Super Capacitor Development Blog

This is a technical blog detailing the creation of a Quake style FPS Super Capacitor. Irregularly Updated.

[supercapacitordev]

I'm not the best artist in the world, but here is some Super Capacitor concept art I threw together. I'm working on getting some fairly ridiculous second hand placeholder models in. When I got prepared to make a private alpha release I realized that there was a lot of polishing that I needed. Right now I'm making sure different teams have different colors, that teams are properly displayed on a Leaderboard and that score is kept track of correctly. I'm not sure if I actually want this much detail in the models. That guy in the top left is unrelated. Time management is going to be difficult, as I try to wrap my tiny brain around calculus II. I'll update you when I can

[supercapacitordev]

WOAH DUDE

I GOT A NEW LEVEL PROTOTYPING WORKFLOW. IT USES ROBLOX BECAUSE I’M A CHILD.  I UNINSTALLED PROBUILDER BASIC BECAUSE IT FUCKING SUCKS AND FAKE LEGO IS WAY EASIER. ALSO WHY IS IT EASIER TO IMPORT A LEVEL FROM ROBLOX THAN BLENDER? SERIOUSLY, IT’S 1 TO 1.

I MADE AI THAT ISN’T TOTALLY BROKEN (A LITTLE BRAINDEAD, BUT THAT’S BECAUSE I NEED TO ADD STUFF, THE STUFF THAT’S THERE WORKS.)

NEW GUNS GOT ME LIKE 😍😍😍😍 (A SHOTGUN AND A REALLY SHITTY TASER DESIGNED PRIMARILY FOR BOT USE. IT’S SUPER DODGEABLE. I MADE THE TASER MODEL THREE YEARS AGO AND NEVER USED IT.)

I GOT BORED WITH HOW SLOW THE GAME PLAYED SO I DOUBLED EVERY STAT IN THE GAME.

I REMOVED LIMITED AMMO BECAUSE IT’S BORING. IT’LL STILL BE IN THE CAMPAIGN (LOL)

THINKIN’ ‘BOUT RELEASING SOMETHING SMALL IN A WEEK. WHICH WOULD BE THE FIRST TIME I’VE RELEASED A GAME IN OVER A YEAR.

THE NETCODE IS BROKEN, BUT THAT’S JUST KIND OF WHAT NETCODE DOES. (FOR SOME REASON ON ONE LEVEL ONLY WHICH IS NO DIFFERENT FROM ANY OTHER LEVEL THE GAME PLAYS LIKE YOUR INTERNET CONNECTION IS A CUP PHONE)

I MADE AN ACTUAL TEAM DEATHMATCH LEVEL, RATHER THAN A CUBE WITH A WALL WHICH HAS BEEN THE PRIMARY TESTING LEVEL FOR. UH. EVER.

I’VE BEEN TALKING WITH A FRIEND ABOUT CAT MODELS FOR THE CHARACTERS, B/C EVEN THOUGH THIS IS A GAME ABOUT CATS SO FAR THERE HAS BEEN 0 CATS.

I MADE A VERY CUT DOWN VERSION OF HOARD MODE CALLED SURVIVAL, BECAUSE THE ACTUAL VERSION IS COMPLETELY BROKEN. INSTEAD OF TARGETING A SPECIFIC THING THEY JUST LOOK FOR PLAYERS AND SHOOT.

SCREEN_SHOTS (FROM THE SHITTY LAPTOP I’M MAKING IT ON, IT LOOKS WAY BETTER ON A 1070, I ALSO NEED TO BAKE THE LIGHTING. AGAIN, I’LL DO THAT ON A 1070.)

1. tdm_courtyard, mid rocket jump

2. surv_talldark. You can see a bullet tracer in the distance there

3. surv_talldark. While trying to get an action shot of the shotgun firing mid air I got murdered by that taser round.

[supercapacitordev]

Hoard mode

After a short (a month-ish) break from development to focus on school work I’ve begun to refocus my efforts on Super Capacitor (probably for the duration of Winter break)

I now have a functional hoard mode which I’ll be calling “Wave siege”, which allows me to easily determine things like monster order, the amount being spawned, etc. Additionally, the spawning system has been reworked with the idea that different game-modes are going to need different spawning systems.

Additionally, I’ve drawn up and prototyped a simple map for the hoard mode game type

It turns out that this map is extremely small (or it feels that way without furniture) so I’ll be adding a parking lot and street for robots to come from.

Aside from that, it’s been all polished up for Unity 5.5, which had some slightly strange ramifications for clients, where the client wasn’t sure which character was their own. I forget exactly what I did to fix that.

This is all gearing up for an alpha demo on Game Jolt, once the map is fleshed out a little bit.

[supercapacitordev]

Teams, a Leaderboard, AI, Android, and Gear VR Support

Wow, I’ve been busy!

I’ve added teams and team specific spawns, a Leaderboard that shows scores for each player in each team, as well as team score as a whole, I’ve added a simple search-and-shoot bot that can use every weapon from here onward, and I’ve also got it running™ on Android and Gear VR.

I hope to have a hoard mode demo done by the 28th (a.k.a LexPlay, a game convention being hosted by the always wonderful RunJumpDev in Lexington Kentucky!)

[supercapacitordev]

Did I mention I do all my concept art sketches in M.S. Paint?

It has better touch-screen support than photoshop or gimp.

[supercapacitordev]

Done with the whole dev hiatus thing

I took a (long) break from developing Super Capacitor over the summer (oddly enough) that was effectively due to me not even touching my laptop when I have access to my desktop. Additionally, I went on a bit of a ROBLOX related development binge and released a game to mediocre reception but decent popularity (8000 plays in a week) that I’ve now basically abandoned entirely.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to make a post, but I think that now that I’ve worked on it as much as I have I’m overdue for one.

So, what’s changed?

The simplest modification was to movement. Now, movement is decided based on accelerations rather than velocities, which give it an extremely smooth feel (don’t worry, acceleration is very high on the ground, and nice and glidey for all that rocket jumping you’ll be doing in the air)

I’ve essentially ripped out the networking related guts from the original design, which used Unity’s default NetworkTransform which was, rather annoyingly, Client authoritative. So now I’ve created a server authoritative model where the player has apparent direct control over their client, but the server has the last say. The primary motive for doing this, aside from cheater prevention, was that in the initial game only hosts would respawn at the respawn points, which was a huge issue to say the least.

Additionally I’ve begun restructuring it, so now there’s only one object separate from the Character that represents the connection between the client and server, one which the player has complete and total control over. However, the player gets control of nothing else at all, they don’t even have direct control over the position and velocities of their Character. This means that a player isn’t allowed to, say, insist that it’s actually 4 kilometers above the spawn with twenty trillion health popping headshots left right and center. This is done for two reasons, encapsulation, and cheater prevention.

That’s it right now, however. After breaking everything, I’ve slowly been fixing it to how it was before the big change from client to server authority. Everything was revoltingly bugging up until today, but after being able to sit down at the library between my Calculus and Engineering classes and work on it for a couple hours straight I’ve actually got to a point where the multiplayer is properly functional. Yeah, I should have done this in the first place, but this is literally the first time I’ve ever worked with networking so mistakes happen. Thankfully, they’re corrected in a way that allows me to change things more easily next time.

[supercapacitordev]

I’ve been busy

So I haven’t really been posting, which is fine, because nobody watches this blog, but I’ve been implementing a few things.

First is weapon switching. I created a semi-placeholder system which worked fine server side about a week ago. Only client side, weapon models wouldn’t update. Now here’s the thing: weapon models and the weapons aren’t separate objects, that meant something wasn’t updating on the clients, and so I started digging. Turned out, the tools on the client had absolutely no association with the “same” tools on the server. So that’s when I start ripping things out, refactoring, changing to better suit encapsulation and the client/server model. Overall, I rewrote the structure and hierarchy of nearly 8 different scripts.

The other thing, which came naturally from the refactor, is that ammo counts are now visible on a loaded/reserve system. When you shoot ammo goes down and you can see how much you have left basically. All of that is relayed to your character.

Weapons now neither clip through walls when you walk up against them, nor are visible above everything for all players.

Art wise, I have the mesh for a new character, and the mesh for the coulomb cannon. The character needs to be textured, weight painted, and animated before being added.

I’m working on getting it onto android, but I had quite a few issues with that today.

Projectiles have been started, but weirdly only a small quantity of projectiles made are actually recreated on the client. Works 100% on the server though.

I also have a bug where dying causes a memory leak which will crash your computer if you don’t stop every Unity related process within 10 seconds, which is why I’ve done the safe thing and thrown the entire project up on bitbucket using git. Now everything’s in the cloud, and I don’t have to be in a constant state of fear that my computer breaks in half.

What was even worse was that I found out that setting an icon will cause Unity to crash when you build it, and the build not to run. This issue has been plaguing me for literally months, and I had absolutely no idea where it was coming from.

Once all these things are worked out I’m going to test it with a few friends. The game has proven itself over LAN, and connecting via external IP, so over the internet SHOULD be okay.

[supercapacitordev]

Respawning

I’ve started a respawning system & deathcam. It’s currently a little buggy, but once I’ve got the kinks (no, not the band) worked out I’ll put out a little alpha build.

Earlier today I actually got a little beta test of 5 simultaneous players going with minimal bugs. Albeit with a few connection issues, and a host only bug, which is probably caused by an abuse of the fact that between the client and server the dead variable is separate, but the host is both so that separation doesn’t exist

[supercapacitordev]

Networking Junk

Today I started working on a new User Interface to connect to different networks, and a main menu.

There will be server history, LAN scanning, the ability to host, change ports (current port is 57891, because of something I made in elementary school that literally only two people will even remember and probably won’t even). In the future I’d like to have official servers and a server browser, but my budget is, as of right now, $20 American in the form of cold hard cash.

In terms of hosting, you can choose between a public and a LAN server if you like (you do still need to port forward for public servers. I don’t have the money to pay for a Unity Relay server, because, again, I have enough money to maybe buy a 40 foot long slip ‘n slide second hand.

I have a WIP player model, but that will take some time to actually develop completely, as I still need to make hands, a head, textures/materials, and guess what: All of those things take me really long.

I’m working on the design for a new gun, which will basically be this game’s equivalent to a rocket launcher, although mechanically it’s more complicated.

Conceptually, the launcher charges up buoyant (no gravity) silicone balls via car battery to something like .1 Coulombs (which is actually a fuck ton, about 10x the amount that will kill you). Hitting the trigger causes an electromagnet to form in the back of the chamber launching the ball forward. Then the next ball is chambered and charged.

Mechanically, the charges will be repelled from each other. They’ll have a blast radius and explode on contact with a surface. If they hit metal, anything touching that metal will be hit. I feel like some interesting gameplay scenarios could develop with that.

Visually, the balls are going to have plasma arcs coming off of them, and will make a loud crackling sound. Based on your character (or team) color.

BTW, the team colors are #ff007f and #00ff7f (sort of like pink, sort of like green). Basically, I really like the hotline miami color scheme.

I’ll post the notebook sketch of that if I can find it. The 3d model will probably be made before the implementation, because that’s my weapon work-flow. The visual design helps me decide what it would do.

[vincyprincy]

Here’s the current build of the game

[supercapacitordev]

Reblogged from my main(?)

[supercapacitordev]

It begins!

Super Capacitor is an arena shooter game I'm making on the unity engine which will work on the Gear VR, PC, Android, and iOS. It's current release goals are 5+ nonlinear single-player maps, 1-3 multiplayer maps, and 7 weapons: Melee Single action Automatic Continuous Hitcone Arc projectile Linear projectile