Broxxar

[Released] Get Hoisted!

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GET HOISTED

 

Get Hoisted is released! Well actually there's been a version of the game up on itch.io since the Jam's submission deadline, but it was missing the end screen to say who won, and there was no AI so you had to be playing with 3 other people for the full hoisting experience... but I grinded out those last two features so now I can happily advertise that this game is actually playable! There are a few wonky bugs/oddities but all in all Get Hoisted came together really well. Let me know what you think, and definitely let me know if you play any multiplayer with some friends, would love to hear about your experiences!

 

And a great big thanks to BadAtStuff for doing such a fantastic job with the music and sound effects!

 

Original Post (start of dev log).

Spoiler

 

Okay I don't have too much of a plan but... I know I want to make something super goofy.

 

I'm thinking it'll be a whacky local multiplayer game where you and your friends play as peasants, frantically running around a small map while the king (possibly Lord Hoistmas himself? TBD) whips coins and other items at you. Who ever gathers the most coins in some time limit wins. Items allow you to steal coins from other players.

 

Items

  • The Petard
    • The most important item and the only one that will definitely get into the game (others are just ideas, time permitting). It will be some sort of weird mid-16th century wooden bomb. You place it in the ground and it is almost immediately armed. Once armed any player who runs over it will be hoisted. Possibly double damage for the classic and inevitable self-hoisting. The key thing about this mechanic is that at any time, the players will have to divide their attention between coins they are chasing and where other players are planting their petards. Planted petards aren't visible, so you have to keep track of where you saw someone preppin' a hoisting (and also remember where you've planted your own).
  • The Spicy Pepper
    • Some sort of speed boost item. I don't imagine 16th century English folk were very accustomed to spicy foods, so it's understandable that they would immediately flip out and start running around, clearly hoisted by their own gluttony. Staying Spicy makes your character run faster, but you have to keep moving. So you can collect coins faster than other players but, the risk of getting hoisted by a petard during the spiciness is increased. The effect wears off over time. If only you could have a nice cold shower capper to cool yourself off faster...
  • Cybernetic Memory Enhancement
    • Your peasant's memory is artificially enhanced! Petards near your player are revealed. Everyone shares one screen though, so other players will see the petards as well. I would be cool if I could garuntee people would play with controllers that have force-feedback and then subtly rumble the controller when you're near a petard. But I don't think that would actually be super helpful and would probably just make you paralyzed the moment the controller starts rumbling. Also the counter play of player grouping around the peasant that'd pointing out where the petards are feels more interesting. After a short duration, the memory enhancing chip will pop back out of your head and you'll be back to regular shitty peasant memory.
  • ...and many more! (maybe)

 

Gonna be a bit ambitious and tackle this thing in 3D, we'll see how that goes. I'll be using Unity and will fit in a bit of shader wizardry where I can but that won't be my focus. As for diversifiers, I'll of course be doing Hoisted. I want to make hoisting yourself really obnoxious. Voice Over, Bedazzled Word-art Text, your coins go flying every where, anything I can do to really make the player feel like a big idiot who was hoisted by their own petard.

 

I'm looking for more potential items, so if you have any ideas based on the Idle Thumbs Cinematic Universe™, share them here! Try to think of items that both positive and negative consequences, or maybe totally random, unforeseeable, outcomes!

 

 

Edited by Broxxar
Release!

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Here are some various progress shots of the peasant. I started some practice modeling last weekend, and it was actually kind of promising, so I'm doing a bit of retopo work, and getting this guy properly skinned and rigged. Next I'll unwrap/texture, and finally get to a bit of animating. All this before writing a single line of code... really a very strange way of approaching a jam, but I'm way more confident in my ability to program the game than I am in my ability to art it up the way I want. It has to look good for truly satisfying hoisting. Though perhaps it is I who will be hoisted when I have one working character model running around a grey box environment with unfinished game logic 2 weeks from now... Only time will tell!

peasant.PNG.a66b99797f675426cca38089a418a001.PNGohgodwhy2.PNG.222806544b37377243d0823723c73449.PNGtoongoof.PNG.5adcdc53e09c057815f60f40124f5e9c.PNG

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open_wide.PNG.6ee84b951b11f49f6b681501f1fd6ea5.PNG

"Ahhhhhhhhh!" - Peasant, probably.

 

Pretty happy with the way the jaw is deforming, I didn't really give myself the right geometry at the corners of the mouth to facilitate this but It still kind of works. Next I need to do some little control bones so that the lips can move up/down a little and show off that pristine 16th century dental hygiene.

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Good idea, I really liked this title too.  

Hmm Items

Decoy food that can be dropped by a player as bait. When eaten instead of the speed boost a swarm of angry bees appears. 

Coins are called goldblums. Haha. 

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1 minute ago, infamous space turtle said:

Coins are called goldblums. Haha. 

 

If this was going to pirate themed, the coins would definitely be Du'blums.

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babywall: invisible collision barriers that can be dropped to limit other players' movements within the stage

horsebag: a vaguely horse's head-shaped sack worn over a peasant's head, that maybe has some good or bad effect. maybe it gives peasants horse-speed allowing them to move around the map faster, but also horse-vision, causing all items to look the same regardless of whether they're coins or petards

 

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Wow that actually worked? Skinning and rigging is all pretty new to me. I've known some of the theory but never actually done it. It's baffling to me that I managed to weight some verts on to a little helper and actually get the desired effect like this... this is flippin' sweet.

593112927dad2_Animation206.gif.4874de27ec0aecb9594bfb51d055a9cb.gif

"Hhhhoooooiist. Hhhhoooooiist.  Hhhhoooooiist..." 

 

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Great concept @Broxxar

That artstyle looks awesome if a little on the creepy side...

How did you even manage a 1st take, 1st try skinned rig, that's magic right there. :P

 

The main thing I would suggest is maybe add a little indication of the pertard locations, just like a shadow or something that's still easy to miss?

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10 hours ago, Broxxar said:

open_wide.PNG.6ee84b951b11f49f6b681501f1fd6ea5.PNG

"Ahhhhhhhhh!" - Peasant, probably.

 

This is really great!

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Finally done unwrapping. Good lord I'm so rusty. Took me way too long to remember how to do everything. I still have a hard time knowing where to place seams to get things unwrapping better, but by the end I think I had gotten into a bit of a groove. Unwrapping all 24 individual teeth was a real pain in the butt. Gonna be totally work it though when these goofs get hoisted and have their big dumb mouths wide open. Gonna do a base color pass on top of this AO bake and then actually see how this guy's looking in Unity!

uvw_layout.thumb.png.39b580620e846c6f50ea9e61a5bd90ed.png

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Animooted!

I finished up my first test animation. It was surprisingly hard for such a simple loop but I was still getting comfortable with 3ds Max's animation window (which isn't great, like seriously, the animation tools in Unity are better than this, yeesh). I also encountered a few minor issues with the skinning and wonky tessellation during the process which I had to double back and solve. Now I have one clean model file and a rough pipeline for how I'll do the rest of the animation set. For now I'll just jot down a list of bare minimum animations to collect my thoughts. Hopefully 2 seconds loops won't take 2 hours in the future though...

 

5933b7f416130_Animation208.gif.8a4b9fd4a93aa36785f1bce1d0f77c14.gif

*tune of BotW cooking song* "Hmmm hmmmmmm"

 

Core Animations

  • Idle
    • Already done-zo!
  • Locomotion
    • Walk & Run, blended based on movement speed
  • Carrying an item Locomotion
    • Walk & Run again, but with the arms out
    • Maybe use Transform masking/layer blending?
    • Darn I'll also have to think about the dummy object that is animated and then detached from the character.
  • Petard Planting
    • A quick hop while thrusting arms down, palms facing the ground. Again, considering some animated dummy object that will blend between animation control and code control... or something.
  • Get Hoisted
    • The primary hoisting animation will be a sort of blast a few feet into the air, followed by a face plant, and a quick recuperate/getting up anim.
    • By far the most complicated thing I have to do re-animation.
    • The actual hoisting will mostly be sold by particles (more on that later).

Extended Animations

  • Idle Rare(s)
    • Any number of variants on the idle animation that can randomly trigger.
    • Handled via sub-state (I'll be optimistic and put the default idle in its own sub-state for now)
  • Spicy Run
    • If I do the Spicy Pepper item, I want the run animation to be more frantic, possibly patting flames off his tongue while his legs flail wildly
  • Turn-on-a-Dime
    • This one actually comes down to a gameplay thing. In Super Mario 64, Mario's body will instantly turn to the direction your turning only if Mario's moving slowly. If you're already in full-tilt and you crank the joystick in the opposite direction, there's a few frames of sliding and upper body turning before the direction snaps. This would be cool (definitely a stretch goal though).
  • Victory/Loss Animations
    • Assuming I have some sort of wrap up screen that shows everyone's score, it would be fun to have the winner dance and the losers hang their heads in post-hoisting shame.
  • Many more!
    • Time permitting (I work a lot but I'm really jamming on this idea and my progress so far!) I want to do so much more. 

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This is looking super cool!

What level of violence are you aiming for?

Are we going to see limbs and blood flying all around the place when you get hoisted or a more nintendo like hoisting?

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4 hours ago, SharedControl said:

This is looking super cool!

What level of violence are you aiming for?

Are we going to see limbs and blood flying all around the place when you get hoisted or a more nintendo like hoisting?

 

Nintendo-like hoisting. I'm basically making a single Mario Party minigame, hopefully with one with a bit more depth to it :P

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So it turns out, a blend between idle and run actually makes for a pretty compelling "walk" animation, which means I can cut that, woo! Life will still get a little more complicated if I want to do rare idle animations, but for now I'm actually gonna start programming using this simple blend tree and actually get some player movement going. Then I'll turn my attention towards... hmmm, any number of things could be next I guess:

  • Multiplayer Input
    • Think I'll purchase and quickly learn the basics of Rewired for this
  • Particles
    • I want to do puffy 3D particles a la Mario 3D World.
    • Dust kick up when the player starts moving quickly
    • Hoisting explosions
    • Bonks/skids/slides etc.
  • Environment Art
    • Running an untextured green plane is gonna get old fast
  • Petard Planting
    • Will require a few more animations, but once I get into coding, I'll probably flip the script from my art-first approach, and instead get this functional before I animate it. We'll see!

5934564dc0271_Animation210.gif.1934e4cf98f55a2bb81484be0f9a84c5.gif

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On 6/2/2017 at 1:56 PM, badatstuff said:

This looks super fucked and I love it.  HMU if you want some music!

 

Oh snap just saw this reply. Yeah I would love some tunes! I'll message you when the game is a little bit more formed. If you want to start noodling around with something, my only thought so far that it would be sort of a goofy, upbeat version of typical renaissance music!

 

If you're also game for sound fx let me know. Some foley, a hoisting boom, coin collection twinkle, etc :D
 

Edit: if you play that YouTube link back at 1.5x speed, it is very much alike how I'd imagine the game's music being.

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Poetry in Motion!

I'm getting super excited now. It's always a great feeling when art and code meet so spectacularly. The Blending idle and run works great! I also got a head start on controller input. I purchased Rewired from the Unity Assets Store and I couldn't be more pleased with it so far. It's a total replacement of Unity's Input system and it's incredibly powerful while simultaneously easy to use. I sound like a shill for the plugin but seriously, compared to fussing with other plugins or actually trying to use the built-in InputManager, this thing is a god-send!

 

I did a test for multiplayer input and here's how completely dead simple it was: duplicate my peasant prefab, change the serialized PlayerID value in the inspector from 0 to 1. And bam! My X-Box gamepad controlled one player, and my keyboard the other. Flippin' incredible. It's a heckin' no-brainer.

 

Gonna take a short break for the evening for foods/relaxin'. Then maybe later tonight I'll do some fun polish stuff. I really want to see some 3D dust particles kick up when you go from zero-to-sixty!

 

5934b56701539_Animation211.gif.29555bd6e614fb921540754492fbab03.gif

"Ya can't hoist what ya can't see!" - The Fastest Peasant Alive

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The peasant jaw wiggle is priceless. Also, Rewired is a miracle working tool, great buy. :)

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Particle Fun

I've been messing around with particle systems for a while. I had pictured some 3D mesh particles that evoke Nintendo's aesthetic and I think I've just about realized that image! I think the actual petard blast will have a bit more upwards motion and not spread out as much. The central flash will have a bit of vertically to it. And finally, there should be some rocky debris bits that shoot out and bound/crumble on the ground. If I get super ambitious, I'll think of some way to dynamically scorch the ground! That would be tight.

 

Over all, I'm feeling super good about my progress in the jam. It's back to the office tomorrow, but nevertheless, there's still plenty of time to Get Hoisted!

 

5934f78ecf207_Animation215.gif.90d42f0ed082a8b416f6b50cfb78e55f.gif

"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a hoist."

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On 6/4/2017 at 8:08 PM, Broxxar said:

 

Oh snap just saw this reply. Yeah I would love some tunes! I'll message you when the game is a little bit more formed. If you want to start noodling around with something, my only thought so far that it would be sort of a goofy, upbeat version of typical renaissance music!

 

If you're also game for sound fx let me know. Some foley, a hoisting boom, coin collection twinkle, etc :D
 

Edit: if you play that YouTube link back at 1.5x speed, it is very much alike how I'd imagine the game's music being.

I've sent you a link for a music idea, I've made a couple of versions of coin sounds I can show you at some point, and I was wondering if you wanted goofy mouth sounds for the running man?

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