Florence for President!

2020 Indie of the Year Awards via Indie DB

FPA Replanted: Awardments Guide

This post collects a bunch of videos that provide an in-depth look at the Awardments (in-game challenges similar to achievements) that can be unlocked in the Replanted Edition of Face-Plant Adventures for Windows PC. The short guides show how to master some of the 24 challenges.

Gone in 60 seconds

How to get through the Amira Cavern in less than 60 seconds.

Vaults Of Vvorr in development

During this week's PitchYaGame event on Twitter, I announced a new game I'm currently working on. Vaults Of Vvorr is a gravity-defying dungeon crawler without all the crawling but lots of fast-paced jumping and running on walls and ceilings - but see for yourself!

Players will drop down huge mine shafts, enter the many vaults to collect treasures and recover the Seals of Vvorr, which are needed to defeat the evil Vvorrlock. This mean mage has unleashed an army of undead creatures upon the once peaceful landscapes of Plantylon, but our hero Aeron is determined to put an end to the Vvorrlock's reign of terror and will dispose of his many minions with well-aimed kicks in their heads and his throwing knives.

I'll try to get a demo out next month, so watch this space for further announcements!

Face-Plant Adventures Replanted released today

Florence Face-Plant, the plantagonist of our game Face-Plant Adventures, has come a long way since the first incarnation on the now defunct Xbox LIVE Indie Games channel (XBLIG) on Xbox 360. You can read all about the creation of the original game in this post mortem. Not only have the past three months been dedicated to finally bringing the game back from the dead and making it run on Windows PC, it's also been enhanced in several ways, mainly in terms of gameplay and visuals. After taking care of strange bugs and mysterious crashes, as well as precious feedback from QA testers, Face-Plant Adventures Replanted has finally been released into the wild today. Check out some gameplay in the Release Trailer below!

Head over to our Games page to download the Replanted Edition, which is also available on other popular indiegame platforms. And I've saved the best for last: The game will only cost you a tiny little bit of bandwidth as it is absolutely free. We hope you will enjoy the game as much as we enjoyed making it!

Fun with Switches and Crashes

Before talking about a nasty crash haunting my game, let's have a look at some gameplay and its switch mechanics. This video shows how to solve the optional switch puzzle at the end of the level "Odd World Of Goo" and how to unlock the "High wire artist" Awardment along the way.

There are some gameplay tips at the end of the video, too, that should help accomplishing this high wire act easily. Now that we got the fun part out of the way, let's talk about a problem that was not so much fun to figure out.

The past two weeks have been a little worrisome. Two of my testers reported a mysterious crash right after starting up the game. While checking the save game the program would throw an exception, but the error message was not really giving me any clue as to what caused the issue. At first I assumed some problem with the creation of the save file, a permissions problem maybe, but after deactivating saving altogether the crash still occurred, which ruled out this angle. I also suspected backwards compatibility issues of the .NET framework. The original game was built using XNA 4.0 and .NET 4.0, my tester's PC is running on .NET 4.8. So I looked into ways of avoiding potential compatibility issues but didn't really get anywhere with this approach.

"Face-Plant Adventures RE isn't working anymore."

But I kept searching the interwebs and read many not very helpful forum threads until I finally stumbled upon an entry in the Steam forums that sounded a lot like the issue I was dealing with. It turned out that several other XNA games would also crash after startup or have audio issues when the Windows Media Player was not installed on a user's machine. To verify this I uninstalled the player on my machine and then was able to reproduce the crash. After checking and creating/loading the save file, the game starts playing back music and with Windows Media Player not available this would cause the crash. I was not aware of this dependency and wouldn't know how to avoid it, but at least I can include this information in the game's readme file now. And now that my remaining two testers can finally check out the game, I will just wait for their feedback before I will finally get the game ready for release.