Game Development

A spot to talk about games I am currently working on

[quackmike]

Got a minute to draw out two more places for Interrobang to hunt around. Actually, I'm making Mr. Impatient hunt down Interrobang in the hallway, he's out of the dungeon. Now the IRS Monster will hunt down Interrobang in the dungeon. Good luck saving Hot Rob now!

[quackmike]

Sketching out some levels for the Interrobang game ❗❓❗

[quackmike]

I'll admit it, I forgot about Tumblr. I should start posting on here again about my game Actor, RE: Actor. It's a Jackbox-style phone controller party game where you need to name famous actors in a specific order based on the actor's name. My friends and I played it growing up and now I've programmed it!

It'll be on Steam and Epic this summer I think!

[quackmike]

Starting Interrobang again

Now that CD-RUN is done and out and I've done everything with it I've wanted to, it's time to move on to the next project!

And the next project is: the previous project! I'm prototyping out Interrobang again and things are progressing nicely with it.

Nice enough to warrant me starting this back up again! So I'll keep posting updates here as an outlet for things I'd like to explain that don't fit into a tweet.

And just for good measure, here's a picture of the man himself who's starring in the game: Interrobang!

[quackmike]

Steeplechase

So, Steeplechase.

Before I had started Interrobang Comes to Dinner, I had tried two times to create Steeplechase. Two times to prove to myself that I was still too green. Two very important lessons!

I was so excited to get it running, I just jumped right in to Unity, C# and learning, learning, learning. And more learning. And more time and learning. And, man alive, why does this take so long? And why don’t the blocks line up on their edges? And how do you support a controller? Or multiple controllers for that matter? I didn’t think it’d be easy, but man alive, this is hard!

See? That is a 100% actual transcript of what happened. So so so so green. 

The main problems with the original two takes on Steeplechase that I had ran into were:

Generating levels procedurally

The blocks that create the level would never be flush against each other

The player never “felt” good to play

I thought “Well, I can’t do up auto-generated levels just yet", and “Why don't the blocks line up flush with each other?”, and “my player feels like slug, this isn’t fun”. With all those three strikes, I decided to focus on creating a smaller game of 8 smaller levels and a simple premise.

I had found and watched and gobbled up all of Sebastian Lague’s 2D Platformer videos on YouTube (great watch!) …this was exactly the “feel” I was looking to have in my games! With some simple tweaking I could have my player feel like Mega Man, Samus Aran or Simon Belmont!

I have my group of characters from my comic strip from college....why not use them to make a 2D platformer! That'll be awesome! After diving into that (getting a LOT of features made, learning animation with Esoteric's Spine, and learning more ins and outs of Unity), I realized none of these were actual game play. I had no idea if this would be fun or not...I had build all the other parts of a game besides the game. Not a great place to be...unless I was building an SDK.

Deciding against taking a break, I wanted to give Steeplechase another try. With all my new found knowledge from Interrobang Comes to Dinner, I should be able to get further in it this time. And, after some tinkering, I did!

I had an especially huge epiphany: The blocks never aligned flush with each other when generating a level because I was moving the level blocks during game play. I should be moving the camera! Then, when I look up the position of where to put the next block, it won’t have moved a little bit after I calculated it. They’ll always stay in place...the camera can do all the moving! Duh! 

With that knowledge and having tight player controls and collisions from the 2D platformer tutorial, I dove straight into it! Now I have 8 players simultaneously, random level pattern generation, a character select screen, a title scree with “attract mode”, and more!

I’ll be posting more about this now, the tools I’ve used for it, and tips and tricks I pick up along the way...Just like I did for Interrobang Comes to Dinner...just with the Steeplechase bits instead :)

Here’s an early version of the results screen from a 5 player match:

[quackmike]

Steeplechasin’...

I’m in your crawl space. Sorry Interrobang...you got bumped for a few months. But I’m learning more in Steeplechase to HELP you in the future! 

[quackmike]

A new path to walk upon

Check it:

Notice anything?

Oh, besides the big, bad radulanana up on that platform ;)

Watch Interrobang walk there...see how he moves up and down on the ground? I got to utilize edge colliders to make a more adventurous path.

The hills nearest to us and the trail look kind of weird, as the hills are parallaxing. I’ll need to put in a horizon separator or something to help that out. Or make the near hills deep purple and the far hills a lighter purple.

Ahhh!! A radulanana!

[quackmike]

Cool tips and howto for parallax scrolling!

[quackmike]

Parallaxing the Front Gate

Getting a little parallaxing done here:

Got the ground, some hills, some back hills, the sky and the moon. Gonna see if we can’t make that moon shine. Hey! Moonshine! Fun!

Our apple power up is still alive and well too ;)

Next is making the path to walk on for the player. I’m aiming to use an Edge Collider 2D so I can get some depth for Interrobang. Especially when HE gets depth and stops being a block :|

Games Plus James helped out on this latest learning exercise, check out the helpfulness in this video.

[quackmike]

Normal lighting proof of concept

Who likes a good test run?  This duck guy!

Since the start of working on Interrobang Comes to Dinner, I’ve wanted to try to make lighting work with it to (hopefully) produce some cool effects down the line.

With CodeAndWeb’s SpriteIlluminator, Esoteric’s Spine and Todd Rivers’ Uber Shader for Sprites, I’ve finally got a chance to test it out and try to get it working. (I’ll be linking all three of these in another posts!)

So, after tinkering around for a little bit, I took my exported skeleton and imported that into SpriteIlluminator and did a simple Bevel and Emboss on it. Saved that off as a normal map and imported all of it into Unity.

After which, I set up the Uber Shaders in Unity, and then opened up the test scene. Copying one of the basic shader sprite tests in it, I created my own material and applied it to Interrobang. Here’s a early result:

Pretty slick, huh? There’s two lights on the scene to produce this effect on him. 

Again, this is super basic, but it gets my mind so excited for what I originally had in mind for the game’s look and aesthetic. Looking forward to making moonlight, torches, chandeliers, and other cool bad-guy-type-stuff. 

Can’t wait to animate him! More to come!

[quackmike]

[quackmike]

Terragon sketch

This isn't final, but here's part of how Terragon is looking in my head.

Maybe he'll be an earthy brute. His face or head needs more....dirt. Or rocks or something.

More soon!

[quackmike]

Quick Radulanana mock up

Core things are there: slug body, slug head, slug eyes, slug foot, slug danger eye spots. 

Going to keep at him to clean him up some more. Or slime him up some more. Clean slime him. Another quick thanks too to Paletton!

You know what’d be fun? Slimey particle emitter trails behind him...

[quackmike]

Stanky Trails...

...from me you to:

Learning about particle emitters some more. Stankies now have a little particle emitter as they’re floating around, looking to choke out Interrobang. This is going to be a lot of fun!

That video helped out a ton, thanks Abhinav! I can’t wait to do more cool intense stuff during game play here.

Also, got the hook up for a better sine wave movement pattern from this Unity Answers post. Super rad.

[quackmike]

Coming soon via punching a Radulanana near you...

[quackmike]

"What is a mass?" - Count Dracula

"A miserable little pile of weight divided by it's gravitational acceleration on Earth!"

Okay, that sounded better in my head, but I'm going to keep it. Cuz I already typed it.

So, I added weight to the actors last night. "But, why Mike?" you ask yourself, "You've already got mass in there." That's true, but that value means nothing to me...I definitely don't know my mass off the top of my head. But my weight? Sure, I know that's 240 lbs. All muscle. And I know how much I'd like to make other things weigh too.

What can I do with weight? Well it's useful if we know what the gravity of Earth is...wait, we do. Unity has that bit in there already. So now when an actor is started, we can calculate it's mass from weight and gravity to then utilize when attacking or being attacked. Cool!

One gotcha: making sure to covert those pounds into kilograms to ensure everything is calculated the same.

[quackmike]

THE FORCE

Not that Star Wars kind, neither.

I got a lot done last night: applied ImpactReceivers to Interrobang and Radulananas and now they get hit back and forth. The values for the mass and force are turned way up and down, but you get the idea:

So now different characters can have different mass and their attacks can have different force. That’ll be really cool to have in place when Interrobang fights different types of bosses like Mr. Impatient vs the IRS Monster.

Also, you’ll see in there edge patrolling. I updated the 2D Platformer Raycast Controller to look for a ray miss and set that as a bool: offEdge. In the Patrol script, if one of the rays is off the edge, then it does a Flip() call as you see the yellow box (Radulanana) do at the beginning of the gif.

The Player class was also removed fully now that the ImpactReceiver has replaced the Knockback functions. I can check that box off the list now too, next to removing the Enemy class (see: previous post).

I’m really excited to have this portion done. Now I can re-couple up the health UI to reflect Interrobang’s health, and do a couple bug fixes in the attacks you can see happen in the gif.

More to come!