GAME DEV LOG

The game development logs of a solo game developer.

[forlornegames]

General Update!

So a lot has happened since the last time I posted.

I've published my first mobile game. Space Lazors is available on google play for free if you want to check it out. :)

The goal with this project was to see how much I could accomplish in a week if I focused solely on the programming aspect of development. I obtained almost all of the assets from the unity asset store and wrote all the code myself. I think the end product is good, but there's a list of new features I'd like to add. The code is also a little messy, so I'd like to revisit that at some point too.

There were a couple of challenges with Space Lazors that I really enjoyed working on. One was performance. I've played with object pooling in the past but this was my first full implementation of it. I pooled just about anything that appeared/disappeared on the screen. Lasers, enemies, explosions, buffs. It all gets instantiated on game load and then recycled throughout the game.

I created a pool manager that was referenced through the game manager. You'd call CreatePool() and provide a prefab and number of instances you needed. A Queue would be created and referenced via a dictionary using the prefab ID as the key. As objects are used in the queue they are dequeued and requeued to make sure they are cycling through the queue properly.

Something else I needed to account for was the varying screen sizes. This made creating the UI a bit of a challenge but I discovered some amazing UI components that were extremely helpful. Layout elements, grid layout group, vertical layout group, and horizontal layout group. Using these layout components made it much easier to keep the UI elements in place and scale proportionately with the screen size.

 Improving my programming skills.

I've been trying to find ways to improve my programming skills, and started by looking into tools I haven't been making use of. I began reviewing lambda expressions in C#, then on to Generics. Very interesting tools to add to my arsenal but it wasn't until a friend of mine suggested I take a look at the book "Game Programming Patterns" that it really clicked. I was missing out on some tried and tested programming patterns, and I needed to really step up my code architecture game. The first thing that came to mind when I read through the book was "wow... my old code is crap". Which is good right?? It means I'm learning, improving. So while learning about these programming patterns I started making up simple game scenarios that would let me use them. So far I've written up a few little demos in Unity but the big test is going to be this new game I started up called "Drago".

While I'm using Drago to test my newfound knowledge of programming patterns I'm also using it to see how much I can get away with without using singletons. I've used them a fair amount in previous games and I'd like to put a larger focus on structuring my code in a more readable way that makes sense in object oriented programming.

Oh, and I'm playing with some new ideas for scene management. Additive scene loading and other fun stuff.

Sorry no gifs or pictures this time around. I'll try to make the next post more interesting. :D

Keep on keepin' on. -Lorne

[forlornegames]

UX and Cognative Science: Recap

Just some context, I’m a Gameplay programmer trying to break into the industry. I’ve been making games for almost 3 years now and my focus has gradually grown from learning programming and game engines to the overall development of video games. This is a summary of what I learned while I attending the CGX Ottawa Masterclass on UX and Cognitive Science led by Celia Hodent. Also, this class was invaluable. I loved this class and look forward to implementing everything I’ve learned as well as continuing my foray into this particular subject in the future. :)

The entire class was broken up into 3 topics: Perception, Memory, and Attention.

Perception is triggered by input (sight, sound, etc) but it is influenced by knowledge. So what you know can change they way you see something. But just because perception is subjective, doesn’t mean there aren’t some rules that are generally effective in conveying meaning. Gestalt’s laws of proximity and similarity show us that when items are grouped together or share characteristics that people group those objects together.

Law of Proximity

Law of Similarity

These principles allow us to convey to the player that these items belong together without explicitly stating it.

Perception also plays a huge factor in affordance. Affordance is critical in educating the player just through the design of the object/UI. Design it to look like what it does. This is a great way to teach players without making them feel like they are learning. Definitely do your best to avoid multistability in your designs. The visual design should be clearly understood to inform the player of the function. Form follows function.

Perception makes testing really tricky since you need to be able to discern the problem from the testers perceived issue. The players will tell you what they think the issue is, which will give you a starting point, but in a lot of cases the root cause won’t be determined until you’ve sat in a game testing session or even better, created a scenario that isolates the variables. Regardless of how experienced play testers are, we’re all susceptible to our subjective perceptions and in most cases, it takes several viewpoints to reveal the true source of the problem.

 Memory is divided into three types.

Sensory memory: Basically perception. No conscious effort to understand what’s going on.

Working memory: Short-term (sec/min). This is where some effort/attention is needed. (encoding)

Long term: potentially unlimited. (storage)

Memory is tied to attention and emotion. You need context and motivation/meaning for the player. Without context or meaning people will forget quickly. According to Ebbinghaus, half of players who have stopped playing for as little as an hour will forget what they learned. And since it’s impossible to say how long it will be between play sessions, it’s important to account for what the player has forgotten. You can place controls directly on the screen or create control popups when items are hovered over. Just so the player doesn’t need to remember as much to jump back into the game.

Prioritized learning is another way to ensure the player retains the core gameplay mechanics of the game even with large spans of time between play sessions. Make sure there are systems in place for what features may require more attention so the player will understand how the game is played. Determine what needs to be learned and create an onboarding plan first, then wrap it in a narrative to make sure the plan isn’t affected by the narrative and the features and mechanics are conveyed clearly.

 Attention is like a spotlight, you really focus on a single thing and it makes it nearly impossible to focus on anything else. Multitasking is a myth. Lots of people say they can do it, but the science says they can’t. Something to avoid in your game is providing tooltips during times when your player is focusing on something else. For instance, how to use a health potion when fighting off a hundred zombies. The player is going to be so focused on fighting that they aren’t going to take the time to read your carefully crafted tooltip.

Using the color red is a great way to convey importance and is used in many games. Just keep in mind that if everything in your game is red, it’s going to lose that meaning relatively quickly and people will stop noticing those indicators.

The deeper you process information the better you learn and retain that information.

When teaching players, you’ll want to provide context and meaning. The context will allow the players the opportunity to try the things they are learning and meaning will give them motivation to learn that will create a deeper learning experience allowing players to retain the information.

 In Summary:

Perception is subjective, use Gestalt laws to inform your UX design. Memory is fallible and requires energy to maintain. Reduce the memory load and prioritize learning. Attention is like a spotlight, multitasking is a myth. Teach players with context and meaning.

I hope this was useful to anyone who’s reading it. I’ll be doing more of these as I have the opportunity to do so. (A write-up on scrums will be next!)

(Disclaimer, I am not a writer. If the quality of this blog post is difficult to understand, I apologize.)

Useful links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestalt_psychology

https://celiahodent.com/resources/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve

[forlornegames]

CGX Ottawa 2018 Recap!

My perspective and expectations

I'm a self-taught Game Developer / Programmer with the intention of attending this conference to learn as much as possible about the industry from people who are actually in it, and to use this information to build on my portfolio and help align my career trajectory. In short, to learn lots and get a job! So, my experience at CGX Ottawa is going to be a little different than that of a presenter or your run of the mill gamer. It might also be important to mention this was my very first conference/convention of any kind.

 Hitting the expo floor early…

When I arrived at the conference first thing Saturday morning I was ready to go. I had a Masterclass with Nathan Pringle on "A Beginner's guide to video game neural networks" which is a subject I've been very interested in diving into, but never really had the time or opportunity. Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances and in no fault of CGX the class was canceled. I caught the tail end of Celia Hodent's talk entitled "Developing a UX mindset on Fortnite" which was really interesting and by the end I was ready to hit the expo floor. As a self-taught developer in a city that has an almost non-existent scene it wasn't hard to realize I was missing out on some of the benefits of being in a social environment with like-minded individuals. The entire 2 hours I spent in the expo I felt like I was in my element. I made some real connections with other game devs and it really primed me for the rest of the conference.

 Connect Café

I was the most excited for this event, and the most nervous. Although I did make some meaningful connections I felt more like it was a means to learn what is required for entry into the industry of AAA games. It was great to get some of my work in front of industry professionals, receive some helpful and encouraging feedback on my portfolio, and I took away a list of things I need to work on as well as a couple things I need to change entirely.

 Portfolios

You don't need to limit your entries to 3 games.

As a programmer it's best to submit games where you had you're hands on just about every aspect of the engine (audio implementation, animation, AI, etc).

Provide small (1-2 classes) high quality examples of your code.

Provide easily accessible video footage of your games.

 Most AAA companies are looking for people with Unreal Engine experience and strong C++ skills. I had the chance to speak to someone working with EA/Frostbite and was surprised to hear they have a similar visual scripting component in Frostbite for quick basic implementations and prototyping. So, it seems a pivot from Unity/C# to Unreal/C++ is in order for me.

 Concerns

As much as I loved all the information I was able to gather from this event I have to say it was not at all what I imagined. The reps had no sign at their table to indicate studio name/positions available which led people to believe anyone sitting at a table was a rep (not the case). This led to artists waiting for a chance to speak to a rep only hiring programmers and vice versa. The chaos of people scrambling to try to speak to an industry professional meant time wasted. It felt like we were sharks circling prey. I understand the difficulties of organizing events like this but it could have only been beneficial for both the reps and the attendees if something was put in place to identify the reps and positions, as well as something as simple as a ticket system to add order to the chaos.

 Scrum Masterclass

Sherri Flemings hosted this Masterclass. As someone who has not been working in the industry in an official capacity this was invaluable to me. Look forward to a separate post on this in the future. :)

 Party at Atari

End of Day 1 at CGX and now it's time to head to the party. This is an excellent opportunity to chat with people I met throughout the day in a more casual setting. I really enjoyed learning more about what people are working on and meeting some new developers and streamers. There was a lot of business card trading.

 UI and Cognitive Science Masterclass

Celia Hodent hosted this Masterclass. It was crammed with really useful information on UX and how it relates to the human brain. Again, another post is coming to talk more about this one.

 Funding Lounge

This was an interesting event to attend. I wanted to get an idea of what kind of programs were available for developers to assist with funding and what the requirements were. Kitfox games was also there giving advice on how to pitch your game to publishers which was really useful. If you live in Canada then the Canadian Media Fund has some experimental programs for assisting game companies that are currently developing a game with production costs and marketing costs. Very exciting stuff!

 Mentor Lounge

For me, the mentor lounge was very similar to the Connect Café. I used it to learn as much as possible about the AAA industry and what I needed to do to get into the industry. Again, this is from the perspective of a self-taught developer so I can't say what kind of courses you should take or what university you should attend but the portfolio information I mentioned earlier is really the key to getting into any studio.

 Concerns

This was a little more organized than the Connect Café but the setup was a little misleading. Before the conference started I was provided with a registration form for the mentor lounge. It was designed to provide them with the information needed to pair me up with mentors who would best suit me as a programmer/developer. However, when I arrived it was the same format as Connect Café. Just walk in and sit somewhere and talk to someone. Thankfully they had signs this time so that helped. There was supposed to be a time limit enforced to ensure everyone had a chance to speak to as many people as possible but that was pretty hit or miss. Again, I feel like I gathered so much information at this event, but I know it would have been more beneficial if it was more organized.

 Wrapping Up

After leaving the Mentor Lounge I grabbed a bite and retired to my room. I poured the business cards out of my bag and made sure I connected with people on at least one social media network. I met a lot of great people with great ideas and games and I plan on staying in touch with all of them! :D

 What I wish I had time for…

First, the expo. Talking to developers who are excited about their game is… exciting!! Talking shop isn't something that I get to do much so getting to talk to people in person like that was just an amazing experience. I left CGX feeling physically exhausted but mentally refreshed and re-energized. It was fantastic, so I wish I could have played more games and spoke with more developers.

 Second… so many awesome talks (In no particular order).

Cuphead - The Creative Process and 2D animation - Tina Nawrocki

Creative Direction for Small Teams - Tanya X. Short

Concept Design, World Building for triple A - Abe Taraky

Level Design: Getting Started - Travis The Evolution of Warframe: 5 years of Continuous Iteration - Jim Leedham

How to leverage government funding programs - Mark Allice

Who do you know? - Mike Mood & Jon Keon

Etc.. Etc….

 Conclusion

I'll be posting full writeups on the master classes I attended as soon as possible. I'd like to thank everybody at the Mood Foundation who put this conference together and I'm VERY much looking forward to the next one. I hope any nobody takes offense to the criticisms I included in this post and know I am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to attend. Anyone who's interested in game development, go to these. They are awesome!!

[forlornegames]

Combat, Animation, Player Attributes...

Time for another Dev Log!

Just a quick aside. As much as I’d like these posts to be on a schedule, my time is currently divided between a full-time job, working with a team on this game, working on my own personal project (Krampus Krusher), staying up to date on relevant game/dev news/technologies, and last but certainly not least, spending time with my beautiful wife and amazing kids. Onward!

Combat

The first thing I worked on after the last post was getting the combat system implemented. I built the framework using GetButtonDown and Debug.Log since I didn’t have any animations to achieve any kind of visual cues. Then that moved smoothly into combo detection. I made a list of predetermined combos and using a combo cooldown timer and a string variable I would concatenate characters onto the end of the string and as soon as the string matched one of the combos it would trigger success.

I created a function in the PlayerController class to handle the damage and effects to the player. The initial function was just applying damage. I followed that up with a couple more overloaded functions that allow the enemy to determine if force is applied to the player and how much along with damage amount.

To handle player death, I wanted to make sure the player could respawn if they had any lives remaining. The PlayerManager class checks for player deaths and swaps the input map from gameplay to assignment which will allow the player to rejoin if they choose. It will also load any customizations applied to the player’s character at the beginning of the game.

Player Attributes

When the game starts, you can choose cosmetic customizations and preferred starting weapon. All of this information is stored in a PlayerAttribute object created at the beginning of the game on the customization screen and added to a Dictionary, using the player’s PlayerID as the key.

Rewired Input Manager Bug

This had me stuck for over a week. I had set the max number of allowable players to 4 but couldn’t assign and activate more than 3 at any time. I had created a player for the keyboard and 4 for gamepads. In some cases the first person to join the game couldn’t move until other players joined. I made sure all of the players were using the same input maps, and that they had the same default map active on start. I recreated the maps for all of the players. I was using Debug statements throughout my script to figure out where the disconnect was between Rewired’s joystick detection and my player assignment was. One tool that was incredibly helpful was Rewired’s Debug Information prefab. Drop that in your scene and it provides a list of all the detected inputs and their IDs. When a player is assigned, it’s given a Rewired ID as well as a Player ID. The problem I was running into was that I was using the Player ID to set the maps for the players when I should have been using the Rewired ID. Once I discovered the problem, the fix was easy. Just pass in the correct ID and everything synced up nicely. This asset is well worth the money, and I’m glad I was able to use this as a learning experience. I’ll definitely be using it again for future projects.

Scrapping features

Something you need to be willing to do, no matter how much work you put into it is cut things. When we first began work on the player controller we decided it would be a good idea to incorporate a ledge grab. And after putting in the time to get it working we did a little play testing and decided the ledge grab would really interfere with the pacing of the game. It’s supposed to be a high energy hack and slash and getting stuck on ledges is just going to stifle that momentum.

Spine animation

So this is my first time working with Spine animations in Unity and I just need to say it’s a whole other beast. I am familiar with Unity’s Mechanim Animation solution and Spine is nothing like it. Spine is much more code heavy, which takes a little bit of getting used to. Where Mechanim will loop as long as the condition is true, spine can’t continuously check for the condition or else it will constantly trigger the animation and it’ll never get past the first frame. Instead, if the condition is true you call SetAnimation ONCE and set it to loop. It took a little bit of time to wrap my head around it. But I was able to check the current animation state and as long as the state didn’t match the animation I was trying to set it was called. Which allowed me to call SetAnimation only once. The next hurdle was getting the attack animations to play completely. Spine likes to blend it’s animations together for a more natural look, which is problematic when you want the entire animation to play. My attack animations would play 3/4 of the way and sacrifice the last 1/4 to allow for the smooth transition back to walking/idling. I was able to resolve this by converting all the functions I created to set the animations to CoRoutines. Spine was nice enough to include a yield waitForSpineAnimationComplete so the transition from attack to any other animation didn’t start until the attack animation was fully complete.

Thanks for sticking it out with me. Hope this was at least a little helpful.

Other places you can go to follow the development of this game!

Facebook Page | Twitter | Twitch

[forlornegames]

Input Manager Mayhem!

Heads up, looong text post this week. Most of my time was spent on an input manager, and there just isn't a lot to screenshot/gif when doing this kind of work.

So, it's been a while since my last post. I've been working hard on this project with Rabbit Hole Studios. So I was tasked with creating the input manager and I've got to say it was a much bigger task than I anticipated.

We talked about it and decided to try to go for 4 player support in this arena based hack and slash and we all agreed gamepads are going to be the way to go for this game. Not that we weren't going to support keyboard… This is a PC game first and foremost.

I initially designed a custom input manager with keycodes that allowed the player to remap their keys. This took me down a UI road I wasn't really prepared for but we really wanted to allow the players to remap their inputs to make sure everyone is comfortable and able to play the way they want. The controls were working and the remapping was implemented. Now on to gamepads.

What a task. So I started off with creating individual inputs for each gamepad, up to 4 max. Then got to work making a generic input mapper that would read the player number and create a custom map for that player based on the player number. This probably would have worked with keycodes, but I worked with strings to make it easier. I used strings to assign the gamepad joysticks to the keycodes I declared in the input manager. Anyway, it took me a couple of weeks just to get that far and I still wanted to implement joystick detection during runtime and support multiple joysticks. In the end the decision was made to pick up an amazing input manager asset off the unity asset store called Rewired.

Rewired supports countless gamepads and other sources of input as well as detection at runtime. It's just a fantastic asset that saved us a lot of time. Which is great since we're pushing for a June release. With the Rewired input manager in place it literally took me one night to get the manager working with 4 gamepads and 1 keyboard input. Rewired also lets you create multiple profiles for different situations. For example, UI, Gameplay and Assignment. It also comes with a fantastic UI that lets the players remap their controls and a system in place that saves the new controls to playerprefs and loads them automatically on launch.  So, with the input manager solved and the camera follow configured to add the new players I was all set to move on to the combat.

I'll be covering how I solved the combat in the next post, and this time it won't take me 2 weeks to get it posted. :)

Other places you can go to follow the development of this game!

Facebook Page | Twitter | Twitch 

[forlornegames]

Getting things set up...

Heads up, this is a long post... future posts will be shorter, I promise. :)

So, to start I got to work immediately on the player controller. Since the core game loop of this game is really in the combat. The controls need to be tight, fast and fun. I elected to use a raycast based collision system so I can get more control over how the player moves. I've also found this system is more reliable when it comes to moving platforms. Having access to the code behind how the player behaves is great when it comes to tweaking things to perfection.

The raycast system uses the collider's bounding box to determine where the origin of the rays should be and then fire X number of rays across the horizontal or vertical side depending on the direction the player is moving. The number of rays cast from the side is determined by the length of the side. Once the horizontal and vertical collisions were finished I moved on to jumping.

Instead of using arbitrary values for jumpVelocity and gravity for the player I decided to use kinematic equations to solve for gravity and jumpVelocity. Knowing how long I wanted the player to take to reach the apex of the jump and the height of the jump I was able to solve for the other variables. 

Now for slopes. To climb a slope, a ray is fired from the bottom right or left corner, horizontally. It checks the slope angle, and we use trigonometry to determine the x and y move amount while moving up the slope. 

moveDistance is the Absolute value of moveAmount.x.

slopeAngle is obtained using

Vector2.Angle (hit.normal, Vector2.up)

The Y move amount was found using 

Mathf.Sin(slopeAngle * Mathf.Deg2Rad) * moveDistance;

The X move amount was found using

Mathf.Cos(slopeAngle * Mathf.Deg2Rad) * moveDistance * Mathf.Sign(moveAmount.x);

To descend a slope it’s very similar. After checking to make sure the slopeAngle isn’t zero, and that the player is on the slope we use the same math to find the X and Y moveAmount, the only difference this time is subtracting the Y value from moveAmount.y to descend properly. 

Now that the foundation was laid I was able to get to work some of the more fun gameplay features. The first one I’m going to talk about is the ledge grab. This was accomplished using a boxcollider2D and an empty child object. I tagged the parent object as “Ledge” and had a raycast shot from either the topLeft or topRight corner of the player’s collider. If a Ledge was detected, set the player’s velocity to zero and move to the position of the ledge’s child object. Once you grabbed the ledge, the player’s controls updated (triggered by a Boolean) to use Up to climb and Down to drop. The Jump button would allow the player to jump as normal. I tossed together a simple climb animation for the player and using an animation event I was able to reset the ledge-grab Boolean and update the player’s position to the top of the ledge.  Something I didn’t consider until nearly the end of implementing this feature was the sprite flipping while grabbing the ledge. This prompted me to create a function dedicated to the player’s direction and updating the sprite flip. 

The double jump. I needed the double jump to work in a few different ways. 

Standard double jump. Once from the ground, second in the air. 

Allow for a single jump after falling from a platform.

Allow the player to double jump from a ledge grab.

The standard double jump was accomplished using a jumpCounter. Counting the number of jumps and resetting the number to zero if the player was grounded. Allowing for a single jump after falling from a platform used the same jumpCounter. If the counter was at zero and the player wasn’t grounded it would allow for one jump and kick the counter up to 2 immediately. Allowing the player to double jump from the ledge was just a matter of using a boolean to say if the player was grabbing a ledge and setting that as a condition for the first jump as well. 

And I think that wraps things up for me tonight! I’m going to try to post these weekly, hopefully every Monday. So stay tuned for more run on sentences and terrible explanations with gifs sprinkled in! :D

Other places you can go to follow the development of this game!

Facebook Page | Twitter | Twitch

[forlornegames]

Pinata Pandemonium - Intro

Hello everyone! I’ve joined forces with the fine folks at Rabbit Hole Studios and started development on a new 2D Hack and Slash game called Pinata Pandemonium! So I’ll be posting updates here on what I’m working on, problems I face and how I solve them. Enjoy!

[forlornegames]

Dev Summary - Fractured Mind

The down side to participating in a game jam is finding time to keep track of everything you've done and learned. But I'm going to try my best to recount everything and record it here.

First, if you want to give it a try Fractured Mind is available to play on itch.io for free. CLICK HERE

Player Controller - Mechanics

On this project I was responsible for gameplay programming for the most part. I started with what I was most familiar with, player controllers. I kept it really simple, using a Character Controller. Initially the design was to use 3D assets but restrict movement along the z-axis. 

I was making changes to the Character Controller for most of the life of the project, adding new mechanics and testing things out. I started with pushing blocks. I decided on using a timed trigger to move them, if you’re pushing against the block for X seconds, it’ll move a short distance in that direction. It didn’t work out very well to start but with some persistence I was able to get it where I wanted it.

Next thing on the list was climbing ledges. Unfortunately I didn’t have a proper animation for this, so it looks more like levitation but it still worked. Unfortunately we needed to cut it out of the game because of the missing animation but I still had fun figuring this one out. Biggest take-away from this was that you can’t lerp a players movement while the character controller is enabled. I created prefabs for left and right ledge climbs, it was made of up a single trigger collider and a couple of empty gameobjects I used to lerp the player to. 

Something else that I worked on that also got cut was ladder climbing. I got it working on a basic level but again had to cut it due to lack of animation. I wish we had more animation completed I really would have liked to work on transitioning states for climbing up and down ladders, and getting on/off from the top and bottom. Maybe next time :) This time though, I just used trigger colliders at the top and bottom of the ladder, press E to attach to the ladder, and while you’re on the ladder the player input changed from UP changing Z position to changing Y position. 

Enemy AI - NavMesh/PathFinding

This was my first time trying out Unity’s navmesh pathfinding system and it was a blast! I had a ton of fun working on the enemies in this game. The first thing I did after figuring out the waypoint system was get them to “see” the player.

I used a custom collider created from a mesh I tossed together in blender. It was a cone shape to mimic range of sight. These guys have almost no peripheral vision lol. So once the enemy detected the player in it’s vision I had it shoot a ray to see if there were any obstacles in the way. This way you weren’t being detected through walls. I also implemented a distraction mechanic, where you could whistle and if you were within range the enemy would come looking for you, and if it didn’t see you it would do a quick sweep of the immediate area and then head back to it’s pathing route. I used Random.InsideUnitCircle to acheive that and it worked like a charm. I also got to play around with particle effects and ended up creating the fire/cloud effect you see on the enemies using my own textures. 

All-in-all I learned so much during this project. Working with a team is VERY different from working solo on projects but it also allows for some awesome ideas you never would have had on your own. I learned how to better organize my project code to optimize for easier scaling, which I am already starting to implement on my next project! :) 

Anyway, that’s it from me. If this was a little rambly I apologize, I’m writing this at the wee hours of the morning after finishing the night shift at work. xD Thanks for reading! 

[forlornegames]

Krampus Krusher demo release!

I finally wrapped up the demo for Krampus Krusher!

Click here if you want to give it a try!

I got a lot done this week, unfortunately there’s still no sound in the game, but that will come eventually. 

Artwork: I needed to create more sprites for the Abomidable Snowman fight

There was a lot of focus on timing this week, since the boss fight was based on a timer. Everything else was related to the attack. Snowmen would spawn, snowmen corpses would explode if left on the ground, and the boss was only vulnerable to attack during his attack. I released the game a couple days ago, but I already received a ton of feedback. The day after the upload, I updated the boss fight and general gameplay mechanics and I have to say it was a great improvement. 

Scott over at Rabbit Hole Studios gave it a “quick” playthrough on live stream, and I recommend checking it out :D

https://www.facebook.com/studioburrow/videos/1759482384116598/

It felt great to hit this development milestone! 

When I started Krampus Krusher, I expected to shelf it after completing the first level/boss fight and move back to working on Recondite. But with all the time and work already poured into Krampus Krusher I'm starting to think it would be wasted effort to let this momentum die. I will be working on Krampus Krusher as my main project until it is completed, and dabble in other secondary projects whenever I'm starting to feel the burnout. Secondary projects could be anything from a small game, to completing more online educational material. I've got a really good feeling about this plan. Wish me luck! 

[forlornegames]

Combat and boss fights...

Another Krampus Krusher update!

This week I finished up a few things, even with taking some time off for Christmas :D

I completed the background for the first boss fight. I might tweak it a little but it’s a good start!

Completed the snowman spawning animation and triggers. I found a good/efficient way to update the pivot points for multiple sprites as well, which saved me a lot of time when I added additional animations for the snowman and player carrying. I uploaded a little clip of how the game is coming along as well if you want to check it out. Until next time!

[forlornegames]

Inaugural Post! Krampus Krusher Update!

This is the first post of many keeping updates of my game development. I have a couple projects on the go. I’ll post about them as I work on them. :D

Implemented toy soldier enemy

I had some trouble with this one. I use raycasting for player movement and was thinking it would be a good idea to extend that functionality to the enemies as well. It turned out to be far more intricate/complicated than what I needed to get the toy soldier to work. I did use raycasting so the toy soldier could detect if there were obstacles or pits in his path. And I used animation events, lerping and a coroutine to get the stepping movement. There were some bugs of course. Like every time the toy soldier died he would always face to the right to play the death animation. That was an easy one to squash though.

 Improve player character feedback

Something I’ve noticed is the player can’t really tell they’ve taken damage unless they are actively looking at the health bar. I wanted there to be some kind of feedback or indicator. I added a kickback from damage sources. It feels much better to play and I think I’ll work on adding some more indicators as well, like sprite blink or red flash around the screen.

 Etc

Outside of the programming I did get a lot of artwork done for the game as well. The yeti redesign was very successful. I also completed the ground pound animation and the toy soldier art and animations. Overall, I feel pretty good about how much I got done, here’s hoping next week is even better!