Amateur Game Making Night

[Joewintergreen]

now you can pick up objects in my adventure game and carry them around and drop them again, hooray

[Dinosaursssssss]

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.

 

 

Unity has 2 methods for getting info about the audio of an audio source, GetAudioData and GetSpectrumData. This really awesome unity answers post explains all the math but basically (and someone please correct me if I have this wrong) the audio data is the total loudness taken at a series of different times, and the spectrum data is the current loudness of different frequencies. In my demo thingy the pink wave plus the two that are behind you when you spawn use audio data, and the green one in front uses spectrum data.

 

So, I took the average volume over subset of that spectrum or audio data, and multiplied a cubes Y scale by that average x some other really big number. There are some particle emitters in back that fire whenever the volume is over a certain threshold, too.  I know basically nothing about acoustics so it's sort of a small miracle that I was able to get this far; I was expecting to have to do something much more complicated but that GetSpectrumData is a pretty easy way of getting into making some weird stuff.

 

Also, I had no idea that The Flaming Lips were so nuts but that concept is crazy and I like it a lot.

[clyde]

I'll have to get to the audio chapter of my book or through that part of a tutorial to really have anything to add, but I think your experiment was inspiring and I look forward to seeing what Unity allows us to do with audio. I love anything synesthetic.

[voxn]

do it

 

how? :<

 

or rather: Where would I take my first baby steps into making a cool low poly model? My first and only foray into 3d was an hour with zbrush so awful I caused it to crash.

[BigJKO]

Don't use ZBrush! That's for sweet high-poly stuff. You should use Blender (or any other 3D software you have access to, but Blender is free). There's a lot of video tutorials out there for making low-poly stuff in Blender.

 

This isn't particularly low-poly, but it'll get you started with the techniques of modelling in Blender.

 

[BigJKO]

I got gamepad support into the latest build. The keyboard controls are now too sensitive, though..  http://kristinsson.dk/tinyracing_web/

 

Also, a pencil was modelled!

 

 

These are all in one texture, just offset on the X axis, so they're only one draw call. I think that's what people call optimization.

 

[Dinosaursssssss]

a good lookin' game

 

Are there any tutorials or resources you used to get the driving to feel right in this? I'm still not sure how I'm going to do handbraking, and my driving still feels very floaty in comparison to yours.

 

Which I guess is a roundabout way of saying that I like your game and it makes me a lil' jealous.

[BigJKO]

Hah, thanks. One thing that helped a lot was putting in some side force, to counteract the car sliding to the sides too much. It still allows for some drifting, because that's fun, but not so much that the car feel like it's just a hovercar! So, every FixedUpdate adds force in the opposite direction, proportional to the amount, of the side velocity.

 

I don't know where I got the resources for this. Just finding various Unity Answer threads about car control was what nudged me slowly to where I am now.

 

It's still super-wonky physics-wise at time, so I'm probably still doing a lot of weird and wrong things..

 

Anyway, I found out how to beat the AI. Place a huge coffee mug in its path.

 

https://vine.co/v/MKegXB5xPIL

[Murdoc]

I got gamepad support into the latest build. The keyboard controls are now too sensitive, though..  http://kristinsson.dk/tinyracing_web/

 

You also don't support WASD  *sad face* (apparently the forums sad face is angry face)

[elmuerte]

I don't like the wall riding ability in the current build. But being able to move the pencil sharper is awesome. Being able to move light obstacles is a great idea.

[danimo]

here is a dumb thing I'm working on

 

http://www.danimo.net/2.0/2.0.html

 

You have a gun. There are evil green cylinders that will shoot lasers at you if you get near them. The room you spawn in is a random height/width, with glowing orb in the opposite corner. You run up to the orb and click on it to go to "next level" (currently just reloads the scene, with new room).

 

The wall/floor textures and background music I took from opengameart.org. The gun and camera rigging is from UFPS, an asset store FPS setup that is saving me a lot of time.

 

The basic idea of the game is supposed to be an "Endless Shooter", where you're trying to keep going through as many rng levels as you can. But right now I'm just figuring out how to implement basic mechanics, and I had to go in and add basic sounds/textures because I could only stare at soundless grey blocks for so long.

[BigJKO]

I don't like the wall riding ability in the current build. But being able to move the pencil sharper is awesome. Being able to move light obstacles is a great idea.

Haha, man.. Is it still doing that?! Gotta fix that.

[clyde]

here is a dumb thing I'm working on

 

http://www.danimo.net/2.0/2.0.html

 

You have a gun. There are evil green cylinders that will shoot lasers at you if you get near them. The room you spawn in is a random height/width, with glowing orb in the opposite corner. You run up to the orb and click on it to go to "next level" (currently just reloads the scene, with new room).

 

The wall/floor textures and background music I took from opengameart.org. The gun and camera rigging is from UFPS, an asset store FPS setup that is saving me a lot of time.

 

The basic idea of the game is supposed to be an "Endless Shooter", where you're trying to keep going through as many rng levels as you can. But right now I'm just figuring out how to implement basic mechanics, and I had to go in and add basic sounds/textures because I could only stare at soundless grey blocks for so long.

Cool. It might be an unpopular opinion, but I like how high the aim is. It makes the game feel different than most FPS's I play, maybe because I always use the sights. It took me a little while to figure out where it was shooting though because the wall was too low for my bullet to hit when I was using the iron-sights. That music is pumpin. Do the white orbs do anything yet? 

[danimo]

Cool. It might be an unpopular opinion, but I like how high the aim is. It makes the game feel different than most FPS's I play, maybe because I always use the sights. It took me a little while to figure out where it was shooting though because the wall was too low for my bullet to hit when I was using the iron-sights. That music is pumpin. Do the white orbs do anything yet? 

 

the aim is actually a bit too high at the moment. It needs some fine tuning, last night I was mostly focused on getting a damage/hitpoint system in place. The white orbs are just more stand-in prefabs for enemies. The idea is that each room will have an assortment of badguys in it trying to keep you from touching the escape orb. I've set up my level generation code so that when I'm satisfied with the base game mechanics and have a couple enemies I can expand from one room/level to several rooms. And when I have time I can expand the Room code to include variations or special levels, rather than just open rectangular areas.

[Twig]

proof that twirly bird is easy

 

[voxn]

decided to embark on blender learning adventures today!

 

scratch that my friend conviced me to learn 3ds max instead 

 

 

[clyde]

Pro tips for Unity users:

-Save everything before you test a while loop.

-If you intend to publish the game on the web, don't use the "Fire2" axis.

[clyde]

Eventually there will be more dancers, more songs, and maybe even some more moves for Patricia. Right now, I'm just happy that I have a build.

 

Early version of Dance Game

[danimo]

Pro tips for Unity users:

-Save everything before you test a while loop.

 

note if you don't save first and a haphazardly written loop goes infinite, you can tab over to MonoDevelop and attach it to the Unity process and use the debugging console to change whatever you need to break out of the loop. handy if you are terrible like me and never save shit

[clyde]

yeah the thing I started working on, when I finished the Unity book I was reading and going through, has really turned out to be kind of a monster in scope. I was having fun coding it and I'm really liking the scripting in c# part but I spent two days this week struggling to understand how animations and character movement would work. Not to mention my complete lack of understanding of how 3D modeling works (Blender is frightening). But I'm considering this "game" an extension of the learning process. Now that I understand how the Animator component works and how to animate sprites and deal with shaders a bit, I can use that in the future. But the game itself is kind of a giant mess. I've learned so much about C# and OOP in general recently to know that everything will need a complete rewrite anyway.

This was largely my experience this week. It's kinda neat to look back through this thread and see that I just went through a similar process as you, just a few weeks later. I had no idea that the Animator component was going to be so deeply complex. The thing that really fucked me up was not understanding that I had to get the animator component in the script and then use the script to pass changes of the parameters back into the Animator by setting them with SetBool and such. I still don't feel confident about it, but it'll be a lot easier to figure out the second time. 

[clyde]

Progress Report for Week #4

I'm pretty much a technomancer now. 

 

What were my goals for the week #4?

 

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.

 

Which of my goals did I accomplish?

- I read the chapters on pre-fabs, GUIs, Character-Controllers, and I also read the ones on audio, and builds (these are short chapters btw).

- I read a little about coroutines. I didn't grok them, but I made progress. After reading this introduction to coroutines, I went back to the wave-spawning portion of this Space-Shooter tutorial and wasn't completely lost.

- Though in its current form, all the choices end with music being played, the visual-novel style text-boxes and choices in the current build of the dancing-game is arranged to be scalable. The way it works is that choices change a int pageNumber; it's not difficult at all to put in additional pages of text. A more elegant solution would be to have variables for the strings in the boxes(or maybe some sort of dictionary thing which I know very little about), BUT THE POINT IS that it's effectively a Twine demo so I accomplished that goal. 

 

What happened? 

- I figured out that reading my Unity book at my job makes the day sail by. And after reading it, I get super excited about trying shit out. I also read this tutorial on 2D sprite-animations and then had to try controlling Patricia's stomping so I banged my head against this wall until I eventually ended up on the other side of a busted wall that I need to fix later. I can tie animations to controller-input, but I'm not good at it and it takes me a lot of trial and error to figure it out. 

-Then I published my first build and I went into a spiral of fantasizing about how I'm going to be a world-famous game-developer and haven't done much since. Except I did one of week #2's goals (watch the live training video for cameras) this morning. 

 

What is the long-term goal?

-Make the dance-game

 

What are my goals for week #5

- I want to make sure that I don't stop working on the dance-game just because I have a little to show for it (I have a history),  so that is the first priority. I want to make sure I add something to it. There is plenty of room for more. I'll probably add another character and hopefully one of their animations. Once I have two lovable characters on the screen, they will tell me what they want to do for a narrative. 

- After Dinosaursssssss's audio-experiment build, I really want to do something in that area. I'm imagining a 3d

kinda thing. I was already successful in making some bouncing balls that play a tone when they collide. I want to make it so that their pitch is a function of their size, make that alterable through controller input, and also create an interesting environment for it. No rush, I just want to work on that some too. 

-I need to read more about Unity's Mecanim. That thing is a beast and it's incredibly useful. 

 

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

- I can't do most of this at my job, so time is a factor. I think the best I can do to prepare for this is to just prioritize my goals. I might not be able to do them all this week. Dance-game progress is the first priority.

- I'm planning on using rigidbody physics for the second character. It won't be the same situation as it was with Patricia. I suppose I can prepare by being willing to switch to a character who is animated in a similar way as Patricia if I get stuck. 

- I may get really into the 3d hanenbow experiment. If I don't input another sprite into the dance-game by Thursday, then no more 3d hanenbow until I do. 

- Mecanim is my nemesis. Maybe I should switch to a character who animates rather than the rigidbody one. That way I will get more comfortable with Mecanim. That's what I will do. Second character will be a standard sprite animation that plays animations with controller input.

 

BTW: I know that ihavefivehat and TheCineaste expressed interest in dance-game making on page 3 of this thread. My response at the time was that I don't have a build to work off of yet. I now have a build to work off of. If you or anyone else still has an interest in contributing or experimenting with the dance-game project, then I am more than willing to send you the Unity files for the game or whatever else you might need to do your thing. I am taking no ownership over this project, it's just a project for amateurs to get started. Experience is not necessary and commitment is not expected. Just tell me if you want to contribute and what you need in order to do so. Anyone.

[Blambo]

It feels weird to have multiple projects moving at once but it's actually helping me be more productive. After I get bored on one thing another project becomes really attractive and I jump back and forth like that. Totally undisciplined but it's helping so far.

 

Figured out a crude dungeon generation algorithm for a weird monaco/hotline/ftl thing:

 

[clyde]

It's fun to look at that gif and determine where the player-spawn is.

[mike]

Hey, my Flappy Jam game is ranked the 6th hardest! That seems like some kind of accomplishment to me! Five votes, but whatever, top 10!!

 

Also 194th in 'coolness', 50th overall? Waiting on a sweet contract from Activision, or a buyout offer from Rovio maybe.

[Twig]

Nobody liked mine. )':