Howdy Follower! Thanks for your interest in Blameless! Another news update to give you some background on me as a developer and how Blameless came to be. Please keep in mind I’m a bad writer and this might be hard to read in it’s entirity.
What is FBP?
Originally FBProjecten is a web development studio that came to life in 2012. After a decade of working different -mainly boring- dayjobs in sectors ranging from carpentry to IT there was the urge to do what I love and doing it my way.
Working together with a dedicated salesman the assignements kept rolling in and the quality of my work improved massively over the years.
Why games?
Growing up I always played games. Sonic and Mario were well known characters in my household and almost every console since the NES has had it’s worthy place next to our family televisions. Then it happened, as a young boy my uncle gifted us our first pc, a simple beige beast running DOS, intruducing me to typing commands instead of using a controller for input. Then I found a small program called GW-BASIC. Not understanding what it did I started playing with it and soon was able to print some text to the screen. An IT guy at my moms job noticed my interest in BASIC and gave me the official manual for GW-BASIC. ( At the time, internet was still poorly formatted and docs for programming we’re supplied in book form with the software or sold seperately, hail the interwebz! )
Now I had a base for doing more stuff with the BASIC language, instead of just printing messages I was able to make a very basic login system with multiple users and saving address books to text files in a homemade format similar to XML.
Then life took over. I discovered girls, parties and set foot into the real world. This was a short adventure since I found the right girl pretty fast and ended up with two kids a dog and a station wagon at 28 years old.
When I started FBP the interest in games woke up again. I started making simple clones of well known classics in javascript and JustBASIC ( a modern variant of the old basic ). All of these we’re unfinished, buggy and very dev-arty. Most of my time was spent on the engine for displaying things and physics. Then Unity came to my attention.
Unity saved my life
Not really… But it made it a lot easier! Instead of wasting time on writing my own engines there was one who did what I wanted, did it pretty well and handled all the file formats I got used to overtime while hobbying around with design softwares. Unity is in my opinion the best choice for a sole developer since it supports a lot out of the box and has a huge amount of examples online for almost everything you can imagine.
The birth of Blameless
If you ask me when I started developing Blameless I have to answer I don’t remember that. I always wanted to make a game someday and almost everything I made was controlled from above most of the time, my love for existing god games like Black and White and the lack of proper new ones also helped a lot. Let’s not talk about Godus, I would have loved it to be the game of god games and some sort of spiritual successor to B&W.
I believe a game called WUPS was the spiritual predecessor of Blameless. It was a 2d game made in Construct2 in a day or three which was rather simple, but received some love from my friends and was really the first thing I ever considered a playable game. Whilst writing this article WUPS has been recovered from a dusty backup and I will upload it here on GJ so you can have a run with it!
The AI in WUPS is pretty basic, but just works. Also there’s some leaderboards that probably don’t work anymore since the databases handling it are no longer in existence.
After WUPS my AI skills developed rather fast since I started to use AI for random things in my life, like deciding what food to buy for the week. ( that AI somehow always makes me buy kale, but no sausages - Vegan AI? )
This lead to trying out how far I could go with smart AI in large numbers, this lead to the current layered AI from Blameless. The guys are pretty smart, make decisions for themselfs and show some funky behaviour sometimes. Bugs are common, sometimes worth laughing about and sometimes pretty stupid or caused by dumb coding!
I want to be a game dev, nothing else! I want to make money of my games so I can stop designing stupid websites and frameworks! I need your help!
How you can help me out!?
Play the game, rate it, flame me in the comments about ridiculous bugs, make me a let’s play or support me by donating a little on itch.
Thanks for reading this entire thing! For doing so I would like to let you enter into the Blameless naming program. Leave a comment here with a first and last name for a Blameless villager and you might see it in-game soon!
Yours sincerely,
FB
Blameless Dev
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