I wished I could always have meaningful updates!

Like the title says….I’m struggling hard, with myself mostly. I thought I knew what I was getting myself into, considering I had done something similar before, but I completely underestimated 1. how much real life can get into your way (as in, things from outside you have no control over) and 2. how freaking hard it is, to every day, sit down at home and work!
It’s almost as if I forgot all the things I had learned the past years, treating it as if this was something completely different from all these ludum dares and trying to learn as much as I could and honestly it isn’t! But I made it to seem different, I started worrying so much again…about everything…I felt like paralyzed, thinking about all those things I don’t know how to do, about all the things that could possibly go wrong…I’m pretty sure that this “relapse” into old self also happened, because…well…I’m not really trained in using my relatively new skills and because I had to reflect a lot in the past months, also partly due to making the Business Plan, on what my skills and prospects are etc.
And I really really struggle to think good of myself.
All this relapsing, is also the reason why I didn’t really update my blog for a (in my opinion too long) while. I was just so frustrated and embarrassed, that I didn’t get where I wanted to be with the time I was supposed to have to work fulltime on my game, that I really felt uncomfortable even thinking about writing a blogpost….I know it’s silly, because in the first place, this blog is for me, to show myself how much and what I have done, the place where I can post anything and it has proven again and again that I’m not failing, but that my perspective is scewed.
I managed to get a bit of a foothold again, from all this tumbling around in my anxieties, so that’s why there IS a blogpost now….because this is what it’s for, to help me through good and bad times (hah! that sounds as if I’m married with my blog harhar).
We have a complicated relationship ;D

Oh well…so let’s get to the stuff I did get done, despite seemingly wasting a lot of time worrying the shit out of myself…>.<

Since my last blogpost I tested out various things, from grass placement on unity terrain (with own texture) to trying to figure out how to make everything move in wind, but I sadly need to put that on backlog for now, because there were problems with the shaders and my custom tree models
I also tried to figure out how to make clouds fitting to the style of my game (stylized and simple) I’m thinking I want to make a shader for that too and probably stick to 3D clouds, which I can then rearrange, resize and recolor for weather effects 🙂 luckily I only mostly see them from the bottom, but the 3D has the advantage of throwing shadows on the ground and they are easy to make in Blender.
(the fern is not from me, was just a sample from AFS asset)

I also tried myself on a desert texture, which works surprisingly well in closeup 🙂

from the top it looks like smoothed diamond shapes XD

then I was also working on updating the Critter models and experimented with making the eye shape in 3D, while it would mean less cartoony expressions, I do think it will add a lot in terms of “lifelyness” and well…plasticity. I always felt like their faces were a bit too flat ^^ and wasn’t really liking the face plane I had 😮
Also I needed to rig them for animation purposes and prepare them to have switchable body parts (don’t have screen for all of them yet, will post some later when I got more body parts and textures ready)

Also, I wanted to try out the 3D eyes, because I liked the very much 3D eyes look I went for on my business cards 🙂 it made them look a lot more alien though 😮
And has a little bit of a fiendish look to it I think, especially with that red eyeframe XD
(ignore the hair floating XD)
I for some reason also got an urge to fix the berry bush spawn, so I can test the critters wherever without them starving and gameover 😀
(although I solved that later on by programming my very first cheating tools XD)

and another thing I was working on, is the promo art, which I will likely use on all my main social media sites, until I have something better. And just today I noticed that all this time I have drawn my own critters wrong lol

Good thing that comes out of it though is, I will definitely add the “mistake” as an option, to get as a mutation (the left picture) And it made me more aware of it, that when I implement the pattern system for Critters that I need to pay attention to how many layers I will need and in which order, since with the original pattern I didn’t just go darker with each iterations of detail on them, which seemed to be the intuitive thing when I was drawing them (how did I even come up with that pattern at the ludum dare?XD)
oh and…I decided “ears” will be a thing 😀
While I was researching a bit more about cat like animals for the proportions of critters, I actually found the “natural” form of critters in our world, they are called “marbled cat” and they have their ears pretty low on their heads, which *coughs* I can use as an excuse why I forgot them in the first place XD But now, the starting Critters version will have no ears, but they can mutate some 🙂 and it’s not just cat ears. In general, when I thought of critters, I actually always had the idea in my mind that they are a very adaptive species, that they can have scales, long fur, short fur, all the colors of the rainbow and body parts from all kinds of animals, but that their main body shape pretty much stays the same 🙂 and cats are just the “closest” appearance wise. Not to mention, that they eat fruits, nuts and mushrooms XD
They are like cat-squirrel-bears or something.

Well enough for now 🙂 I shall update again ^^ (hopefully not so long from now)

ludum dare slaughter

didn’t have much sleep past nights…or maybe weeks. I don’t know. Today I was spending alot of my time on just slaughtering away at the ludum dare themes, hoping I can Influence the outcome enough to get something I want as a theme to jam on 😀
Also…I think I’m procrastinating a little O.o for days I was wanting to more or less redo that sketch I did from my ratpeople in form of a shape drawing, but instead of just doing it, with whatever tools I have available I got hung up on the fact that photoshop has no nice and fast one action way of adding or removing bulks of color with just the lasso tool.
Something that I had seen in a tutorial and apparently it also exists in programs like Illustrator, which I don’t have.
In short, if you want to make fast and filled shapes in photoshop, you either need to use a brush (meh) and filling everything manually with strokes or you learn all the necessary shortcuts of photoshop like: X for switching background and foreground color, B for brush, L for lasso and G for paint bucket and in my case Alt+Backspace to autofill a selected area with foreground color or ctrl+backspace for background color.
I also tried the freeform pen tool, because it promised to do exactly what i wanted BUT unlike the lasso tool, where i can just hold Alt to invert what I’m selecting with lasso, I had to actually go in manually to remove pieces…not to mention that it took me quite long to merge all shapes and I think it was Shift C or Shift+ctrl+C to hide the path lines, which has to be repeated every time I make a new path..>.< So visually it’s always obstructing me.
Now I did all of this mainly because I wanted to try out something i had seen in a tutorial, which is making a filled shape of a figure and with help of my brain unconcsiously knowing how things are looking “right” I could figure out a good looking shape or silhouette for my ratpeople. And i wanted to do that, because I felt that it still is nowhere near what I actually wanted….And I want to get that nailed, before I start making a 3D model of it.
But yeah….I think, if I would have just started doing it, no matter how “uncomfortable” it is with photoshop, I would have done it already, so i guess there was some procrastination at play, so i wouldn’t need to face my fears about not being able to meet up to my own expectations, no matter how many shapes i make….

so what?! mind?! I promised myself to DO this and for doing it is not important if the tools are “good” enough if they can do the job! Frigging mind….seriously….

oh and…this is my 100th entry 😀

Making music (or trying to)

I wished making music would be easier 😮 mostly I just don’t know how to do the things I have in my head, how to translate them with the tools I have ….

GUI and stuff

So I created a healthbar (finally), that even works….well, kinda XD it’s decreasing it’s value over time, I can also reverse it, but I’m still looking for a good way to measure when and how often enemies are damaging the dragon and I have not yet fully grasped how I can use time.deltatime in every occasion.
I’m even starting to think, that I maybe should create some kind of universal timer, for the whole scene, that I can access in my scripts, instead of creating new methods for every time I need some kind of timer.
It’s going forward slowly, but sometimes I really wished I could be faster and knowing what I’m actually doing, but hey, thats exactly what I’m learning for, so that some day I can actually make such things, without needing to struggle so much with syntax and possibilities that I’m simply not aware of atm.

That said, a little screenshot of my current GUI:

Dragon concept again :D

I went through the whole beginner tutorial of unity yesterday and phew, it’s quite exhausting. I tried to concentrate to write down information that I could easily forget and everything else I just try to keep in my mind as “reference” of what i can do while programming, since that was quite a big issue before: not knowing the possibilities of what tools I even have available to do things in unity.
Now it feels though, that if not using a very “complicated and special” game mechanic, that games in general can be prototyped in a relatively short time.

Also, last night I had a bit of a “I need to draw” situation, which led to me trying to make a more proper concept of a dragon, or in this case, more likely to be an hatchling. I’m gonna work on finishing that, aswell as the header, when I need some off time from programming again 😀 (and having some off-time from my baby) I actually like this one alot more then the rhino kind of dragon XD

Programming Joys…

I don’t really understand how some of the tutorials aimed at Beginners are actually explaining less, than those aimed at higher advanced programmers O.o and why would code be made in an inconsistent way, which would lead to more likely making mistakes?
Like as example, I just watched a tutorial that explained “if” statements or it was supposed to do so, but then he has 2 “if” statements where on one side, he is using the scope and on another part he isn’t and then I’m wondering like why? Why would you do something like that aimed at beginners? It’s just coincidence, that I actually had an issue with something like that from another tutorial, where i tried to add some functionality in form of additional “if” Statements and tried to “Debug.Log” it, just to find out, that without using the scopes, everything would run at the same time (kinda), so I couldn’t actually get the information WHICH of those ifs was firing…it could have been prevented to just ALWAYS use the scope, even if it is not really necessary…just to keep consistent and avoid problems later on, when you have already forgotten about it.

I will probably try to “just” continue programming after I’m done with some of the basic tutorials…somehow I felt like I was learning so much faster by just making a tons of mistakes XD so maybe those developers that suggested to “just start” are actually right…sure it feels like you are not really getting forward in the beginning, but therefore you get very fast alot better in asking the right questions 🙂 Learning how to be more precise with what you need and WHERE something exactly is not running the way you want it.
I don’t know how many times I was really close to an answer, all by myself, just by excluding and experimenting and when I asked someone for help I felt like “aaaaaahhhh I knew it was somewhere there” which is somehow also a little bit satisfying, that i was atleast close, but just couldn’t see what I needed to change, because I lacked some basic information.

I hope it will get better soon.

mostly babbling about inexperience

I’m always stumbling over my lack of knowledge 😮 I have read that it is adviced from some game developers to “just start” and so far I can do that and it is making me progress, but it also makes it extremly difficult for me to see sometimes what I did wrong, specially when I’m missing some very fundamental basics for working with unity and c#. Which then results in workarounds of workarounds of more workarounds of a simple “basic” gone wrong, which makes the further game development awful and very slow and painful. refactoring ( a word I learned recently) can help to fix some of this issue, but I would need to do it regularly I believe.

So i think my best approach currently is going through the Basic tutorials from unity regarding scripting with C# and using unity. I certainly don’t need to know everything there is right now, but getting a better understanding of underlying structures, how to use unity in a proper way and how to make “simple” code solutions and not a big mess of spaghetti code….I think it’s very important and I probably should have swallowed my “pride” of wanting to learn it without going into basics way earlier…there is nothing wrong with needing to go back to the basics and in the end it will benefit me in the long run for all the projects I’m gonna do. So here I go 😀

and btw. I had tried myself on making a small “simple” actionbar in unity and I came as far as creating some icons, an Actionbar base and a selection frame that I can move with number keys on my keyboard 🙂 so that works, but figuring out a way how to use the toggles in unity and connect that with code which would then allow me to activate “skills” and unlock them after reaching certain lvls was getting a bit too much, though thats why I thought I should go back to basics…heck, I don’t even know exactly how to use arrays or for loops, even though I had learned it at some point, but just didn’t know how to use it properly.

Also, my thoughts wandered off into my big game project “dragonlands” and I noticed that I tried so much to find solutions, that are actually just workarounds around the PVP issue that so many games have. In the end i just figured out, that I’m not really a PVP oriented/interested person, so why did I think of including it into my game? So with that out of my head, how about a game that is “mostly” PVE where dragons can indeed destroy players housing, but you can protect yourself against it with means of magic, maybe alchemy, special building materials or simply “peaceful” behavior. As example dragons wouldn’t attack your villages, as long as you stay away from their territories and not try to hunt them down 😛
But the more you are hunting them, invading their homes, stealing their stuff, they would actually get very angry at those players and try to track them down and kill them and if a village is nearby, which gained a bad reputation from armies attacking dragons, then it will be attacked aswell 🙂 Simple as that.

Then I thought “but I still want players to be able to make a bloodpact with dragons and turn themselves into dragons, how does that work together with no PVP?
Well, besides that i could make it a pain in the ass to become a dragon, so the amount of players being dragons stays low and those player dragons would be actually exiled for most time of their “hatchling” state. So that they are theoretically in a constant state of pvp, but they are weak, helpless and kinda lowest of the foodchains, since everything and everyone is trying to hunt them down. And when they turn into adults and since they are players, they would become “tame” or “wise” dragons, that are not those huge beasts that roam the world and live like normal animals, but instead, they represent some kind of enlightenment of a person, they can help defend villages and they can use special abilities no one else has etc. I’m not exactly sure of that yet, but I imagine it rather nice, to have players have to go through some kind of “monk” like state, when all they do is having to survive to understand what “life” means to gain access to a higher being.

score points :D

It’s starting to feel more and more like a game 😀 I am able to track how many enemies I have shot, which are added as points and I have my first UI elements showing score text and a lvl up text, when having shot 12 enemies 😛 of course that is just a random value to test if it works XD
Now I just need a healthbar for the dragon and some damage made by my ratpeople…oh yeah and I added a rudimentary model for the “enemies”, fixed some shading issue on my dragon (seems the mirror modifier was creating a plane between it’s halfs O.o) and in general, all my folders are alot more organized now.

Most faszinating thing is, how every little step makes me learn so much 😮 I somehow think the speed of learning needs to reduce at some point…or my working speed should increase somewhen, but so far, the only thing that increased is my ability to find problems in my code and fixing them 🙂 which I think is a good thing.

Oh and my fireballs have a point light now 🙂

uff…I feel like I have overworked myself

So today, was a big “refactoring” day. I stumbled upon some problems with my code, that would have been avoidable, if I would have tried to learn some of the basics in C# first and also looked at some of the unity basic tutorials. But I wanted to have some kind of prototype as fast as possible, so I had just “patchworked” code together from tutorials I was watching.
In the end it DID work out though and I did learn alot and even now the refactoring is helping me alot to learn and improve my code, it just means I won’t progress alot for the actual game development XD
But thats ok 🙂

Also. I don’t even want to know, how bad I would have reacted if some of the bugs would have happened in the middle of coding today. Like unity suddenly crashing on me my old project scenes somehow being lost due to making a package out of them?! Not to mention, that I tried to rename a folder, which made itself and all it’s contents vanish (it was containing scripts -.-)
Good thing though, that I was mainly organizing and pushing things into a new project, so it wasn’t affecting me as badly as it could have been…
Still, it scared the shit out of me.

On another note, my game has a name now (I will still call it Dragon shooter here though) and everything seems to run more fluently now. I have fixed an issue about positioning instantiated objects and some parent-child issues and created some “if” functions to recognize different kinds of collision (so I can add different types of projectiles later).
I also added manager gameobjects for most of my scene objects and a proper folder hierarchy, aswell as shortened some unnecessary scripts and changed some 3D models to use less unity primitives.

and now I need a proper timeout with some gaming…o.o

Fiery, Fyria, Dragons and Rivers

I didn’t do much in terms of “developing” today, that is, if you don’t count thoughts and stuff as part of it XD
I noticed that I had not even thought about a Titlescreen before, but since I stumbled over a tutorial to just do that I needed to get some ideas on paper on how it could look like…also some thought rambling about Dragon anatomy, a name for my dragon shooter (which seems difficult, since dragon is pretty generic and often used in games, I want something that stands out, but is clearly understandable) and some thoughts about how I imagine a not so performance intensive but dynamic river system could look like. Of course the last thing is very “rough”, since I have not worked with procedural generation or liquid simulation yet or even mesh generation, but I want to keep it in the back of my mind in case I stumble upon something that could help me find a way to achieve the effect I want. Which is practically generating a Plane on the Top of Voxels, which are using physics to move when changed. Those Voxels would be static unless terrain gets modified and the effect of floating water would be created through textures and normal/displacement mapping and hopefully I will find a way to determine which direction is “downhill” to determine which direction Texture would need to “flow” to create a realistic water effect.
I wonder how difficult it would be to realize this concept XD Time will tell 🙂 For now it’s just on my backburner as a “nice to have” feature, for far far in the future 🙂