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Hey everybody. For this jam, I'll be making a game based on the title:

Idle Thumbs Episode 6: Explode Mode

 

I spent a while during the weekend not really knowing what I wanted to make, so I made a title screen and menu as a sort of procrastination. Probably the first time I've made a menu for a game that didn't exist yet.

 

So after having spent the weekend thinking about what kind of game this will be, I have the following loose details:

  • The game will be a twin-stick style* arcade shooter in the vein of Geometry Wars and Waves.
  • It will feature at least one explosion
  • There will probably be some kind of novel movement system; possibly physics-y but we'll see

* I want to do something more interesting than left stick to move and right stick to shoot, but the general setup will be the same as a twin stick shooter.

 

I'm going to try experimenting in Unreal and see if I can make some kind of physics-based hover tank. I'm not really very experienced with physics stuff so it kind of scares me a little; but a jam is the perfect opportunity to push the comfort zone.

 

It's kind of exciting and different to be working so fast and loose; I usually have most things pretty well-defined by the time it comes to building the game. We'll see how it works out.

 

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UPDATE

 

qWW4oKx.png

 

This game has been released and you can play it!

https://zerofiftyone.itch.io/explode-mode

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That menu looks fantastic, really like the colours you've chosen. Looking forward to how you approach the gameplay!

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Your games are always gorgeous but too hard for me! I am especially crappy at twin-stick shooters, so please include a Baby mode.

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Your games are always gorgeous but too hard for me! I am especially crappy at twin-stick shooters, so please include a Baby mode.

 

I don't think this game will be quite as difficult. The control scheme is quite unusual so I'll be dialling down the difficulty to compensate.

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God damn, dude, what a slick looking title screen. Also, baby mode should be called "No Nicks."

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I started work on the actual game last night! There's a lot to explain, so I recorded a video.

 

So basically the player controls a hover tank, which is driven by physics forces (it took me quite a bit of finagling to get the physics feeling nice and not horrible).

 

The controls are based on actual tank controls, where the left and right "treads" are controlled separately. So on an Xbox controller, LT/LB is mapped to forward/reverse movement of the left side; and RT/RB is mapped to forward/reverse movement of the right side. It sounds pretty complicated but in practice, the controls are pretty similar to Katamari Damacy. After messing around with it, it feels really satisfying to locomote; I just hope it's an easy system to pick up as a new player.

 

Also in the video is a couple of the weapons I have planned. Not sure how many I'll implement, but I've got a modular system for weapons that will make it fairly easy to add more as and when I need to.

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Looking swell! Love the rainbow bullets (is it just the video, or is the screenshake on the smaller bullets quite high frequency?).

 

From what you described, the controls should be pretty easy to pick up. It'd be like using a wheelchair, where you need to drag down on the opposite wheel to turn faster, right?

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Oh jeez that video looks so pretty.  

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Looking swell! Love the rainbow bullets (is it just the video, or is the screenshake on the smaller bullets quite high frequency?).

 

From what you described, the controls should be pretty easy to pick up. It'd be like using a wheelchair, where you need to drag down on the opposite wheel to turn faster, right?

 

Yeah that's a perfect example; it's like a wheelchair.

The screenshake in that video probably looks weird because I lazily slapped in a camera shake asset from the main menu instead of making a more appropriate one :P.

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The physics and movement already look great! I like the hovering nature of the vehicle; was it hard to get that working? I've thought about doing a similar thing before, but I wouldn't really know where to start. Unreal's probably already got physics functions to deal with that kind of thing, though.

 

How is the turret controlled, if both sticks are being used for steering? Left and Right bumpers?

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The movement is controlled with the shoulder buttons; LT/LB for left side movement and RT/RB for right side movement. So that frees up the thumbsticks for aiming. 

 

The hovering was pretty hard to get working. It would have been even harder if I didn't already have a rudimentary idea of how I would approach it going in. I can go into more depth another time if you're interested but basically, each corner of the vehicle has a custom BP component which I call a "HoverComponent"; and it basically uses line traces to determine the distance between itself and the floor, and enacts a physics force on the mesh with a varying strength based on how close it is to the ground. It's like a crude suspension system. So I have one of those on each corner of the vehicle and that's what keeps it floating in the air. As for movement, that's much more simple. Because the vehicle is floating in the air already so has no friction with the ground, I was able to just use standard physics thruster components (one on either side of the vehicle). The force they enact changes based on the player's input.

 

I hope that mostly makes sense! Let me know if you want more detail. I'm generally not all that experienced with physics-y things, but I'm pretty comfortable with how this specific movement system works.

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That makes perfect sense! I imagine getting the amount of force right on the hover components was fiddly; I did physics stuff on Nineties Cockpit Freakout, and unless you're a physicist, you can't really sit down and say 'The amount of force required is x'. All you can really do is stick a value in and repeatedly tweak it until it basically works. 

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Yeah, there was a lot of tweaking of values. I didn't do it this time, but something I have done in the past is hook up Unreal Engine to a MIDI controller, and use the knobs to control physics variables at runtime. I've found that to be one of the better ways to handle that process of trial and error because you can see the effect of the different values immediately. It's pretty cool.

 

Another thing that I did do was increase the world gravity to something like twice its default value. A while ago I learned that if you have a higher gravity force, and balance the rest of your physics forces around that, the result is that everything feels less floaty and more immediate.

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 something I have done in the past is hook up Unreal Engine to a MIDI controller, and use the knobs to control physics variables at runtime.

 

That is an incredible tip, I'm going to try it out sometime.

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This already looks super cool.

 

I was gonna suggest you make the player only able to move using the recoil of their shots but what you ended up making looks much easier to control.

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The game now has things to shoot at.

 

I started working on AI last night and wow why didn't anybody tell me how hard AI is. What I have right now is pretty janky but it's an okay start. The enemy will currently wander around aimlessly until it detects the player. Then it will either attack if it's close enough, or move closer if it's not. The attack is currently a volley of 3 slow-moving bullets which, as you can see, most of which are colliding with the bot as soon as they're fired. Gotta fix that.

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Yeah, there was a lot of tweaking of values. I didn't do it this time, but something I have done in the past is hook up Unreal Engine to a MIDI controller, and use the knobs to control physics variables at runtime. I've found that to be one of the better ways to handle that process of trial and error because you can see the effect of the different values immediately. It's pretty cool.

Another thing that I did do was increase the world gravity to something like twice its default value. A while ago I learned that if you have a higher gravity force, and balance the rest of your physics forces around that, the result is that everything feels less floaty and more immediate.

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I started work on a tutorial level today!

 

As I mentioned briefly earlier; the control system isn't difficult to pick up, but it's different enough that I think it needs some explanation in-game; so this is what I've been working on.

 

It's not totally finished yet; there's still some features that aren't yet implemented in the game, so I can't add them to the tutorial. It's getting there though.

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Can't wait to see them stream this one and get into how it controls.

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The title, lighting, and overall aesthetic of this is fantastic. You have a great knack for effects.

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