[Dev Log] World of Blanks: Gunnin' Six

[Super_Jogurt]

(I'm newer to these forums though I've been a longtime listener of the cast. Let's see where this goes!)

 

Premise/Gameplay

Gerbilsinspace and I have been working on the Wizard Jam together using the episode title "World of Blanks." The basic premise of which is an offensive russian roulette using something like Towerfall or Samurai Gunn as a design base. We're shooting for 1-4 players, each having a revolver containing six shots, five of which are blanks. each shot takes a moment to recover from and reloading paralyzes the player momentarily. They must eliminate other players to remain the last person standing.

 

I want to keep the scope real small so we have a more realistic goal to shoot for (though I'm the air-headed artist/designer so I'm always Double-checking with Gerbil to see what's doable.) The features I was hoping to have at a minimum:

• Local 2 players (though hopefully 4)
• 1-2 maps
• 2 playable characters to select from (shooting for 4)

If we got this much done, I would come away a happy little boy!

 

Styyyyyle! (Characters and animation)

I wanted the game and characters to be themed around luck, statistics and chaos. So I got to concepting a batch of characters made from luck totems.

 

• Lady Luck: A dice-headed six-shooter
• Maneki-Neko: One of those hand-waving cats you see in windows all the time with little coin medallions. His medallion would be a fractured bullet, they're actually really appealing when they split...
• Misunderstood: I wanted a character based on video game RNG, so of course Missingno comes to mind. He's a random set of numbers running around the map and glitching constantly. Or is he random?
• The Soul out of Luck: A ghost which is our joke character. His bullets do no harm and shooting him triggers a death animation which ends in another ghost coming out of his previous ghost corpse.
• A one-legged Rabbit: Just a coin-flip away from death.
• A black cat: The inverse of the Lucky-cat?
• Disc Lincoln: A lucky penny that roooolls around.
• Horseshoe crab... thing: I'm runnin' out of ideas, guys.
• A ladder to walk under: come on, what??

Here are some links to character sketches: 

 

I made some quick test animations for Gerbil to use in-engine while I worked on designs and other assets for menus and such. This triangle-man probably doesn't fit with the theme at all, but since he's done I guess he's in. It's basically Bill from Gravity falls or the triangle from nuclear throne. Sue me!

 

Animations: idle, running, reloading, jumping, firing, and dying.

 

Here are some Misunderstood test animations. Since he's made from text we can't be lazy and flip him, I'll have to make left and right running/shooting sprites respectively.

 

I like him a lot because I can't help but animate with a cartoony look, so this is a great way to add bizarre variety to the characters. The more left-field designs are in multiplayer games, the more they appealed to me. You bet I'd pick the monster blob or writhing bug-lady over big-sword anime guy any day of the week.

 

Animations: idle, run, reload, fire.

His idle animation spells "chillin" frame-by-frame in binary. Can you read the rest?

[Super_Jogurt]

And here are a few separate effects elements as well.

 

Dust-kick-up from jump

 

Bullet casings from each shot

 

 

Gun image to fall with phsyics from a character once shot

 

 

 

UI Design/Flow

To give myself a big-picture idea of every screen we needed assets for, I mocked up the general UI flow. This helps better remind me what we need.

 

 

Temp Logo

 

For most UI elements I've been shooting off loose sketches just to figure out sizing on screen. For example these character portraits are 480x1080, so you could fit exactly four across one screen.

(These are reduced to 60% size for preview purposes.)

 

Tiled background element for character-select and pause screens (grayscale so we can make whatever color we want, or make a slow color-cycle.)

 

[Super_Jogurt]

What about the winter/holiday theme???

Huh? Holiday? Oh, uh... Hmm...

 

We'll figure it out.

 

-Jogurt

 

Engine/Coding?

Shieeeet, homie. I don't know!

 

As far as engine/coding goes. Gerbil will be in here later to throw in his two cents the we could all learn a lot from! You excited as I am?

[zerofiftyone]

Sweeeeet. So much art talent on show here it makes me sick! 

 

 

[Spenny]

This is too good looking!

[Xfer83]

Maybe this game inherently constitutes its own winter holiday by looking so dope?

[osmosisch]

Holy moly that visual style.

[gerbilsinspace]

Let's do this. Firstly, with a gif. I am terrible at making good quality gifs. if you know a decent gif maker for macs, hook me up.

 

http://gfycat.com/SleepyVillainousAldabratortoise

 

This has been a massive learning curve for me, as although I've made a few games for jams before, this is my first multiplayer game, and the first game of mine in Unreal Engine 4. Zerofiftyone has been a fantastic help, answering all the beginner questions. You can tell I've asked him from the look of our background.

 

So the plan is to have a single scene game, where you transition into scenes by dropping in from above. Player 1 starts from behind the logo, and falls down into what will be character select. Here we will show the different controls for each player (sharing keyboard, if I can figure out how). the player stand in a character select section, and each time they press up or down, curtains will surround them while the character sprites change. when each player is done, they will stand on their own trapdoor, and then fall through into a randomly chosen level area. 

 

From there it is a 2d side scrolling game, with most of the bullets being blanks. I still need to implement this, as I am fighting with getting player two to move at all. best of three, show winner screen, then restart game, close or credits.

 

Things to do:

Player 2 character movement.

Spawn and fire bullets.

Instant death and respawn.

Character select

level select.

 

We'll get there!

[Ben X]

Art looks gorgeous and the idea is very cool interesting rad. Looking forward to this one!

[Nappi]

Damn this looks nice!

[gerbilsinspace]

We have 2 player character movement!

 

Now to the shooting

[gerbilsinspace]

Ok, to round off the day, we now have bullets, that get fired, and knock back both the shooter and the victim. nobody dies yet though. we don't have the blanks mechanic yet, but that is for another day (tomorrow). I'm very happy with the progress I have made today, but now, I need sleep.

[jenthetracy]

Such good animation! 

[gerbilsinspace]

So much for having working multiplayer, as soon as I built it for my mac, rather than running it in engine, the second player didn't want to show up. I've got a demo project that shows how to fudge it, and I'm trying to slam that into our game, hopefully this will be done in time. ugh.

[gerbilsinspace]

Ok, now we have a built built in unity, as I wasted around 3 days in unreal trying to get shared controller support. unity have a video by the devs explaining how to do it, and although it isn't as smooth as it could be, the instructions worked, and we now can control 2 characters. 

 

So, as I built this in a new engine, there is some things that we are further along with, and some things further behind. I firstly need to stop a player from being able to shoot themselves in the face. Then, it will be character select.

[Super_Jogurt]

PORTRAITS!

 

 

Guest-starring Evan, a buddy of mine for the Waluigi portrait!

 

 

And some Unfortunate sprites.

  

[gerbilsinspace]

EDIT: http://gerbilsinspace.itch.io/world-of-blanks it is released!

 

OK. I'm just about to put up the build for the jam. I'm putting up the mac build now, and the windows build when I get access to one to test it in the morning. 

 

If you are going to play this game, here are a few things to note!

 

Firstly, the controls! in order to select your character in the character select screen, it is E player 1, Left Alt for player 2. as soon as both have pressed, the game begins.

 

Secondly, I strongly recommend choosing Three Point Shot and Missunderstood, the glitch character. I recommend this, because the other two are very much broken / work in progress. if you want to not be able to jump, and not move as quickly, go ahead.

 

After those caveats, I am pretty happy with this. As long as it isn't completely buggy over on windows (Like last time), I'll be happy. I'm going to finish this game up a few days after the jam has ended, as these assets deserve a working game.

[Spenny]

With a little more polish this game could really be something I think. All the art and design had me and the lady laughing, its just the controls held us up a bit.

[Ahr Ech]

Man, this just bleeds personality. I'd love to see you guys keep going with it.

[Broxxar]

"Sonic Adventure!", I literally laughed out loud. The game itself is a bit of a buggy acid trip but it's oozing with potential. Great work everyone who contributed, hope you can fix this up and put a bow on it!

[gerbilsinspace]

Of course we will be making this less buggy. as the sole developer on this, I apologise for the state of the build. I have a fix for the random character switching. turns out, you could control the character select menu throughout the entire game, making you switch characters. I'll have a fix for the characters being broken tonight.

 

@Broxxar when you say the game is a buggy acid trip, can you explain a little more? The reason we don't have a web build was because there was some weird stuff going on, with textures from the ground flying around in lines across the screen. is that what you saw? Or the fact that characters were broken, and your character choice was ignored on death? any other bugs you have found?

 

Thanks, and apologies,

 

Joe.

[Broxxar]

Yes so character choice ignored on death mixed with dead bodies being left behind resulted in a scenario where two Waluigis were separated by dead bodies, unable to jump them and the game dead locks. It was also confusing at first that Missunderstoods dead body is a single 0 floating in the air.

 

There's also no shortage of physics/animation quirks. Examples: unable to jump off other players; holding run into a wall causes you to stick to the wall while still in the fall animation; shooting while mid air (or stuck to a wall) returns to the running animation; all sprites look as if their floating several inches off the ground.

 

 

I recommend if you want to keep going on this, you use Prime31's 2D Character Controller. I'm also quite interested in how some characters can jump and others can't. Aren't they all the same Object just with a different sprite/animator? If you have any Unity questions, feel free to hit me up! I spend a lot of time on the various subreddits and Unity Answers anyhow, so I'm happy to help out if I can!

[gerbilsinspace]

thanks, that was really helpful. In terms of why some characters could and couldn't jump, I'm not really sure, and in an ideal situation, they would have been based off the same prefab, with switching out of animators. i couldn't figure out how to do that, so i ended up duplicating prefabs, some of which didn't work. I've duplicated them from ones that do work, and now every character can jump. Each character now faces the correct way, although the positioning of bullets are still off, the bullet starts firing from behind them. I'm waiting for redone sprites facing right for those.

 

The death animations are broken at the moment. eventually, the characters should fall to the floor properly, with a collision box to match. once again, ran out of time on that. I will look into the 2d character controller, you are the second person to recommend it to me. I didn't use it for the jam, because I had spend 4 days working in ue4 to realise I couldn't get shared keyboard working. as i had 2 days to work on it, and I found a tutorial by the unity guys to set it up, I followed the tutorial like gospel. now I have a broken base to work from, I'll implement the 2d character stuff with that.

 

That was really useful information, thank you. When I have a more solid build, I will probably come back to you for advice.

[gerbilsinspace]

in terms of character choice being ignored on death, that was because the character selection was always active. when you pressed left or right, it changed character in the background. oops. although I have dome more work on the menu, I'm still not one hundred percent with it, so if you have any tutorials on how to implement a less buggy menu like that, I'd be happy to receive.

[elvaq]

Regarding the menu bugs, you could put the menu on a separate scene and pass information via a script on an object that persists between scenes (http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Object.DontDestroyOnLoad.html), like the menu script sets the character choices on the script that's not being destroyed, then load the game scene, then spawn the characters based on info from the script.

 

Programmers are incredibly tricky to get right, especially in a game jam setting! Physics causes so many edge cases that you'll spend a lot of time just testing, making small fixes, and re-testing. Looking forward to a more developed/polished version of this though, nice work