Tyler Doak / Culture Riot Studio

I have a website?

Tyler — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 02:24:01 +0000

HAHAHAHA Oh man. Seriously, I have been working like 16 hours on my days off from my job at the Y and a good handful on the days I work. Sorry there hasn’t been an update but I’m almost done!
Mostly it’s been compatibility stuff. Making sure maximum PC’s can use it. And then a struggle with finding an xbox 360. I DON’T ACTUALLY OWN ONE BUT I STILL DEVELOPED IN XNA!

New enemy type. You’ll like her. Got a voice for her too!

Getting lots of good feedback.

Also sorry about the download links. I removed them and you can get a copy if you pm me and agree to not talk about it unless authorized.

Get Hype and Stay Tuned.

On and On

Tyler — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 21:38:33 +0000

Whoa! Shiz! It’s been two months since the last update! Well… I’ve been working non-stop!
Got most of the voice cast set and currently slicing and adding voice audio.
Not much else to say! Most of the work has been polish and bug fixing.
Stay Tuned!

Voice Attack

Tyler — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 16:31:54 +0000

I have 79 emails with the Label, Aces Wild Voice Auditions.
A few characters have been settled on and offers have been sent to those individuals.
Overall, just the experience of sending out a casting call for the game has been insane! In a good way.
So much talent and they’re basically all doing it for free (I’m offering a slight revenue share though).
I really couldn’t have asked for anything better. Even though I’ve sent the request to an ‘amateur’ (i only ever use this word to mean it’s original, positive definition meaning lover) forum I don’t feel like I’m settling or even feel any wanting for something better. These gals and guys are truly skilled and passionate! The only thing I have any negative feelings over is that I wished I had more characters to use all their voices. Simply: VOICE WORK IS SO COOL!

Right now all the main arcade stages are “done” but they don’t feel perfect. So while I keep improving the bosses, I keep my eyes open to improve the stages where I can.
For some reason, some of the bosses have been really easy to make fun, while others are difficult or finicky.

Joan, for instance, was pretty fun right away. You fight her while flying around a moving semi. She fires missiles and does crazy kicks and you have to keep dodging to stay in the air. So this foundation is wonderful but eventually becomes flat. The experience needs to be deepened a bit. But when i do this, the flow of dodging the missiles and attacking gets busted up. It is a VERY difficult balance of randomness and flow. I have a new attack for her that will help a lot however.

Gene is a real toughy. He’s been hard from the beginning. I’ve never really loved the encounter, though I still love the concept in my head. Basically he’s supposed to have a difficult rhythm. Sometimes fast aggressive, sometimes evasive. Then sort of ‘learns’ as the fight goes on against the player so that he evades and counters in an increasingly difficult fashion.

Just gotta keep at it!

The other bosses are on their way and the path is clear, so I’m not worried.

Stay Tuned, Wilders!

4 Years

Tyler — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 20:58:16 +0000

Oh man… With a title like that, I should have more to say. I’ve blogged about this before, but 4 years ago I had been trying to get a nice demo of an area for an RPG maker game I was working on called Beyond the Veil. It was supposed to come out on September 15th. For months, I had been hating the project, but wanted to keep going as I had spent tons of time on it (over a year). At work, I had been doing sketches of a new game I wanted to work on and kept bouncing ideas for it off of a good friend. So the day I wanted to release a demo for Beyond the Veil, I started drawing animations for Ace.

The past couple of days I’ve just been working on the menu and map files so that its easier for users to drop in their own levels (I know i’ve been saying that a lot too ;p).

I have a to-do list that basically has everything else that I need to do on it. Some of the things are small-ish but creative–like: make bosses better–others are easy-technical things which means they just require a little to a lot of work but not much though. Others still are hard-technical which require a lot of time and work still. These are all rolled into Coop features, especially netplay. Which I hope I can get working still! Finally there’s voice work and I’ve received over 30 submissions so far. lol
The big thing after all that is to create a Trailer!
Stay Tuned, Wilders We’re almost done!

Deadline Approaching

Tyler — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 04:18:16 +0000

Just had a birthday and time’s really slippy by! Generally that means I’m working on something constantly.
That seems to be the case currently. It just seems like not much is getting done. But in actuality, so much is!

Finishing up the menu and level reading so I can start making end-user levels easy enough (outside of the editor that is).

This almost seems like a footnote, which is weird, but I finally got around to polishing up charge attacks in the way I had always envisioned. I dunno why it took this long, maybe it just required a deep knowledge of the game. It’s sort of the final building block of the combat and it’s really quite amazing honestly!
I plan on writing a lot about Aces Wild after I finish but the charging has a really nice risk/reward short-term/long-term dynamic to it. The added element of it using up your Wild allows it to be a climactic (or anti-) to really intense situations brought on by the Wild mechanic. Plus it feels way awesome!

Going Wild and Cooling Off aren’t working as well as I had initially thought. I never really liked powers that have contrived conditions. That’s basically the problem. I hope to have the damage multiplying mechanic built in a different way as well as the life gaining. The life gaining one is especially important.

Have I mentioned Pinata enemies? These type of enemies appear sporadically during Arcade mode and will be generated a special way during other modes. When you KO them, Ghost enemies fly out. Depending on how you KO the Pinata enemy, very few or very many Ghosts will pop out. These Ghosts attack several times all at once and then disappear. This creates extremely intense situations where you have the opportunity to score a ton or take a ton of damage.

Stay Tuned, Wilders!

Culture Riot

Tyler — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 01:58:46 +0000

Hey everybody! Just workin’ like crazy! So much is happening inside and outside of Aces Wild!

I’ve changed my Studio name to Culture Riot (Studio). I think this reflects my ideals and mission as a company a lot more. Hope you like it, because I love it!

Posted a few voice audition threads to a couple of forums and in one evening I’ve received an insane amount of talent. This has me so excited!

Got some slick new character select art!

Was gearing up to post this bad boy to Greenlight but I wanted a new trailer first. BAM!!! Now there’s a $100 submission fee. Oh wells! I’ll do what I gotta do!
Stay Tuned, Wilders!

Stage Select

Tyler — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 03:50:29 +0000

Just finished up (mostly) a simple read to file folders and stage files in the game. This way end-user and designer created stages will be easy to just drop in and play!

WORKIN’ REALLY HARD! Still tons to do!
Stay Tuned!

Rank Up!

Tyler — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 18:07:27 +0000

Can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before so sorry if some of this is redundant.
In the game you have Wild and Bonus. Both of these things affect how aggressive enemies are among other more primary functions. At the end of each stage I wanted to reset your Bonus to provide a more averaged approach to the scoring. However, this meant there wasn’t a persistent element across each stage since your Wild reset as well.
So I decided to implement Rank. Wild and Bonus were basically your rank anyway but I wanted that effect across stages. Will after implementing it I realized how almost totally exactly the same it was to Bonus. I even just inserted it into the Bonus methods in the code. So now, I’m just gonna go with the one thing: Bonus Rank! It will be a smaller affect on your score multiplier but it will provide more opportunities for bigger scores based on the extra enemies you’ll get to fight because of it. It works like rank in manic shooters and godhand where it depends, basically, on how well you’re playing. I’m actually quite please with how this has all played out. Which brings me to my next little update.

They’re still not fully done but the new additions of ‘Going Wild’ and ‘Cooling Off’ (might be called Cool Break in the future) are really exciting. By accident they have some interesting balance to them. I made it so each time you used it, the Wild required to use it again would go up (this is reset at the end of each stage). The extra cool thing about it, is that you still want to build up your Wild really high because you’ll get more out of each execution at a lower cost. Or rather, you want to get the most bang for your buck each time you use it because it will cost more next time.

Anyways, I’m struggling a lot to fix things I’m not happy with but lots of other stuff is going awesomely.

Stay Tuned, Wilders!

Voice Actin’

Tyler — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 03:00:51 +0000

Hey, peeps!
I haven’t worked much on Ay Dubs for the past couple weeks. Just been really busy because family was visiting for CHEYENNE FRONTIER DAYS!!!! And I had a weird work schedule because of CHEYENNE FRONTIER DAYS!!!!! And then had to unexpectedly work on days I wanted to work on Aces Wild.
Here we are now, though and I’m almost back into the swing of things.
Did some voice work today. Downloaded a ton of dog sfx, cleaned them up, put them into the game. Then hated them! They were awful. So, then I tried barking myself. It’s much cleaner and nicer, but I’m not a good dog voice actor so it just sounds like, not just a human barking, but Ace himself barking. So it just won’t work.
After that pissed me off real bad, I recorded some voice for the ninjas. It’s pretty typical, but sounds great, hopefully it will sound good in the game as well.
That’s basically what I’m working on! Just a few more things to finish up in the main game. Just revising where needed. polishing up the bosses more. Balancing the battle mechanics.
Trying really hard for August 30th. WHICH IS FUCKING CRAZY!
Stay Tuned, Wilders!

Wicky Wild

Tyler — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 03:50:41 +0000

Seriously over two weeks!? I swore I made some posts. Anyways. Not much to report. It’s kinda slow going as I try and finish up everything.
Wild was rebalanced a bit again. It builds pretty fast now and Crash attacks do a bit less damage relative to Wild. But now using Wild will be better I think (not totally done yet). When you do a Wild Bomber you’re invincible for the moment, then you regain Health while your Wild drains. Landing attacks regains health faster and getting hit resets your Wild to zero during that time. Getting hit normally still raises your Wild.

Trying really hard to get netplay working, but i’m not sure it’s possible. SUPER SORRY TO SAY THAT! But I’ll do my best.

Stay Tuned!