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[Release] Unmasking the Brain Burglar

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Hi everyone, I'm going to attempt to make a game called "Unmasking the Brain Burglar", which will be a puzzle game where you attempt to catch the brain burgler before he turns all the NPCs into brainless wanderers. Because this is my second ever game, entered into as many game jams, I'm going to attempt to keep the scope very small, relying on my wife potentially for artwork, although I'll probably end up begging for help in this here thread.

 

As this is my second game, I'll still be following along to tutorials, which will most likely feed heavily into the gameplay. It just happens that the most recent Unity tutorial that is 2d is a 2d roguelike series, which means that this will be randomly generated levels, with a turn based nature. The burglar will look identical to the NPCs, and will be able to steal brains only when he is directly next to other NPCs. The effect of the thievery will be delayed to obscure his dastardly deeds. I may make it that after a certain amount of brains he may attempt to steal the characters brains, creating a potential fail state.

 

This idea is a little half baked now, and I'm starting to worry about the scale of this project. A large amount of the project should be doable by following along with the tutorials, but I've not done AI scripting before, and I don't have an artist yet. This game may end up having a Thomas was Alone vibe. Wish me luck, because I need it.

 

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Ideas I've already thrown away: 

 

Oh boy. It took me quite a while to make the decision on which Idle Thumbs title to choose. I had a fair few decent ideas, which I've had to throw away quite quickly, because of scoping issues. I wanted to create a game called Super Good, where you played as a deluded regular guy, who thought he was a super hero. I wanted to make it so that the world around our hero would help him complete impossible feats of good, thus keeping his delusion. 

 

The problem with this idea is that I really wanted to include more than one super power. I wanted flying to happen through trampolines, pigeons swooping in to carry you, and a wave from the ocean carrying you. I wanted tricks of the sun to blind people, thus making you invisible... Either this was going to be a text adventure, or this was going to have to be scrapped.

 

My second idea was for His Cyborg Familiar. I wanted you to clean up after your BigDog familiar, who was accidentally destroying the world around him. I couldn't figure out how this would work in 2d, and I am trying my hardest to keep working in 2d while in my early stages of games development. I hope that this was a good idea. I wasn't too sure whether this idea would have had legs, so I ended up scrapping it. Let's hope I've made the right choice.

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I can't tell whether you are talking about my first ever game, or my primary idea for this game jam, so if it is the former, here is the link. It is a procedurally generated infinite runner where you attempt to chomp as many puppies as possible. I was very happy with how it came out, but it isn't remotely perfect. Sometimes the player cannot double jump, when they should be able to, and the unity web player version had a persistent bug where the character kept falling through the world. I didn't have enough time to fix that one, so I removed that option, so it is download only, sorry.

 

In terms of my new game, I've made some pretty good progress, my level is generating quite nicely. I'm using the art assets from the tutorial so there isn't much to show, but I'm quite happy with how much I managed to achieve in a few hours yesterday. I'm hoping that I'm going to be able to spend most of my time making gameplay tweaks on the development side, rather than sheer implementation.

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I have managed to complete the tutorial, except for the sound, which I will do tonight. After that I'll be stripping out the mechanics that I don't need, adding a menu, and start to plan out the enemy and the npc AI. 

 

Overall, I'm happy with my progress. The tutorial through me off guard on a few things. Note to future self: GameObject.Find() doesn't work when your GameObject is hidden. Two hours wasted.

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I've been able to team up with an awesome illustrator, @meanhouseart, so very soon I should be able to start showing you what this game looks like. 

 

As an update, at the moment I'm still stripping out the finished tutorial game, to get the game ready for my mechanics. I would like to research more about ai scripting, because it is easy enough to enemies in the current build of the game. their pathing focuses on horizontal movement rather than vertical, so as long as you are out of the way of the enemy on the horizontal axis, it is easy enough to avoid them.

 

That being said, as the main character isn't going to be getting attacked by the enemy, this may be less of an issue. In enemy vs npc hot action, maybe it will be okay that everyone walks like crabs in this game.

 

I'm really looking forward to seeing how the art starts to take form. Hopefully with the art I can start to pick some music that fits stylistically. All the things!

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A playable build is available here.

 

At the moment the web version is an older version, as it is more exciting than my stripped down version. This version doesn't match the tutorial exactly - I removed the food score, and added a pixel enemy for testing. All art and music is from the tutorial. 

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So today I've spent more time stripping out the game, and I'm focussing on npc AI. I've manage to make it so that both the enemy and npcs want to walk towards each other, but I've somehow made it so that they cannot walk at all. I was being too clever trying to tie up all the movement code in one place. Now the enemy needs to worry about hitting npcs as well as the player, that code got super complicated for my dumb brain, so back to writing the movement code per type of character. 

 

This has been a slow day. I've had around half an hour on the bus ride home, and I keep getting distracted by, you know, playing the game.

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Yesterday I went back to a previous build, where everyone was walking, and I started again. So far, I have it so that the enemy will go between the npcs, and kill them. I also have it so that the NPCs want to walk around, but they seem to have forgotten how to do so. 

 

No coding tonight, but the weekend will be full of it, so hopefully I'll be in a much happier place with it all. We have the beginnings of artwork now, so hopefully I'll be able to post screenshots soon.

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I got the NPC Moving! unfortunately all my npcs just chase after the player, pushing each other out of bounds. At least it is a start.

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So the NPC is moving correctly, the Brain Burglar can disabled NPCs, effectively stealing their brains. I'm running into trouble with the Brain Burglar just running into a brain-dead npc. it doesn't understand how to walk around the NPC.

 

Yey scripting.

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My brain burglar now understands how not to keep running away from and running towards one of his previous victims. My next step is to make the npcs move around to obscure the brain burglars actions. Then, I will need to give the user a way of accusing the player. I think the stage after that would be to make the enemy run up the stairs to the next level. 

 

Man, my ai sucks real hard right now. I knew well enough to choose a simple game for my first, but my second was too big for me. 

 

EDIT: typos.

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I've managed to get it so the npcs are avoiding each other, by switching where they are walking to if they bump into other npcs. I have made it so disabled npcs cannot trap any character in by turning them into the floor essentially. I don't like the fact that people will be walking on the bodies of victims, but it stop the game from being unsolvable. 

 

The artwork is coming along nicely - we have some walls, floor tiles, and exhibits for the museum we are setting the game in. the characters we are creating have a Superbrothers sword and sorcery vibe about them; lanky, low res pixel based wonder. Thanks again to @meanhouseart - I'll show it to world soon. :)

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The enemy and npc ai is doing well. it is not great, but it will do for the moment - there is so much to do! I've added sound - some pretty happy jazz music, but here are the next things I want to focus on, then I'll come back to the AI.

 

Implementation of artwork: - I've got some wonderful artwork from meanhouseart, which I want in my game as soon as possible. 

the ability to catch the enemy.

Character Selection.

Level amount selection - this game is randomly generated, so I want the user to choose the length of game they are willing to play. 

Scoring system.

Online scoreboard (Offline if it will take too long)

UI

AI

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I'll be passing a playable build tomorro, as it seems like I am getting too tired to function. Until then, hee is my progress.

 

I have implemented the artwork that I have. This was more amount of work than expected, due to the sheer amount of animations that I am going to have to do. The scoring system is mostly in place, and the ability to catch the enemy so far leads to a debug message saying you caught the enemy, but not much more. 

 

In terms of animations, the animations for enemy and npcs turning around is there, but not hooked up. I doubt I'm going to be able to do any form of scoring board, which is sad. We'll see. Most of my work tomorrow will be making it be a playable game. I know that I'll only be able to do a small amount of work on it tomorrow, due to life things. I think this will be cutting it short for the deadline.

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We have a new build of the game over on Itch.io! I wanted to post this despite the fact that the game is still barely playable, to start showing of some of the incredible work that meanhouseart has done.

 

In terms of this build, we have a character select screen, half the animations, movement mostly sorted. You can click on NPCs to accuse them of being the brain burglar, but I have no window telling you whether you are correct or not yet. If you go to the furthest top right of each level, you'll be teleported to more levels. the game will increase up to infinity if you let it. 

 

I'm happy with the progress tonight, but there is still a few issues:

 

The npcs can walk into the same space, slamming them together. The only character to be able to escape that is the burglar, who will promptly kill the other npc, and walk over their body. This can also happen to the player, and the burglar will just leave you there, taunting your newly trapped existence.

 

Obviously we would like a scoring system. I want to make it so that you have to stand next to the npc before you can accuse them, otherwise why have a playable character at all... I would also like to work on the ui a bit, maybe have one. Create a menu, a selection for how many levels you want to compete in... 

 

And finally, I would like to fix the AI a bit more. The eagle eyed among you will notice quite quickly that if an npc is wandering upwards, away from anything, it is usually the burglar, who has gotten lost. Sometimes the burglar will walk in a square, too, which is nice for them.

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I still haven't managed to implement all of the sprites yet. You will notice the ladys idle animation is half her, half a floor sprite until I get the idle animation. none of the walking animations are in yet, which is a shame, considering how amazing they look.

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I knew the sight of MeanHouseArt's artwork would get people talking. :P

 

I've done quite a bit tonight. I have set up a controls scene, game over scene, and credits scene. I have hooked it all to flow from one part to another. I have worked on the ui, so it shows how many burglars and alive people are left per level. I also have a dialog box which lets you choose whether to accuse someone of being the burglar. I have used PlayerPrefs to set things like total points, level count, gender of main character.  I decided that instead of artificially limiting what level you can reach, the level you were on after you wrongly accused people after 3 times, along with the people you saved, as a double points.

 

I have a little bit to work on tomorrow. I still need to put in the lovely animations, hook up the dialog boxes, get the logic right for counting down the amount of chances left you have to make accusations. I need to prevent the user from going up to the next level withour finding the brain burglar. I need to prevent the brain burglar from killing after you successfully accuse them, which is a big problem in later levels.

 

Whoops, that still sounds like a lot of work, but hey, at least it is the weekend. I feel pretty confident that I can manage this with the extension to the deadline. See you in the morning.

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The build is up! (Or will be very shortly, it is still uploading.)

 

I think, for the time given, I'm quite happy with the game. It is not perfect, and I am going to clean it up after the submission is finished. 

 

Things to note:

 

We don't have all of the animations in, as I can't figure out how to transfer between moving and not moving in the animation.

Although you will see that there is a character selection, as of now the game ignores your choice, and chooses the second character. This is because at the moment, there is a bug that prevents the first character from moving.

 

I would also like to have a cleaner ui, the font sizes are everywhere. There is only one song, and no sound effects, as I ran out of time to implement them.

 

That being said, I'm proud of what I've managed to do, and I think the artwork from Meanhouseart is stunning. I've loved working with him.

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As I still have time tommorow to clean up, if I find time in the day I might do so, although it will be a busy day tomorrow for me. I'm happy with people thinking the current build is the final until I change my mind later.

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I like the style and mechanics of this. It was a little hard to play in the buggy state, unfortunately. I couldn't read what was going on very well so when there's no clear signal of the murders or anything like that, discovering the brain burglars was a bit difficult.

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I liked the art and sound, but yeah, had trouble playing the game, it sounded cool too!

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