coughlinjon

[Release] Eyes of the G-Man

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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

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Update:

I was out of town all weekend, but I finished up the code that controls Gordon's crowbar swings tonight; he now swings only once per cycle (left/right).

Tomorrow I'll continue with the collision detection between the animated crowbar and the head crabs.

*I'm still looking for help with my terrible art! Any artist is welcome :)

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OK, my head crab (currently a spider) now has an AI that always tries to walk toward the player. It commands its own XY accelerations, so its velocity has some lag and overshoots its target (I like this).

 

Spider AI gif

 

My next action is adding an animated collider to Gordon's crowbar and I need some help/advice!

 

Help with Animated Colliders

 

custom Gordon crowbar collider

 

Above is a snapshot of the first custom polygon collider I made for Gordon's crowbar. He swings the crowbar from left to right in this gif

 

I would like my collider to map to the crowbar in each frame of this gif. I've found a couple threads online suggesting I make multiple colliders and flip through them as the animation progresses. Does anyone in the community have a suggestion for how I should handle this? Or does anyone have a resource/tutorial they could point me toward?

 

Thanks in advance :)

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Audio Help Needed

 

I wrote a G-Man monologue and recorded it on my Tascam DR-05  :P

 

Does anyone have any tips for smoothing voice recordings? There is a general background noise I'd like to remove from the track. I'm probably using Audacity.

Or, are there any audio people here who could take my raw file and smooth it for me? Maybe chop it up into pieces?

 

Thanks in advance :)

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I am an audio person only in my happiest dreams BUT I do know that Audacity has a pretty sweet noise removal feature. Start recording the audio and let it run for about a minute before talking/making any noise, then use that bit with the Noise Reduction filter. Details here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Noise_Reduction#Get_Noise_Profile

 

 

That is an awesome tip, thank you for the help! I found some help for voice/sound effects but will try your suggestion on my own to log the skill :)

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Team Updates!

 

I've received word that I might have some help finishing this thing! All within the last 12 hours I was contacted with help/advice for programming, sound effects, and background music :) Thanks in advance to these collaborators, I'll let them name themselves if they want to be known.

 

Development Progress

 

This game is evolving into a sort of playable G-Man monologue. I wrote and recorded a script along with some common G-Man phrases in different intonations.

I spend the first 30 seconds laughing because I can't take any of this seriously. The raw audio is available at the dropbox link below :)

 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/76hbb0vh2go4476/GmanMonologue1.mp3?dl=0

 

Also, now that I potentially have a couple people helping on the project, I've created a short design document to keep us all organized. I've uploaded it to Google Drive and anyone is free to read it.

 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mwH4HLYbBzota9f5Dqa9X7QKP5W0NZXtfBpa_NQoO7E/edit?usp=sharing

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I was able to put together some sound effects for this - all of them fresh for this game jam. 

 

The goal was to get footsteps, a whoosh of a swinging crowbar, and a headcrab getting splattered by said crowbar.

 

I used a Zoom H6 recorder for all of these and then edited them in Audition. The samples were recorded at 96 kHz (which really helps if you need to do a pitch up or down effect) and 24 bit (because I can) and then converted later to normal CD quality wav files.

 

The footsteps were easy enough. The whoosh sound was also surprisingly easy, it was just a matter of finding a rod that made a satisfying sound and swinging it in front of the recorder. I pitched that down a bit.

 

The headcrab splat was a combination of the impact event (a prybar puncturing a box full of clothes) and then the shlorping sound of jello being squished in a bowl.

 

Here's a video I made of the Zoom in action:

 

You can give a listen to the final product here:

https://soundcloud.com/hermbot/some-video-game-sounds

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In addition to his sound effects, Michael also cleaned up my G-Man monologue track. His stuff is incredible :)

David also made some background music for the game out of audio from Idle Thumbs episode 125!

The full link to our audio folder is here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ovcr4lakd4v3jw9/AAD5uKvRZHSPNziJaitgf5hDa?dl=0

Also, I spent last night working on gameplay and drawing/importing a custom G-Man face with much bigger eyes :)

Have a look at some of the assets here:

https://drive.google.com/folder/d/0B1p24Mtti2l1djFsZDNVSUthRWM/edit

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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 :P

Also, if anyone is free to help me build the intro/exit, that also would be a fine solution!

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Here is the learning module for te new Unity UI system

http://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/ui

The thing that took me a while to figure out its that you have to add something to the beginning of the script in order to use the components from the new system. I can't remember off the top of my head, but it's something like

Using Unity.System.UI;

If you look those short videos over and you are still confused, I'll be happy to help you figure it out.

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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 :)

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Hey fellow thumbians! 
 
I composed and produced the music for "Eyes of the G-Man". I always love documenting any work I do, so I made a quick little video highlighting how I came up with the piece (which involved stealing a short section of the Idle Thumbs theme from episode 125). 

Have a watch if you're interested! 

 

 

And the piece itself:

 


 
Happy I had an opportunity to contribute to this game and the Wizard Jam in general. The Thumbs community is pretty sweet after all. 
 
David Cowling
@AprilFoolsChild

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Oh man! That is convincing! Especially the initial burst. We should make a mod that just replaces all audio files in Half-Life 2 with our work - would be marvellous.

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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 :)

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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!

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I can get about 30 seconds into this, at which point the number of spiders becomes so intense that the framerate drops to 1fps! Is this intentional? Otherwise I like the general feel, and the audio is nicely done.

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I can get about 30 seconds into this, at which point the number of spiders becomes so intense that the framerate drops to 1fps! Is this intentional? Otherwise I like the general feel, and the audio is nicely done.

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.

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I enjoy very much that, in its current state, spiders just overwhelm you and fill the entire eye without the game acknowledging said overwhelming in any way before the game just gives up and dies. Sweet. 

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Yeah, it really is quite beautiful in its current state, also, quite tough to explain to my girlfriend what was going on.

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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).

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