rid of this one first. They might try to keep their distance from you.

An enemy that can dodge?! Wait, I haven't even made that a feature.

These little scrap rats are giving H0-17 a hard time.

We hope to have the Chapter 0 Demo done some time in February, but with both work and school that might not be the case. A final round of testing is also necessary to identify any bugs and mistakes before shipping the demo. We hope you've enjoyed reading our first official blog post and if you have any questions, comments, concerns or testimonies let us know in our Discord.