Ya Boi™

Mark Lipina | Game Design Major @ RIT | Computer Programmer, Casual Artist, Nerd

[battlestarsgunstars]

Battlestar Valkyrie derelict

Pierre Drolet Sci-fi Museum

[marklipina-blog]

Made a little poster thing for the game I’m working on! I’ve got a lot coming up - I’m submitting my game to the NYS Game Dev Competition, and I’m showing off a demo of my game at STARFest, a sci fi convention at my school. Made this for both of those, and I really like how it came out. :) Hopefully I’ll have a more presentable game demo to show off then, and not just some neat art!

[marklipina-blog]

Big update!

So for my most recent and most ambitious project, I decided to try to make a 3D game using Unity 2D. I’ll probably go into technical details in another post.

Anyway, this was my first product...

And after a month it evolved into this!

And here’s a custom-made AI that follows you around!

Really excited to work on this more, I’m actually submitting it to the NYS Game Dev Competition on March 1st, and also I’ll be presenting it at a local Sci-Fi convention on March 3rd!!!

Before those deadlines I’m gonna be working on some art, levels and mechanics to make a demo that represents a more fully-fleshed-out vertical slice of the game. And I’ll post more art I’ve been drawing recently, too. 

[marklipina-blog]

Little update...

Hey, whoever happens to follow me. It’s been a loooooooong while since I’ve posted anything. Honestly, partly cuz the longer I wait the more I think “eh, its been too long to post anything and I’m sorta ashamed to admit that I put a hiatus on my Monster Dating Sim. 

I still feel kinda bad about that, I was really excited about the idea (and still like it a lot!!!) but once I finished the dialogue system, pretty much all that was left to do was make an intimidating amount of art, write a bunch of characters and respective stories, and make increasingly complicated dialogue graphs (or dialogue trees, even though thats *technically* improper language from a CS standpoint since trees have a clear hierarchical structure w/ no loops, and in most dialogue-based games there are loops in the dialogue) Since I enjoy programming above much else, and had other ideas in the back of my mind, I set that project aside for the time being. Sorry to those of you (if anyone) who were looking forward to me finishing it. Maybe later! But I decided to take on a bigger challenge, something more focused on gameplay than art or story, but still with those in the picture.  More on that later, tho, in a post of its own.

[datemonsters]

Showed off what I have done so far yesterday at a creator’s fair! Didn’t have a ton to show, but seeing people enjoy what I did have was really inspiring.

[nezushion]

this turned out fucking tiny because im a dumbass but whatever i dont care anymore (click on it, its transparent)

[really-low-resolution-deactivat]

This is so cool

[datemonsters]

Police Bug Robot Alien! 50% Durasteel, 50% Boyfriend Material Progress has been slow lately, school’s keeping me busy, but I’m trying to get back into it! (Plus Destiny 2 is very distracting…)

[marklipina-blog]

Made a devlog for the game

I decided to make a devlog for my monster dating sim I’ve decided to call “You Date Monsters In This Game”, here it is for those of you who might be interested!

https://datemonsters.tumblr.com/

[marklipina-blog]

Participated in my first game jam this weekend and I'm really proud of what my team and I accomplished for a bunch of newbies! I did the character animations and concept art, one of my team members made the level art/tileset, another did the level design, and another did all the programming. Our project is incomplete but playable, you can run, jump and slide with traditional wasd and spacebar, and swing your sword with j or k. Cant kill enemies yet cuz we ran out of time sadly. If you're interested, the game is up on github at: https://github.com/gavmat8/ImagineCup2017

[marklipina-blog]

I got the dialogue system working!  It looks really basic and not too complex, but it’s really just a proof of concept at the moment. Since my project is a dating sim, dialogue is obviously the central mechanic of the game, and I wanted to make a system that was both dynamic in that if I wanted to make changes they wouldn’t be (too) tiresome to make, and I also wanted something that scaled well, something that worked in cases where there are dozens of dialogue nodes. In my CS classes, we recently reviewed some inheritance as well as data structures, and lo and behold, both of those tools worked perfectly into designing this system. CS jargon ahead! In summary, I wanted to set up a bunch of subclasses of superclass “DialogueEvent”, an abstract superclass I made up myself solely for the purpose of the dialogue system. Examples of such subclasses are “MonologueChat”, in which the NPC displays a bunch of text and the player presses “next”, “NormalChat”, in which the NPC asks a question and the dialogue box provides a few buttons for the player to choose from to respond, etc.  These objects would be stored in JSON files specific to each NPC. I loosely based this system off the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern for user interfaces. I have a script which reads in a JSON file of objects of subclasses of DialogueEvent, and it loads each object into a data structure, currently a Dictionary, though I may change it to a Map or ArrayList or something else. This script essentially sends commands to another script which handles the GUI, and instructs it to change anything from text elements, to the character sprite, to what buttons are displayed. That GUI-managing script then waits for the player input in the form of a button click, and passes the button selection back to the original script, which handles the selection and gets the corresponding next dialogueEvent, and the cycle continues until the exit case. I gotta say I feel pretty proud of this. Hopefully things keep going smoothly!

[marklipina-blog]

A quick gif of a game I’ve been working on in some of my free time over the past month or so. It’s just a prototype, as you can see. Placeholder graphics, mostly focusing on functionality before refining the look. This is my first real attempt at making a game. I’ve only dabbled in it until now, followed a few GameMaker tutorial series’ and made a few quick demo projects. I recently moved to Unity, since it offers more control, and some ((actual programming)). Being a CS major, I was attracted to the potential to learn C# as well as being able to apply some of my programming experience practically. I started off with tutorial projects as I’m sure most people do, but I feel like the best way to learn is by going off and doing your own thing and learning along the way. But, my project! It’s simple - an alien dating sim. You date aliens of all sorts, tentacles, claws, talons, beaks, robots, hopefully covering a wide spectrum of creatures, with the objective of kissing one. Gameplay’ll mostly be point and click adventure style travel and interaction, and heavy on the dialogue. That’s the gist of it as it is now, at least, definitely subject to change, but there’s my elevator pitch.  This gif mostly just demonstrates what I’ve got working so far. The point and click navigation is pretty roughly shown, and so is the dialogue window opening when you click on an NPC. I’d go into more detail but this post is already far too long.

[marklipina-blog]

Missed a few days of Inktober there, but here's something gigantic.

[marklipina-blog]

First time doing Inktober! For the Space Explorers prompt list, The Dreamer