Synnah

These are really good! You're like a proper musician and stuff. I like how solo violin is kind of a counterpoint to the game's visual style. I'm all about seemingly-incongruous musical choices!

I'm a bit disappointed with my ghost. My intention was to use Apex cloth physics to simulate a guy wearing a sheet, and it would have looked amazing. I don't seem to be able to get Apex to work, though, possibly due to my Blender-to-Unreal set-up. I don't know. I spent about 4 hours trying to get it working yesterday, before figuring I should do something productive. I've got basic movement code in for the ghosts, but they navigate like pricks. Need to write some code to reduce the likelihood that they'll just go back and forth for ages, because that happens all the time at the moment. The ghost model above is just a single mesh, but it ended up deforming quite nicely. I think the arms are a bit too fat, so I'm probably going to scale those down a bit. I'm not really sure where that foot-pop is coming from, either. I checked the anim compression settings, but that's not what's causing it. It looks fine in Blender. Also, here's a high res dot gobbler render.

That's really great! Like Jake said in the 'cast, I'm really impressed at the two fully-realised driving games in Wizard Jam this year. It's rad.

Haha, man, I completely missed that! That was a much easier fix than I was expecting. Thanks!

Dot Gobbling is in and working. Took me a little longer than I'd have liked, but I can move onto enemies next. I also added rotation interpolation, but it doesn't really work, as he often spins around the wrong way. I forget how to deal with this; I think I did something for Nineties Cockpit Freakout, so I'll have a look at that tomorrow.

I got animation blending working on the arms! There's an animation for the left arm and the right arm (And another for the mouth), and when I trigger one of these, I quickly blend out of the walk animation into the grab, and then blend back into the walk animation at the end. I really like how animation layering and blending works in Unreal! Next thing to do is attach the dot to the hand socket, and then transfer it to the mouth socket, and hope that doesn't look too bad. I also want to do a quick rotation blend when changing directions, because the way it snaps at the moment looks a bit gross.

Yeah, it's actually quite surprising how hard it is to make a game with an orthographic camera look in any way dynamic. Monument Valley does an amazing job of that by having animated details all over the screen, but I think if you have a moving camera like the Lara Croft Go and Hitman Go, you need to do something to make it less flat. I think it would actually make sense for the flip-screen adventure that I was originally planning to make, but for a scrolling maze with not a lot of distinguishing detail, it's just nicer to have perspective. Need to play around with the FOV a bit, and maybe have some zooming in and out based on the distance to enemies.

Currently building the system for dots, and the gobbling thereof. I have left- and right-handed animations that I'm going to alternate between, and a chomping animation that'll trigger when the dot reaches his mouth. I have sockets on both hands, and one for the mouth, that I intend to attach the dots to. I'm hoping that'll just work, and won't look super naff.

"Blag the lingo quickhaste to keep your patrons happy, or you'll be out on your backarse." Well, that's me sold.

Building the maze gave me a fair bit of trouble. I made a mistake right from the start of not making all of my meshes modular and building the maze out of them, because when I built a single mesh for the entire maze (Which is huge), baking the shadows looked like arse (Even with presumably 2048x2048 lightmap texture, the definition was just too low). I split the maze into four quarters, which improved things a little, but not enough. I wonder if it makes sense for me to treat the maze as a dynamic object at this point, and just take the hit on dynamic shadows. I think that's what's happening in this video, because I didn't bake the lighting for it: You'll probably have noticed that the second half of that video has a different camera. I've been building the game under the assumption that the camera had to be orthographic isometric, but when I tried a perspective camera, it looked a lot nicer. So, unless anyone feels particularly strongly about it, I'm probably going to leave it as perspective. At any rate, I probably need to start slamming the rest of the mechanics in now. I'm not that happy with the maze, really (The floor texture is just some crappy .jpg I grabbed from the internet, and the walls are a bit repetitive, but I can add some variation to them quite easily), and I'd like to make a number of meshes for detail furniture to scatter around the place, but I probably won't get time. We'll see!

Oh man, this is legitimately amazing!

Ah, that is a great rat king! I like the way he flops his arms and legs about to gain momentum. Until they all fly off. I'm also wondering where all of the other Rigid Body Rat Kings went!

I was trying to think of ways that I could add things to or change the basic mechanics to make a Pac-Man clone more interesting; I haven't got anything particularly amazing in mind, but maybe one or two things will help a little. Thanks for the suggestions! I think building up narrative elements over the course of several levels is probably the best way to go with this. The idea of making smaller levels by closing off sections of a larger level also sits pretty well with me, so you're not just playing the same level over and over with slightly faster enemies. I can do that quite cheaply. I like the idea of having simple cutscenes between levels, like the original Pac-Man did, but I don't think I can do those quickly enough. Maybe dialogue or text between levels is the best way. I'll think about this.

Hey, I've finally got some gameplay in there! I mean, you can move a guy around a maze. Look: Getting the Pac-Man controls of 'select a direction and he keeps going until he hits a wall' was trickier than I thought it would be. I tried to use overlap events and collision sweeps to deal with hitting walls at first, but this was such a pain, and you could just push your way through. I have such a hard time with UE4's collision channels. In the end I used raytraces for everything; when he's moving forward, I'm checking in front of him to see if there's a wall there, and stopping him if there is. When you push in a different direction, I do a trace in that direction before deciding whether to turn. If the coast is clear, I make sure that he's close to the centre of the current 'tile' before turning, and then snap him into the centre. Seems pretty straightforward when I put it like that.

There is now! I think I've found a way to implement the Uncle Who Works at Nintendo diversifier!

Thanks for the kind words, everyone! I became weirdly ill yesterday, so I didn't make any more progress after finishing the texturing. I made a basic run cycle this morning, though! I'm finally going to start setting up the game in UE4; I always sort of prioritise modelling first, but I figured in this case that if I didn't have a realistic Dot Gobbler, why even bother? Regarding the ghosts, I initially thought that having a single solid mesh was the way to go, but I think animating that well would be tricky, getting a sheet mesh to deform realistically. I think what I'm going to do is try and get cloth physics working, and model a rudimentary human shape with a cloth sheet around it. I've never used Apex before, so I'm hoping it won't give me too much trouble. I feel like I need to do this to give Dot Gobbler the AAA polish it deserves.

That makes perfect sense! I imagine getting the amount of force right on the hover components was fiddly; I did physics stuff on Nineties Cockpit Freakout, and unless you're a physicist, you can't really sit down and say 'The amount of force required is x'. All you can really do is stick a value in and repeatedly tweak it until it basically works.

The physics and movement already look great! I like the hovering nature of the vehicle; was it hard to get that working? I've thought about doing a similar thing before, but I wouldn't really know where to start. Unreal's probably already got physics functions to deal with that kind of thing, though. How is the turret controlled, if both sticks are being used for steering? Left and Right bumpers?

The eyes are going to be a material where I can move the pupils around, or swap it out for a blink animation. I hadn't thought about swapping out the rosy cheeks, though. I just figured he would be profusely uncomfortable at all times. I could technically swap out the entire character texture to switch between normal and flushed Gobblers.

Is this better? It's not better, is it? If anyone hasn't seen the cover of Dot Gobbler, this is what I was working from.

Sorry for the nightmares, guys! He'll probably look marginally less horrifying once he has pupils. The power pill will cause Dot Gobbler to enter a drug-induced fugue state where he flails around wildly and is able to defeat ghosts through sheer frantic adrenaline (I'd like to ragdoll the ghosts when this happens, but I've had trouble getting ragdolls to work in the past, so I'll see how that goes). It is very likely that his eyes will roll into the back of his head when this happens. So I'm thinking about Pac-Man mechanics. Because my original intention for this game was to be an adventure game where you walk around at will, when I started thinking about making a Pac-Man clone, that's what I expected the mechanics to be. Pac-Man never works like that, though; he keeps moving in his current direction until he hits a wall, so your inputs are basically just choosing a direction for him to start moving in. I assume the main reason for this is because there's a very specific point at which Pac-Man can 'snap into' a new lane, so to have the player line themselves up perfectly before they can enter a new passage obviously doesn't work. I feel like you can move interpolate them into the right place, though, so maybe I don't need Dot Gobbler to always be moving. I don't know, I'm going to have to think about this. I'm hoping it'll fall into place once I'm prototyping the mechanics.

Hahaha, that video is amazing. This is looking good so far!

I think he's exactly the right size for the King of France. This looks great!

Right, I spent today tidying up and rigging the model, and only had a small amount of time to spend on texturing it. I'll make the textures look a whole bunch better tomorrow. For now, here's the result of the texturing: And the rigging: