Oiral

You

[theconcernedpotato]

Update your game already!

Its been awhile since i did a proper update, so i think its about time i do some actual work while i have time and not only write, but show how the project is going.

i wont lie, with the change in scenery, work has taken a hit. I normally tend to get most my work done between 10 pm and 4 am, but such time doesn’t work well with a partner that keeps busy during the day. and the lack of such amazing creative people working next to me, motivation took a hit.

Not sure where to start, so lets start with the more interesting. 

Particles. Since I didn’t have anything in mind when i started, but knew i would be looking into collision detection at some point, i decided to start there. 

The game was not to be a realistic looking game so i went back to the beginning themes and what the game was about. I had got much inspiration from cartoons like bugs bunny and road runner, and the way they dealt with characters hurting themselves or setting off bombs have this amusing feel to it. this was something i wanted. 

Finding tutorials on YouTube, i set to work.           

Although i have yet to put any explosions in the game currently, the cartoon style got me and i would try to base all other effects along the same line. 

After playing around creating a few different yet similar types, i wish to see them in action.

For this i needed to start work on the collision detection. The idea was -  depending on how hard you hit a surface and where, the type of particles, noise and at what volume would change.

Rather then having everything tied to the character who would collide with everything, i decided to have the ground calculate where it was hit (the white flooring/walls would now detect everything). The thought was that if Stan hit and slid down a wall, the impact dust/smoke would spawn at the point of impact rather then on Stan who might  have moved on from that spot. The result i think worked out quite well.

Once dealing with the actual point of collision and how i would spawn the effects in, i set to work on detecting how hard Stan would hit a surface. This actually wasn’t an issue and was more of a copy and paste with a little modification since the wizard ( https://oiral.tumblr.com/) helped with, and implemented such a thing back near the start of the project (since future mechanics i want would need it). 

Once a few of the effects were done, i tied sound to it all. The sound of Stan hitting a wall at high speed then falling from a height to go splat was very amusing (more then it should have been. So much so i sat back watching and listening to him hit objects for far too long before getting back to work).

One of the criticisms i had when testing was the need to feel more like a stunt man. With that in mind one of a few ideas that came to me and hope to do was having stunts to have more impact and weight. a sense of actual danger. Having Stan hit the ground or wall at high speed would have An ambulance race across the screen when having to repeat a failed attempt.

Although amusing at first, because of the trial and error nature of the game, this might get annoying fast, so i still need to tone it down and call it every other time rather then every time. plus need a siren sound effect.. 

Talking about sound, Greg reached out after reading my last post and looped the track, so guess that takes care of that job (anything i don’t have to do is awesome!). 

 The import of some world assets was great and really brings the game to life. Stan has yet to be done yet but he is coming.

(no lighting or post have been done)

With trying to get the feel for being a stunt man, i tried to think how someone like that gets started. In my head they probably have always done crazy things like jump from the roofs of builds etc. (no i haven’t researched that haha just a guess).

i had done a tutorial that would walk you through placement of items and the gameplay, but it wasn’t well implemented or well received. Oddly, even though i had the play button flashing to indicate to push it, people completely glossed over that fact (could be the play testers, but il take it on myself that maybe it way not clear).

To date the above gif is all i have done in re-inventing the tutorial. By removing all buttons but the play button, this would see no confusion in what needs to be pushed. This was to be one of a set of small  tutorials that would walk the players though the play style of the game. In a brain storming meeting with my partner, this didnt seem the best way to go about it, so this too will be replace with something a little more better suited and the above will become part of the earlier levels as to how Stan becomes a stuntman. 

       So i was going to leave the assets all 3D since they are all very low poly, but due to performance testing, i plan on changing all assets into 2D sprites. Because i want it playable on most phone and all are different, getting the best  performance is of the most importance. 

So as you may see, turning the world into sprites made a huge difference. The aim was to get Batches and SetPass calls down as far as i could. 

Running two tests for each, i set one at monitor screen size and the other at phone screen size just to see if that helped at all too. From what i took away was models into 4K sprites were the way to go (will drop the size even more too), dropped both Batches and SetPass calls by roughly ¾, and this was without any optimization in any other way then switching out assets or Occlusion culling (as i did on the top left, which would see even better results. Occlusion culling = not seen, not calculated). The screen size saw most notably a spike in FPS and less strain on the CPU (not fully sure if this would truly transfer over to the phone yet since phones although small, actually are high res, but interesting to know anyways). 

On the subject of performance, something it seems i will need to do is object pooling.. because the game is trial and error, it has people creating and destroying items constantly.. which is a major hit to the game performance.. this means a complete over haul of what systems are there currently. Not as hard as i thought it would be, but will take some time before i can get to it..

For those that are unsure what that meant, the way i understood it when learning about it was - the current system works like this - 

        I create items, and if i don’t want or need them, i throw the items in the bin, then when i need another item, i create another.  As you might notice this is not really the best system, as the rubbish collection will become a problem, and its a bit of work to always create a new item from scratch.

         Object pooling is more like - I create a new item,  and if i don’t want or need them, i place them in a store room. Then when i need another item, i go pick that item up off the shelf.   

The UI placement is getting an over haul for the next play test too, to see if it works better then the last. Also UI placeholders replaced with actual assets. Although these are still not final as they may not fit the game once it all comes together. 

Test of the new layout and look. ignore the font.. 

i also did a small intro screen for when booting up Stan, needs quite a bit of polish still, but as a first pass i think i can live with it for now.

Now there is probably a lot i have missed and forgotten, but my partner has presented me with a glass of red, so i will leave it there, and hopefully get better with updates and actually working on this. Till next time, Thanks for reading. 

[oiral]

Release and Reflection!

Hey guys! It’s finally here. The full game.

A few updates to game play but the biggest change, Audio! Im super excited for you to try out the game with custom created audio by Gregg Lamse (Inftable Vegetables) and Splittybooms.

Update 1.0 comes with some updates to the game, We now have music, better spawning, better highscore tracking that doesn’t constantly take up more and more memory.

I have also simplified the AI so hopefully this makes the game run smoother when there are more and more enemies.

We started with a turn based firefighting game. Which I then tried to take into a rogue like. That didn’t turn out so the went back to being a simple turn based game.

After working on that game for a while, I realised I was not working on it as much as I would have liked due to not enjoying the game or development so I started working on my own game at the same time. 

This game Iconic was what I was enjoying developing more and more as it got further along into a game. I think I was really enjoying the gameplay because I was focusing on making it feel good and have all the nice things that make games feel good like screen shake and particles etc. 

So I switched. I think this was probably the best decision I made for my final project for school. I really enjoyed the switch and was waking up wanting to come in and work on the game.

I did some work on it over the holidays and published the game onto Itch.io! Super happy with the release. I then came back into course with a new plan of getting the game out and reworking the UI.

I loved the new UI and simplicity of it. 

After working with the game for a while I started to try and implement things that weren’t really working and trying to push more features into the game that didn’t really need to be there. Like different weapons and bosses. After having a think about this I came to the decision that instead of working on the game more and adding more features. I would just polish the game and adjust some things that were already in the game.

I then worked on the trailer which took me about 3 days to complete. Saying that makes it sound like it was a short time but I really enjoyed creating it and It is the first ever trailer I have made for a game and I am super happy with the way it turned out.

This is going to be it for the game development of this game. This doesn’t mean the blogs will be stopping here though.

Download the game here https://oiral.itch.io/iconic I hope you enjoy it and let me know your feedback!

I am going to try keep up with the dev blogs and start on a new project.

[oiral]

TRAILER!

This week while Gregg has been working hard on the sound. I have not been wanting to touch the game unless I touch something that messes up Greggs works. So I have been working a trailer for the game which I am very happy with! 

This is my first time using after effects in a while so it took me a while to get my head around using it again. I think going into the trailer with a specific look that I wanted really helped me achieve the look of the trailer.

[oiral]

Features and not so features

This past week I have been working on lost of different features of the game and changing different aspects of the game.

I have changed up how the enemies are spawning. So instead of spawning around the center of the world in a circular fashion. It now spawns around the edge of the screen so I can now pull back the camera and the enemies will always spawn around the edge of the screen. 

While doing some play testing I had some feedback that as you progress in the game and the amount of enemies gets bigger it gets more and more cluttered so to counter this, instead of removing enemies I have just made the screen get bigger as you play.

I have also been adding in different tiers of enemies so that as you progress through the game it gets hard and hard not just with the amount of enemies but also the toughness of them too. 

[oiral]

Whats next

So I have been thinking about the game. I feel as if it is in a state (minus a few bugs) where I would be happy to call it a final product. I have had huge plans like bosses a huge variety of enemies and making the game much bigger. I would not be able to implement that in the remaining time I have left. I want to focus on improving the play and adding a few smaller things into the game before the final release of the game. 

I have been overhauling a major system in the game, The drops for the enemies, Previously each of the drops was attached to the enemies themselves and so now I have changed it all over to be attached to a drop manager, by doing so has made it easier to edit drops. 

I have also been working on a weapon system that allows there to be different types of weapons in the game. I have only created one of these weapons. It locks onto the mouse and homes into the mouse allowing the player some control over their projectiles.

Because I have been working on the background systems everything looks the same so not many gifs and images to show.

[oiral]

UI

It has been a great week! We have got the game feeling awesome to use and play! Super happy with it! Our sound guy Gregg, has been implementing Wwise into the project so that we can have music that reacts to the game as you play it.

I can’t wait for the next few weeks to see where the game continues to go!

So on Tuesday I have been working on getting the UI overhauled and looking better. I did some research into some minimalist design and what that may look like. 

After doing some research I then went on to design the start menu for iconic inside Photoshop just so I could throw it together so I could see what it would look like and I was really happy with the way it looked.

After putting the text and buttons into unity I then had the task of animating it all. 

Animating took most of Wednesday and Thursday, I now have the menus and animations mostly all working in the game!

On Friday I really wanted to try get everything into one unity scene so that there weren't any weird jumps and also so that i could keep the background particles consistent between scenes. I managed to put in animations for the start menu and integrated the main menu into the main scene So now everything is just in one scene which is really awesome!

I was really hoping to get a update out by friday this week. However due to some issues with the sound. I will be waiting until monday to realease the update. I shall hopefully be building out to mac the weekend and fixing any bugs that go with that. So Hopefully we should also be able to get a mac build in with the update too.

[oiral]

Long Holidays

Over the Christmas break from the course I have gotten a new job which has been taking up most of my spare time. So not much progress has been made on the game.

I tried for some time to get a UI shader to work inside Unity as I have no idea how shaders work this didn’t go very well. Thats fine because when I came back into course I had some help and found that the UI was shifting on the z axis and this is what was messing up my shader. So it was a simple fix.

Now that I am back at course I am going to be spending more dedicated time working on the game so hopefully updates coming soon!

So I am wanting the UI to break apart and fracture like so when you take damage and then it shifts back into place when your back to being able to take damage again and think this is a better visual change from slowing down time. However I will keep that in as a nice touch too.

After doing heaps of work this week. I’m thinking by the end of next week I will be able to push out an update for the game improving visuals.

I have been working on some animations for menus and as well at the end of the game there is now an explosion that spreads out and kills anything left on screen so as the player you can see your death a bit easier.

While creating this effect I am thinking of adding in a power up for the game which when you pick it up creates a smaller version of the death circle and spreads out around the player to give them a reason to time some of their pickups.

With this pickup I started with a simple circle that grew and the line itself got bigger but what i wanted was for the line size to stay the same but the diameter of the whole circle to get bigger. I had to use a line renderer and then when I had that working I wanted to add some simple animation to the line so that it didn’t look just completely flat because explosions are never flat.

I have also been enjoying creating some character cards and for the different enemy types of the game.

[oiral]

Release week!

I have had a great first week of release! I started up the facebook page and now have more than 50 people following! The game has also had more than 10 downloads within the first few days! Now most of you reading this would be going, wow, only ten, most games I hear get in the hundreds or thousands within the first day. As this is my first solo game I am really happy that even ten people have experienced my game and will continue to enjoy it with updates coming soon. 

I am also really happy that a brother of a friend of my girlfriend, BurstFire made a you tube video of the game play and an analysis of the game in it’s current state! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsPe_CVJ7T4

More about the game!

I have been working on the game! After watching the analysis of the game. I have decided to really try hard to redesign the UI to make it a bit more readable rather than just a few numbers. I also want to try to move away from using lots of numbers that just count up!

Going from numbers and icons (above) and to a shot bar that moves as you shoot and bars that multiply as how many shots you fire at once (below)

I have also been working on a new enemy that randomly moves around the map rather than aiming towards the player! I have been making this guy because after playing the game a while I have found that it becomes really easy when you start guiding or kiting the enemies around knowing that they only move towards the payer.

[oiral]

HUGE HUGE Changes!

So, as you would know from all my previous post that I have really been struggling with my project. I felt that it wasn’t going anywhere good and it wasn’t going fast enough to be done and able to be handed in at the end of my course. After a play test a while ago at school of a personal project my tutor has allowed me to switch to that. My personal project that i have been finding really enjoyable to create and even to play. Even though it may be a small project right now. That is just the foundations, I am going to building up on what I already have create over the next few months!

I have just released the game on Itch.io and also created a facebook page for those who would rather get updates there. https://oiral.itch.io/iconic and https://www.facebook.com/IconicTheGame

I have been creating images and art for the game over the past week or two in between Christmas family events! It has been really enjoyable seeing the itch.io page coming together slowly! Once I was happy with the game to be released I added in some little extra bits like an alpha text down the bottom.

Go get the game now! Download and see what you think!

[oiral]

Friday Alpha

So I this week I have been pushing towards my alpha build of the game. I have gotten a menu working so that I can then get some play testing but other students and tutors to get some feedback on the gameplay. I will not be releasing my Alpha to the public im going to do some private testing of my game.

Anyways enough about what I have been doing here are some screen shots!

I have gotten squad spawning working with a bar that allows the player to select what squad it will be (need to make this have more info later)

I have also added in a section for the meta layer. I need to make sure this is better laid out and more readable but for now it contains most of the info that is needed!

We have also gotten some people making some music for the game and they have been doing an awesome job! 

[oiral]

It’s been a very slow week

This week i have been struggling on development! been slowly chugging through and getting some back end stuff. so not many new visuals or anything much to look at.

I have added in a moving fire station which you will get to upgrade throughout the game!

Next week will be my my alpha build hopefully if everything goes to plan! I need to get some more UI done, add music and sound effects. and even add in a simple tutorial because I have some systems which aren’t very clear and as the player you can lose very easily and quickly without even realizing! (which isn’t good for a game)

Hopefully I will get some more visuals next Friday and then the next I will be working on some art to get some visual clarification that i’m heading in the right direction with the art style i’m thinking of.

[theartofanimation]

ömer tunç  -  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChIIDpMXWF0jCgfseg5WpXw/videos  -  https://www.instagram.com/kalmahul  -  https://www.facebook.com/omertunc1313  -  https://www.behance.net/omertunc  -  http://drawcrowd.com/mertun13  -  http://gallery.wacom.com/omertunc  -  https://artlords.com/u/omertunc  -  http://omertunc.deviantart.com

[theconcernedpotato]

So much work, so little blog..

Between going on a week holiday north where the sun seems to be hiding. Yes like Stan i went north for the winter (I’m in New Zealand), and also with knocking a basic prototype out, I’ve been ignoring posting updates.. You guys are obviously not worthy XP

From the pitch i went straight into seeing if the basic idea could work and if it is somewhat amusing. 

At first i had no phone to develop on (i have an iPhone and no mac, don’t get me started..) so the basic prototype would be tested on the computer. I now have an android phone and testing on the phone is currently working so yay #winning! 

At first i needed to figure out controls. Well actually item placement but i’l show you basic panning of the camera.

Top screen is the in game screen, based off a mobile size, the bottom is the editor screen

At first it was controlled by mouse, but with a little help from (https://oiral.tumblr.com/) the wizard, phone touch controls works the same.  

With movement down, item placement was next. Had the basics down before movement, but added UI and testing of snapping to vertices, (placement so it lines up clean) so kinda there. Not fully happy but that is within polishing i guess, right?   

With item placement down, i needed to test if they worked as intended.

The player will react differently with each item. For testing purposes only two items were created. Well the same item but different shapes..

 Pushing play and watching was obviously needed. A button was not as simple as just saying “go” either. My mind set was - once you placed the last item down and pressed play, action just couldn’t go. It should lag a bit so not to disorientate you from where you left off, plus having the camera instantly snapping to the character also wouldn’t feel nice. Although some refinement is needed. On top of that, character tracking was put in place.

For testing purposes i added a reset button, which will put the character back at the beginning without resetting the level. Although for testing, it soon became apparent it will be needed in game since the game is trial and error.  

The white dots on screen represents the camera shots the director would like for his movie and which you have to move through for them to capture.This will act next to a score system maybe? Although it is possible to finish the level without hitting these. 

Plus it might not be clear here, but the dot within the “building” is the finishing position and where the player must reach to complete the stunt for the movie.

 Sorry again for a lack of updates and a dry balls catch up, minds all over the place and life seems to be lacking in enough hours in the day to nut anything out lately. On top of this project I’ve been hard at work creating a model not only for 3D printing, but a show case, texturing and all, plus trying to pick up contract work. 

But things are coming together no matter how slow, so suck it up people!  

[oiral]

Freaky Friday

Happy Halloween!! It’s been a slow week! 

I want to be total honest with you guys about the development of my game, for better or worse. From the start of the project I havn’t really been too into the game and after some time working on it, I am really struggling to get some motivation to work on the game. I had some motivation from the start and once I hit a brick wall with my other idea for how the game would work I really went down hill. Thanks to my tutor who managed to steer me on the right path, I think the game is starting to look promising but however my motivation even after getting some pieces together didn’t get very high. I think this is my first project i’m hitting a low at. I reached out the the indie dev facebook page asking for advice, I got some really good advice about development and motivation. I have found two that really helped. Motivation starts a project and perseverance finishes it. and also that if you go in every day and get something done on your game to make it closer to the final product eventually the game will be finished. This has helped me to just keep going in and continuing work on my game!

Sorry for the bulk of text, have some fire!

I have been trying to get the meta layer of the game feeling right and feeling cohesive and working together. I have been trying to steer away from the rogue like aspect for the game because of how well that went last time. I think that I have gotten a better handle on my game now as before I was trying to build a pure rogue like game from the start without much of a care for the game play. how ever now I have some game play that is enjoyable I can now push game in that direction again. After spending the week testing and implementing some rogue like features I think it is the right direction for the game.

For some of the week I have been looking into the flow of the game and how the User interface will work. This is what I have come up with so far. I think it’s looking pretty good and it is finally coming together.

I have also gotten the squad spawner working, This dynamically updates depending on how many squads you have and it also stores information about your squads so that I can have multiple squads spawning in.This means that I can move towards dealing with the meta layer of the game easier.

[theconcernedpotato]

It is the season

Oh Kay.. So not a lot has been done with the amount of time away from the computer. Another holiday, and working on other projects. 

So the time is coming closer to pushing out that Alpha build, so if anyone is interested in play testing, ill will be posting a link to the download in the next post. Must have an android phone or a computer (still unsure if i will do the computer, but thinking i may as well since its set up for that anyways).

Was meant to be pushing one out this week but with much more to do, i doubt i will make it, so hopefully next week.

Work has progressed enough to tell you about it which is a bonus. Like - With much annoyance, i got the rubbish bin to work. Was more painful then it should have been, but least now when you place down too many items, you can delete them, yay! (much needed). 

Also with the phone i picked up, i can safely say phone controls work, although refinement is needed still as i expected, but baby steps.

I did get into a lot of the systems behind the scenes, like Setting up level scripts and item creation so that once i’m in full swing i can create added content and updates for the game later on without too much issues. (i did think about posting a picture or two but code isn’t that exciting, and id hate for actual programmers to see my work, since its really really bad haha..)  

On top of all that i did start grey boxing out ui and menu scenes. Started pretty rough and it was recommended blocking out the flow in a program called 

Figma  - an interface design tool used for UI design and prototyping. 

Just wow, great tool to use and i can honestly recommend it now myself. With its easy and quick interface, you can grey box the UI and UX flow in no time. And best yet, its weirdly free, well unless you’re a large company, a win for the small guy! (Will Update tomorrow with pictures and a video/GIF).

Oh, i did get a hold of a guy that will do music for me which is neat! Cant say ive had custom music for any of my small projects before!

Really should keep up to date on posting so i can remember what I’ve done since the last, but sorry i didn’t, and i cant. I can tell tell you what still needs to be done before the alpha push next week. More levels, UI all hooked up, item shop, more items, rotation handle, set up for music, some kind of point system etc, oh and the much needed analytics integration so i can see how you, the play testers, went with testing. 

Yeah.. that’s a bit of a list.. and i did just get red dead 2.. haha well i guess we see how that goes. Fingers crossed and lets hope for the best. 

Sorry for the boring text wall, il try up date so it is a touch better on the eyes. Just thought it was best to post an update while i have some time. 

[oiral]

Friday Again

So it has been a while since I have done a dev blog. I have made progress in the game!

I have been working on the fire spread. It now shows where the fire will spread so you can stop it or preempt where it will go so you can plan out your moves.

I have created 7 levels for people to test my game with. I have also been updating the UI features so that there are things for each item I want the player to know about. Soon I will also be able to update the UI elements to look nice. 

Over the next week I will be developing the meta layer of the game and hopefully making it enjoyable to play and replay and giving the player something more than just levels to complete.

[oiral]

Prototyping!

This week I have been prototyping my game! I was trying too hard last week to push the game down a rogue like route and I was stuck. Very stuck! I turned it around with the help from my tutor to turn it around and we went back to the original idea. That same day I made a basic paper prototype, This worked but for me it was too slow because there were a few randomness factors which sucked the fun. So I took it from paper and put it into unity!

I have also been playing around with some fire effect too. I’ve changed it from the last post so you can see more of the grid.

I have been trying to prototype the win and lose conditions on paper. Right now I’m not making too much headway but hopefully over our week break I should be able to come up with at least a goal for the player.