Jul 10
13
Back to Unity
The office has been working us like bitches, so updates have been a bit thin on the ground lately.
In order to salvage some personal time i’ve had to burn the candle at both ends. One of those ends has been messing with the U3 beta,and quite frankly it does everything I could need in the mid to far future. TBFiEngine is therefore on full stop and I was able to pretty quickly recreate everything I had done for it in pure GL back into unity.
Seeing as unity, has great audio, physics, rendering,editing, networking and scripting I can see no more reasons to pursue the hard path of not just re-creating the wheel, but hoping to build a Ferrari on the first try.
Regardless the TBFiEngine was a great learning experience and has given me a better understanding of the low level systems at work.
Stay tuned.
So yeah, kinda been making an “engine” of sorts on the iphone.
…and heres how the ‘game’ looks so far.
I’m not going to explain any of it, because if i do, i’ll never finish it….
It took a little while I’m a bit more sure on the game-flow, and spent some time one evening figuring out how I was going to put that plan into action.
The game is broken down into days (a day ends when the hero lands ….or crashes… into the ground)
Depending on how much progress he made on the previous day against what he though he could do, is how much “Determination” points he earns.
Determination is invested on upgrading / improving elements of the rocket, which allow it to fly faster, higher and with more control.
One unique feature is that things you can upgrade are only available once our hero has leant about them. Its real trial and error, as far as he is concerned.
As an example on day one, our intrepid hero bravely launches into the sky. The rocket fly s wildly out of control and crashes into the ground. “A ha flight stabilizers!, thats what i need to fly straight”. From that point on stabilizer stats are available for the player to tweak, thus improving how the rocket controls in the air. As his experience grows so does the number of things you can tweak on the rocket.
As the days continue on, the rocket gets faster and faster, more situations arise which force the player to learn and change tactics.
Just so we know i’m counting a day as 8 hours, so for the whole project 5 * 8 hours = 40 hours.
Right now i’m on about 27hours.
As the point of this is to get the prototype done, i’ve focused on getting the underlying framework working first ( which is why everything looks a bit basic), and then time permitting will look at ways of visually upgrading the space rocket inline with how its stats have changed. If not, then it will look like a cargo crate at all times, but handle like a fighter jet.
The stats part of the project has been a bit harder to get right than i thought. More specifically choosing which elements of the ship to allow the player to change vs how to balance the gameplay from them.
I’ve also added thermalShielding to the ship (something i didn’t think of to start with). As you travel faster and faster the stress placed upon the rocket increases, thermalShielding is a way to counter act this effect. Of course you could just travel slowly, but to do that you would need a larger tank capacity. Which brings the tradeoffs on how to spend your determination points.
I’ve also added an underlying wind system. Its pretty simply but effective, i’ll need to display that on the GUI so you know whats happening.
About 16 hours into the project i realised i was going about some things in totally the wrong way. My biggest problem was that moving at actual speed meant it was too hard to react to the obstacles that were in the way,this also made it harder to balance the level as i play around with the height that “The Moon” is.
My solution was to seperate everything into layers and have them move at independant speeds whilst the rocket itself stays in place.
This means that i can have the background accelerating as it would if you were moving really fast to give the sense of speed, but the forground obsticals can be balenced between min and max speeds based on player reaction times. Its pretty much what they do in scrolling shooters i guess.
So that’s where i am.
Still plenty to do……
I was cruising the inter-webs a couple of days agog and happened across the Experimental Gameplay Project website. For whatever reason the theme took my fancy, so i decided to plunge in head first.
It seems so far like the perfect way to
a)Get something made,
b) learn about Flixel some more.
On seeing the theme i thought of two things, being a bullet (i might come back to this idea), or being a rocket.
I remembered something from school about objects only being able to leave the atmosphere if they reach escape velocity. For some reason i also remembered this as 11500km/h. “Cool” i thought, theres the game goal, reach 11500km/h and leave the atmosphere to space.
I imagined a character who desperately wants to travel to the moon, everyone tells hims its impossible but he stays determined. His quest is to reach that magical speed and break free from the pull of the planet.
On actually refreshing my memory on the real facts I’ve quickly realized this game idea is based on a false assumption, It turns out you can actually leave the atmosphere at any speed, just as long as you have some thrust against the gravity (which gets weaker the higher you go).
For the sake of the theme, i’m sticking to the false assumption.
High Velocity in my case refers to the velocity of escape, and our hero’s goal. How exactly he achieves that goal is TBD.
I started this morning with a white square which represents the space ship. Next i started messing around with thrust and gravity.
I watched a video of a real NASA launch, it’s amazing that by the time they reach space they are traveling at 5 miles per second. My brain stops dead, unable to imaging going that fast. Wow.
Back to the project and without a background of any kind i quickly realized its hard to gauge a sense of speed based on numbers alone. So I generated height markers all the way up from 0 to 10000units.
It actually works out pretty well, watching the markers flash by faster and faster instils a panic as you try to stay on course realizing you wont be able to react to what is ahead should something get in the way.
When you finally break into space (10000 units) there is a moment of relief, and you realize you’ve done it. I want to make reaching the goal feel liberating.
I’ve spent a lot of time (probably more than i should have) working on the system for changing color of the background as you get higher into the sky.
I’m also messing with the idea that theres more trial and error in how the game plays out. A concept of Days, and each day you gather fuel (or parts for the ship). I’m hoping in someway the journey into space will feel individual to each person.
Time spent total : 6 hours
I’ve been recently introduced to a lovely open source game engine known as Flixel. For those who don’t know, Flixel is designed for rapid development of flash games and is / was written by Adam Saltsman (of Canabalt fame).
So far is been a pleasure to use, it’s design favours simplicity and ease of use over, bespoke features and complexity. My first experiences with Flixel have been extremely rewarding, and without that I wouldn’t have even considered trying development in flash.
Flixel has fantastic potential, and has given me yet more playgrounds to test my ideas in, Thank’s Adam!
I suggest you give it a try.
I was curious as to what all the fuss about android was. It was more faff setting up the SDK and such, but still…
Its a spinning white square, openGL of course.
Marvel at its magnificent prowess.
So I thought I’d update you on progress with the iPhone project, It might not be sexy, but it works pretty well so far.
Character movement is controlled by touching on the screen (much like phantom hourglass in fact). The closer you are, the slower the movement speed.
Tapping on an object selects it. once selected simply drag in the direction you wish the object to move and the character moves it in that direction.
The character will also automatically climb up edges if you walk him into them, He also jumps if you run him off an edge.
The circle in the corner does something special, but I don’t want to say
what just yet. 
Progress has developed much faster than I expected on this. So far the
biggest bottleneck is in getting my art asset pipeline up and running.
Currently
all my 3d tools are on PC but my development is on Mac, so the turn around
on model tests isn’t that great.
For the basic movement, I tried a couple of things;
First was casting a ray from the screen into the scene and having the
character run towards that point.
This worked out pretty well for a time but ran into the following problems;
1) Despite your finger being to the right of the character, the character motion actually got translated to diagonally up and right. [ needs a diagram ]
2) When the ray hits a wall and the character is close to it, the resulting motion was a walk. But what I wanted was for you to be able to run along walls.
3) As the player character got higher up, or on a small platform area it became harder to control. [ another diagram ]
To start getting through these problems, the first thing I tried was making the Ray cast only onto a generated plane that was under the characters feet. This worked pretty well, but I still had the diagonal motion problem to solve.
What I tried next was to start thinking about the problem in 2D rather than 3D. In summary it works like this;
1)Get the player characters WorldToScreen position.
2)Compare the character screen position to the cursor position to give a Vector direction and a distance
3) Transform the direction vector by the camera forward.
4)Set Y to 0 (as we move in the X – Z plane), then Normalize the vector and multiply it by a range from 0 to capped distance which basically makes this a velocity.
5)Apply the velocity to the character.
Ta-daaaa
This was a best of all worlds solution. The player only needs to think in 2D for how they control the character without worrying about what is happening in the scene, and controls are consistent no matter where the character is in the world.
Selecting objects works by firing a ray from the screen through the touch position, except it only tests against object tagged with “selectable”.
And….that’s where I am.
I’ve recently started looking at development on the iPhone again (this week). At the moment I don’t really have a clear idea of what i’m going to make other than some kind of adventure-esq game.
The one thing I am sure about though is my preferred control mechanism… that being “Touch”.
What i mean by this, is using an interface that matches the user experience, not trying to retrofit an existing interface. I’ve never really been a fan of putting traditional controller interfaces (d-pads and analogue sticks etc) onto a touch device like the iPhone / pod unless you REALLY have to. I understand exactly why developers do this because it easily allows you to transfer existing experiences onto the platform. However i’m in the school of “Make what’s best for the system”*, and in this regard the iPhone features an excellent multi touch surface (the best of its kind some would argue), Accelerometers, Wifi, Bluetooth, mic and camera.
A game that is really suited to the platform would attempt to utilise any of those features as best as possible, which in itself is no small task.
I’m not saying that you can’t make something like a ‘platformer’ on a touch device, merely that you be mindful of the limitations and focus efforts on an experience who’s strengths play into the unique features of your input.
so, yeah…. thats what’s happening at the moment.
* Reserves the right to change mind, if he cant get a touch interface working well
Just a small update really, Trialbyfun’s GammaIV entry isn’t going to be ready in time for this weeks deadline.
This doesn’t mean the project is canned, quite the opposite in fact. We will be continuing to work on it over the next few weeks and hopefully releasing more updates on its development.
I’m kinda sad it hasn’t happened, but i guess it was only inevitable that our working lives should get in the way, and of course they need to take priority.
I’ve always said one of my biggest frustration with normal work is playing it safe and not being able to try many ‘risky’ ideas and fail. It’s frustrating because without having my own failures I can never learn how to make them succeed. In just a few weeks I’ve learnt a number of really important lessons that i will continue to build on as i experiment with other ideas.
GammaIV’s legacy will live on with our game, but it’s going to sit this dance out.
Onwards and Upwards.
Time continues to tick on at an alarming rate, and finding spare moments at home to work on this is becoming harder and harder. Still, thats show business!
Last we spoke, I was having trouble with how the game was going to proceed from an artistic point of view.
Well luckily in the mean time i’ve managed to coax a pair of very talented artists into giving me a hand. We had a discussion about the main mechanics of the game as it stands and how best to create a world that works with it both thematically as well as ways we could create it without breaking the bank. I’m not really going to talk in detail yet about whats been decided (so as not to spoil the surprise for the actual event 
)
Until then here’s a preview of our lead character. (unnamed at the moment)
Hope you enjoy.
Gamma IV by .