Siege Weapon Simulator

A game about physics and destruction. For questions and business inquiries, e-mail [email protected], or leave an ask.

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Had my friend come over today

I showed him my game, and he showed me his. He's definitely got skills with Blender, so I definitely want him on board with this project. Gonna have him make a few weapons while I'm busy hanging out with my girlfriend this week. I'm excited to have some extra help!

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While I should have gone to bed a while ago... progress has been made, and I am happy. This is exactly the direction I wanted the wall destruction to go, and the performance of that many physics objects actually isn't bad! I'm halfway to making it even more efficient already, and while I had to do everything in the picture myself, I'm already on the way to making that kind of large scale collapse occur automatically (I believe I mentioned that in one of my earlier posts). Hooray for late night programming. Also I almost forgot to post this, I got sidetracked again. Good job me.

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More programming stuff!

Took a crash course in LINQ, it's pretty useful and quite easy since I took SQL before. I don't know why I never learned it sooner!

Just getting some extra programming in since I've had a bit of an itch, probably because my job has been keeping me from doing anything lately... So yeah, not much got done with the game over the last week. My girlfriend is also visiting this week, so not much will get done in the near future either =P

This is why I need to hurry up, get my game on Kickstarter, hope to get funded so I can quit working my crappy retail job, and do what I love to do for a living.

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It's 2 am

and I have work tomorrow. Why am I still programming?

Curse my career choice.

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First taste of VR sickness

take breaks, kids!

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Coolest. Thing. Ever.

I'm quite satisfied with my purchase. I wonder how long it'll take to implement Rift support for my game...

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Just did a few improvements today, nothing special. Finished walling in the town, updated some prefabs, made new ones (like the gates at the far left of the picture and at the back of the castle), and changed up some code to fix bugs and improve a few things.

Still waiting to talk more with my new friend from work before continuing with modelling weapons. I haven't been lazy! I suppose in the meantime I can add in a player character, and work with some inputs in preparation for having the weapons in-game. I might also work on a menu screen, I will need that at some point. I'd like to get some pre-tech-demo versions out with some play testers before I head to Kickstarter. I've come a long way, but there's still a lot to do!

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Those times when you feel like an idiot

Gotta love when something you've been pulling your hair out over is solved by simply converting Degrees to Radians.

Yup.

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Finally got the Unity Pro upgrade, it adds shadows! I also threw in some free buildings off the asset store, and changed to a gray stone wall. Just thought it'd look better. Didn't get far with making a catapult, blender is still annoying me. Also I met a guy at work who does his own games as well, and he has quite a bit more experience with Blender than I do, so I might end up recruiting him. That's to be determined.

I should also be ordering my Oculus Rift dev kit tomorrow, really looking forward to that! I don't see any reason not to add Rift support, as I'm really looking forward to VR. I would love to provide another experience for those who are investing in it.

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Yes, more wall destruction stuff. It is one of the most essential features, after all. I will still get to making weapons this week though, possibly even tomorrow!

So, I finally fixed (most of) the issues I had with joints, and now bricks will actually stick to surrounding bricks! Really improves the look of things, I feel, so I decided to post this quick update. I spent a good portion of the day just coding; affixing bricks to each other really makes the wall harder to punch through (took probably 10 shots at point-blank to get that hole in the picture...), so I started implementing some "tracking" for each 2x1m block in order to put in some random structural failures over time. Here's how it'll work: if two horizontal blocks have been hit, the block above them will be weakened (basically just swapped out for a bunch of bricks). If three horizontal blocks have been broken up, then the next two up in the pyramid will be weakened as well. Walls tend to hold themselves up in an archway, after all. However, weaken the wall enough horizontally, and it'll fail the rest of the way up.

I'm dreading having to make all of that efficient enough. Oh well, I know it can be done! Anywho, waking up at 5 a.m. tomorrow morning for my other job. I'm dreading that even more...

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Was busy with my other job the last few days, had surgery yesterday, and got frustrated with texturing issues (since everything is a placeholder currently, I'm going to wait to fix all that later and focus on features now. I think doing so will save me a lot of brain cells). So, I finally put together the wall with full destruction and everything, and it looks amazing for the early state it's in (those bricks hanging on the right side of the first picture are actually hanging there; the screenshot wasn't taken while they were falling or anything). I just need to sort out some bugs, fix colliders and things, do some cleanup with physics calculations (the wall itself is quite efficient, but all those bricks having physics is quite CPU heavy), and make sure some of the bricks actually stay in place and don't leave huge corners showing. However, I'm satisfied enough with how it currently is, and I'm going to finally get to making some weapons this coming week. I'm tired of shooting balls from the camera, I want to use an actual siege weapon! Whoohoo!

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Been working on wall destruction more the last couple of days, and finally came up with a method that looks to be reasonably efficient and that I'm happy with (also learning more about texturing... I hate it). This evening, I'll be wrapping it all up into a large wall segment prefab to place wherever I want (I'll actually have a castle made soon!), and the next couple of days will be setting up the interaction between smaller sections of the wall so the whole wall can have a chance of collapse (which would conveniently also give me gameplay data, to pick up whether a wall is sufficiently destroyed). Perhaps next week I can actually get on to making some weapons! I'm happy with the progress so far. I also messed with some terrain stuff and it looks quite pretty already. I'll post some pictures of that once I actually have a castle put into it, so ignore the blatant testing graphics in these first few pictures lol

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I suppose it's time to make a development post. I just got back from vacation this weekend and finally got started implementing things for this game I've envisioned. The concept is mostly in the name, but I'll put off saying any more about it until later (don't take it as being a hardcore simulator though; making it fun is first and foremost).

About me: I'm a recreational programmer with nothing more than an associates degree, and I've got absolutely no game making experience. Yay! I am getting used to Unity by now though, and slowly growing familiar with what I can do coding-wise for the game engine. It's quite different from the windows applications I'm most familiar with.

So, with about 20 hours of time in Unity total, I've got some basic wall destruction, crappy placeholder textures, a debug camera that allows me to shoot some almost half-meter wide projectiles at stuff, and errors abound. I'm nowhere near happy with the wall destruction (not to mention the performance...), but I'm happy with how it's coming for what little time I've spent, and it will only get better with time. I've got a lot of work to do yet, so I'd best get back to that now. Look for another dev post next week.

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Well then.

It begins...