Superstick Game

Super Stick is a side scrolling platformer. Gamers will see a brief video during the loading screen of our main character, Super Stick's reaction to a nuclear attack at the food factory where he works. Players will then be placed into the story by controlling Super Stick. Early levels are simple as players are introduced to game, environment, and enemy mechanics. Super Stick can walk, run, run fast, climb, swing, slide, get phased, and strike with his stick using multiple combos. Each enemy has special abilities and new enemies will be constantly introduced through the progressing levels.

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3 Way Camera - Independent Effects

The look and feel in #SuperStickGame is quite unique in the sense that we wanted to create a cartoon style game and also keep a dark style atmosphere. There were many iterations the team went through to achieve a blur effects depending on where objects are placed on the screen. Our first attempt was to do all of the blurs right from #Photoshop, of course developers objected right away knowing how we could use the power of shaders to achieve the effect; after many iterations we decided to have the game setup with three levels of depth:

Gameplay Layer

Middle Layer

Background Layer

With three layers we wanted to keep the camera focus on the gameplay so blur was 0%, camera on middle layer has a blur at a 40%, and camera on background layer has a 20% blur.  

This setup enables us to have flexibility in adjusting effects independent to the camera selected. We could modify the blur in the middle layer without affecting any object placed in the gameplay or background layers. The camera was setup by selecting "Depth Only" as clear masks, "Culling Masks" should include the objects layer you would like to render, and "Near" and "Far" must be set depending on the range you want your camera to be able to view. (We did the same procedure in the other 2 cameras)

The Camera options setup in our Gameplay Layer :

Results from including all 3 cameras in the editor :

Results in Game Mode:

Cheers

Dilmer

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Level Design - Our Experience

Level design is to me one of the most challenging aspect of game development; many could say this is one of the components of game development where there isn't really a right and wrong way to approach it.

What I've learned by going through the process is that there are certain fundamentals to adhere to. For example here's a list I adhere to when designing a level.

1- Observation. If I feel like I can't really come up with ideas sitting in front of my computer; I mainly go out and observe an environment; for our game I mainly go to the factories close to my house and see how they work; I take a closer look at the architecture, weather at that point in time, and surroundings.

2- Asking a lot of questions. If you think you can't come up with any other fun levels or they currently do not make much sense, ask yourself questions and put yourself in the shoes of your hero, even on the shoes of your enemies. Ask questions such as:

What am I doing here?

What would happen if I could jump higher?

Can I fly?

Can I slide?

Is the environment underground or outdoors?

Etc... etc...

3- Grab a pencil and piece of paper. Can't count how many times I began in the level editor; designing levels before I even knew what I was going to create. This task can save you A LOT of time.

4- Play test your levels. I always come up with great ideas while playing my levels, I tried to experiment as much as I can with my level and always come up with something new; the new can be an environment change, or even a new mechanic made by a mistake I made.

Level Design is a complex process, but the key is to keep your levels simple, when I say simple I don't mean boring whatsoever but get your levels working before creating a level like the ones in Halo or GTA.

Cheers

Dilmer

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Using Unity3d - 2D Colliders

At the beginning of the project I began to test all available 2D Colliders in Unity to determine and also learn which one would fit different game assets. For example I began to explore all the options and also wanted to keep our game as optimized as possible. So when setting up colliders for platforms I began my adventure by testing how Edge vs Polygon collider 2D would work, keep in mind that our platforms are not just made of straight lines like the ones in Mario, instead our platforms are pretty diverse just like shown in the image below:

So when looking at the sprite above you can easily tell how you would choose between an Edge or Polygon collider 2D, I began my testing by setting up an edge collider as follows:

This looks beautiful right? Just no more than 6 vertices? Well when I saw this I said to myself "Dilmer this is what you're using for all platforms" but that didn't really happened, so what happened? it looks clean and optimized right? It does but our "Player" in many cases was able to go through platforms and not as an mechanic, instead as a buggy feature. So there goes edge colliders. 

The next collider I wanted to experiment with was a Polygon Collider 2D, which I did and looked like this:

Mmm but why so many vertices? Well a polygon collider will automatically try to draw the sprite shape, sure you can optimize it by selecting each vertice you want to remove, but YOU CAN'T SELECT multiple vertices, no instead you have to do one by one! wait but I have more than a 100 different platforms? Yes that would take forever! ok so what should I do? Well this is what I did.

Went to the #UnityAssetStore and purchased 2D ColliderGen, what for? well our game needs to be optimized and I don't want to have to go through 100 or more sprites and have to clean up all the polygon colliders which I could do but it would take me away from my focus which in my case is releasing the game on time and focus in the game and no the tools, anyways this is how the platform looks like when applying an "AlphaMeshCollider" which is how they call their script.

Did I have to select every single point to get to this shape? Nope all I had to do was use two sliders "AlphaOpaqueThreshold" and "OutlineVertexCount" that's it!

Cheers hope you find this helpful as I did :)

Dilmer

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Don't let go of your passion!

Like everyone else I tend to lose focus once in a while when my life revolves around #programming where in general and lately more around #gamedev specially when in average I sleep around 4 to 6 hours a day.

My routine goes from waking up early in the morning and going to a programming day job which means I am working 8 to 9 hours shift to mainly pay for bills and keep money coming in, once I get out of work I spend around 3 to 4 hours with my lovely wife and baby which I love with all my heart, right after putting baby to bed I quickly run down to my office, start up the coffee machine and begin looking at #SuperStickGame #Trello backlog to see what's next to do in game development. 

If you do that everyday from Monday through Friday's it really can get old and in times very discouraging, specially when you go out and watch other people just live their day to day life and no even bother to do anything extra or take an extra mile that #IndieGameDevs have to go through.

Keep in mind that by no means I'm saying you have to have extra projects to be motivated or that some people are lazy or don't have dreams, we all have busy lives but some of us have a different vision and passion in which sometimes can take you to a level that can definitely be unhealthy.

What do I do to keep passion levels going up?

I often look back at early #SuperStickGame prototypes that I've created about 1 year ago and evaluate progress over the year, I also keep an archive of all the testing level videos and often watch them to see where the game can improve on, I also follow many great game developers in #Twitter and feel so proud when I see #gamedev guy with a super busy life work through years of development in a small team and having to support a family and still yet be able to release a beautiful, playable, and awesome game... Those are some of the things that keep me going!

To me passion is the key to becoming good at anything you've ever dream of. I often think that we as individuals have the same potential and opportunities in life, even when we're not born with a skill or have are gifted at "x" as other's do naturally. If you work on it you can overtime train yourself and gain the experience required to become good at anything.

I remember my early years when I started going through college with a major in Software Engineering and taking a class on C++ class, for the first 5 minutes of the class I was already giving up, asking myself questions about how will I ever be able to understand all those "(*678%^&&^%" codes and make sense of them, worse when I took an assembly class in college, I was in the edge of giving up, however in the back of my mind there was that dream of becoming one day not just a developer but also a Game Developer.

To resume guys, keep your passion up! don't let anything or anyone tell you what you can't or can do, always believe in yourself and learn from mistakes, look at mistakes in a good way since you know that without mistakes you wouldn't have ever learned what you know now. 

If you have a project or idea and you have the though of success just do it and start it and remember that times go by very quickly and if you don't start now you may never start it.

Cheers 

Dilmer