Eat. Sleep. Indie. Portfolio
Professional Freelance Game DesignEat. Sleep. Indie. is a small game development team founded by myself (Al Ridley) and my daughter (Zoey). With more than a decade's worth of game development & testing experience, we recently combined our efforts as Lead Developer & Lead Play-tester to help bring Creative Storm's title Age of Gladiators II to Steam. We have both been holding controllers and sitting at keyboards since we were old enough to hold up our heads, and we bring that passion for gaming and a keen dedication to any project we work on.
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| Email: info@eatsleepindie.com | |||||||||||||||||||
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Al Ridley
I have over 2 decades worth of experience as a freelance programmer and almost 10 years experience with Unity and game development. I began my freelance career programming data-driven web applications using Coldfusion & PHP, and following over a decade of success, I decided to cash in all my chips and begin a life-long dream of developing video games for a living.
Work over the last several years has ranged from having a small part in games - setting up Steam SDK, building multiplayer frameworks, etc. - to Lead Developer for Creative Storm Entertainment's sequel Age of Gladiators II. The development team was small and so my responsibilities were numerous, ranging from rigging character models to programming AI for the arena.
Zoey Ridley
Don't let her small frame or single-digit age fool you; Zoey is a pro at finding gameplay bugs. Possessing a knack for attempting to do things in ways that most others wouldn't, her contributions to the work at ESI have been paramount in ensuring a top-quality game is delivered.
Her love of video games began before the age of 2 when she would join me at my desk, grab the mouse and wander the world of Revery. Since then she has helped prepare several projects for release, including a children's book about the Forbidden City in China and receiving her first game development credit with the release of Age of Gladiators II.
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Demo Reel
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Looking to hire a game developer? |
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| Email: info@eatsleepindie.com | |||||||||||||||||||
| Discord: eatsleepindie#0989 | |||||||||||||||||||
Bite Me
Zombie Shooter
Al Ridley
I have over 2 decades worth of experience as a freelance programmer and almost 10 years experience with Unity and game development. I began my freelance career programming data-driven web applications using Coldfusion & PHP, and following over a decade of success, I decided to cash in all my chips and begin a life-long dream of developing video games for a living.
Work over the last several years has ranged from having a small part in games - setting up Steam SDK, building multiplayer frameworks, etc. - to Lead Developer for Creative Storm Entertainment's sequel Age of Gladiators II. The development team was small and so my responsibilities were numerous, ranging from rigging character models to programming AI for the arena.
MMO Demo
WebGL MMORPG
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Building Blocks - NEW!
I just wrapped up the first stages of my new map editor, which should help me make short work of the most tedious parts of level design: placing all the sidewalks and streets. It is still very basic and already in need of a rework, but given that it works in both editor and play mode (which means this could lead to an in-game map editor for players to experiment with), I'm pretty excited at the thought of how much time this going to save me when creating new levels for my shooter.
Skadonk Showdown
Split-Screen Taxi Racing
Zoey Ridley
Don't let her small frame or single-digit age fool you; Zoey is a pro at finding gameplay bugs. Possessing a knack for attempting to do things in ways that most others wouldn't, her contributions to the work at ESI have been paramount in ensuring a top-quality game is delivered.
Her love of video games began before the age of 2 when she would join me at my desk, grab the mouse and wander the world of Revery. Since then she has helped prepare several projects for release, including a children's book about the Forbidden City in China and receiving her first game development credit with the release of Age of Gladiators II.
Poly Royale
Low-Poly Battle Royale
Photo Mode II
I finished work on my project's new photo mode feature late Friday night. Most of the UI work done so far is placeholder, but my main focus was to start working towards a system that would make it much easier for me to capture screenshots that will be used in the comic book to advance the game's narrative. I wanted to be able to use this new feature via builds rather than just the editor so that it can also be offered to players.
Orcs v Humans
Fantasy RTS
Photo Mode
I just finished up the first round of testing for an in-game photo mode. It's fairly basic in its current state, but I have plans to add a lot of features this coming weekend which should come together fairly quickly now that the basics are in working order. I'll be sharing gameplay video of this new photo mode once done; the screenshots below don't capture the effect of moving your camera around in a world with blood droplets and body parts suspended mid-air, so I'm excited to get some polish in place so I can share here and on social media.
Poly Plaza
Mall Management Sim
Space Race
Space Exploration Sim
Age of Gladiators II
Sci-fi Gladiators Sim
Lead Play-Tester | Zoey Ridley
Off To The Races
It's been a very busy few weeks since my last devlog and I've only got time to quickly go through what little I've been able to get done on my project since then. Two weeks ago I turned my focus back to vehicles in an effort to update the controller to work with my new zombie spawning system. Luckily, this work wasn't overly complicated and the majority of my time was spent driving around aimlessly in the desert and racing my less-than-talented AI opponents. The setup only works for the vehicle pictured below as of now, but it won't be much more work to extend this to the other vehicles once I am motivated to do so. For now, at least I am back to running over the undead and sending their body parts flying as I speed through the game scene.
Revery Online
Fantasy MMORPG
Helmets 2.0
It's been a week since my last post, the reason being that I've been spending most of my free time updating the new zombie spawning system in the hopes I'd finally be able to solve an annoying problem: bringing back zombies with helmets didn't seem like it was ever going to be feasible due to some of the limitations inherent in the methods being used to accomplish 1000+ zombies spawned simultaneously. Several months and a lot of dead-end ideas later and I have a solution. I am now able to spawn more football-player zombies wearing full headgear than I'll ever need, each of which can have their helmet popped off individually with a few well-placed shots.
The Greatest Place
Children's Story App
Lead Play-Tester | Zoey Ridley
Book Ends
Fantasy CoOp RPG
A Day In The Apocalypse
I'm a bit behind on sharing my most recent gameplay video to this devlog, but after spending so much of my free time tying all of these features together into a cohesive vertical slice, I needed a bit of a break from everything. The following video depicts recent footage of a full day in this zombie apocalypse world and is the best representation I have of what the final gameplay will be like. The full video is available is on my YouTube channel.
ZomBros
Zombie Twin-Stick Shooter
Poly Farm
Farming Sim
GameDevGame
HTML5 Simulator
Home Renovation
Freelance work has been keeping me pretty busy but I did manage to make some progress on the game's first safe house last night. The structure being used for this purpose in previous videos was done quickly in an effort to test out the concept; now that I am leaning in that direction, I figured it was time to give this some attention.
RTS Template
Real-Time Strategy Template
FPS Parkour
FPS with Parkour Mechanics
Toon Adventure
Mobile Adventure Game
Keeping Warm
Today was an unexpected day off so I am taking full advantage of that by knocking a few more items off of my zombie shooter's to-do list. It is a great feeling to finally be investing my free time into my own project again, and comparing the rate at which I am now making progress in this project to the previous few months makes it very clear to me that some of my recent decisions were the correct ones to make. This brings me to what I have done with my surprise day off: fire barrels and sleeping bags.
Dungeon Crawler
ProcGen Dungeon Crawler
3D Platformer
Basic 3D Platformer
Black Powder & Soup
I've taken my jack-o'-lantern zombies as far as I will be taking them for now. This Halloween-themed distraction came about for no reason other than I thought it would be funny to give these zombies pumpkin heads and have those pumpkins smash into a bunch of pieces when shot. I have multiple people who are planning on hiring me for some work within the next few days, and for that reason, I have decided to buckle down and get something done tonight that actually adds something to the core gameplay loop; preferably something simple that allows me to half-watch horror movies playing in the background.
Archenaut
Mars Terraforming
Pumpkin Carving II
Continuing with my Halloween-themed distraction, I've made quite a few improvements with this version of my Ichabod Crain zombies. The jack o' lantern mesh has been redone, the new version of that mesh has been split into chunks for effect, and I've also extended the system to work with a second zombie. This has been an enjoyable diversion so far given the fact I've been having a holiday-inspired horror movie marathon playing in the background the entire time. It has been a very long time since I've had the freedom to work on my own project at this pace, and so I have been diving in and getting lost in this playground while I am afforded the opportunity.
Pumpkin Carving
I felt like getting in to the Halloween spirit with my time off today, so I am currently distracted with creating new zombie prefabs that have jack o' lanterns for heads. There's no point to this other than the sake of doing something, but with my first draft already tested and looking better than I'd expected, I'm definitely going to put some time in tonight polishing things up a bit by leaning into what's working and pulling away from anything that is not.
Death Is Inevitable
I've just wrapped up another short freelance gig and am again free to focus entirely on my zombie shooter, at least for the next few days. I'm enjoying these one-off jobs lately; history suggests that the longer I work with a client, the less they value my time. I've had clients go from being perfectly pleasant to acting out their own rendition of Single White Female as they (apparently) stalk the whole of Reddit's gamedev communities crying out to anyone who will listen; that or I have clients who I've worked with for the better part of a year meet my 60+ hour volunteer coding-sprint with nothing but paragraphs of new ideas to tack on to the work that I just completed for free - work they have admitted on numerous occasions they cannot afford to pay me for. When giving your time away to a long-term client is met with the words "more, more, more" then it becomes clear very quickly that short-term gigs spent working for fellow developers who need a bit of help is the best route to take. Fellow devs get it and are often nothing but appreciative, which is a nice break from what I've been experiencing these last few months.
UI & Stick Updates
I've spent a fair amount of time since my last post cleaning up my zombie shooter project files as well as knocking some bugs and annoyances off of my to-do list. After losing interest in this type of work, I decided to finally tackle the task of updating the layouts for the character and weapon panels. These layouts were the best I could design at the time given how little I knew about the game I was making when they were first created. Now that I'm slowly zeroing in on a direction to take this project, I felt it was time to see if I could come up with anything better.
Naked Gun 3.14159
If you've tried (and failed) to visit this site in the last few days, here's a summary of events explaining why it was down: the web host I have used for years got a false red flag that suggested my server was running a crypto miner. Rather than look into this or reach out to me, they destroyed my entire hosting account. Not the suspected server, but my entire hosting account, complete with my portfolio site, MMO server, and more. After several days of going back and forth with them in an effort to prove that there was no miner on my server, they finally admitted their mistake and offered to restore my account, my server environments, and credit my account with an amount equivalent to 3 hours of freelance work at my current rate. Apparently, nobody on the engineering team was able to recreate the server I had built, so I rebuilt it from scratch. I finished this about 10 minutes ago. My MMO server is still non-existent (I didn't even bother with having them restore that config, it is much more complex than restoring my portfolio's environment) but I will eventually get around to rebuilding that from the ground up as well.
Half Past Dead
I still do not have a working title for my zombie shooter, but I may have a title screen for when that day finally comes. After a multi-day coding sprint for a client, I decided to avoid programming as much as possible yesterday. I randomly had the idea to try out a guitar-playing animation on my main character prefab with the Jackhammer in place of the instrument. One thing led to another, and what follows is the result.
A No Labor Day
It's not often that I am in the position to take a full day off due to a national holiday, but that is exactly what is planned for today. Most of my dev time since the release of 2019.4.30 has been spent on my client's RPG (much more info on this will be shared in the coming weeks) but today I am taking full advantage of the fact it is Labor Day and the only work I have penciled in until tomorrow is a few hours to make a bit or progress in my zombie shooter.
Roll Out The Barrels
With Unity 2019.4.30 finally arriving the other day, I've been pretty busy with work and still haven't found time to make progress on my personal project. I did, however, take some time during my lunch break today to record some new gameplay footage so I'd have something to share here, on what has become a dust-covered devlog. There's nothing new in the video below beyond the fact that I added a lot more explosive barrels to make things a bit more exciting, but it is the first gameplay footage I've recorded without issue in over a month - a Phyrric victory, but a victory nonetheless.
Browser MMO Updates
Today marks the first time I have updated my WebGL MMO demo in well over a year, which came about due to the fact that I am currently waiting on Unity 2019.4.30 to be released (slated for September 1st). The issue I am experiencing seems to be related to the UnityPlayer.dll file storing corrupted Windows registry entries, which results in any build created with 2019 crashing immediately. Unity staff has stated that the fix for this bug will be included in the next update for 2019, so until then, my hands are tied. On top of that, the issue seems to extend to the editor in the form of constant crashes, all of which leaves me in a position where I had no choice but to delay some client work and to set my zombie shooter aside until next month.
Burn Out
I was recently in need of a break from the normal so there isn't much to show for my zombie shooter project. It's been almost a month since my last post and all I have done in that time is to swap out the placeholder graphic novel screenshots with new ones that tie into the gameplay scene better. These new images have the black outline added for effect - something that the previous screenshots lacked - and I feel this new page does a better job of tying everything together. I still have not decided whether I will be using the 3-dimesional book layout or not; as much as I like it, I feel like the work required to pull off the camera transition would be too high a cost for the payoff, so I will be going with the 2D UI layout featured below for now.
Flying Hot Dogs
I have been working on the storytelling side of my project the last few days, mostly because I knew I could test out several concepts very quickly given that they leveraged packages from the asset store that I have past experience with. Beyond that, the work consisted mostly of playing with filter effects in Photoshop to try and nail down the look I was going for regarding the graphic novel I intend to use for advancing the narrative.
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© 2020 Al Ridley |
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