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Is there going to be a Dot Gobbler variant called Mrs. Dot Gobbler with a bow on her head?

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Is there going to be a Dot Gobbler variant called Mrs. Dot Gobbler with a bow on her head?

 

There is now!

 

MsDotGobbler.png

 

I think I've found a way to implement the Uncle Who Works at Nintendo diversifier!

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I bet they can't even blink, but why would the monsters need to? Oh god, with the eyelashes...

 

You'll barf for joy, you'll puke with pleasure!

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Hey, I've finally got some gameplay in there! I mean, you can move a guy around a maze. Look:

 

 

Getting the Pac-Man controls of 'select a direction and he keeps going until he hits a wall' was trickier than I thought it would be. I tried to use overlap events and collision sweeps to deal with hitting walls at first, but this was such a pain, and you could just push your way through. I have such a hard time with UE4's collision channels. In the end I used raytraces for everything; when he's moving forward, I'm checking in front of him to see if there's a wall there, and stopping him if there is. When you push in a different direction, I do a trace in that direction before deciding whether to turn. If the coast is clear, I make sure that he's close to the centre of the current 'tile' before turning, and then snap him into the centre. Seems pretty straightforward when I put it like that.

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From the Slack:

I'm kind of annoyed that I've had to scale back the scope of my game to 'it's a Pac-Man clone'.

It was originally intended to be an isometric adventure game, like Head Over Heels or Cadaver, telling the story of Dot Gobbler's Halloween.
I figured that I wouldn't have the time to model all of the separate areas I'd need, though. The game was always going to end up with a Pac-Man clone, so I figured I'd just make that.
And if I had time at the end, I'd try and get the story stuff in.
When I say 'end up with a Pac-Man clone', I mean that the story was going to end with you entering an abandoned LaserQuest, at which point it would switch to Pac-Man gameplay.
 
Totally feeling this, gonna toss out a bunch of mediocre ideas in the hopes that something triggers greater ones... Firmly believe in trying to design around any and all limitations to reach a satisfying goal!
 
Maybe it's possible to have your narrative cake and eat it too somehow:
  • What if gobbler finds themselves trapped in the LaserQuest surrounded by dots, with no clue how they got there...
  • There's dots to gobble, but instead of points they represent memories; gobbling all the dots in a stage recovers a memory of the lost Halloween night, lost clues to how this came to pass.
  • No idea how to deliver these little memory vignettes, but think about text or sprites, things that won't push you into scope creep land as quickly as full 3D adventure segments.

Man, Dot Gobbler's map is way bigger and more intricate than Pac-Man's, and not in an interesting way.

 

If some part of the above were true perhaps this would help with that:

  • You could start with a small level, no ghosts, just to ease the player into the controls and deliver a narrative fragment "teaser" to whet the appetite.
  • Then consider ramping up the level sizes, complexities, and enemy counts with each narrative drop for a sense of progression that most pac-clones lack.
  • Look for ways to re-use assets, like perhaps the simpler levels are just copies of the larger ones with areas cordoned off?
  • No idea what checkpointing or saves should look like, but remember that our player target is now a merry band of thumbs streamers looking to blaze through a bunch of jam games in a single sitting!

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I was trying to think of ways that I could add things to or change the basic mechanics to make a Pac-Man clone more interesting; I haven't got anything particularly amazing in mind, but maybe one or two things will help a little.

 

Maybe it's possible to have your narrative cake and eat it too somehow:

  • What if gobbler finds themselves trapped in the LaserQuest surrounded by dots, with no clue how they got there...
  • There's dots to gobble, but instead of points they represent memories; gobbling all the dots in a stage recovers a memory of the lost Halloween night, lost clues to how this came to pass.
  • No idea how to deliver these little memory vignettes, but think about text or sprites, things that won't push you into scope creep land as quickly as full 3D adventure segments.

 

If some part of the above were true perhaps this would help with that:

  • You could start with a small level, no ghosts, just to ease the player into the controls and deliver a narrative fragment "teaser" to whet the appetite.
  • Then consider ramping up the level sizes, complexities, and enemy counts with each narrative drop for a sense of progression that most pac-clones lack.
  • Look for ways to re-use assets, like perhaps the simpler levels are just copies of the larger ones with areas cordoned off?
  • No idea what checkpointing or saves should look like, but remember that our player target is now a marry band of thumbs streamers looking to blaze through a bunch of jam games in a single sitting!

Thanks for the suggestions! I think building up narrative elements over the course of several levels is probably the best way to go with this. The idea of making smaller levels by closing off sections of a larger level also sits pretty well with me, so you're not just playing the same level over and over with slightly faster enemies. I can do that quite cheaply. I like the idea of having simple cutscenes between levels, like the original Pac-Man did, but I don't think I can do those quickly enough. Maybe dialogue or text between levels is the best way. I'll think about this.

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Building the maze gave me a fair bit of trouble. I made a mistake right from the start of not making all of my meshes modular and building the maze out of them, because when I built a single mesh for the entire maze (Which is huge), baking the shadows looked like arse (Even with presumably 2048x2048 lightmap texture, the definition was just too low). I split the maze into four quarters, which improved things a little, but not enough. I wonder if it makes sense for me to treat the maze as a dynamic object at this point, and just take the hit on dynamic shadows. I think that's what's happening in this video, because I didn't bake the lighting for it:

 

 

You'll probably have noticed that the second half of that video has a different camera. I've been building the game under the assumption that the camera had to be orthographic isometric, but when I tried a perspective camera, it looked a lot nicer. So, unless anyone feels particularly strongly about it, I'm probably going to leave it as perspective.

 

At any rate, I probably need to start slamming the rest of the mechanics in now. I'm not that happy with the maze, really (The floor texture is just some crappy .jpg I grabbed from the internet, and the walls are a bit repetitive, but I can add some variation to them quite easily), and I'd like to make a number of meshes for detail furniture to scatter around the place, but I probably won't get time. We'll see!

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Currently building the system for dots, and the gobbling thereof.

Shovel2.gif

 

I have left- and right-handed animations that I'm going to alternate between, and a chomping animation that'll trigger when the dot reaches his mouth. I have sockets on both hands, and one for the mouth, that I intend to attach the dots to. I'm hoping that'll just work, and won't look super naff.

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Low FOV perspective is what Lara Croft Go and Hitman Go use instead of isometric and I think it's great. You get the readability of a relatively flat camera but the extra visual juice (and spatial information!) from light perspective and parallaxing.

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Yeah, it's actually quite surprising how hard it is to make a game with an orthographic camera look in any way dynamic. Monument Valley does an amazing job of that by having animated details all over the screen, but I think if you have a moving camera like the Lara Croft Go and Hitman Go, you need to do something to make it less flat. I think it would actually make sense for the flip-screen adventure that I was originally planning to make, but for a scrolling maze with not a lot of distinguishing detail, it's just nicer to have perspective. Need to play around with the FOV a bit, and maybe have some zooming in and out based on the distance to enemies.

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Low FOV perspective is what Lara Croft Go and Hitman Go use instead of isometric and I think it's great. You get the readability of a relatively flat camera but the extra visual juice (and spatial information!) from light perspective and parallaxing.

 

That is a fantastic nugget of information.

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Gobblin.gif

 

I got animation blending working on the arms! There's an animation for the left arm and the right arm (And another for the mouth), and when I trigger one of these, I quickly blend out of the walk animation into the grab, and then blend back into the walk animation at the end. I really like how animation layering and blending works in Unreal!

 

Next thing to do is attach the dot to the hand socket, and then transfer it to the mouth socket, and hope that doesn't look too bad. I also want to do a quick rotation blend when changing directions, because the way it snaps at the moment looks a bit gross.

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Dot Gobbling is in and working. Took me a little longer than I'd have liked, but I can move onto enemies next.

 

 

I also added rotation interpolation, but it doesn't really work, as he often spins around the wrong way. I forget how to deal with this; I think I did something for Nineties Cockpit Freakout, so I'll have a look at that tomorrow.

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I also added rotation interpolation, but it doesn't really work, as he often spins around the wrong way. I forget how to deal with this; I think I did something for Nineties Cockpit Freakout, so I'll have a look at that tomorrow.

 

I have a hunch that you may need to use "shortest path" mode.

 

FapaUCA.png

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Haha, man, I completely missed that! That was a much easier fix than I was expecting. Thanks!

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GhostWalk.gif

 

I'm a bit disappointed with my ghost. My intention was to use Apex cloth physics to simulate a guy wearing a sheet, and it would have looked amazing. I don't seem to be able to get Apex to work, though, possibly due to my Blender-to-Unreal set-up. I don't know. I spent about 4 hours trying to get it working yesterday, before figuring I should do something productive. I've got basic movement code in for the ghosts, but they navigate like pricks. Need to write some code to reduce the likelihood that they'll just go back and forth for ages, because that happens all the time at the moment.

 

The ghost model above is just a single mesh, but it ended up deforming quite nicely. I think the arms are a bit too fat, so I'm probably going to scale those down a bit. I'm not really sure where that foot-pop is coming from, either. I checked the anim compression settings, but that's not what's causing it. It looks fine in Blender.

 

Also, here's a high res dot gobbler render.

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