Synnah

The last two-and-a-bit weeks have been a lot of fun! Thanks to Dinosaursssssss and Spenny for organising everything, and to everyone who made anything for creating a load of totally rad stuff! I wanted to play the games that were submitted early and give feedback, but I left everything so late that I didn't have time. I'm going to play everything tonight! Also need to write up a mini-post mortem for my game, and make a list of the features I still want to implement.

It almost killed me, but I'm done! http://giraffecat.itch.io/nineties-cockpit-freakout I'll write some stuff about how unfinished it is tomorrow.

Because my priorities are all wrong, after modelling my environment objects, the first thing I did was obviously not to import them into UE4 and make a damn game out of them, but to render out a high-quality ray-traced image that I would downscale to 320x160 to make this title screen: Here's the original render, if anyone's interested: So, uh, let's see if I can get everything in-game before the end of today.

So, thrusters are in and basically working, and- oh god help! I haven't hooked up the logic for translating the slider positions into an amount of thrust yet; at the moment they're just turning the thrusters on or off. Shouldn't be too difficult, but it's going to require a lot of faffing around to find sensible values. I've also got seven buttons there that probably aren't going to do anything before the end of the competition. After I get thrusting working, I think I'm just going to focus on making the environment, and anything else I can do after that is a bonus.

Looks a bit AWESOME now!

He's Winning(ton)!

In terms of policies, Green are one of the few parties that line up for me, too (And Lib Dems on a couple of points, but I'm not getting on THAT boat again), so I've been a Green voter for the past few years. And will be again! If there was a way I could use my vote to actively negate a UKIP vote, I would probably do that, though.

Yesssss! Welcome to the Jam!

This is good advice in general, really. Still looking good!

Neon Dinosaur Museum.

Ahhh, rad!

Thanks! At the moment I'm literally just swapping to a separate material; changing parameters definitely seems like a better idea, though! I've got this page about material parameter collections, which I'll go through when I'm setting up materials for ever, and hopefully it should make sense. I'll let you know if I need help, though!

Buttons and Lights and Levers, oh my! Okay, so there's currently no light coming the lights (Up at the top and on the right side of the dashboard), but I'll (probably) sort that out at some point. I've got highlighting working on all of the interactible elements, but I'll probably need to make custom highlight materials for each item once I've given them colours. I've had to make the sliders all chunkier than I'd like, as the built-in mouse events that I'm using only seem to do pixel-traces on object geometry to determine whether you're over something, and you can't use a mesh's collision volume. The solution would be to make my own mouseover script, but I don't have nearly enough time for that! So I just made them all big and stupid-looking. Here's the cockpit full-sized:

I'm still making progress on this! It's just been slightly less visual progress. My sliders are working, bar one which has a weird bug that I need to fix, and I'm in the process of getting the buttons in and working. I should have a GIF of the everything being interactible tonight, after which I need to make them actually do things. Blueprints are fun!

Sweet! I'm working on Saturday (Booo) but should be able to get some stuff done on Sunday (yay).

Otogi was one of my favourite games on the original Xbox! I'd never considered the through line from that to Demon's Souls/Dark Souls, I guess because by the time I played the Souls games I'd kind of forgotten most of my experience with Otogi and its sequel. I remember them being difficult, but I don't feel like I played them in the same was as I play Souls games, where I'm cautiously progressing and taking stock of everything; they always felt more similar to Ninja Gaiden to me. I do feel like I should definitely go back to them at some point, though.

Sounds good!

I keep forgetting to comment on this, but it looks great! All of UE4's glow and lens flare effects look completely absurd on pizzas falling from the top of the screen, and I love it. I also really like the idea of putting you other game inside it as an easter egg!

That is amazing! The start-up effects are great too.

Your art style is off the charts! The general presentation, and specifically the little people walking around remind me of Rymdkapsel.

Ahhhh, yes! I'm glad someone's making this! Also, that character looks great.

That is SO flashy. Befitting of such a weighty legend!

I have, actually! The cockpit in that was one of my inspirations for this game; I really like how you're not given any instruction, and you have to figure everything out for yourself by just clicking on things and seeing what they do. It reminded me of playing games without instruction manuals as a kid, and that's something I want to do with my game as well. And when I say I need to texture the cockpit, it's still going to be flat textures for all of the consoles and interior, but I need colours and graphics for my displays. I also need to set up some lights in the cockpit at some point, so you can actually see everything.

Man whatever, I'm excited about this!

Progress has been pretty slow since moving to UE4, but I think I'm getting the hang of things. Rather than jump straight to applying forces to the ship, I figured I'd get controls out of the way first, as they were always going to take me the longest. It quickly became apparent that having solid collision for the whole ship, and then expecting to be able to detect mouseovers on objects inside of it was dumb. So, I created my own collision mesh for the whole ship, which considering UE4 doesn't do concave collision meshes had to be made from convex shapes. It was a pain. Anyway, it's in, and after a load of screwing around in order to get my slider to work as a child of the ship, which has collision and physics, here's where I'm at: This is probably the least interesting progress GIF of the entire Jam. So, I feel like I can now make quite a lot of progress getting all of the sliders and buttons in and hooked up. I'm strongly beginning to doubt that I'll be able to finish everything I want to finish before the end of the Jam, though. At some point I'm going to have to switch to texturing the cockpit and getting all the environment elements in so that it looks like an actual game, which probably means a lot of the displays in the cockpit won't function. And man, I haven't even thought about sound and music yet! I think I'd rather have something playable that I can upload by the deadline, though. And whatever happens, I'm going to finish this after the Jam!