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[Release] Nineties Cockpit Freakout

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Nineties Cockpit Freakout!

It is the nineties, and there is time for... whatever this is!

 

Dowload Link: http://giraffecat.itch.io/nineties-cockpit-freakout

 

Original Post:

This is one of my favourite episode titles, and it gave me quite a vivid idea for a game. I don't want to say too much about the mechanics, as I feel like a lot of the impact will come from experiencing them, but it's basically going to be set inside a cockpit with a bunch of controls that you manually operate with the mouse. In the episode, the Thumbs guys invent a story about a kid who plays a lot of Wing Commander and is then transported to the Wing Commander universe in order to save it. I'll probably try and work this story into the game somehow.

 

I'm going to be using UE4, with Blender for modelling. Ableton Live 9 and Sound Forge 10 for audio stuff! I'll post some stuff when I've made something worth showing.

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This is one of my favourite episode titles, and it gave me quite a vivid idea for a game. I don't want to say too much about the mechanics, as I feel like a lot of the impact will come from experiencing them, but it's basically going to be set inside a cockpit with a bunch of controls that you manually operate with the mouse. In the episode, the Thumbs guys invent a story about a kid who plays a lot of Wing Commander and is then transported to the Wing Commander universe in order to save it. I'll probably try and work this story into the game somehow.

 

I'm going to be using UE4, with Blender for modelling. Ableton Live 9 and Sound Forge 10 for audio stuff! I'll post some stuff when I've made something worth showing.

 

Sounds great! Lots of possibilities with this title. :)

 

I don't know if you're new to UE4 or already experienced, but if you need any help with Unreal related stuff, let me know and I'll try and help out.

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I sketched a basic outline of what I wanted the ship and the cockpit to look like. I'm not great at drawing. I also don't have a scanner! Or an eraser:

 

NCF-SketchSmall.jpg

 

Perspective is HARD. Anyway, my next step is to load up Blender and realise that I've chosen a really awkward shape for the ship, which will probably make it impossible to make a cockpit that looks like that.

 

I don't know if you're new to UE4 or already experienced, but if you need any help with Unreal related stuff, let me know and I'll try and help out.

 

I've used it before, but I haven't made anything concrete, so I'm essentially new! I'll let you know if (when) I have any questions.

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Oh snap I had the exact same game idea from this ep title as you ha. Mine lives more in a Top Gun universe, but the idea of manually frantically flipping controls seemed like fun to me too. Good luck!

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I actually made some stuff! Haven't started on the cockpit yet, but I've modelled the craft itself, including thrusters and guns. Untextured so far, but exterior textures are probably going to be flat colours, as I don't expect you'll ever see the outside the ship.

 

CraftUntextured.png

 

CraftSmall.png

 

Cockpit should be easy enough to model, but I should probably decide on what I want the controls and displays to be first. As I see it, the main challenge I'm going to have will be in creating the respective buttons and levers, and then setting them up in UE4 to be draggable and clickable.

 

Oh snap I had the exact same game idea from this ep title as you ha. Mine lives more in a Top Gun universe, but the idea of manually frantically flipping controls seemed like fun to me too. Good luck!

 

I guess it's a pretty straightforward interpretation of the episode title! I mean, I sort of had Justin Smith's Enviro-Bear 2000 in mind when I came up with the initial idea. Are you going to make yours as well? You should!

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Is that second screen simply the model rendered in UE4? Because that looks really nice already! I'm kind of picturing this game as a 3D Single Player Space Team, which is to say that I'm looking forward to it.

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Nice ship!

 

If you want a starting point for making interactable buttons and levers etc, take a look at the UE4 Content Examples project. It's a large download, but there's tons of stuff to learn from in there so it's worth having. Cockpit buttons will be relatively simple to make, but if you're looking into more complicated stuff there's a working slider, lever switch, crank and chain switch which you can play around with and adapt to your own needs.

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 guess it's a pretty straightforward interpretation of the episode title! I mean, I sort of had Justin Smith's Enviro-Bear 2000 in mind when I came up with the initial idea. Are you going to make yours as well? You should!

 

Looks good! I didn't know about Enviro-bear but that looks super fun, looking forward to your take on it. So it's cool with you if I make my interpretation as well? Then I think I will!

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Is that second screen simply the model rendered in UE4? Because that looks really nice already! I'm kind of picturing this game as a 3D Single Player Space Team, which is to say that I'm looking forward to it.

 

That's Blender's default render, with Ambient Occlusion. Flat-shaded models look pretty nice in UE4, though, and pretty much everything in the game is going to be flat-shaded, possibly with Blender's ambient occlusion baked into the textures. I'll be happy if everything looks like that render, basically.

 

If you want a starting point for making interactable buttons and levers etc, take a look at the UE4 Content Examples project. It's a large download, but there's tons of stuff to learn from in there so it's worth having. Cockpit buttons will be relatively simple to make, but if you're looking into more complicated stuff there's a working slider, lever switch, crank and chain switch which you can play around with and adapt to your own needs.

 

Awesome, that looks like exactly what I need, thanks!

 

So it's cool with you if I make my interpretation as well? Then I think I will!

 

Yeah, go for it! The more the merrier.

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Okay, so I'm mostly done with modelling the cockpit interior, which was more fiddly and took longer than I'd hoped. Who'd have guessed that making a bunch of awkwardly-shaped consoles and panels and then having to subdivide their faces and create buttons and sliders would be difficult? I'm pretty happy with the result, anyway. Here's a render from Blender:

 

CockpitTest2.jpg

 

None of the controls themselves (Buttons, lights, sliders) are in at the moment, as they're going to be separate meshes. The displays (Most of which are on the top console) are probably going to be texture based, so I'll need to look into changing textures with Blueprints. My next step, however, is to get the ship into UE4, set up the camera inside of it, and figure out how to create thrust and stuff and generally get the physics working.

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Thanks guys! Solo Space Team is kind of what I'm going for in terms of franticness, and not really knowing what you're doing. Making that fun is a concern of mine, though, and I'm worried that I won't have enough time to do balance stuff like that, on account of everything else I'm doing being new to me. We'll see how far I get!

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Okay, so I've imported my cockpit mesh into UE4, I've given it physics, and I've put a camera inside it. Here's what happens when I drop it in a test map:

 

FirstPhysics.gif

 

Not ideal, but getting there. I've fixed the problem where the camera wasn't keeping the cockpit's rotation. Need to play around with the physics of the ship in order to stop it sliding across the ground. And then: Apply forces to it! I also realised I was using a really old version of UE4, so I'm updating now. Oops!

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Looking rad! Already has a great sense of being in a tiny fighter craft, and the diagonal lines in the window and panel really draw the attention to the center. Can't wait to see it in action in space.

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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:

 

Slider.gif

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!

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I actually like the untextured look. Have you played Mirror Moon? There's no manual space flight in the game, but the ship that transports the player between levels is kind of similar to your concept.

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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.

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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!

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Buttons and Lights and Levers, oh my!
 
SlidersAndButtons.gif
 
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:

UnrealCockpit.jpg

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