Game 2 design process (Part 4)

It's been a while since my last update which is basically because of the fact that I pretty much haven't done anything on the game in the past week or more. Which yes I know is a Bad Thing but you get that.

Anyway the progress that I have made so far is to get the important assets done. The terrain is done, however I have a feeling I am going to need to make it much bigger than it currently is. I've made a custom skybox for it, which is just a gradient colour at the moment though I'd like to add some clouds. I'll probably add a sun and sun flare if I get the chance. I have created both a tower where the loot is stashed, and the bloater that flies into it to collect the loot.

Behold the glory:

The aim is to make steam come out of those vents in game.

The tower does end up being super super dark in Unity, and some of the textures flipped about a bit, so I'll have to work on that.

The game itself, unfortunately, is not progressing quite as well. I am having issues repurposing the demo airplane code etc to work with the bloater. I'm also having issues with getting the turret's bullets to actually hit the plane as it flies past. The turret can detect the plane, and it shoots when it gets in range, and then the bullet flies in a lovely parabolic trajectory and doesn't actually hit anything. I've tried fixing it but pretty much all the code I can find is either in Javascript which I'm having issues in translating to C#, adds additional errors to my existing code, or is just plain incomprehensible. I'm also spending a lot of time trying to work out the physics for how the bloater is going to fly using the plane script's variables.

Currently I'm researching how to get the turrets to spawn in random locations in the terrain region, so every time the game is played they'll be in a different spot.

I think my main issue with this game is that I'm just not feeling fun and excited about it like I was with the prehistoric one, I think mainly because this one is much more difficult to bring about. I may have overreached with it, I'm thinking.

Game 2 design process (Part 3)

I'm currently working on getting some assets created for the steampunk game.

Like the last game, it really doesn't require terribly much in the way of assets. Currently my asset list looks like this:

Game Object Asset List
High priority	Mid priority	Low priority
turret	pirate galleon	background animations (birds flying, etc)
cutter	pickup object (treasure)
tower	turret animations
pickup object (health)	cutter animations
terrain

I've made a turret in 3DS Max, which didn't turn out too badly. I may need to add some more steampunky type textures or gadgets to it, but otherwise it's pretty good.

When I get a bit more progressed I want to add some animations to it, a bobbing in the air one where the balloon constricts and expands slightly, and a gun firing one where the barrels go in and out. That's not a high priority at the moment, however.

In code class yesterday we looked at navmesh and basic enemy AI interactions. With the help of Paul I got a simple script for a stationary enemy (ie, the turrets) to look at a designated target. I then added to this to make the turret fire a "bullet" at them when they get within a certain range. At the moment it fires 50 million bullets at the target but at least it's on the right track! I'll add a delay and a destroy to the script to cut that down.

The next object to design is the pirate cutter, the "bloat", and tomorrow I'll probably also start playing with the terrain.

Game 2 design process (Part 2)

So, progressing with the steampunk game.

I've been collecting a fair few reference images to try and get my head around the theme and look. Most of them are airship related as essentially that's what the game's about:

 

I have a few tower ones as well, I'm still trying to figure out the tower look:

And I have a random collection of piratey, skull, cog, and tool type things, which will be for iconography and the like:

 


I have essentially decided to go with the airship pirate thing. I've also written a quick background for it:

The scan got a bit cut off, but it reads:

Rumour has it that the Order of the Adamantine Cog (my titular "establishment") has amassed a vast treasure and stashed it in a mighty tower on a lonely island in the Ocean of Winds. (I haven't thought of a name for the tower yet...) As the fastest airship pilot of your trusty pirate crew, it is your job to "liberate" the loot, but be warned! The Order expects such action and has protected its tower with airborne turrets. Fly fast to avoid the turrets, recover the loot, and return to your pirate galleon to share the booty!

Style wise I'd like to have it looking all nice and airy, very influenced by the early Columbia stages of Bioshock Infinite. The Order is all neat and tidy and regimented. All their ships look the same.

The pirates on the other hand are free and individualistic. Their stuff isn't as shiny, but it gets the job done. With a bit of tinkering, a la Millennium Falcon!

I've also done some sketches of how I'm thinking of things at the moment.

 


Like I said, the tower stuff isn't nearly done yet, and I still haven't figured out a pirate galleon design. However I'm pretty happy with my turret sketches and I like the final pirate cutter (the one with the spiney thing).

I've also been thinking of a possible title and am leaning towards either Bloater Ace or Bloater Hoist. A "bloater" is a steampunk term for a small pirate-style steam driven dirigible. "Ace" has the usual connotation especially for flying. "Hoist" in this case refers to stealing, especially shoplifting.

Decisions decisions!

Game 1 design process (Part 7)

Okay after another day's work this game is done. Yay!

In Friday's class I spoke to Mark and quickly sorted out the issue with the UI not loading new levels. The issue turned out to be operator cause, naturally *rolls eyes*. For future reference, don't drag the script onto the on click area, drag the game object with the script attached onto it.

Mark also helped with getting the countdown timer working with text, and I adapted that to get the health counter working too.

For prettiness, I added a particle effect to my tar pit so now it's really obvious it's the destination point.

I added sounds as well - a random array of "ows" for when the bubble hits the thorn bushes, and a looping piece of background music. The background music I found on Freesound.org and played with it until I got it sounding more or less how I wanted it to. Credits page was updated with the details, and all is good.

I am currently considering adding some PlayerPrefs to the game. The game is finished as it stands presently, however. Yay!

Now onto the next one!

Game 2 design process (Part 1)

So I don't have to do a massive catch up for this one, here's the details on my second game of the semester.

The game is required to be of a steampunk genre and with a theme of "rescue". Everything else seems to be up for grabs.

I was actually a bit disappointed by the change as I had an awesome idea for an underwater game. Oh well. It's in my ideas book, now.

Anyway. I've been playing a lot of Bioshock Infinite lately so I had the idea of airships stuck in my head. So I thought it would be kind of cool to do a flying airship game.

I was warned by Mark that having it in an open world would be difficult, but me being stubborn as I am, I really want to go open world!

So, steampunk. Steampunk is essentially stuff that is Victorian and sci-fi at the same time. The thing with steampunk is that it's both grand and grungy simultaneously. There is steam, yes, but there is also gilt. It's a challenge, design wise.

So, steampunk airships, and have to rescue a thing. I'm loathe to do the typical "rescue the girl" because steampunk typically has strong women characters who don't really need rescuing. Also it's been done to bits. Rescue the "thing" though sounds okay.

Anyway, I started concepting a level:

The idea at the moment is to have a massive airship where the player starts, and they need to get to the tower to "rescue the thing". The tower is set in the middle of an endless ocean. The player will be in their own mini airship. The red balloons are enemy turrets. The turrets have a reasonable amount of fire power, but are slow and only have a very limited range of movement. The mini airship will be quite fast and manoeuvrable, and I'm undecided yet as to whether it will have weapons. Once the player has reached the tower, they will pick up the "thing", and then have to return to the massive airship to win.

At the moment I'm leaning towards steampunk airship pirates, most likely as the player (you must go to the tower to "liberate" the booty, arrrr) and the enemy turrets being those of the "establishment".

I'll probably set it in a massive terrain, build the sides right up so the player can't fly out of them and a cap on the top as a roof, put in an island, build a nice tower on it, and add water for the ocean.

Hopefully it won't be too bad to make!

Game 1 design process (Part 6)

As a brief update.

My game is having issues with the new UI system and loading levels. The very first one I added worked, the rest of them don't, and they've come up with funny naming conventions. I've tried deleting them and re-creating them, but that didn't change anything. I'll show the experts tomorrow.

I got the bubble health working, now he has 10 health and every time he hits a thorn bush he loses one. When he hits 0, the game is over.

I made a flat cylinder in Max and deformed it a little for my tar pit, imported it to Unity and added the tar pit texture. Set it up with a rigidbody and a collider and now when my bubble reaches the tar pit, the game is over.

GUIText doesn't work in the new version of Unity. Am trying to figure out how to get my countdown timer which asks for GUIText to work asking for the new UI text. Again, leaving that one for the experts tomorrow.

However, build levels are set up and it's otherwise ready to go. I hate how this takes forever to get anywhere!

Game 1 design process (catch up post - Part 5)

After that I went back to revisit my map and game flow, and cut it right back. After discussing with Paul, he recommended adding an extra path to "home" for a bit of variety. One path is free of obstacles but narrow, which makes it hard to bounce through. The other path is fairly wide but has obstacles which can make the tar bubble bounce around and get stuck.

The updated map etc looked like this:

Once that was done it was kind of obvious that the original plans for motive decay really weren't going to work, but the timer would. It looked like it would have to be a race - get your bubble to "home" as quickly as possible. I may even put in a high score tracker, if there is time. For my second GUI element I'll probably add a health bar.

So with the assets pretty much done, it was time to return to the dreaded coding side of things. Now I'll freely admit here that coding is not my forte, at all. I'm really not good at it. At all. I'm okay following tutes and stuff, but making it up on my own is where I fall down. So anything I do has to be really simple and easy.

Because I played around in Unity a lot making things that could possibly work for the game, I ended up with about five different project files, all called similar things. Which was as confusing as hell, so I ended up deleting them all and starting a new one, giving it a sensible name.

That was also good because I could remake everything from scratch.

The base plane for the ground was done and textured, I added a background plane and textured it, and that was my basic environment done.

After that I started dropping in boundary bushes to make a path. Which was pretty tedious. Once I had a basic path shape done, I added in the obstacles: thorn bushes and logs. Then I added the hero sphere and played with his settings to actually get him to work properly. Eventually that was done.

Once all that was set up, I started on a basic GUI, making a title page. I looked up various ways of making interactive buttons that would fit the design. However as it turned out the previous day version 4.6 Beta of Unity was released which has inbuilt GUI options. Yay! So that's what I'm implementing. So far it seems to work okay...

I made my title screen and added in the hero prefab with a simple animation to bounce him up and down. I made a credits screen and added a help screen for the controls. I made text images for the GUI buttons and set those up.

Essentially at this stage most of the game is done - for a prelim web build at least. I haven't added in the timer yet or the health bar, I haven't made any sounds yet, and I'm yet to do a win/lose screen, but the vast majority of it is done.