» Uncategorized PxlPlz

Posts filed under ‘Uncategorized’

The Progression of Bull’s Hit

Sometimes it helps to step back and look at how for a project has come. I was getting frustrated about some background art in Bull’s Hit, and just getting ticked off at how slow the project was moving overall. Until I accidentally installed an old version on my iPad and saw this:

Yeah, that’s really what the game used to look like. I mean, this is quite obviously a testing phase, but… look at it! This is a hard game for people (me included) to get excited over.

Here’s what it looks like now, for reference:

I don’t think it looks half bad! Was just doing a full run though, trying to see if I could complete all of the goals (I had to change some because they were way too hard). It seems to take quite a few hours to really complete everything. Maybe I’m just a bad player though.

Anyway, it’s late and I need to wrap up my testing. Just thought someone out there may be interested in seeing before and after images.

Add comment January 13, 2013

Super Bull’s Hit!

It’s Bull’s Hit Time!

That’s right. The inexplicable popular Flash Game Bull’s Hit is getting an iOS release! Super Bull’s Hit in fact.

I worked on this game for the Global Game Jam a couple years ago, and put on Mochi on a whim. A couple million plays later, and I think… I should really port this game.

So I did!

It’s wrapping up very shortly (Not Star Saver short, I mean like literally aiming for an Apple Submission today). It’s a shockingly addictive game. Try to avoid the bull, and mow down as many other runners and obstacles as you can.

It’s got an achievement system with multiple levels, 100 different combos, 4 upgradable stats with 6 upgrade levels each.

I mean, it’s actually a complete game. Yeah, no kidding! And it’s totally worth what ever I’m going to charge for it, right? Come on, you guys are all my friends – you can drop me a couple bucks .

1 comment January 11, 2013

Let’s Make A Game – Day 4!

Let’s make a game. Day 4. I make some painfully slow progress. Like, really painfully slow. Ever wonder why your characters slide when physics are applied?

Yeah, me too.

It took a lot longer to figure this out than I’d really like – but apparently rigid bodies in Unity that have their constraints locked still have a small amount of wiggle to them.

This causes some weird physics behavior, that I 100% thought was totally my fault. Well, it could actually BE my fault. But I’m not sure how to fix it. Here’s the setup.

I need to move my character to a target position, so every frame I look at the difference between the current and target positions and apply a Normalized Vector scaled by a Walk Speed. This gives a very nice, smooth transition between the positions and will apply my physics correctly.

I don’t know if this is driving the physics engine crazy (changing the velocity all the time) or if there’s another bug involved, but when I did this, my character started drifting slightly. Never consistently.

So I tried doing everything I knew how to do. Reseting the rotation, manually setting the position when you complete your move. Things like that. No effect.

Now, I’m not a Unity Pro by any means. There are a lot of little switches and buttons that I’m not really clear on yet. And that “is Kinematic” button was one of them.

To finish the story – it’s important. Use it. The ground object kept “wiggling” slightly. I guess the constraints just push it back to it’s origin, or something, so the player would pick up on that and move around slightly. I would guess it has to do with using a sphere collider as his base, too. Or the fact that he’s also rotation constrained.

Don’t know. Anyone have any further info about this?

Add comment January 11, 2013

Let’s Make A Game!

Ok, Day 3 of Let’s Make A Game. One Hour a Day. It’s been pretty easy to keep myself to an hour. Please excuse the sloppy editing, but getting an hour down to 10 minutes is pretty difficult. Also, I’m trying to do it quick.

So far, I’ve learned some new stuff about Unity. And I’m slowly getting away from my insistence to go hierarchy crazy, and getting used to adding components to Unity Objects. I haven’t accomplished very much in 3 hours but it’s slowly starting to shape into something, and I’m getting ideas. Which is really what this is all about.

Anyway, enjoy the first couple Episodes, and I’ll have more up soon!

Intro: Let’s Make A Game (Intro)

Episode 1: Let’s Make A Game – DAY 1

Episode 2: Let’s Make A Game – DAY 2

Episode 3: Let’s Make A Game – DAY 3

Please let me know everything I’m doing wrong! I’m sure I’m doing a LOT wrong.

Add comment January 10, 2013

New Experiment

Hi All. Just news about a quick new experiment I’m doing. I’m going to work for 1 hour a day, every day on a game prototype. I’m going to keep it exactly to one hour and record the results as I’m working on it.

This isn’t really a serious project. More of a time management experiment and a need to break up my day just a little bit.

Let’s see how this works out…

Add comment January 8, 2013

Kate Demos some Baddies

Update Kate has been helping out on Star Saver for a while now, and she’s doing a great job. She’s been helping port the old Star Saver code to the new platform, and more recently going through our baddie list and implementing behaviors. Enemies had been back-burnered for a while while we worked on getting core features up and running, but the game was starting to get a little boring to play with nothing around to kill you.

So Kate was more than happy to oblige! She wasn’t so happy to record a video talking about it though. I made her do it anyway :).

I think she did a great job putting this together.

The baddies are all run by simple state machines. Some of them determine their state by looking at player distance, like the Thwomp (not a Thwomp), and some of them just run though a list of states and repeat. The bosses tend to have a combination of these (but we’re not showing off bosses right yet). In general, the design of the baddies is to get the player to stop and observe the behavior and surroundings before continuing. Like most games, they aren’t ‘exactly’ dangerous, but we’ll throw you into some tricky platforming situations.

I think there are… 7 baddies total implemented now? And we’ll probably implement a couple more core ones before we start special casing out some for unique levels.

Anyway, enjoy the update. Hope to have more soon!

Add comment October 26, 2012

OMG!? Progress?

OMG! Progress?! On Star Saver?!

Yes, there’s been a lot of progress. We’ve been swamped over here on some rather high-priority projects that have taken *way* too long, but indeed we are still working hard over here on Star Saver! We have some awesome new features and enemies in now, and about 30 levels in various states of completion.

Squid Village We’ve still got a long way to go, and a lot of assets need to be completed but there IS light at the end of the tunnel.

We’ve even got iPhone 5 support in… though we’re not sure exactly what to do with the widescreen yet. I want controls partially off screen, but I’ll post some examples of what direction we could go in another post.

Here are some quick shots of what we’ve been working on, and some sketches of what’s going in:

As you can see, we finally have a background in Polka Hills. The world still needs decor, enemies, doors set up, etc. It’s looking a little plain, but that should change. This is the second level, and where the game actually starts forcing you to consider where to go next, and opens up a little more.

Here’s the first pass of the Squid Village. Not much to see here yet, but this will act as the general world hub and link to all of the worlds. Polka Hills We still have the old “level selector”, but we may just end up with a set of doors that transport you to the different worlds. It changes the feel a little (makes the game feel more like an interconnected world than a series of levels). Maybe the difference between Mario 3 and Castlevania/Metroid. I’m not sure yet what feels better, and this may change a few times yet before we wrap the game up.

We’re working hard on getting more enemies in the game. Say goodbye to the spikey baddie being the only critter running around the world. We got buzz-saws, thwomps, jumping baddies, shooting baddies, flip-flop baddies, hovering baddies, a couple of bosses – all kinds of things to kill you! But they all look like cheese currently:

cheese

The good news is that we got some additional help over here on production art! I’ll have him introduce himself here and he’ll be putting up sketches soon. In the meantime, here are some sketches of what we’re working on:

Casey's Baddies

Since I stole Casey’s Sketchbook, I thought I’d scan a couple pages and show you some of the enemy concepts we’re putting together. He’s just too adorable . I’ve got some other scans, but I think I’m going to save those until I don’t have anything to talk about.

I’ve also been doodling some bad guy concepts around the goo concept. They’re much less refined (to say the least), but I’m trying to work though how some enemies may act in the world.

Other Baddie Sketches

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this long coming update. Like I said, even though we’ve been quiet we’ve been slogging away.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned that we did a re-write on the level loading, the sprite data block construction and some core engine refactoring. I can actually read and understand my own code now!

If anyone is interested, I can do a tech breakdown of the tools and engine some time. I’m not sure exactly what parts to talk about though.

Ok, enough rambling. I’ve got a lot to get done today. I’m interested to see if anyone is reading this blog, so leave a message!

1 comment October 19, 2012

Fan Art

The awesome guys at Castwave Studios sent us some really cool fan art for Star Saver! Thanks guys! Believe it or not, it’s still coming and we’re still hard at work on it! Lot of fun new stuff to show very soon!

Squidly and Squishy