Mattrified Games Blog

Since 2019, I've had a Patreon account.  I'm happy with what I've done over that time, having made over 225 posts, but I think it's time for a change.  I'm very appreciative of everyone who has joined my Patreon over the years, but there are several issues I'm having with it that I'd like to write about here.  The Monthly Requirement Is Stressful Patreon is stressful for me because supporters get charged monthly, and game development is slow.  I feel Patreon works better for small form content.  Though I know making high quality art pieces is not easy by any means, it's still a smaller piece of work than say an entire game or even a prototype or tutorial.  I think if I only was doing video game prototypes or tutorials exclusively and not working on larger games like MerFight or Battle High, it wouldn't be so bad, but there's still small Patreon monkey on my back every month that's like "Did you make a post yet?" that I'm tir...

It's been about two months since I wrote and posted this on my Patreon.  I was going to publish publicly a few weeks later, but there was some discourse over the future of offline events, so I decided to reread and wait a bit.  Unfortunately, that wait turned into forgetting; so with a few revisions from that Patreon post, here are my thoughts on how showcasing a game at EVO went back in early August of 2023. Besides Battle High and MerFight, I've worked on a several other indie fighting games.  Probably the biggest and most ambitious is Drag Her, a 2D game focused primarily on real-life drag queens and kings.  It's camp, it's stupid, and it's aiming to just be silly and fun.  It's still a fighting game though, and this year, the team was invited to showcase the game at EVO, the biggest fighting game tournament in the US -- possibly the world.  Overall, I think it went well, but I have some thoughts on EVO, its indie showcase, and more.   The Trip ...

This post was original written and posted to my website in August 2021.  Despite this, I feel these are still relevant; I also added an additional section, Uphill Battle #6. So you want to make an indie fighting game? Well, first off, good luck! Indie games are already a tough, competitive market to break into, and the fighting game genre is not the easiest to target. I'm the last person to want to discourage you though. I'm making a fighting game with merfolk in it almost entirely by myself. That being said, I wanted to write about what I see as difficulties and uphill battles that I and others are most likely going to face when creating -- but more importantly, releasing -- indie games in this genre as well as some things they could do to help. Note, these thoughts are my opinion, so take them with a grain of Pink Himalayan salt . I'll upgrade my opinion from normal salt to this.  Why not? Uphill Battle 1: Big & Old Competition I mentioned competition ...

Originally, I wanted to launch MerFight into version 1.0 by May of 2023;  however, this is not going to happen.  I'm a bit disappointed in myself, but I also learned a few things as to why this happened.  With that being said, here is a list of what else needs to be accomplished so that I feel I can enter 1.0 for MerFight: Finish Story Mode Content I feel I could release 1.0 with some characters' story modes incomplete, but I'd rather not.  That being said, there are a lot of unlockables I have to make to finish said story mode.  The more time-consuming task will be animating the facial expression for story mode's lines. AI There's no point to story mode or any single player content mode if the AI opponents aren't good.  I'm not looking for expert-level learning, but something a bit better and something that makes the difficulty levels feel like they actually matter would help. Main Menu A smaller task, but I want to make the main menu a bit less cluttered....