coughlinjon

I've done almost no work on this, but here's my first screenshot. It's got some blades

Hey everyone, I'll get straight to my question: My character has several sing buttons. I need to smoothly loop a clear "ooo" singing tone when you hold a sing button. Thus far I've recorded short "ooos" and "ahhhhs" at each tone on the major scale, but I don't have a good plan for initializing the tone and transitioning to a smooth loop to continue it. How long should I make these tones to get a good loop? Any Audacity tips for creating an audio file of a clear singing tone that smoothly loops? Any Unity implementation tips? Thanks! Notes on the game: I'm making a little prototype where you sing as part of a large choir. Right now the game controls with the keyboard, with each of your home row keys commanding your voice to a different pitch on the major scale. Here are links to my concept art and my first in-game gif https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1p24Mtti2l1c1p0ZGpXbmZuM2s/view?usp=docslist_api https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1p24Mtti2l1bDB4NjNnNXFFeHc/view?usp=docslist_api

Thanks for the help so far! I uploaded a super early windows build. coughlinjon.itch.io It's at the Chorus Boy page I'll keep uploading new builds as I fill out the features.

Where do you get your midi tones? I eventually want to use human voices, but right now they sound like garbage; I think that using midi sounds would be best for my prototype. I think I'm close to getting a minimally playable build ready. I'll post here when it's up on itch so people can give me some first impressions

Eyes of the Gman Hey all, I'm working on a game themed after episode title 125, "Eyes of the Gman". Concept I originally envisioned a very simple 2D head crab smashing game - sort of a Hotline Miami feel - but the playable portion of the game is only visible through reflections on the Gman's eyes. Below is my original sketch of a zoomed view of the Gman face, with Gordon and a crowbar fending off the head crabs as a tiny reflection in the eyes. concept sketch I'm shooting for a silly tone - heavy on Gman as creepy overseer. I'm planning to record myself speaking Gman to lay over top and I will scale the head crabs to overwhelm the best Gordon in under a minute of play. Progress I'm building this in Unity with 2D defaults. So far I've pulled an image of the Gman face off the internet and set it as my background. I then drew a quick spider and Gordon, animated them, and have them crawling around the Gman face. gordon animation spider/face spider/gordon/face Help Needed Art! I need help with art! My head crab looks like a spider and my Gordon barely looks like a person. I am awful at this stuff and I draw it on my phone during lunch breaks I also have my hands full looking up basic Unity tutorials to make the game begin/play/end. If anyone would like to make a better looking, top-down head crab and Gordon with crowbar animations it would help a ton. Also, I'd probably like to replace the Gman face I have in the background with something more appropriate to my game - likely with bigger eyes so I can stick with the gameplay-within-reflection concept. Audio - I don't even know where to start with background audio and sound effects like a crowbar swing or head crab splatter. I'm planning to record my own voice to speak some custom Gman dialog, and I think I can handle that part, but if anyone has suggestions or would like to create the other audio tracks it would be a great help. About me I'm an avid Idle Thumbs listener, but this is my first dive into the forums. I've been working with Unity for a few months and I'm still very much a beginner - this is my first time working with animations. I'm trying to use itch.io jams as a motivator to finish projects; I want to build a portfolio of small games and eventually tackle a big project. I have dreams of releasing a game commercially or working at a small studio some day. Sorry this first post is so long. Thanks in advance for anyone who's able to help. You can contact me via dm or twitter below. Jon @clicktozoom

I drew a new sketch of the G-Man. This is my first attempt at coloring it. He's cut off at his hair and has no ears I'll fix that later. Full G-Man face

Ha! I originally wrote and recorded that script in 15 minutes when I was scrambling to get voice audio for the game. Now that I have actually implemented it and have no deadline, I'm planning to rewrite and record something with more direction. My hope was always to make this seem like a frivolous request, more for G-Man entertainment than world changing assistance, so I might run with your idea and make his motivations over the top trivial. Glad you played the web build

I uploaded a new build that has a real ending! Some of my assets are still garbage (art, voiceover, script) but the game plays from start to finish now. I'm going to take my time replacing all of the art and polishing up the camera movement. http://coughlinjon.itch.io/eyes-of-the-g-man

Thanks for playing! I'm working on the game right now - adding a title sequence and some of the G-Man monologue. I need to find a good way to communicate to the player that they have control of Gordon. I think adding a floor texture to the "reflection" would help, so when you WASD around you can see that you're actually running, even though your character stays mostly glued to the same spot on the big face. Also, I want to animate the G-Man eyes, I think that would also help teach people that they have control of the little guy. I'll post in the forums when I've uploaded incremental builds, and I might change it to a browser build to streamline the download process.

Lol, I couldn't explain it to my girlfriend, either She played it late last night for the first time and left the room disturbed.

I find this really interesting! I'm still planning to wrap the actual monologue and presentation around this whole thing, and I do intend for the end state to be lots of head crabs overwhelming the player (then the G-Man steps in). So maybe I could maintain the feelings you are enjoying while still cleanly exiting the monologue. I can always artificially cap the frame rate to give the illusion that the game is breaking (I'll need the audio to run unhindered, still).

Thanks for playing! Unfortunately I submitted this build without an end state. The game is very unfinished and while I don't intend for your application to lock itself up like that, I submitted understanding that would be the case. I left a note about it on the itch.io game page, but I probably should put it in bold. I'm continuing development and I have some of the planned features listed above in this dev log as well as on the itch page.

Here is my submission! http://itch.io/jam/wizard-jam/rate/24562 I was out of town all weekend but arrived home with an hour and a half left in the jam to strip down my game into something relatively unbroken and playable It became obvious to me Thursday night - my last real chance to add features to this project before I left town - that I wouldn't be able to include any of the G-Man monologue script/audio I recorded earlier in the week, and that I might not even be able to add the background music I received from David (above). I slapped the background audio on 15 minutes before submission to add a bit of atmosphere to the build, but it doesn't do justice to the awesome segmented tracks David originally sent me. I'm nowhere near finished with this project, and now that the first deadline is out of the way I'll be able to slow down, develop, and polish the existing and future features that will make it the experience I originally envisioned. All of that might be a little lofty speech for a game that is a silly Half-Life parody, but the Wizard Jam and its community's enthusiasm has made this the first of my Unity projects that I've explored in earnest. Also, the piece of garbage I left on Itch.io is an excellent motivator to expand and polish the project Thank you to everyone who answered my questions, and to Michael and David for the assets you created. This was a special two weeks for me!

I feel stupid asking this question. I see most people changing "dev log" in their topic titles to "release" but I can't figure out how to do it on my own post. Can anyone give me a tip? Thanks

Submitted my game 3 minutes before the deadline, yay! It doesn't even have an end state and is barely a playable thing, but it's also the first Unity project I've felt comfortable enough sharing This was an awesome experience - a great two weeks. It was my first time browsing the Idle Thumbs forums and I found answers to questions, collaborators, general enthusiasm and support. Thanks to everyone who made this environment so welcoming

Hey everyone, I thought I would start a common thread for everyone looking for last minute advice. The forum contributors have been awesome answering my questions, but I thought it might be nice to give people with lots of skills one place to look to spread their knowledge

Hey all, I'm having trouble with animation state changes. I have 4 animations that I need to rotate between. 1. Resting with crowbar on right side 2. Swing from right to left 3. Resting with crowbar on left side 4. Swing from left to right I want the swing animation to run a single time, then immediately transition to the wait animation. I have attached a "state" variable to my animator that I can use to force each animation, but what I can't figure out is how to query the animator at runtime to check what animation is currently active and how to check when the swing animations have completed. Does anyone have direct advice or a reference they can link me to? I'm apparently inept with animations.

Got an awesome suggestion on getting a collider to line up with my crowbar animation. Made an empty object a child of my Gordon character, added a polygon collider to it, and included its translation/rotation states in the sprite animation I had already created. Here's the gif This forum is full of helpful people

I like that idea. I'll continue as a DM

Ok, here's my immediate advice needs Animated Colliders I have a 3 image sprite animation of a character swinging a crowbar. I need to animate a collider to follow my crowbar so it registers contacts with enemies. Anyone know a good tutorial for this or have advice themselves? I've struggled to find the proper resources on the internet. Thanks

David, I mixed one of your tracks with a bunch of "Mr. Freeman" clips for fun this morning. Here is the result; I think you nailed the tone of the music! https://soundcloud.com/clicktozoom/mrfreemansample Lol, I was laughing pretty hard when I first imported 14 different "Mr. Freeman" tracks and set them over top each other

Segmenting the 7 minute voiceover track and labeling each for easy import into the game. This 30 second segment includes 5 "mmmm" and 14 "Mr. Freeman" utterances. I hope a couple of those work It's time for bed.

Gameplay Progress - mirrored scenes I've spent this evening working on the mirrored image of Gordon and head crabs in both eyes; my concept is that the player sees themselves, Gordon, in a reflection on the G-Man's eyeballs. I originally had planned on having a single Gordon and head crabs somewhere out of the scene with a camera on them and a broadcast of the action rendered over top of the G-Man eyes. The little research I did sounded like I would need a Unity Pro license to project secondary cameras onto a surface; I'm not sure whether or not this is correct, but I found a different way to solve my problem anyways I now have two separate Gordons that receive all of the same user input, and every time I spawn a head crab I actually spawn a pair of them with identical offsets to the right and left Gordons. My head crab AI should move identically as long as they are given identical offsets, so they'll theoretically trace the same position paths and arrive at Gordon's crowbar at the same exact time. I still have a long way to go with graphical effects to make these look like reflections on the eyeballs, but I seem to at least have my Gordons doing identical things and my head crabs doing the same Here is a gif of both Gordons and head crabs moving in unison. Balance I'm planning to balance the game by controling my head crab spawn rate - it should take a predictable amount of time to cut through each wave of spiders, and I'm thinking that I can increase their spawn rate exponentially to cap the max time a player would spend in the game. I'm only concerned with game time because I want this to feel like a real, contained G-Man monologue. If the experience drags on too long I think it will lose its novelty. Here's a gif of head crabs spawning quick enough to crash my Unity

I posted more details in my dev log for Eyes of the G-man, but I need help/advice on building intro/outro sequences in Unity. I'm thinking black screens with logos/text.

Advice/Help needed: Eyes of the G-man has turned into a playable Half-life G-Man monologue. As such, I'd like to open it with a sequence that mimics the opening of Half-life 2 with its black screen, white text. I have no idea how to do this Can anyone point me toward references/tutorials on how to do intro/exit sequences in Unity? I also want to put credits at the end. I have never even put text on screen in Unity Also, if anyone is free to help me build the intro/exit, that also would be a fine solution!