#tri-wing unity

[executabledream]

Thoughts for the future

These past few weeks have been kind of strange for me, as I’ve felt a strange mix of emotions while working on Tri-Wing. Perhaps I had issues with the code at first, and I began to feel uneasy about the stability of the game, or perhaps it was due to my perfectionist tendencies and lack of experience that halted my progress and created a sense of frustration. I’m really not too sure, but what I do know is that over the last couple of weeks I have not been fully satisfied with my work. I found myself asking questions like “What are you doing to do if it isn’t up to your standard?”. I really just felt so incompetent.

A few nights ago I was clearing my email inbox when I saw my old Alpha code for the game “Duelyst”, a game in which I drew some inspiration from, and decided to give it a whirl. I got through some of the tutorials and decided to stop playing it because I knew I would love this game. I thought to myself “Why can’t I feel this way about my own game?”, yet something was still missing. It wasn’t the fact that the game was still incomplete and the card system had not even begun yet, nor was it the fact that various combat mechanics are still in early development as well, but it was the simple fact that I felt insecure. I still kind of do, honestly. My game lacks a real lobby due to my own inability and personal constraints, it doesn’t have the most stable netcode, but it does work, it lacks many crazy online features and cloud saves that most games have, and I feel bad for not being able to do that much. It’s one game and I’m one newbie, so it’s to be expected, but I still feel bad about it.

I’ve been trying to find the inner motivation to work on this game once my exams are through with next week, and it was so hard. There’s still so much work to be done! I need to begin the card system, then I have to make card attacks (which includes coding them, doing the art and animations, etc), then I have to add all of the sound! After that, I have to port it to Android and try to get local Bluetooth multiplayer working in the future and then make a website! There’s so much to do, it’s just so stressful, when I could just be spending my free time doing other stuff. 

I’ve been watching a lot of videos and reading articles about Indie games. Few of them ever “make it” in the gaming world, and often times they just get lost in a sea of games. I thought about how to present this game. Do I move away from the pixel art look? Do I add some crazy features? While I have considered a material (flat/solid) design, I don’t think I could change what I already have going for me. I like the look of this game. It means a lot to me. The style is strongly reminiscent of the Megaman series, which is something I wish to pay some homage to. 

Speaking of Megaman, I actually played some Battle Network 6 with my buddy today. We grabbed our GBAs and played a good 5-6 sets, and I forgot how much I loved it. I forgot how crazy the dynamics were and how fun it was just to shout some stupid stuff at my opponent cuz we were having a good time. It made me reflect really hard on Tri-Wing, because my original purpose was to capture that essence. Tri-Wing won’t have super big lobbies. Tri-Wing won’t have super complex matchmaking systems or anything like that. The most important part of Tri-Wing that I will try my best to create is the gameplay, because I want people to enjoy that the most. I have to accept the fact that I am still just a new guy in game development with no real training and that of all projects, my first one will not be perfect, and that’s ok. It doesn’t mean that I won’t try my very best into making it the best game I can, and you can bet that I will. I don’t ever see myself not improving on this game as I grow older, because I want to see this game evolve with my skills as a game developer. I hope you guys will understand that, and I thank you all for the support. The card system is coming up next.

[executabledream]

Ok so I’ve been pretty busy with school and work, and this just hasn’t been going smoothly. There’s always errors in which I cannot explain with the lobby. In theory I should be able to get it set up, but it just chooses not to work with my game. I can get it working on like every sample scene, but just not on my game. I decided to make the game just work via direct connection without a lobby. Up top is a screenshot of the current menu. The right-side of the menu changes depending on what you press on the left, so it initially starts off as blank. The deck editor also comes up and down on click, and I just need to hook up the buttons. I’ve also done some general code trimming in order to up the overall efficiency as well.

I have exams for the next week and a half, so I can’t work on this as much as I would hope. This workaround will have to suffice for now, because I’m tired of not making progress. I hope this is the only time where I’ll have to do this, but I MUST move on. If the demand for the lobby system grows high enough, I’ll try to update the game ASAP.

[veakthegeek]

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtbuLD84aZk) VIDEO, BITCHES  HOMIES.

[executabledream]

I forgot to install a gifmaker on my Surface, so I’m going to make due without it today. So yesterday I went to my favorite coffee shop and do some clean up work with the project. The collect button now works and can unlock card slots for 5 fuel per turn! Now that I look back at this picture, I forgot to include the actual number for the remaining fuel LOL. I’ll do that tonight. The Disk Drive also smoothly slides in and out of the screen when called, and the battle UI is basically done. Next up are lobbies! So basically for an online lobby, I had no clue where to begin. I tried looking at Unity’s example lobby, and it was far too overcomplicated for my tastes. I found an older asset that they made with a simple and customizable UI element. I’m basically gonna modify the living hell out of it and go from there. It’s looking like the lobby will be filled with player element like this, and people should have the option to scroll around to find a player to battle. ETA one week. (Don’t expect it to look pretty) Next thing I have left in the UI department is the card/deck editor minus the card logic. I think I want it to be a window that can pop in and out of the screen like the Disk Drive does in order to make it feel unified when sitting in the main menu or while waiting in a lobby. I still draw the damn thing out first, so I guess I’ll be doing that tonight haha. ETA two days. Things are going a lot smoother than I had anticipated, although it IS admittedly taking longer due to my personal life and school. I have no control in that, so it is what it is. Later tonight I’ll have some pictures about my planning process! I am loving the way this game is progressing, and I can slowly start to feel myself becoming a slightly more knowledgeable coder. It feels incredible.

[executabledream]

Hehehe I couldn’t resist. More updates coming soon!

[executabledream]

Saving, please wait...

I began working on persistent data and game saving the last few days, and I ran into the weirdest bug. While working on saving data throughout my game, there was this glitch where player 1 would always overwrite player 2′s data when battling! I’ve had no previous experience in creating save data, so this took me a solid four hours or so to figure out. Long story short, I just messed up some control logic was all. The way that data saves and loads inside of most games within Unity (to my knowledge) is done via persistent data. Simply put, a GameObject that stores player data hangs out from the beginning of the game until you close the application, and it doesn’t disable or destroy itself while the game changes scenes. It also has the ability to read and write to a file in order to access your data in between sessions, so you can close your game and resume later. It’s that simple, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever! I am pretty stoked to have that out of the way, however. I need to add a couple of UI tweaks to the menu now that saving works properly. The way it’s looking, I’m probably keeping relatively basic looking UI elements outside of actual combat for now. I’ll update them as pre-alpha rolls out. This will give me something to work on as I get feedback from other players when the time is right.  Next thing I want to discuss is the website. I’ve been looking into Wordpress lately, but I have little knowledge on website creation. I was thinking about picking up a book about Wordpress or a website creation for complete moron’s book or something. A website is pretty important for a game like this, and even more so now due to the state of my theoretical networked lobby. So after a little bit of research, it seems that making a dedicated server is going to be a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. So difficult, that I might not even include it in the early versions of my game. players will have to stick to direct IP connections for the time being. Once I make a lobby scene for TW, I should be able to run some stress tests and see how many players can be supported on one instance of a game. Theoretically, an unlimited amount of players should be able to connect to one game and they can act as a pseudo-dedicated server. I’ll have to see for myself in a little bit. I’m spending most of my free time thinking of solutions for this, in the event that this becomes an actual problem and I cannot have over, say 10 people on one server. Ideally, I’d love to have a few hundred players on one instance of a game at a time on some beefy server hosted somewhere, but I’m not sure how viable that actually is. We’ll have to see, as I should start making the lobby scene this weekend.  It feels really nice having the ability to save in my game though. Not just because reading/writing data and accessing it across a network is pretty fuckin’ dope, but because it’s visible progress. I won’t lie, not seeing immediate progress all of the time really bogs my mood down. It discourages the hell out of me having spent so much time on the UI, and seeing so little progress because a lot of my time was spent tweaking small things. It has to be done and all, but it’s frustrating. This little coding session really lifted my spirits back up, and I’m ready to lead this thing into pre-alpha. I’m still shooting for the end of the month, but it’s looking less and less likely. The realistic goal is around the end of October, with the Kickstarter campaign beginning in December, and Alpha towards January. I’m so ready to see a completed version of this game, because today was a good reminder that this project isn’t just some tutorial project or practice code, but an actual game in development. 

[executabledream]

Ok, so I’ve given up on the whole “day XX” things. In all honesty, I usually spend multiple days working on Update posts that you see anyways. So yea, this is an update! I’ll make up crazy names for them after this post haha. So on Thursday, I actually went to work in my school’s quiet study room and spent a good seven hours working on my game. Oddly enough, I still ran into problems with sending the info over the network. I spent another three hours at home and two more on Friday figuring it out. A lot of it was trial and error, and even more of it were dumb mistakes. I try to keep my code as simple as possible, as I do a lot of backtracking due to my “freestyle coding”. This is a gift and a curse, because my development is quicker than usual, until I run into a problem and I have to redo a shit ton of logic. Anyways, I ran into this issue where player animations would not sync. I spent HOURS messing with my code, when I forgot to check my Animator Controller pictured above. I was pissed. So pissed. Like, “Fuck this stupid ass game, I’m playing so much Hearthstone that I’ll eventually get pissed at that game and come back to my own fucking game” kind of pissed.  I got the versus text working as stated before, as well as a round counter, player win counter, and a win/loss counter. There’s also a screen fader that turns the screen white for a second in between rounds and a reset command that puts all of the parts of the gameboard back to their original settings to start a fresh round. Next I have to hook up the Fuel Gauge and and make the online lobby. Oh, and I need to start looking into making an early deck editor (which will be barebones as hell since I have no card system yet). School is picking up a little, but I should have the first parts done by the end of the week. I keep saying that, but we’ll see how things go. I need to stop playing so much HS and get back to work. Ugh, this game is a drug. I’m still happy to see progress though. It’s beginning to feel like a real game, finally.

[executabledream]

Day 30: BLANK VS BLANK

So before I begin, allow me to say this post is being done on mobile because I am too fucking tired/lazy to turn on my main PC at 2AM. Anyways, let's begin with the update. So I finally got around to adding the versus animation in the game, and holy shit I ran into so many problems. It took a solid four hours for the animation to play on both players' screens, and it didn't do anything after it played! I started this at 4PM, and I didn't get it working until 12AM or so. Now it behaves the way it should! Basically, the player joining the room is frozen until both players have entered and then the animation plays. At the end of the animation is an RPC that triggers the Disk Drive menu to open up, and then it seamlessly flows into the game's turn system. Pretty freakin' incredible for a newbie, if I do say so myself. Second thing that I've taken care of is the online connection issue that I've never told anyone about. Due to the way I created the network algorithm, there was some logic in the script that would stay "stuck" into believing that a player was always online until you closed the game. What this meant was that if a server host left the game, he/she couldn't rehost another game until they shut the program down because the game's memory still believed it was online! I left it this way due to a bug in Unity's 5.1.1 beta, but it's since been fixed, and I took the time to update my code as well. This is convenient now because I don't need to close and reopen the game every time I have to test something...and also because that's 100% unacceptable in a game haha! There is still so much I have to do though. I still need a main menu so that the game can transition with ease and player's can add their name into the game, I still need to have the round logic and the win/loss logic integrated, the Collect button needs some logic too, and the fuel gauge needs to be hooked up, and then there's also the lobby. Actually, let's talk about the lobby real quick. So I couldn't help my impatience, and I went ahead and checked out the lobby example. It has some very valuable information, but it also uses Unity's MatchMaker service as I expected. The problem with the sever is the low CCU of 100. It's OK now, but what happens if my game takes off? Basically, CCU is the number of players allowed online at one given moment determined by this number (more or less). It's more technical than that, but for this case, that's all you need to know. In the example however, they did show the potential for a dedicated server ran within Unity! I might be able to just host massive servers and have players converge on those, which is great. We'll have to see in the near future though. It's looking pretty bright though. Before I do that, I must finish the rest of the menu. This is taking much longer than I had wanted it to. School is also kicking up a little, so I don't have as much free time anymore. I'm thinking of spending my whole day working on TW this Thursday, in exchange for the weekend to do nothing but work and study for my college courses. I better hit a major breakthrough on Thursday!