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Amateur Game Making Night

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Hey, guys! You might notice this is my first post here, even though I've been a hit-and-miss lurker for years. Anyway, since I was sent to this thread by the podcast and then convinced to put my nonexistent Unity skills to use in the Flappy Jam by said thread, I figured I might as well post a link. 

 

I've tried out several of the entries others have posted and had a fun/frustrating-by-design time with them. 

 

Here is my entry, Frothy Bird: http://whogas.itch.io/frothy-bird

 

Let me know what you think. I had to cheese through some of the elements to get it done in time, but I had a lot of fun and think it turned out alright. 

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Nice, I wonder if you could take that idea, and mix it with the original Flappy Bird, where you have to fly though colored gates, and also match that color. Make the gates a little wider so it's not impossible of course.

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Progress Report for week #3

What were my goals?

What is my goal for week #3?

- I ended up getting a book on Unity development and I'd like to make some progress in it. I'd like to read through and experiment with what I learn the following:

-the two chapters on scripting

-the chapter on prefabs

-the chapter on GUI

-I'd like to actually make a very short twine-like in Unity with what I learn from this chapter.

-the chapter on character controllers

What challenges am I likely to face and what steps can I take to prepare for them?

-Amnesia Fortnight is actually this week, not last. So I'll take my advice from last week and limit my twitch watching to lesser than or equal to my time spent learning how to make a game.

-I might get side-tracked again, but that might be a good thing. I still don't know what all I need to know. In moments that I find out, my goals mutate and I think that's ok at this stage.

-It's possible that the GUI and scripting chapters won't cover everything I need to know in order to make a short twine-game in Unity. I need to be prepared for that possibility so that it won't be demotivating. I'll be ready to accept that I need to find some additional resources for that learning-project.

-I still don't know how to create a 2d sprite. I really want to know that. I need to figure out how to make a 2d sprite. That is an additional priority. I'll search a bit and then start asking y'all.

Which goals did I accomplish?

-I did go through those two chapters on scripting and I feel reasonably confident about what I retained. I started the chapter on GUI and learned some stuff, but I only went through half of it, so I want to start that over at some point.

Which goals did I not accomplish?

- The GUI chapter

-The chapter on prefabs

-The chapter in character-controllers

-A small Twine demo within Unity

What happened?

I read the chapters on scripting and then started going through the GUI chapter in front of the computer. Once I got the "Hello World" box to pop up on the screen I wanted to see if I could make it move around with the xbox controller. It did, but only one pixel, so then I played around with a public float that would show up in the inspector and act as a multiplier. That was successful. This excited me about movement again, so I went back to the scripting portion of the Space-Shooter tutorial and breezed through it. I continued on with that tutorial until I got to coroutines last night and was like "What?" Yesterday was not a good day for concentrating, so I decided to delay my plans.

My most successful moment this week was when I went ahead and tried to figure out how to spawn many asteroids without watching the tutorial video. I managed to do it with a while-loop and enjoyed changing the frequency of them in the inspector. It was a proud moment. Then I watched the video and dude doesn't mention while-loops, but starts talking about coroutines and how they have a different syntax and I was like "What?"

What is the long term goal?

-The dance game

Goals for week #4

-read the chapter on pre-fabs

-do the excercises inthe GUI chapter

-read the chapter on character-controllers

-grok coroutines

-do more of Space-Shooter tutorial

-maybe make that twine demo. After reading Dewar's question about space-economies, I want to make sure that I'm moving forward on the simulation-track in some quantity. A twine demo using the GUI could get me started in thinking about changing variables between scripts without collision.

What challenges might I face and how can I prepare for them?

-I'm pretty sure I got this. I'll be working a regular schedule this week, but I will require naps. I am sleepy.

-I expect that coroutines go pretty deep. But if I throw myself at them, I'll learn a lot more than I know (nothing).

-The way that scripts speak to each other is still kind of ambigous to me. I know it has something to do with typing things like

Destroy (other.gameObject)

but I need to expose myself to that type of thing more and may not be about to make a twine demo in the GUI that can use interactions between more than one script. We will see. It's a low priority right now.

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Hey, guys! You might notice this is my first post here, even though I've been a hit-and-miss lurker for years. Anyway, since I was sent to this thread by the podcast and then convinced to put my nonexistent Unity skills to use in the Flappy Jam by said thread, I figured I might as well post a link. 

 

I've tried out several of the entries others have posted and had a fun/frustrating-by-design time with them. 

 

Here is my entry, Frothy Bird: http://whogas.itch.io/frothy-bird

 

Let me know what you think. I had to cheese through some of the elements to get it done in time, but I had a lot of fun and think it turned out alright. 

 

Cheesing through stuff is the best part of game development! Mostly because it means you are worrying about making an actual game and not an engine (which a lot of people seem to get sucked into, myself included). I suspect people who use Unity barely ever have this issue though.

 

Also I like your game! That bird sure can eat a lot of pellets or whatever. But I think it's a nice take on the "genre" without just being a bird that goes up and down and avoids obstacles.

 

 

Decided to start making some of the graphics a bit prettier! Here's the work in progress for the blueprint track. https://vine.co/v/MmIzxJgliXu

 

Woah, I really like it! I actually originally thought the blue was some kind of placeholder texture or something (like that orange one in Half-Life 2 maps) but this one reads a lot better as a blueprint.

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Woah, I really like it! I actually originally thought the blue was some kind of placeholder texture or something (like that orange one in Half-Life 2 maps) but this one reads a lot better as a blueprint.

 

It totally was (and is, still, on the pool table track) and I'm still going to draw a nicer version of it. So for future purposes it's still going to be a placeholder texture! :)

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HELLO FRIENDS!

MxZ2%2FE.png

I have also completed my own Flappy Jam entry! Here it is: http://twig.itch.io/twirly-bird

BE GENTLE!

Also the game is HARD! My personal high score is 15, but I rarely get above 3 or 4. Good luck!

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You're not the only person to say that. To be honest, I'm a little shocked so many people can't survive for ten seconds!

 

The trick I use is to move back with the obstacles in an up and down fashion to keep my horizontal position relative to the obstacles, and then weave through. Repeat until dead.

 

There are definitely some configurations that are very difficult, and to that end it just becomes luck of the draw, but in my experience that happens maybe one out of ten times (granted: at my skill/knowledge level). I'm okay with that flaw in particular for the purpose of the game jam. Were I to expand on this idea outside that context, I'd definitely try to make the game more balanced, at the very least. I'd also rework the scoring mechanic to reward points based on obstacles defeated, rather than time survived.

 

All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with it, but I'm definitely sad people are finding it this difficult. ):

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Nice, I wonder if you could take that idea, and mix it with the original Flappy Bird, where you have to fly though colored gates, and also match that color. Make the gates a little wider so it's not impossible of course.

 

That's  an interesting idea. I was trying to change up the concept to a decent degree since I was sticking with a bird as my character. 

 

Cheesing through stuff is the best part of game development! Mostly because it means you are worrying about making an actual game and not an engine (which a lot of people seem to get sucked into, myself included). I suspect people who use Unity barely ever have this issue though.

 

Also I like your game! That bird sure can eat a lot of pellets or whatever. But I think it's a nice take on the "genre" without just being a bird that goes up and down and avoids obstacles.

 

Thanks! I did get stuck with a lot of "technical" issues that I would like to truly resolve at some point. If nothing else than to help me understand the tools better.

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HELLO FRIENDS!

MxZ2%2FE.png

I have also completed my own Flappy Jam entry! Here it is: http://twig.itch.io/twirly-bird

BE GENTLE!

Also the game is HARD! My personal high score is 15, but I rarely get above 3 or 4. Good luck!

 

I gave yours a go and it is definitely very hard! I finally got 1 and was pretty satisfied. I like your environments a lot and even though the pathfinding is difficult to wrangle (intentionally, I assume), I am impressed that you made it work. Great work!

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Thanks! I did get stuck with a lot of "technical" issues that I would like to truly resolve at some point. If nothing else than to help me understand the tools better.

 

Yep, that's how making stuff like this works. You think of the best way you know how to do something and end up learning that it probably wasn't the best way to do it at all, but at least you learned something from it! I want to say eventually you learn the right way and make stuff perfectly, but every day I see some code I wrote a year or six months ago I almost always go "what was I thinking?" and I write a lot of code professionally (not games). So... I don't know! Keep it up, either way!

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Alright, QuickTime actually has some decent screen capturing features, so here's a video!

 

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today I totally set up my object-using system in UE4 so that when i mouseover a usable object, i get a little hand icon indicating that i can use the thing, and if i use it i get a camera-facing text popup on the object describing it, and if i use it again i get a different, shorter description because my character doesn't like repeating long phrases in his inner monologue

 

yaaaay

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Learning about the computer-game craft shows me how many opportunities there are to contribute to a project:

- terrain

- 3d models

- 2d art

- textures

- GUI skins

- fonts

And lots more stuff I haven't read about yet.

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I was home sick with a cold today and ended up spending some time messing with unity3d audio sources:

http://www.maximum-extreme.com/muzak/muzak.html

 

This was kinda fun to make, but I really don't know where I'm going with it. I tried making a room with a floor that moves along to the audio waveform but it ended up catapulting me in the air when the beat kicked in (which was actually pretty funny, but sort of glitchy). If anyone's curious about how this works I'd be happy to talk about it / share some code, since as I said I'm not really sure what to do with it now.

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I was home sick with a cold today and ended up spending some time messing with unity3d audio sources:

http://www.maximum-extreme.com/muzak/muzak.html

 

This was kinda fun to make, but I really don't know where I'm going with it. I tried making a room with a floor that's moves along to the audio waveform but it ended up catapulting me in the air when the beat kicked in (which was actually pretty funny, but sort of glitchy). If anyone's curious about how this works I'd be happy to talk about it / share some code, since as I said I'm not really sure what to do with it now.

How can you use the waveform as an input? Yes, let's talk about this.

I think that it would be cool to do some sort of

environments in Unity. I don't have close to the knowledge yet, but it's a dream.

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