Slice of Sea major update and overhaul to version 2.0


Entire game got full refactor and logic upgrade. This includes:

  • Full controller support, now you can play entire game using your controller. This functionality was added in preparation for Steam Deck compatibility re-review, which means that while the game is not officially supported on Steam Deck, you can still play it on Steam Deck without any additional key and buttons remapping. You can check out key / gamepad bindings on new, restructured controls options screen.
  • Updated entire code of the game, based on new Submachine: Legacy logic. With each subsequent game my code is getting better and more robust, therefore after releasing Submachine: Legacy I decided to go back to Slice of Sea and rewrite it to match better version of my code architecture.
  • Added new cursor icon showing hotspot regions where an inventory item can be used. When you hover over an area where game expects you to use some inventory item, the cursor change will indicate that.
  • Aristocrat and Collector achievements now trigger in-game, not in outro. As you collect final item needed for those achievements, they will trigger instantly.
  • Reworked Tibet Drums availability to spin. Now you can spin them without finding drum order notes first. You still can’t solve this puzzle without finding all needed notes first, but you can at least spin them and see the structure of the puzzle.
  • There’s a new achievement to unlock. It’s seasonal, which means it will be available only for two weeks around Halloween. Hunt them pumpkins.
  • Unfortunately, Mac version doesn’t work anymore after latest macOS update, so I can’t have that version still available to buy. Note, that this is not fault of the game itself, it was working fine, nothing changed in the code, it was fulfilling Apple’s long list of demands to be playable on macOS, it was checked, approved, notarized, paid for etc. And then it stopped working. Subsequently, Mac version is not updated. I would like to come back to this subject in the future, but I’m not sure if it’s sustainable at this point. If they expect me to try making the game playable after each system update, then I’m sorry, I’m not sure I want to handle that.

 



Submachine: Legacy, Destructoid review


This Flash puzzle games collection is holding a strong 99% positive review on Steam.

Adobe Flash is, of course, dead. It was deprecated back in 2021, putting a scruffy little bow on this particular niche of PC gaming. Line Rider, Happy Wheels, and Bloons all started their careers via Flash, and while some of these games do make a return every so often, as the upcoming Alien Hominid remaster, they’ve certainly fallen out of favour with the younger crowd.

Now, even though Newgrounds continues to exist, the legendary Adobe Flash content repository is not nearly as culturally relevant today as it once used to be. That is not to say, however, that Flash games have been totally taken out of the equation. Notably, Flash developer Mateusz Skutnik – whose name may ring a bell for the older folks – has just released an all-new entry in his Submachine puzzle series. This is, of course, a big deal for Flash fans all on its own, but even more interesting is the fact that Submachine: Legacy has already got a 99% positive rating on Steam.

Submachine: Legacy enjoys a remarkably high review score.
Skutnik’s Submachine titles weren’t quite as incredibly popular as some of the games mentioned in the previous section. They were, however, a mainstay for point ‘n’ click fans due to their satisfying puzzles and a mysterious vibe. All of that seems to have made the transition into Submachine: Legacy, which is basically a collection of 12 previous Submachine releases.

Now fully updated and tied into a single experience, all of Skutnik’s previous work on the Submachine series has been enjoying praise on Steam, with fans being positively thrilled with this new release. “Thank you Mr. Skutnik,” said one reviewer. “Been playing your games since 2005.”

Another compared Submachine: Legacy to Dwarf Fortress in an unexpectedly wholesome way: “You remember when Dwarf Fortress hit Steam and there was a post saying “have you people all been waiting 20 years to give the devs money?” This is a little bit like that. Cheers, M, this is superlative.”

Good stuff all around, then. Submachine: Legacy seems to be a must-have for Adobe Flash veterans, and may even be a sign of things to come for Skutnik himself. Fans may remember, after all, that the mysterious Submachine: The Engine was a thing.

Posted 17 October 2023 by Filip Galekovic



Submachine: Legacy, Rock Paper Shotgun review


One of PC’s best and spookiest puzzle games has returned from the abyss.

Rage against the submachine.

We talk about retro and throwback game releases being a “blast from the past”, but in this case, it’s more like you’re strolling down a sunny path amid soothing birdsong, and then one particular, innocent-looking paving stone swivels underfoot with a rustle of gears, dropping you into a dingy, yellow-panelled room. There are vacuum tubes mounted on one wall, doors to either side, and a ladder leading further down into darkness.

You click one of the doors and the perspective switches over slide-projector style to a second room with identical proportions. There are pipes emerging from the floor, here, and some kind of antique radio on a pedastel in the centre. Hang on, I know this place. I know this formless sense of dread. I know these machinations. The last time I set foot here, it was 2009 and I was running a Flash game blog, writing up choice submissions to sites like Kongregate. This is Submachine, a 14-part escape puzzle series from Mateusz Skutnik, which Skutnik has now compiled, polished-up and re-released as Submachine: Legacy.

Submachine is one of the highlights – or perhaps that should be lowlights – of the Flash gaming era. It’s clever, compact and menacing, a world of terrible contraptions that must be operated, fixed or broken, from relatively everyday clumps of pistons to eerie, pseudo-magical tech that calls to mind the Amnesia series. There’s a story to follow, too, for those of you who find “pure” puzzles too dry. While deciphering each nugget of ominous gadgetry, you can gather up dropped journal entries that recount the exploits of an unfortunate lighthouse keeper.

The puzzles come and go in terms of consistency and satisfaction, but each Submachine chapter is a wonderful mood piece, and it’s lovely to see them pieced together into a “complete” game. This isn’t just a compilation of Flash ports, mind you: the visuals have been spruced up, new mechanics have been added, and the chapters have been re-interpreted as pieces of a much larger machine. And then there’s Submachine: Universe, which I never played, but which is apparently a Submachine project consisting of over a thousand rooms, with each room containing clues as to the coordinates for the next.

If you’re halfway interested in point-and-click puzzling and good old-fashioned eeriness, I can’t recommend this enough. It’s available on Steam or Itch. If you need a taster, you can still play the very first Submachine game on Kongregate.

by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, News Editor
Published on Oct. 16, 2023



Submachine: Legacy


get from my shop | get on Steam | get on itch.io | get soundtrack

reviews: Rock Paper Shotgun | Destructoid | World of Legions

overwhelmingly positive timestamp

remastered graphics: sample 1, sample 2, sample 3, sample 4, the ladder

Become the Researcher
Submachine is a hand-drawn point and click adventure game. You will find yourself in a vast network of desolate locations containing puzzles, secrets, notes and inventory items to collect to help you along the way.

the World of Submachine
The underground world of submerged machines offers you vast variety of locations and structures to discover and repair. While everything is shattered, you will try to put things back together to understand and escape.

Story
You are alone here. You will follow the footsteps of a banished lighthouse keeper discovering his descent into ruins of Submachine. The story is divided into chapters that will unlock for you as you progress through the game. The story is conveyed by series of notes that you’ll collect and read.

Puzzles
There are tons of puzzles, some of which you’ll solve by bringing the machinery back online, tinkering with it, turning off and on again. For others you’ll need to find missing parts, levers that were broken off or stolen, depleted power sources, gears, cogs, lamps, coils and so on. As you move through the structure, you will be putting back together things that were shattered.

Graphics
Entire game is hand-drawn. There’s nothing auto-generated nor procedural. Each location was thoughtfully designed. Stylized drawings give the game it’s eerie atmosphere.

Music
Ambient music for this game was created by ThumpMonks, with chapter 1 ambient by Marcus Gutierrez. The music perfectly emphasizes the atmosphere of lonely exploration.



Daymare Cat 10-year Anniversary


download this game for free | see original release post

~

“Daymare Cat is a gorgeously sketched exploratory platformer that feels like a simple adventure game. The platforming here isn’t particularly challenging, but almost every hand-drawn scene is worth witnessing.” – said some by now non-existent indie game review website in 2013.

~

The main character of this game is Cat Jahnke, and I’m not talking about the in-game little girl, but the singer and songwriter, who created the song that this game is all about. This is the reason why this particular game stands out in my catalogue of games. Hats off to you, Cat. Let’s just hope that you’re right in the song, and things will finally get better.

~

Meanwhile, it’s 2023. How is it possible that it’s been 10 years already… Daymare Cat is the ancestor of Slice of Sea, one could even say that it was the foundation of Seaweed’s game. Cat is the OG.

~

This game needed some major upgrading, since its release my gamedev art direction and workflow changed drastically.  Things that are new in this Anniversary Edition:

– The game is in glorious 60 fps and plays in full screen.

– Most noticeably the game has new background texture. This might be a bit controversial take, but in my opinion this improves the vibe.

– Interactive items have a color. Yes. A color.

– Cat now runs like a ballerina, not a raptor. Thank god.

– Platforming is a bit easier thanks to hitbox tweaking but also by redrawing platforms in few places, for reference check the main gate.

– I added a new pathway for you in case you have a fear of being eaten alive by a cosmic horror monster and really don’t want to do this part. So now you can go around it.

– No changes were done to the music, since it’s already perfection.



the Symmetry




Easter Egg 2023




the Ladder


Home improvement tips! Upgrade your climbing rope to a brass ladder to lighten up the room!



Daymare Stray


download this game for free

Hear me out.

For the sake of my mental health, today I decided to take a one-day break from remastering Submachine into Legacy (I’m still finishing chapter 8) and see how things were back in the good old days of flash development over a decade ago. Not sure why I started tinkering with “Where is 2010?”, but here we are with a brand new version – renamed into more lore-friendly title of Daymare Stray. I think I was just curious to see how the code looked like in those old days. Not code per se, but my thought process concerning constructing game logic. It was… strange. Like reading your old diary pages, stepping into your old self. Then I changed main character animations to look a bit better, then switched to 60 fps, which prompted me to update all animations, and and then also sound design needed a bit of love. The screenshot you see above shows a small graphical change in which I emphasized the fact that you can climb back left up that wall, as in old version it was not so obvious. Is this a one-day remaster? Nah, that will come when I remaster entire series into one big game, just like Submachine Legacy. But I have to admit – it was fun to get back to flash for one day. It’s also super convenient to be able to draw and code in one application. This really highlights the genius of flash workflow. The freedom to create in an instant. Don’t get me wrong, working in Game Maker and Photoshop and Spine and Flash all at once is also super fine, but flash was on a completely different level. It made a game designer out of me after all. Ah, to be young again…

Enjoy this little trip down the memory lane!

 



2022 wrap-up


Well, this is a first.

My first year without anything published. First such year since… 2004 or so. Not a game, not a comic book, nothing. But there’s a good reason for this.

Nothing was published, yet so very much was created.

Let me elaborate.

The era of free, small games is long over, a sentiment cemented last year by the ending of “10 Gnomes” and “Where is?…” series of games that were born in the online web browser flash era of days gone.

Would you believe there were people caught by surprise, that the 12-year project of 10 Gnomes ended after 12 years. Shocking, I know.

So this year it came as a no surprise to me that there were people asking where is “Where is 2023?” game, after the series clearly ended last year. Clearly. This series ended so much, that I even wrote about it in last year’s wrap-up.

Now. Let’s take a look:

Plan A

Submachine: Legacy. The remaster of all Submachine games smashed together into one, giant Steam release. I need to write completely new engine for this. I also need to retouch some graphics that clearly need some love after a decade of remaining small-sized web games. I also need to export all of those graphics from flash, animate all moving things in Spine 4.0 or newer and finally create all logic from scratch in Game Maker Studio 2.37 or newer. Is this all doable in one year?… Let’s see.

2022 was the first year of working on just one project. That project being the remaster of all Submachine games.

This was my workflow goal since a long time ago, being able to focus on just one project at a time. Now, some people say this may lead to a burnout, and they might be right, though I never experienced that during development of any Submachine game. The solution to this conundrum is simple – long time ago I was also a comic book author, some of you might remember. Switching between two drastically different projects lets you avoid burnout if you feel tired doing one thing for months on end. This hasn’t happened to me yet, but I still have around 5 comic books on the back burner in case I get tired of creating games. Which I assume will happen after the release of Submachine: Legacy. This will be the year of the shift.

But first, let me walk you through the development process of 2022. After taking a brief sabbatical after finishing Slice of Sea, which realistically ended some time after game release (fixing bugs, adding features, monitoring comments and reviews for possible gameplay improvement opportunities etc) I started writing Submachine game template from scratch in Game Maker Studio 2 in March of 2022.

Why from scratch, you might ask, since I already had the template of Slice of Sea to use?

Writing templates from scratch is probably the best part of game development. Everything is fresh, new, the code is not bloated, you find all your own new paths, you get a boost of confidence in your skill, everything is fine and dandy. Even if you wrote particular chunks of code before you write them anew, looking for improvements that you can make on the way.

the only thing I took from Slice of Sea was the inventory, which to this day I consider as my pinnacle of development achievement and the best thing to happen to my point and click games since… Well, since I got the idea to create the first Submachine back in 2005. It’s that good. In my opinion. Which will surely change in few years.

But Submachine navigation is something completely different from what was implemented in Slice of Sea. You had your Seaweed to move around there, remember? In Submachine you just point and click, no walking of any kind is involved. More over, from time to time I still get those things called “ideas” on how to code things in a better and more efficient way. You see, I had one of those “ideas” in early 2022, so all Submachine template preparation I did before that went straight to trash. Well, proverbially, because I maniacally archive everything I create and keep it on external drives as well as on my PC and my server. At least four copies of all projects. Don’t get me started about archiving things, it’s a long story for another time. So all preparation went to a folder in my archive to never be seen or used again.

But that new template, man, that was something to behold. It went so smoothly, that in one month I already had all mechanics implemented. The movement mechanics are so slick that I even had all locations (rooms) from all Submachines added to that new template by the end of April. All traversable and ready for navigation. I was so very focused in by then, design milestones were flying by, in May I had all necessary logic for creating a playable point and click game (finding items, using items, saving object states, inventory, movement and so on).

And then, in May, I entered another development milestone. The one I’m still in right now… Recreating all active elements and animations using Spine Animation and adding all puzzles to the game. The real meat of the game. Recreating complete Submachine Ancient Adventure took me about a week. Submachine 1 – two weeks. Submachine 2 – a month. You see the pattern? Remember that each consecutive game is bigger and more complex than the previous one? Yeah, and here we are in January of 2023 and I’m still recreating puzzles and active elements, by now in Submachine 8. I barely managed to finish recreating Submachine 7 in December of 2022. Mind you – two biggest chapters are still ahead of me, and one of them is Submachine 10, which in itself is like 5 other games put together size-wise. So yeah, the task of compressing 10 years of game development into one big game for Steam is taking it’s time. I know that’s not a problem for you, you will wait as long as it takes to get final build of the game that is up to my standards. I’m not burned out, I am working on the game every day and I can’t wait to finish it and show you guys the result. I can’t wait to see your reactions to the Legacy. But for that – we all have to wait a bit longer.

Plan B

Submachine Card Game. Preparing a Kickstarter (or Indiegogo) campaign. Once funded – print them decks, send to backers and release the game worldwide. There are countless more steps to this entire thing, but these are biggest milestones. I also want to create loads of youtube videos going over rules and unclear situations that might occur during gameplay.

I decided to release this game after the release of Submachine: Legacy. I count on the fact that Steam release might help a bit with popularity of this here card game. So we wait. It is still done and ready, still waiting for Kickstarter campaign, still being played from time to time, being tweaked and improved, some cards are in, some are out, you know the drill. It’s not dead, dammit!

So let’s look ahead to 2023. Even though we know exactly what is in the oven.

Plan A

Submachine Legacy. Finishing and releasing the game on Steam. Please remember that finishing all in-game puzzles is not the end of development. After that comes entire late-development phase, which includes adding all notes (yeah, I still haven’t decided how to display those, that’s why it’s pushed back to the later stage of development), creating intro, outro, cinematics between chapters, also let’s not forget entire sound design that I have to do with ThumpMonks on board. So there is still a lot of work to do. Be patient. I know you are. Be more patient. It will be worth it. I can’t wait either.

Plan B

Submachine Card Game. Plan minimum here is creating Kickstarter campaign and seeing what comes of it. Then plan and execute accordingly. I know, all I’m saying here is  sweet nothings, but hey. I’m neck deep in the Legacy and don’t think about this project that much. Some progress will be made here. Maybe.

Plan C

Blaki 5. Yes, a comic book. Would you believe it. I want to at least try to come back to the idea of drawing a comic book. Try to remember how to do it, at least begin painting that new album. At least try. You know, this entire album is already written and sketched out. All I have to do is draw and paint it. That’s all. So little, yet so much. Just try to begin. You can do this. One page. Maybe just one, single page for the new album. Is that too much? Let’s wait and see.

~~

Ok guys, enough of this pep talk. I just found out Heilung released new album, so I’m off to buy it and plaster it all over my eardrums while I figure out that insane Submachine 8 layering mechanic. Figuring new Submachine mechanics is tight!

See you in a year.

I hope.


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