in the middle of the night…

and I write down things about leveldesign, what areas I want to implement, how to implement them, what assets I will need to make, what atmosphere I want to achieve, what particle effects could come in handy, how I want to lead the players attention and how to make a player explore without having a holding hand?
How to wake curiosity in surroundings, without glowy sparkly signs “here to your next achievement!” ?
How to give player the full freedom of their shapeshift forms and at the same time give them a challenge? How to make terrain and areas challenging without making puzzles or “restricting” the player through locking and unlocking forms?

Several times now it was suggested to me, that I could make the shapeshifting something to “unlock” or to add extra areas that can be unlocked…even though I could say that extra areas sound nice, since they are more of a bonus than a restriction, I don’t feel comfortable restricting the players abilities for the sake of challenge and achievement.
I want lots of other things to be challenging and I want achievements aswell, but the idea I have in my head is more based around, feeling free, but having areas require some thinking or agility with shapeshifting etc. to reach them. And all of that without making one form better than another, but rather make forms have disadvantages and advantages in certain areas. Like as example, the mouse is very small and it could have alot of difficulties going through bushy and overgrown terrain, while the cat is ideal for it, having higher jumps, being able to climb etc. at the same time the bird COULD fly over those obstacles, but it might be difficult to just keep it high enough off the ground to not fly against anything, but at the same time not too high so it wouldn’t crash into the branches of a tree. The mouse could be shortsighted, is slower than the other forms, but therefore it fits through spaces the other forms won’t fit. The bird is the only one being able to go way above the trees and into the mountains and being out in the open it would have most advantage, it would be travelling faster than the other forms, which would be hindering in more tight environments.

The game is about exploring, about mysterious places, about working WITH the environment and WITH the abilities you have. The achievements are rather secondary, but the ones I have in my mind are challenging enough all by themselves without needing to restrict forms 🙂

Progress in this game is shown through the orbs (20 are not the final number). Maybe I can add other types of orbs later on, but currently I want to stay with the simplistic version of this game 🙂 Which is, honestly, complex enough XD
Just coming up with ideas for interesting places to explore that is not “too” worn out by other games and worlds is difficult! And bringing them into reality is even more challenging for me and I DO want players to have more than just 2 or 3 of them 🙂

I have to say though, that I like to work on it 🙂 it’s somewhat more relaxing and interesting than playing games 😛

 

not sure how visible things are, but the cloud is one experiment, the orb with sparkles 😀
and the trees have falling leafs 😀

wow…much done today again

If a pattern of “doing” is starting to form I’m gonna be very happy about that 😀

Okay, so today I reordered a midi keyboard, since the one I wanted to have was not available and I really really want to not have to use the normal keyboard for working with music >.>
Then I changed all the UVs of my models(not sure if that was today though) adjusted them, removed overlaps and spaced them properly and figured some more stuff out on how it works in Blender, it still confuses me alot o.o Blender is weird.
And after some frustration with seams showing up on my mesh (black and white) and weird artefacts when baking the ambient occlusion map I finally figured out that the subdivision modifier I had used, was set to subdivide Uvs aswell XD causing those weird artefacts…and the texture painting was causing issues, because I had not enough “Bleed” on the edge when painting, causing the edges past the UVs to appear due to mipmapping in blenders view. Quite annoying, specially since it transferred over to unity aswell, so I had to find out what the cause was and I did.

So now I know what to do about those issues and also how to fix it afterwards without having to repaint everything and also that same solution can apply for future alpha mapped pictures. Which is using the solidify filter in photoshop, which kind of extends the pixels of a selected layer to the edges of the image 🙂 very handy (it’s a free plugin, you can google it)

Now that thats out of the way I can paint textures of all characters more properly and more detailed and then start rigging them to animate them. I would really like tog et rid of those stiff “statues” XD also to experience how the whole importing of animations in unity works and how to embed it into the whole game etc.
I’m sure it’s gonna be a challenge 😀

if someone wants to try my current version of the game, click this link :

Windows: Purrr WIP
(I can make a build for other systems aswell on request, but I can’t test them myself)

Controls are currently:
Arrow Keys or WASD for moving the character

Space for flying and jumping

1,2,3 for shapeshifting (same order as icons on the bottom)

F for sniffing out where nearby orbs are (it has a cooldown timer)

bonus:
isn’t it a cutie pie?:D

Update on my “kind of” horror game

Since a while I’m now working on a small-medium sized project, that was inspired by a website that spits out random game descriptions 😀
clicky 😀

My very first result was this:

and since I always loved spore and any kind of survival game aaaaand because I want to learn more about special effects etc. I thought why not? Why not make a game that pushes me a bit more, helps me learning the things I lack in currently and maybe could become the first game that I put on gaming platforms to sell, just to see how it would do? (That is only, if I get it to work and look properly)
Hopefully, since I intend it to be a horror game aswell, I can also learn alot about atmosphere and immersion 🙂

Soooo…I showed last time already how my prototype looks like, which I used to see how I can add screen effects in unity and play around with cloth physics to make a Blob like shape…I will probably not use the cloth component though, since it’s movement is very unreliable and might not be suitable for attaching more components to that body…besides in unity 5 cloth can only collide with spheres and capsules which is rather disappointing, buuuut I just want creatures to look as IF they are jelly like, so I will just work with boneweights in Blender instead 🙂
Also this gives me the opportunity to work on my Blender skills 😀 which I am somewhat excited about.
At the same time I’m trying to find out how feasible it is to make a random Cave Generator, which is not as difficult as I thought, but at the same time more difficult than I thought 😮 mostly because the one tutorial I’m following, which seems to be for unity 4 instead of 5 (although it’s compatible) and some confusion about what variable names that person is using etc. Not to mention that I have difficulties with understanding how exactly binaries are being “counted”, which seems to be important for the mesh generation per code. All in all I’m not sure, if I can make random levels, it might be easier to just model a 3D cave, but with what I have in my mind, it would be also ALOT of work.

now to some more graphical aspects: I made quite many sketches already and figured I could show them off here, since I got some off time from my daughter and because I promised to upload even the crappy stuff here and to make the game development visible, which is honestly hard, once you get into game development, because all I can think of is working on the game and writing into my blog seems to be rather annoying, since it’s not progressing the game 😛

GUI again :D or still…

I was asked, why I had not made my last update with a gif animation of my Healthbar…and well, now I have 🙂
I simply never had any reasons to look into how to make gifs, but I can see how it’s mesmerizing to watch something moving 😀

So, for my update, today I was actually managing to make it work properly! That means, the healthbar stops reducing at zero health and the damage is a float number counted from every enemy that is close enough to “trigger” an attack on the dragon. It also accounts for every enemy being slain, that it won’t keep on counting down when enemies already died.
Aaaand since some friends told me that updating every frame to check for an enemy that only hits every second, could become heavy on performance at some point, I changed it to update every 0.1 seconds 🙂

Only thing I don’t like at the moment, is how the numbers are so small, I don’t think it poses any challenge for players, if the health is going down only 0.01 per second from every enemy reaching it’s goal.
But thats for later, when I start polishing the game 😀

In overall this day was good, even though I was stressed with my code looking messy (or atleast I perceive it that way)

yep…that sums it how I feel about my code.

Now…just what to do next…random enemy spawns? more spells? making the actionbar work? 🙂 Let’s see what I will crave for most.

(sorry for all those smilies, it’s a sign I feel relatively good today)

and as a little bonus, because I just felt like sketching some dragonlands stuff: Rat Alchemist 😀

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:

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 🙂

Explosions! :D

Now THAT feels alot more satisfying, when every time I hit the Enviroment or my enemies I’m actually getting a nice little explosion, instead of both the projectile and enemy just vanishing XD
I don’t even know if I will need a separation later to determine with what exactly those fireballs collide and explode, but maybe for other projects it will be useful 🙂

I think I have played enough with projectiles now, so next should be something like an Interface, Main Menu and maybe a Highscore (if i don’t get distracted by doing some more concepts and better 3D models 😛