#steamcraft

[alpha-beta-gamer]

Steamcraft is a vehicular combat game where you build, drive and fight your own unique vehicles in multiplayer online battles. 

Read More & Join In The Open Beta (Steam)

[teenwolfficrec]

archive

by Steamcraft (AO3)

Pairing: Derek Hale x Stiles Stilinski

Chaptered

Word count: 9k

Rating: Mature

Summary: From Stiles at 9:08pm: druk*

From Stiles at 9:08pm: druck**

From Stiles at 9:08pm: DRUNK

To Stiles at 9:09pm: Congratulations on achieving basic spelling.

Read Here!

-> Follow me for more fic recs!

[xlerotl]

i’m not dead! here’s some gaytobers i didn’t post

[danielstuddert-blog]

SteamCraft: A postmortem

The SteamCraft prototype, a project made for my game design course, is done and dusted.

I now have a piece of work completed that overall I have mixed feelings about which I would like to dig a little deeper into the reasons behind them. 

I promised this a day or two after Day 71 of the 100 days of Maya project. But life got a little in the way, both of my stepdaughters have birthdays within a week of one another, so between that working on the next module of the game design course and picking up a handful of extra shifts at work, my time to rant on projects was cut a little short. 

Preamble aside lets’s get started.

What Went Well

I got everything done, well all of the mechanics I wanted to implement anyway. I successfully created the three types of bots I wanted in the game, which I have spoken about before so I'll just glaze over them in this instance and just leave a link to click if any more info is wanted. 

Buzzsaw Development

GunBot Introduction

Boomer Introduction

Speaking on the bots this was the first project that I have put in any sort of effort into 3d modelling as most of my previous projects have been 2D in nature so with the help of the 100 days of Maya project and the time I spent creating the models in this project I have definitely seen an improvement in my 3D modelling skills.

What Went Badly

I do feel like the name of the prototype could be converted to something like BloatCraft as there were many things that I could remove and in essence have the same type of game. Or even ConfusionCraft as I found it difficult to present the goals of the game to new players.

Starting with the Pikmin inspired character controller:

I could have done the same thing with a much simpler UI based design which could have been setup in less time and would have caused a lot less confusion about what was going on. Where having the player controller added a lot of confusion in return for no gameplay improvement. Bug fixing the issue with the player movement being blocked by the bots also cut into valuable polish time.

The two-lane map setup:

Another point of confusion and frustration to people that were playing the prototype. A single lane would have removed some of the ‘noise’ of the map giving a clearer goal to the players, especially people who were playing it for the first time.

Removing these two ‘features’ that I decided to bring into the game would not only have removed some of the confusion I was dealing with when people were playing the game but also freeing up a considerable amount of time to focus more on polishing the balance of the game.

Conclusion

I learnt a few important lesson throughout this process, firstly that even if you can get something completed within a given time frame, the more complex the something is the more time it takes to get it feeling just right. And feel is such an important concept to nail.

Secondly, life gets in the way and time that you thought you had gets converted into something else, sometimes that thing is to do with family sometimes it is wasted on procrastination.

The third most important thing I took away from this was, which does tie into the first point a little is that refining a small thing getting it to feel right is a much more enjoyable in production terms for me and that in the future I will focus my efforts on defining and polishing a single mechanic instead of a mess of interconnected ones.

[xlerotl]

8.) Arguing About Which Movie to Watch 9.) Fanboying About Something They All Like 10.) Giving Advice About Which Dress/Shirt to Wear 11.) Ruffling the Other’s Hair

a 4 day streak of the good mlm/wlw solidarity. amazing

[xlerotl]

sketched my girls between comms..

[xlerotl]

she's back at it again.... for the first time....

[danielstuddert-blog]

SteamCraft Update: Boomer Edition

Introducing the third, and final Bot for the SteamCraft prototype the Boomer, who wanders harmlessly down a lane until it meets an enemy.

Then it not so harmlessly explodes.

This one was quick to implement with the current code base that I have setup though there were a few little issues that cropped up.

Friendly fire was not really the intention for this one...

There was also a little bit of tweaking to make sure that the explosion radius was big enough to hit things that were within range but not to make it so it destroys everything on the map.

Part of the week was also spent doing a round of testing within class where the major feedback for the project was I keep getting blocked by my guys, so I spent some time learning a little more about Unity’s Navmesh, Navmesh obstacles in particular and fixed the swarming issue by allowing players to push past their Bots.

Another bit of feedback was that the fact that you constantly had to reposition your cursor when trying to give the same command to multiple Bots. I have started to address this by having a given amount of time pass before the reset to player position happens instead of it happening instantly.

Other feedback included the character controller feeling sluggish, there being too many Bots spawning too quickly, the Gunbot being too strong making the others not worth Upgrading to and other balance related issues. So in this, the final stretch of the project, my time will be spent on making little tweaks to everything to make things feel just right.

Well better than they did before the feedback session at any rate as I think that to get balance 100% perfect will be a task that takes a much longer time that that which we have allocated and even then, myself or players will probably find ways that the project can be improved.