Connorses's Arts (s)

Connor McHarney's game development blog and artwork showcase.

[connorsesarts]

Prototype of a new style of puzzle, you have to hit the button without falling into the hole, by bouncing off the wall!

Also, updated the appearance of the blob a bit.

[connorsesarts]

Updated my 2-player soccer game Spaceball. Try it out on the Pico-8 forum!

http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=40779&tid=2813

[connorsesarts]

Making progress on the Slimegame!!

[connorsesarts]

Workin’ on an idea I had

it has driving and shooting and a cat

[connorsesarts]

game boy jaaaaam

[connorsesarts]

I only learned gamemaker maybe a week ago and I’m using it for my Gameboy Jam 5 submission. :L

https://itch.io/jam/gbjam-5

[connorsesarts]

Made in about 1 hour for the AGDG art jam

[connorsesarts]

PICO-8 terrain generator thingy.

[connorsesarts]

I found a cool royalty-free font for the scoreboards in my game.

http://www.1001fonts.com/crashed-scoreboard-font.html

[connorsesarts]

SUMMER GAMEDEV LOG #7:

I have implemented textures! This is a big deal for me and I’m excited to experiment with it more… I don’t know that all the levels will look like the above photo, however, because I don’t want to make a lot of polygons matching the surface of a texture. I would rather make textures which are more homogenous so that I can make any shape I want and add texture to it. I will most likely use a lot of polygons on top of textured polygons to create surfaces (a dirt-textured block with a grass texture stuck on top for example). I might use some large images for textures/backgrounds in minigames, though!

This week I messed around with ideas for levels a lot, but I need to go back to doing more engine work. I’m pretty close to having moving platforms and hazards, and once I’ve done more work on those I will have all sorts of options for traps and puzzles and things. So that’s the next priority. Moving platforms!

oh and an interface to choose textures would be good.

[connorsesarts]

SUMMER GAMEDEV LOG #6

Hey everybody if you’re reading this it means I’m still alive and I’m still trying to write as many words as possible without any actual meaning to them before I actually start the log.

I’m still gradually adding features to my level editor. I downloaded a GUI library called “SUIT”. It advertises itself as an “Immediate Mode” GUI, which means you can call  the code to display a working element, such as a button or label, without initializing the element first. If you don’t call the code, the element doesn’t show up! It’s not extremely powerful, it does everything I needed: It gives me a quick, convenient way to add buttons, sliders and text input spaces to my editor, so I can more easily manipulate data. It’s also the first step towards making this thing maybe vaguely user-friendly.

[connorsesarts]

Making slow progress! Here’s a screenshot of a short level I made while I was testing out some new tools.

[connorsesarts]

SUMMER GAMEDEV LOG #5

Perhaps I’m giving up too easy, but I have abandoned Unity for use in my 2D physics game in favor of the original, adorable game engine Love2D.

I lost about 3 or 4 days screwing around with Unity and actually got a surprising amount of things sorted out. The main reason I wanted to try Unity was that I thought it would work as a sort of level editor, but I found that it was severely lacking in the 2D graphics department. I was able to figure out how to draw polygons in real-time, but there were other issues. I couldn’t draw polygons in the editor and it was a pain to edit boxes without changing the size of the box and it’s sprite separately. The debug draw wasn’t working at all. But the worst thing about it was that my physics were drastically different with the new blob design. The love2D version of the blob just looks cleaner, smoother and less buggy.

I’ve gone back to my original plan of writing a level editor in Love2D, where I have better, lower-level control of the physics and various other things. Love2D also has a more robust system for 2D drawing. Also, the oddities with my blob guy’s behavior were piling up in Unity and I just feel like Unity was better for 3D, not so much 2D games. I will absolutely go back to Unity if I decide to shift focus to another game I have in mind, however, because there are a lot of ways in which it is incredibly powerful, particularly in deployment to various platforms.

[connorsesarts]

Summer Gamdev Log #4

I have made significant progress since the last log. I really ought to have been writing more of these... Here’s a summary:

Blob can now stick to things if you hold z!

 - Springs are created at point of collision, but only if the gameobject has the tag “stick” (i can make some things slippery)

The scale was tweaked, jumping is now easier

There is a death animation of sorts

 - Upon touching a deadly surface, blob decomposes and after a second or so the scene re-loads

There is a spawn animation!

 - When the scene loads there’s a brief slo-mo effect and the blob is created with nodes close to the center, giving the illusion of the blob growing out from the center.

The center of the blob is marked by a tiny pink heart. This was supposed to be placeholder, but I might keep it. It’s cute.

[connorsesarts]

SUMMER DEV LOG 3: VIDEO EDITION

I’ve basically recreated my softbody game in Unity. Next I’m going to work on adding the “sticky” button where it creates breakable springs attached to objects on contact.

[connorsesarts]

Summer Gamedev #2: Controlling The Blob

I’ve written a function that pushes each node of my softbody around the center based on the relative angle (see most recent screenshot for a visual of the softbody’s “wheel” construction). It gets the relative position of the node and the center of the “wheel” in the form of a 2D vector, rotates that vector 90 degrees left or right (depending on direction), normalizes it and then multiplies it by an arbitrary speed value. I can roll the wheel-blob around now, which is exciting. I noticed while doing this that it has a hard time with slopes and feels like it’s getting more slippery the more I climb them. I realized then that the nodes are probably spinning on their axis rather than being locked facing the center-node. This game me some more ideas on how to better construct my blob so this won’t happen, and it might eventually change the way I make it roll.

[connorsesarts]

Summer Gamedev Log #1

This blog is as much for me as it is for the Internet, but I want to track my progress on my latest projects so I don’t feel like nothing is being done. I’m trying to push myself harder, and one way I’ve increased my productivity is by setting a stopwatch whenever I do a session. It makes me want to focus more, somehow, and toggl.com keeps track of the hours which makes it feel better to get things done.

I have begun recreating the game I made in Love2D a while back, with the blob that rolls about and jumps and sticks to things. Turns out Unity uses the same Box2D physics engine! I had to learn how Unity handles the connecting of joints, but after I worked out the kinks I was able to spawn a softbody. I can’t control it yet, and I might need to invent my own joints to do the job right, but it looks squishy and bouncy so I’m on the right track.

TO-DO LIST:

 - Continue searching for optimal settings for scale, mass, joint frequency etc. to make the blob look and feel better

 - Find a new way to make the blob roll (The technique originally used in Love2D was unsuccessful in Unity)

 - Learn how to draw a mesh which fits the shape of my blob.

P.S.: Unity, you really need a built-in line drawing library, seriously this is pathetic.