Follow the code...

So it has come to our attention that recently that the CEO of Unity has stated that "any developers who do not prioritize monetization are [expletive] idiots".

Well, let the ship's log state for the record that by these terms we, the team working on Bullion, are proud to be "[expletive] idiots".

Those who have been with us for a while might recall the delight of Bullion coders Ben and Paul when Jeff Minter played Bullion at Play Expo Manchester; Jeff's titles had been a major influence when they were first starting out making games. But just as important as his games was Jeff's philosophy: having been in the video game industry since the very start, it was his observations that a fledgling Leda Entertainment used as a basis for the studio's values. To quote the "readme" file from Jeff's Atari ST title Llamatron:

"The programmers went back to their assemblers. The Men In Suits handed them pieces of paper upon which were written the exact specifications for the games. The programmers had to pay their mortgages, so they coded and were employed. The Men In Suits laughed, and took a bigger cut, and molded the market to make themselves an even bigger pile."

The full file can be found here - it's well worth a read!

Llamatron: no mess or fuss, just psychedelic blasting mayhem!

And that was over three decades ago. Fast forward to now, and the evidence of how monetization is damaging the games industry is everywhere, from the triple-A studios that have grown so big they cannot afford to take the risk that comes with being creative and try something new, right down to those working cludging games together from tutorials, believing that by putting enough ads, microtransactions and NFTs in that they are going to get rich. And then, of course, there are the bottom-feeding reskinners that - true to Jeff's words - are just changing the graphics and putting a different title on the storefront.

Now we will freely admit that the concepts of free-for-all fighting and collecting the most of something are hardly original - but Bullion is the game we want to make. Yes, we want to cover our costs, and a few drinks worth on top would be very nice, but that has never been the motivation behind Bullion's development. We're all about creating something that's fun and brings people together, and watching the reactions of our players at the shows we have demoed Bullion at, it certainly feels like we're on course.

Bullion may be about pirates, but we have no interest in trying to fleece our players. And if that makes us [expletive] idiots, then we'd rather that than sell out, despite the fact that Bullion is built on top of Unity - and it indeed raises the question whether or not we want to use Unity for future titles.

The Long-Overdue WASD Retrospective...

 WASD was the biggest show we've exhibited at to date and as such, we thought it only right to get the input of the team members who attended for a blog post... which has taken a lot longer than we expected! But here it is at last - the thoughts of our three intrepid crewmates in their bid to conquer London...

Paul H:

WASD was always going to be a different kind of show - would our grassroots game studio stack up? It certainly felt a bit fake-it-till-you-make-it as we dragged the wheelie suitcase containing all our gear across the cobbles of Tobacco Dock with one hand and a trolley of stickers and chocolate coins in the other.

The first couple of days were weekdays, so visitors tended to be other people from the games industry, who were largely very complimentary, praising the game's striking and colourful art style and easy playability. These were valuable contacts for us to make - with Bullion launching later in the year, this was as much about seeking publisher and promoter opportunities as it was growing our audience. Many a conversation, and many a bottle of grog, were had over the event to this end.

But we did have players - and the usual pattern of play emerged! Reluctant player mums would take great joy in beating their gamer kids and husbands. Groups of young adults delighted in stabbing each other in the back, demanding rematches to extract instant vengeance. Many of those we spoke to said the Indie Room was their favourite place in the event, always full of buzz and excitement...music to our ears!

Competive families... let's hope they read the disclaimer!

Matthew:

Our stand was roughly in the centre of the Indies, Merch and Curios room, amongst games of all shapes, sizes and styles, and that's not even mentioning having giants like SEGA and 2K games a short walk away from our room!

Thursday started off slow - this is fairly common at shows like these, especially on a weekday, and being towards the back of the venue. Nonetheless, players took up the challenge and played! Response was positive early on, and throughout, from kids to kids-at-heart and members of the press, players were having a blast. Maybe they were drawn by the man in the cartoon bull mascot head (or the chocolate coins!), but many stayed for multiple rounds, or brought over friends to keep the bovine buccaneer brawling going! We saw plenty of true enjoyment at our stand, particularly with a full 4-pirate crew playing, as well as facing our beastly boss battles!

The love for indie gaming was really exemplified when I ventured out of the indie room to see what else was on offer. Surprisingly many of the big budget publisher areas were very quiet - unexpected for a London-based gaming expo! Maybe it was having an events team presenting these games, who cannot possibly match the energy and passion of indie developers hosting their own pride and joy in the next room.

Overall, WASD was great fun and the reception for Bullion was brilliant! I'm already looking forward to the next show, wherever that may be!

Joe Medforce's jacket was so shiny we wanted to nick it!

Ben:

Almost all the shows we've done previously have been about something else - usually retrogaming - with and indie zone tacked on. So walking through WASD to our stand with bits of our rig tied with string to a little trolley and seeing entire rooms devoted to the likes of Devolver and Team 17 did induce a certain level of imposter syndrome! 

Getting the stand set up alleviated this feeling somewhat; with fewer set-dressing pieces and a full backdrop, it started to feel more like we at least appeared to be on a par with the others in the "indie room". The friendliness of those running the surrounding stands was also a great help - plus this time, we finally had the long-awaited Silverside head and jacket, which I spent most of the event prowling around in, and certainly gave us some extra "stand-out" quality.

The audience was much more industry-oriented than we had previously experienced - however, the game was as well received as ever, and we gained not only new contacts but a lot of valuable insight as well. And while the show was not as busy as we had hoped or expected, it was reassuring to learn that the "indie room" - for those of us not linked up to one of the big publishers - was the activity hotspot at the show!

The biggest take-away of all though was that despite our limitations as part-time, self-funded venture, we were able to stand toe-to-toe with much bigger studios and labels - and even, in the eyes of some, come out on top!

The JM:TV Live crew were great to chat with and gave their all against Queen Ella!

Quotes and highlights for the show...

• - "Bullion: Curse of the Cut-Throat Cattle shows potential as a fun little party game" - Xbox Tavern
• - "My true game of the show, which is a diamond in the rough, is Bullion!" - Joe Medforce, Words About Games
• - Stuart bringing the GDL team to the stand, in an attempt to defeat the boss he created (watch the video - below!)
• - The number of people wanting photos with Silverside!

... and there is still one more big surprise we've got lined up as a result of WASD... but we can't talk about it yet! As soon as we can, it'll be in our newsletter and on our discord, so sign up to get the news as it happens!

Livin' La Vida Low-Cash

 Okay, so this time we did do it again - (pirate) radio silence since March, and with our biggest show to date in this timeframe, no less!

Actually, this is a large part of why we've been so quiet. Make no mistake, it was a great show (and we do intend to get something up on here about it, promise!), but what we learned there has forced us to put the brakes on somewhat and rethink a number of our plans. We're still on course for launch, albeit a bit later in the year than we had hoped - it's a few of the things that happen between then and now that we are having to re-evaluate.

One of the key issues we face is that we are entirely self-funded. This leaves us very little wiggle-room for how we use what reserves we have, and often puts us in a position where a bit of extra creative thinking is required to get the result we want... which sometimes leads to unexpected amusement.

This particular case relates to voice acting: we realised a while ago that we needed to re-record the vocals for Silverside. Since he has a big, loud, piratey voice, it was suggested that gameplay coder Ben take on the role, and that way we save ourselves a bit of our tiny budget, so it was arranged that while he and Paul were in London for the WASD show (which we swear we will cover in the next post!), they would meet up with our audio engineer at the hotel and record the required vocals. And along the way, it was decided that we could double up on the saving if Paul became the voice of Beefy Stu.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the hotel room backed onto a railway line... and thus came a golden moment of both creative improvisation and hilarity. Ben picks up the story...

'... so we're in the hotel room with trains constantly rattling past, Heather - our audio engineer - is in the bathroom, and Paul and I are both thinking "what do we do now?" - Paul's on limited time as he's got a family commitment that he needs to get to before coming back to the show, and we're wracking our brains trying to figure out how to salvage the situation. Then Heather comes out of the bathroom and she says "you know what guys - it's really quiet in there, you can't even hear the ceiling fan...'

You can see where this is going. Yup - in short order, the hotel bathroom was converted into an improvised recording studio:

When you gotta record, you gotta record...

A dedicated headphones holder...

Ben continues...

'... we've got almost all the bedding in this bathroom to prevent echo and that sort of thing (I don't pretend to understand audio!), and since he has to be elsewhere in a couple of hours, Paul's gone in first to record Stu's lines, along with Heather so she can coach and direct him to get the result she wants. So all I can hear outside is a woman's voice shouting instructions like "Say 'Mercy'! Louder! More annoying! Now moo for me!", followed by a man's voice complying... I am literally biting on the one remaining duvet, tears rolling down my face with laughter as I imagine what the people in the next room must be thinking!'

Of course, Ben got his comeuppance when it was his turn to record Silverside's new vocals... but it was agreed by both our humiliated coders that the embarrassment was a small price to pay for two characters' voices... and an entertaining anecdote for the blog!

Bossing it...

Ever since the early days of Bullion, we knew we wanted to have multiple modes of gameplay The standard avarice mode - time-limited gameplay with a winner based on treasure - was the obvious main mode. But we wanted to include boss battles as well, and so the question was how to make that gameplay mode sufficiently different, but still retaining the mood and themes of Bullion?

In avarice mode, Captain Silverside and crew attempt to appease the gods of the Isles of Ser-Lloyn by being the pirate to collect and thus offer the most treasure. We wondered what would happen if they chose to provoke the gods instead - after all, pirates are not best known for following rules! What if they intended to defy the gods and try to keep the treasure for themselves? Wouldn't the gods take umbrage?

Hence defiance mode - the crew refuse to play the game, so the gods send their champion to smite them! Each game arena would have its own guardian, appropriate to the theme of that arena, which the crew would need to defeat in order to win the game and keep their treasure - and their skins!

Meanwhile, Bullion's human development crew had hit a few rocky shores of their own. It looked like we were going to be blocked for a while and we needed to pivot. We onboarded enemy character artist Stuart at just the right time - we asked him to "go nuts", and boy did he deliver - for what should land in our inbox one day but the fearsome undead zombie parrot figure of Captain Krackerz!

Try feeding this guy a cracker!

Up to this point, the world of Bullion was populated only by anthropomorphic bulls. In this one act, Stuart had reimagined the world our corsairs inhabited, opening up endless possibilities that have led to the crocodiles, lizards and sea creatures in the game today (with more still to come - make sure you follow our social media for an early heads-up!). And what better way to start, in a pirate world, than with a parrot? Perennial companion to the pirate figure, Krackerz seeks revenge against all of the cruel captains that have gone before, mistreating and teasing his brethren. We decided to go all-in, working on the boss battle, replacing our placeholder skeletons with new parrot-themed models built by Stuart, and thinking through how a boss battle might work.

Most of the existing enemies in Bullion were simple 'grunts' - they'd pick a player and attack them, possibly running away if outnumbered, but doing very little else. Bosses needed more sophisticated handling - advanced weapons, range attacks, and interacting with the environment and the other creatures therein. And they would need vulnerable moments too, suitably signposted, to enable the players to perform mob attacks.

We worked on a script for Krackerz based around several rounds of gameplay - as the battle progressed, his behaviour would change, becoming increasingly more difficult to attack. He'd fire his cannon at players; he'd summon minions to act as a shield and stand around him, waiting to attack approaching players.

We wanted the core mechanic of Bullion - that the winner is the pirate with the most treasure - to remain. Being the pirate that defeats the boss was more an element of chance than skill. But attacking the boss needed to be rewarded. We made them 'treasure pinatas'; the more you attack them, the more treasure they drop. What's more, each stage of the boss battle ends with the boss dropping a BFD - a big fat (ahem) diamond - worth a considerable amount of treasure!

Once we had Krackerz, there was no holding us back! For Salty Swamp, Stuart's warped genius came up with Ella Gator, the most fabulous Queen of the Deep South - a lizard with attitude and a whole slice of drama, darling. And from a gameplay point of view, she is more complex than Krackerz, too (as befits a boss of a harder level) - she controls how her minions attack, sets fire to the marsh gases, and bats a huge rock at our players to crush them!

The most fabulous boss in the bayou, darling!

Our usual process is to test new features of the game by taking it to the public at shows and expos. There we can watch people play, with more or less prompting, and gauge what needs adjusting. It became clear that people liked the idea of boss battles, but they did tend to drag on, particularly when players didn't want to be the one to engage with the boss and get smited! Why 'take one for the team' when you could be collecting treasure instead, since that's how you win the game? We found this a bit irritating, and wondered what to do about it.

Then we realised - if we were irked, how would the bosses feel? The champions of the arena, sent there by the very gods themselves, were being ignored by these rebel ruminants? They'd be positively furious!

We made the rage of the gods part of the game mechanic. The longer the boss goes unattacked, the angrier they become - and the more swift and devastating their revenge! The players need to find that balance between co-operating to defeat the boss, and collecting treasure, otherwise they'll all be slain and nobody wins.

Boss Battle mode achieved!

We have more bosses in the pipeline, and a whole third mode of play now added to the game... but those are subjects for future blog posts!

A Taste of the Pirate's Life...

With all the positive feedback we've received ever since our first show all that time ago, we decided it was high time we took the plunge and released a demo on PC!

Download the demo!

You can check it out here: https://ledaentertainment.itch.io/bullion-demo

Demos have always been bit special for the older Bullion team members (aka Ben and Paul H). Back when our two programmers were but young scallywags with Atari ST computers and dreams of being game developers, playable demos were limited to what could be squeezed into the capacity of a single floppy disk - that's about a megabyte, if you're lucky! - and slapped on the cover of a monthly magazine... no internet back in those days! So releasing a playable demo by this means was considered something of an achievement - possibly more so than actually releasing a game!

Nowadays of course, the opposite is true - any would-be game developer can get a demo, or even a full game, out on the marketplace with barely a few mouse-clicks (and a bit of grind-work preparing all the required content!), and we are spoiled for choice when it comes to digital storefronts: Steam, Itch, GOG, Gamejolt... since all our previous releases have been either on mobile or Xbox 360, this was another "Bullion first" for us! Eventually we went with Itch.io, just for its ease of accessibility - however we are not blind to marketing trends, and so at the same time, we also set up a Steam page for the full game, and to allow people to wishlist (hint! hint!) for when we do release it. We're hoping to get the demo on Steam too but, thanks to a flurry of "life events" simply ran out of time before the release date! Ah, the joys of being a small studio...

So: demo live - check. Steam wishlist page - check. What else... ah yes! Public feedback has been at the heart of what we do even before Bullion was a concept, and the insight we have gathered from the shows we have taken the game to has been invaluable. So we set up a Discord server as well so that our demo players can let us know whether we should be showered in treasure... or walking the plank!

Wishlist on Steam!

Join us on Discord

Of course, one thing we were ready for was the inevitable chore of putting together all the various content assets required for each storefront - imagery is always the pain-point here, with so many different sizes and aspect ratio requirements... just like back when we were making mobile titles! That said, back in those days at least the mobile storefronts required you to manually resize your imagery to all the different required permutations and upload them all, whereas on PC, this tends to be automated - it's a small thing, but we'll take it as a win!

Deciding exactly what to put into the demo was pretty tough - on one hand, we had a definite idea of what we wanted to showcase, but our experiences watching people play at expos showed us some very definite trends as to favourite characters and arenas... hopefully what we have here is a decent blend of the two: Gyutan Sands and The Locker can be played in the "avarice" game mode, players can face Salty Swamp's fabulous boss Queen Ella Gator in "defiance" mode, and a single voyage that links all three of these arenas together. Playable characters are limited to Captain Silverside and Bovy Jones - to enable the requisite four player action, each of these appears in two different colour schemes... could this be a hint of things to come...?

At the same time as preparing the demo, we've had all the normal activity going on as well. Ship's cook Beefy Stu was unveiled earlier this month as our fifth playable character - if things go the way we want (and by heck, the heathen gods owe us this much after the last few months!), we should be announcing a sixth next month, along with the next arena our mottley bovid miscreants will be making berth at! As ever, all details will go up on our social media as they happen - alternatively, sign up to our mailing list for super-advance updates!

... and then, of course, there's our plan for public shows and expos... but that's for future posts! Meantime, go grab the demo, give it a play, then join the crew on Discord and let us know what you think... we look forward to seeing you on there!

Voyaging onward...

 A while back, we admitted that we've been more than a bit rubbish with our blog and social updates until recently... and we've only nearly gone and done it again! Blame a combination or Christmas, New Year, COVID and other family/life challenges - it was something of a perfect storm, apologies for a couple of quiet weeks!

On the subject of being rubbish with updates, would you believe that our last "year in review" type post was nearly four years ago? With everything that has happened in that time, it feels like a lifetime since then!

Anyway, let's lead off with some great news: welcome back, Stuart DeVille! Yes, the winds of life have blown in a direction that has seen the return of our original master of monsters, and between him and Chloe, we're now accelerating towards filling out our crew of minions and bosses.

Cap'n Krackerz brought a new vision for the enemy characters

Last year was a tough one, no doubt about it: all the plans for Play Expo Margate 2021 that we had started laying the foundations for over a year earlier were well and truely scuppered and our "life comes first" maxim was pushed to a level we had never even thought possible as the entire crew wrestled with the impact of the COVID pandemic. But even in the face of this leviathan, the voyage continued, and the calmer waters of the autumn was a most welcome break.

And despite us battening down the hatches for much of the first half of the year, a great deal of progress has been made: work on the defiance-mode stage with Queen Ella Gator, the fabulous carnival drag-queen boss of Salty Swamp was finally completed, giving us our second boss battle, so it's fitting that Stuart has re-joined us just as we have finished bringing his last creation to life!

Underwater arena "The Locker" added our fifth playing field: this was always envisaged as Bullion's "final stage", so the threat level has been dialed up. As well as fighting off tough crab-man enemies, players have to keep their air levels topped up, and also watch out for the giant squid tentacles that surround the arena. The overall atmosphere of the arena is one of deadly beauty, so full credit to Paul J and Chloe for bringing this together.

The Locker: Beautiful to look at - lethal to play!

The new voyage mode of play has added for longer and more varied matches as players fight it out across a number of islands in a combination of avarice-mode's flat-out treasure grabbing and defiance's boss battles. Similar to the "cup" mode of gameplay in many racing games, the overall winner is the player who claims victory on the most islands... but in true Bullion style, should the whole crew wipe out - on any island - it's game over!

Finally, there have been a host of other tweaks and enhancements across the board; the AI players now use the dash/rush escape mechanic, the ghost characters have all been upgraded (again!), and a whole slew of new visual effects, UI and cut-sequence enhancements have been rolled in. Our initial release platforms have been decided, and it definitely feels like everything is coming together.

Of course, the highlight of the year has to have been getting back out on the road and putting Bullion in front of the public. Having people at Play Expo Blackpool remember playing the game when we were last there (in 2019!) and commenting on all the improvements and additions we had made since was awesome, and being part of the very first GDLX and getting the opinions of other developers was similarly amazing. Getting to finally catch up with old friends - Badger from Stoffel Presents, TristaBytes, AsobiTech's Quang, the Replay Events team - was a huge morale booster, and having Stuart re-join is the icing on the proverbial cake.

Now, as we head into 2022, there are stormy clouds above us once again; like the villain in a bad movie franchise, COVID is back in its new omicron incarnation, and right now it's difficult to say whether we are heading back into the storm or if the skies will clear again. But we sail on with hope: every enhancement, every feature, every tune-up and tweak is a step closer to the finished article, and in the face of this uncertainty, it's reassuring to think about all the support we've had. As turbulent as 2022 may be, we are still confident that it's going to be a great year for Bullion - and be sure to keep an eye on our social media as we've got some big announcements coming up!

Full Circle

(Game designer/developer Ben talks about GDLX)

Last weekend found the good ship Bullion docking at the inaugural GDLX: Game Dev London Expo.

Game Dev London is a rapidly-growing developer community, with one of its key administrators being our very own ex-crewmate Stuart DeVille. Stuart pretty much re-invented the look and feel of Bullion's enemies, including giving us our first boss battle, and it was a real blow when changing life circumstances meant he had to step down from the team. So GDLX was a great chance for us to catch up with him. It also gave us a chance to put Bullion in front of a whole new audience: instead of the families and retro-gamers we were used to from the Play Expo shows, most of the people attending GDLX were connected to game development in some way.

The show was held at the Samsung KX hub: described as an "innovation space", the main area comprised of a sizeable auditorium for the various talks that were scheduled through the day, surrounded by various stands that would normally used to showcase Samsung devices and technology. Which meant that rather than the plain table we were used to, we ended up setting up on a desk that looked more like someone's home office, complete with house plants! But it was a decent enough space, so we cracked out the roller banners, the stickers, the treasure chest - everything we usually have on the stand - and settled in. And then things started getting slightly surreal...

If only the boss could see what really went on in the home office!

We had plenty of players during the day. But we also had people asking us about how to market their games. About how to position themselves to break into the industry. Pitching their skills to us. Even asking whether Leda Entertainment was offering internships. And suddenly it began to dawn on us that we'd come full circle: back in 2013 at Leda Entertainment's first show, we'd watched with no small amount of envy from behind our barely-decorated table stand as the team opposite us, with their banners and big monitors and other highly visible promotion material had attracted a continual flow of players. And now, here we were - while most of the other teams had crammed themselves together in a relatively small space which left little room for any kind of promotional display, we had our posters and pirate hats and give-away stickers and pirate gold chocolate... it was a bizarre Vader-meets-Obi-Wan kind of moment, especially given the people-oriented ethos of the Bullion team!

A great day of networking while watching other developers fighting each other...

But this also turned into a delightful opportunity. Game development is a hard industry to break into, especially straight out of education, and we've heard many tales of broken dreams over the years. So to a number of the would-be developers who came to talk to us about internship or job opportunities, our part-time team approach and the idea of building a skillset that would widen their employment prospects while at the same time improving their abilities as game developers seemed to come as something of a revelation.

With a little luck, we may see a number of other "grassroots" game studios springing up in the coming years.

Raise the Black(pool) Flag!

It's moments like this that throw into sharp relief what Bullion is all about.

This weekend gone, we were at Play Expo Blackpool - our first show since COVID sent the world careening off the edge of the map and into "here be monsters" territory. The Bullion team are no strangers to turmoil - over the course of development more than one of us have faced life-changing events which we have navigated successfully. But, just like the rest of the world, COVID affected all of us in ways we could never have prepared for - so to be back at a show, demoing Bullion to people who love playing games, was a much-needed re-kindling of our enthusiasm.

From vintage cabs and rare consoles to modern PCs...

The impact of COVID showed in a number of ways: attendance was lower than we had seen in our previous visits to Blackpool, and we had a number of quiet periods at the stand. But despite this, the overall atmosphere seemed even more friendly and passionate than previously experienced; probably because this was the first chance for many to attend an event of this scale since the pandemic hit. Equally obvious was the increased sense of nostalgia that has arisen during this time, and this was reflected in the indie zone, with a strong presence from the ZX Spectrum Next team, plus new homebrew titles for the vintage Gameboy handheld (AsobiTech's D*Fuzed) and NES console (Lowtek Game's Flea! and Tapeworm Disco Puzzle), leaving both Ben and Paul H yearning for the Atari STs!

It was also a chance to catch up with old friends who we hadn't seen since pre-COVID times: Badger (from Stoffel Presents), TristaBytes, AsobiTech's Quang and Jim Bagley from the ZX Spectrum Next group, and of course, Andy, Simon and the rest of the Replay Events team.

It's all about families and friends

All together now... Volcaaaaaanooooooo!

Players from 2019 loved the latest features

But the jewel in the crown was undoubtedly our players. The enthusiasm and overwhelming positivity with which Bullion was received was a balm for the twenty months of uncertainty wrought by COVID. Better yet, a number of them remembered trying the game previously at the 2019 Play Blackpool show, and were delighted at seeing not just how the game had progressed, but also that suggestions that they had made at the time had been taken on board in its development since then. We even ran our very first official tournament with players competing throught the weekend in voyage mode, trying to gain the highest total treasure for a specially-built voyage and win a plushie of Captain Long John Silverside (provided by Sew 8-bit).

Eventually, of course, the show had to close - it was time to pack everything up and make the long journey back home. Except there was still one last surprise to come...

One of our players had asked for a photo with Ben (who he had played against). That photo was waiting in the Leda inbox when we got back, accompanied by the simple statement: "Loved it today. Great game - will definitely be getting a copy."

An amazing final surprise to end a great first show back

Over five years development time, and twenty months since our last show. Worth every second of it.

Get Ship-Shape!

Saying that we have been... "sporadic" in posting updates about how things have been going for Bullion - both on here and our social media channels - would be being incredibly generous, to say the least. In fact, we are more than willing to admit that we have been "downright lousy" at it.

This stops now.

Things are a-changing on the Bullion front, and we owe it to everyone who has encouraged us since development started to get this ship ship-shape. And with the COVID situation finally improving AND it being International Talk Like a Pirate Day on Sunday gone, we felt it was the perfect time.

So first of all, something we know that those who have been following us have been waiting to hear for some time: we are very pleased to confirm that Bullion will be released for Nintendo Switch and Xbox One, and we are aiming for a launch at some point in the second half of next year. We are also looking at Steam as another option - we're still not 100% sure how many local multiplayer players there are on PC, but this option that Steam offers that allows a local multiplayer to work online is definitely worth looking into. So that leaves Playstation: sorry guys, but Sony's requirements to even enroll on their indie scheme are horribly complex and expensive when compared to the other platforms, and too great a risk, given our part-time, low-budget status. Of course, this may change if we get a sufficient return from the other platforms... so if you want Bullion on the Playstation, your best bet will be to get all your Switch and Xbox (and potentially PC) owning friends to buy it!

While we may have been utterly rubbish somewhat lax about updates, the same cannot be said for the game itself! We have a load of new features (including the much-requested "bull rush" dash move), a new arena (with a second well on the way) and a new boss battle that we're looking forward to showing everyone - and now that large events are starting to pick up again here in the UK, we are on the look-out for opportunities to get back out there and let everyone try them out.

We've also completely re-vamped the website! Yes, another long-suffering casualty of neglect while we try and fit everything in and adjust to the crazy place the world has become over the last year and a half, we finally got round to giving the poor website a much-needed makeover. If you didn't come in that way, go cast an eye over www.bulliongame.com - we think you'll agree, it's a huge improvement! And we'll be keeping it updated with latest news and video footage as we go, so make sure to check back in there. Same goes for our social media - facebook, twitter, instagram... yep, we're serious about getting our act together!

Lastly - and if you thought that we were bad at keeping this blog updated, then we've been even worse at this! - we would like to (re)introduce the crew of the good ship Bullion as it currently stands, as some of these amazing individuals have not been given nearly as much credit as they deserve:

• Chloe McCann: Enemy and support character modelling and animation, environmental hazard modelling
• Matthew Isteed: Player characters modelling and animation, environment modelling
• Paul James: Environment design and modelling, visual effects and enemy character modelling and animation

... and of course, Ben and Paul are still on board, doing the coding and other bits and pieces round the edges.

Let the voyage continue!

Pirate Ghosts...

Last entry in the ship's log, we talked about the oft-asked "dash/escape" question, and how we had re-invented the "Bull Rush" - a mechanic that had been part of the game since its initial design - into something that would fulfill our Expo players' requests while retaining the original spirit and characterisation of the move.

This time, we're looking at another feature that has been in since the beginning, but has been shown by our players at shows to be in need of some upgrades - ghost mode.

Spot the ghosts... there's two of 'em!

From the get-go, we knew that players' characters needed to be able to respawn, but we wanted to do something a bit more fun and player-led than just a time delay before that happened. And since ghosts are almost as integral to a good pirate story as the pirates themselves, the idea we came up with was that when a player character died, their ghost would appear at the body's location, and the player would have to "corpse run" back to the respawn point (as made popular by a certain well-known MMORPG!) in order to join back in. And since ghosts can do nothing but move around, the faster the player got their ghost back to their respawn point, the quicker they could get back into the back-stabbin' treasure-grabbin' action...

... at least, that was the theory. But at shows, we started spotting a worrying trend - some players got the ghost thing immediately. Others needed a bit of explanation before getting it; fine at a show when one of our able crew is around to tell them what to do, but not a desirable quality in a release version. A significant number just plain struggled; either they did not realise that they were supposed to move the ghost, or where they were supposed to go, both of which were definite "red flag" situations! And finally, there were those who simply did not even see the ghosts... okay, it's not quite as bad as the image above when everything is moving, but still, totally unacceptable!

Our first thought was "okay, how about we switch over to a timed auto-respawn?", but taking away that control from the player just felt... wrong. Moreover, some of our more canny players had realised that ghost mode allowed the resurrecting "Water of Life" power-up to be used strategically - since a character's respawning causes a blast wave which knocks back and damages any nearby characters (a deliberate mechanic to prevent spawn campers!), a player could move their ghost into the middle of a treasure-rich area and fire the power-up to clear the area of other players and enemies before grabbing everything they could! However, we quickly realised that we could combine the existing ghost mode mechanic with a timed auto-respawn: if you got back to your respawn point before the timer ran out - great, you're back in play that few seconds earlier! If not, and the timer expires... well, you're still back in play, but you lose even more treasure on top of what you lost for dying in the first place! This double-penalty not only is designed to push players towards trying to respawn under their own steam, but also fits the game's plot concept: the heathen gods of the Iles de Ser-Lloyn will not let our bovine buccaneers rest until they have passed judgement on them!

So we've got a solution for making sure dead players don't end up just wandering around as ghosts - great! Now we just want to make sure we are not penalising players who do not realise what they are supposed to do when their character dies... we need the equivalent of Ben or Paul, or whoever yelling "Player two! You're dead - get to your respawn point, it's over here!"

Well, the first step was to make it very obvious which player's character was where. We had already made some changes to make it much more obvious which character was being controlled by which number player as part of another piece of work (which we would have blogged about earlier, but it involved UI work, so Ben doesn't want to talk about it!), so it was simple enough to add that information to the status panels. Next, a marker with the player's number was added for each character: while the character is alive, the marker tracks them around the arena. When the character dies, the marker tracks above the ghost instead - however, every few seconds, the marker will move across the arena from above the ghost to the character's respawn point, before fading out and reappearing over the ghost again. So - hopefully - this will provide some much-needed guidance for our poor, lost players who either don't realise they're ghosts, or don't know what to do about it! And, as a final touch, we made the markers configurable: show always, show only in ghost mode, do not show.

Follow the pointy sword... or wait for the auto-respawn

Of course, this is all theoretical right now - thanks to COVID-19, the chances of getting a show around our usual time in late September/early October are pretty much in Davy Jones' locker, and with them go the opportunity for any real public testing and face-to-face feedback. In fact, at the moment it's sketchy whether or not we'll be back in business by next February... so to everyone out there, we would offer the following advice: face masks look great when paired with pirate hats!

Ye asked... ye got!

For some time now, one of the most-often-asked questions we hear at shows (after "when's it going to be released?") is "Is there any way to move faster/dash/escape?"

Back when Bullion was in the design phase, it was decided that the signature move that united all the player characters would be the "Bull Rush": once charged up, a player character could drop to all fours and bolt across the arena like an enraged bull. Any chests in the way would be smashed, enemies and other players would be knocked flying and take damage... the down side was that once rushing, the character had to keep going in a straight line until either the power ran out, or they ran out of the arena or into a solid obstacle (rocks, trees etc). It was intended to be a showcase "finishing" move, requiring flashy start-up animations plus several others just to execute the move, and caused more bugs than we would care to remember (yes, this includes the infamous "Teleporting Dead Bull" bug)! But we eventually got the mechanics working for Silverside by the Play Expo Manchester show in 2017...

... and then it kind of got forgotten about! We decided that we would work with a "minimum requirements" set in order to get additional playable characters plugged in; Bull Rush was not a necessity for a new character to be playable and had a high animation overhead, so it simply got switched off for all the characters that followed. And because of that, while Silverside's rush option was left switched on, we never put any time into balancing the mechanic or publicised it at shows. It became something "we would sort out later".

Well - it's "later"...

Chaaaaaaaaarge!!!

The message from our players is that they don't want a big flashy move that takes time to fire off once triggered - they just want to be able to get from A to B faster (or at least part-way), or get themselves out of trouble if things are going bad. So we took Bull Rush back to the drawing board and simplified it, while retaining as much of its "charging bull" signature as possible - at the end of the day, the "cow" part of Bullion was always intended to be something more than just an excuse for bad puns!

Gone are the big, drawn out flashy entry sequences and the complex all-fours animations. Instead, we now have a leaner, meaner Bull Rush: the player hits the button, the character immediately bolts forward. Gone too are the fiddly conditional charge-up and the "all-or-nothing" lack of control: the power charges up over time and once full, the rush lasts until the power runs out, the character leaves the arena or hits something solid OR until the player takes their finger off the button (okay, so we've introduced a minimum requirement that at least quarter of the power is used, but that's it). The character is still invincible while rushing (good for escaping!) and still has to go in a straight line, but our new Bull Rush introduces both immediate response and a degree of control to the player while also vastly reducing the development overheads.

In these mad times of viruses and lockdowns, we have no idea when our next show is likely to be. But rest assured, we fully intend to have all our bovine buccaneers able to use their Bull Rush to dash and/or escape by the next time we dock for a public demo!

Back-mounted cannon equals jet-pack!

A plague be upon us!!!

All good pirates know how fickle a mistress the ocean can be... and right now, the seas of life that we - and by we, I don't just mean the Bullion team, but everyone on this globe of ours - must navigate are possibly the stormiest we have ever faces... we're definitely off the map and into uncharted waters here, lads and lasses!

Of course, we're talking about the menace that was brewing half a world away as we, the crew of the good ship Bullion, were laughing and patting ourselves on the back after a great show in Margate: the world's new foe, the pox known as CORVID-19, or "Coronavirus".

Now ye all might think "but hang on - you're game developers and you were already working in a distributed team, so apart from a bit of extra care, it's business as usual, right?"... oh, if only that were true! Ultimately, we are a part-time team, developing Bullion in spare time around day jobs - and those day jobs have to come first. And, ironically, with those day jobs being at home, for some of us it is actually proving more difficult to carve out time to keep Bullion moving forward...

But our troubles are pretty small fry, when we think of all those people we are mingling with at the Margate show only six weeks ago... complete strangers sitting down less than a foot away from each other to gather round our demo rig and take on Chilli Con Carnage, or see what Kanonbul is like to play - in this new world of social distancing, that would be unthinkable! And then there are our friends at Replay Events, whose livelihood depends on these shows that are now impossible...

... our thoughts are with you all as we navigate these troubled waters. Stay safe, stay home, and keep a weather eye on the horizon - we will survive this storm.

Through the Storm...

We're back!

There's no denying it's been a rough year or so, as evidenced by the lack of updates on this blog and our social media channels. Captain Long John Silverside and his motley crew of bovine buccaneers may have been drifting in the doldrums for a while, perhaps even headed for the rocks - but at the eleventh hour the sails billowed, and last weekend the good ship Bullion docked once again in the safe harbour of Margate, our perennial Winter show.


Leda Entertainment has exhibited in this old English seaside town every year since 2013, missing only last year as there was no February half-term expo in 2019. Perhaps the disappointment of that had fed into the slump we'd found ourselves in. So a triumphant return to the Winter Gardens venue was just what we needed! Not this time the brightly lit, cold corridors of Dreamland; instead we were back in the cavernous space of the old theatre, the semi-darkness making the retro console screens 'pop', with chip music echoing off the walls. All that was missing was that copper-and-ozone smell of the old video arcades. We set out our stall on the exact spot of our 'breakthrough' year in 2014, exhibiting our platform runner 'Bopscotch', when such was the demand that we'd had to trawl local GAME stores to gather enough kit to build a second rig overnight! All the omens were there for a similarly epic gig this time around.

So many memories...

10am Friday morning, the doors opened, and the first few visitors eagerly approached our stand - families with children aged 8-12, our usual target market. Our hearts lifted! And they spoke to us with wide eyes, saying.... where are Fortnite and Minecraft? And our hearts sank again. But we'd have the last laugh when those same children would come back to Bullion, some several times, during the course of the day - eager to have another go on our family-friendly brawler. That MarioKart-style local multiplayer magic lives on!

Families are still our biggest audience

The team had done us proud: we had both a new character (Kanonbul, a new favourite amongst our younger players) and a new island (Chilli Con Carnage, which certainly lived up to its name!) to reveal to the public. It wasn't flawless - we had to make a few new builds of the game during the event, and notably one day we were still coding at the venue and deploying to the demo rig 15 minutes before the doors opened! We found one (fortunately rare) game-ending bug, but otherwise all the issues we spotted as developers didn't spoil our players' enjoyment of the game. The feedback was extremely positive, with many players somewhat disappointed to discover we still have a couple of years of development to go. Many commented on how great the game looks, with strong characters (thanks Matthew and Stuart!) and beautiful environmental artwork (thanks Paul J!). Sadly the venue was too noisy for the great sound work of Tristellar to get the appreciation it truly deserves. Constructive criticism from our players included confusion around the character select screen, the lack of an "escape" mechanism when being mobbed by enemies, and that the AI players would often easily beat less experienced players. The former was solved with some brainstorming on the journey home; the second is because the signature "bull rush" move is still awaiting animations for most of our characters, so had been disabled; and the final issue is the focus of ongoing AI enhancement efforts. Addressing these issues will be the priority for the next phase of development.

Chilli Con Carnage got a thorough playtest

Is that parrot debugging?!?

Good interest from press and Youtubers too...

As ever, the camaraderie between the indie developers and other familiar faces at the event made it special. The hardest working man on the UK indie scene - Quang, of Asobi Tech - was there with the incredibly cute Mao Mao Castle (launching soon!); he also gave a presentation about his extensive collection of retro game gear. Drive Buy from Glitchers drew a crowd; a neon-electric capture-the-flag driving game, impressively demonstrated on two Nintendo Switch cabinets alongside a couple of PCs. The dungeon-crawler Millions of Minions, by the young Matt of Head Tilt Games, was impressive in its first outing. And the beautiful retro-styled beat-em-up Okinawa Rush from SteveX felt right at home in the vicinity of the Double Dragon arcade cabinet and the Street Fighter 2 tournament playing by the main stage.

Certainly quality beating quantity in the indie presence!

All in all, a great event - and there are so many people to thank! The tweenagers who kept returning to our stand, bringing friends and family along, buoying our spirits. Andy, Simon and the rest of the Replay Events crew, who were great hosts as ever - and we're looking forward to future events with them. Friend of indies Trista Bytes fending off illness to hold court on stage, hosting several talks. Kim Justice and Stuart Ashen keeping watch over events, feeding back all they saw to their audiences on YouTube, the latter finding time to enjoy a quick game of Bullion with our character artist Matthew ("it's fun already, being halfway done", he observed). And our spirits were lifted by the Gaming Muso rocking out on stage; days later I'm still humming along to the earworm of Outrun's Sound Wave playing in my head.

Matthew and Ashens take on Chilli Con Carnage

Even Replay's Simon got in on the hats!

But the enduring memory of the event will be the sound of Ben cheerfully screaming "Volcaaaaanooooooo!!!" while helping our players test the new Chilli Con Carnage level. Here's hoping we rise, phoenix-like, from the remains of the past development phase, reborn from the lava.

Observations of Play Expo Margate 2020 by AI coder Paul H

Swabbin' the Decks

To many game developers, front-end UI is one of those necessary evils that gets put off as long as possible. It's basically all the menus, options and other bits that are an absolute must-have, but are not actually part of the gameplay, and therefore perceived as "not as fun to program".

Regrettably, game front-end developer Ben P falls firmly into this category. But we decided to just go ahead, bite the bullet and, after two years of scraping by with placeholders and cobbled-together hacks, put together a UI that would not only fulfill all the game's setup needs, but also bring some consistency to places like the pause screen or when the round ends.

Updated title screen mock-up

For a long time, we knew we were going to have to provide a means whereby players could  not only select their own characters, but configure those driven by AI as well. But it was actually something we had observed at the various shows we had demoed at that prompted the decision to go ahead: if two players join the game at the same time, how do we know which player is selecting which character?

Needless to say - this would involve planning... and post-it notes.

The first big change was to ditch changing the appearance of the option buttons to indicate which was currently selected, and have a cursor instead (in the shape of a pirate's hook, natch). This greatly increased the clarity of the UI, as it removed the problem of "is this option disabled or just not selected?" We also took the opportunity to revert back to having one of the islands in this opening screen, greatly enhancing its colour and thereby its impact, and reinforced the bull's-skull-and-crossbones motif from the ships's flag by using it as a background in the options and game setup views.

Options view mock-up

We also reversed the sequence in which the game is started - previously, all players joined, and then any of them could alter which island was selected on the map. This had proved to be rather chaotic at shows, so in this new UI it was decided that only the player starting the game can select the island (and round time/game mode), with other players joining in after this - although they do have the option to cancel the game setup, should the original starting player not be able to finish the job.

Once through stage selection and setup, the view then pans through to the crew on the ship in much the same way as previously.

Updated character selection view

So we're now back to that old chestnut of what happens if two or more players joining at the same time - which we solved by stopping it from happening!

When a player joins the game, their character set-up cursor (marked "P1", "P2" etc) appears - at the same time, their controller now vibrates and a message stating "Player [n] has joined" is displayed. Following this, there is a half-second block on other players joining - hopefully not so long that it becomes annoying, but long enough for the successfully joining player to realise which cursor they are in control of.

Will this work? We'll find out at the next show!

There are also a number of other enhancements, most important being the optional random setup of AI players, and the game being blocked from starting until all human players have selected their characters - again, driven by feedback at shows where we had to restart several times following players not joining the game in time!

There's still a lot of fine tuning to be done, but the whole team agrees that this is the polish that the opening and game setup screens needed...

... but that's not to say that Ben has changed his mind about coding front end UI...

Longhorn Lubbers in London - Play Expo London 2018

The weekend of the 11th/12th of August saw Replay Events' inaugural Play Expo London - and given our history with their team, there was no way we were going to pass up the chance to be there! Moreover, the timing of the show could not have been better, neatly falling on the end of our standard six-month "slow agile" development cycle, and thereby providing a great opportunity to get public feedback on the latest game features...

... or at least, that was the theory! Truth be told, the last six months has been very challenging, with our "life comes first" philosophy taking on a whole new depth of meaning; the entire plan for this phase of development ended up being completely re-worked, and it is a testament to the team that we managed to get at least an alpha version of the boss battle up and running in time! Even at the last, there were a few gnarly bugs that ended up being worked round as opposed to fixed, giving the demo build a feel slightly reminiscent of the original GEEK 2017 pre-alpha version.

The view from the booth

The new "Defiance" mode got a good workout

So with no small amount of "hope we don't have anything too embarrassing happen!", we hit the road to Printworks, Canada Water, London to set up... arriving in the middle of rush hour - not our finest bit of planning! On top of that, unprecedented rainfall the night before had caused some flooding in the venue; we arrived to find the Replay crew re-working the floor plan, once again proving their mettle in the face of difficulty. But once we had actually got there and found the new location of our booth, setup went smoothly and we were as ready as we could be for the weekend ahead.

Kick-off on Saturday morning saw a solid flow of people through the stand - and this pretty much set the tone for the entire show; consistently busy, but not as crazy an Play Manchester last year had been. Of course, at Play Manchester, the indie aisle had been right on top of the entrance to the show! Once again, the feedback was great, with many players having a go at the new "Defiance" boss battle, and despite our concerns, the build held up well, the only new bug being an irritatingly sporadic issue in which the game would lock up at the point of returning to the title screen - a little embarrassing, but fortunately pretty un-intrusive when it came to the actual gameplay experience.

Good to see Jupiter Hadley again

Sadly no pirate cosplayers playing this time

Having four of us on the stand definitely made life a lot easier - both Matthew and Stuart were on-hand (Stuart's very first time exhibiting! Bless!) to get first-hand reactions to their artwork, with favourable comparisons to the likes of Spyro, Crash and Jak & Daxter. The extra manpower also allowed everyone to take some time out to go and play, and check out the other indies at the show: once again, we found ourselves in the company of childhood heroes, with Jim Bagley of ZX Spectrum fame on one side and Huey Games - the next generation of Hewson - a couple of booths down on the other, plus a number of familiar faces and some new ones to boot... as ever, the indie camaraderie was strong, one of the great things about shows such as this.

Baggers plays Bullion!

So once again, a very enjoyable show with plenty of positive feedback and ideas to take forward as we move into the next phase of development. And with the extended team now feeling a lot more solid, we're finally beginning to think ahead to when we want to actually release this thing we're creating...

... ultimately, what happens over this next development cycle will be pivotal in setting that date!

A motley crew if ever there was one...

Going Krackerz!

The Bullion team is growing again! We are very pleased to welcome aboard new crew members...

• Stuart De Ville: Graphic designer, artist, 3D modeller & animator
• Deanna Chrisbacher: Graphic designer, artist, 3D modeller specialising in environments

This has been a huge boost to the team - we have been wanting to add more artists to the line-up since GEEK 2017, and as with Matthew and Ben before them, we feel very lucky and privileged to be working with such talented people.

On top of this - as those who have been paying attention to our social media will know - we will be exhibiting Bullion at Replay Events' new Play Expo London in August! We are very excited about this, and since our new artists came over as being so enthusiastic, we decided to drop Stuart in at the deep end and give him the first Bullion boss battle to design... which ended up with Cap'n Krackerz - an undead pirate parrot!

Raised from the dead to bring the wrath of the gods down on our bovine buccaneers...

Of course, this brings with it a host of new challenges, not least being how to integrate a boss battle into a game where the basic idea was to grab the most treasure in a timed round...

For the boss battle we decided to do away with the timer, but otherwise, the basic premise remains the same: be the one with the most treasure at the end of the round and if the whole crew wipes out, the round ends with no winner. To push the players towards fighting the boss, we set up the boss's health bar with a number of units - the player who scores the hit which completely depletes a health unit gets a big, fat treasure reward which - unlike the smaller treasures - cannot be stolen by other players. The stick to this carrot is that the boss's attacks will gradually increase in damage over time, so the longer the boss is alive, the greater the chance of the crew wiping out becomes. So once again, our players are faced with the choice: do they collect treasure? fight each other? fight the boss? Compete or collaborate - the key concept behind Bullion's gameplay.

"BFD"s (big fat diamonds) drive both the boss sequence and the player actions

As expected, the boss battle has brought a host of new coding challenges: Krackerz has multiple "special moves", including summoning minions and projectile attacks (what, you thought that cannon under his arm was just for decoration?) which his AI has to be capable of choosing, and then the game front-end has to deliver. The latter of these has actually proved a lot more straightforward than anticipated, largely thanks to the massive rebuild that took place after last year's GEEK - once again, time well spent! Similarly, following the debut of our computer-controlled players earlier this year, we are expecting to see similar returns on the planning and effort that went into building the AI framework.

Meantime, Deanna has taken on the job of taking the Salty Swamp stage from the current placeholder-heavy demo version up to production-ready. Building the island arena stages presents its own unique challenges, which we will be looking at in a future post - along with some before-and-after and other showcase images.

So - exciting stuff! And while we don't want to count our parrots... sorry, chickens! before they've hatched, we're pretty confident we'll have a boss battle to show off at Play London... and maybe a few other additions besides!