Good morning. I've had a couple of days off the project and got going again yesterday. I am going to spend the holidays with the in-laws, so you've not seen there end of the lazy times, but that's not the point. The point is that I'm getting close to finishing the PC build of my yet unnamed goalkeeper game (going - in a flash of creativity - by the name of: 'Goalkeeper Game' right now).
Yesterday was quite productive. First, I finished the sound system by hooking a sound handler script to a couple of events like the shooting, the scoring, the game over script and a couple of collisions for the ball. Then I downloaded some sounds to play from a free royalty free site. It's funny that searching for 'football' gives results for a totally different sport and one needs to search for 'soccer' to get football stuff. It's ok. We'll let the Americans have their thing.
Then I asked my wife if she had any ideas for a sound when the ball went in the goal. I found out quickly that cheering crowds don't work when the ball is shot every two seconds and there's crowd sounds anyway (including 'Als we gaan, dan gaan we met zijn allen de kroegen overvallen hier in het mooie Breda.') So she recorded her own cheer. Then she played the game and we got to test the high score. It worked and I'm very proud of her. My wife does think her cheer does not suit the moment the player fails, but I'm keeping it in anyway.
Technical stuff now. I made a mistake that I saw last time when I discussed the mobile build. The gloves were not in the middle of the goal to start when the game is played on something else as the screen that I tested it in in Unity. I had to change it to take the screen size into account and I think it works much better now. I'll test it again a bit and after Christmas I'll have a couple of days off from work to make the mobile build and see how I can release them.
After that I'll see what other idea I'll start 2020 with. Maybe some first version of Holocene in 2D and maybe turn based or otherwise simplified. We'll see. If I don't get to writing another blogpost tomorrow, I wish you a happy whatever-you-celebrate these upcoming days!
Sunday, 22 December 2019
Wednesday, 18 December 2019
The small screens of mobile phones
Good morning everyone. Today I won't have time to work on my goalkeeper game, because I'll be at a restaurant to have our annual Christmas dinner with work. I'll be home late. This blogpost will be the only thing I'll do for the game today.
Yesterday I had a little more time, although my favourite team had extra time in the cup, which I was not expecting. And there are farmer protests worth being annoyed about. I'm not so much into alt right climate denier stuff. Anyway, the game.
What I did yesterday was finally get Unity Remote to work on my phone. I have no idea what an SDK, NDK or JDK actually is, but it seems that I needed to click Browse Three times before Unity understood it comes with this trio. I also had to tap the build number on my phone a couple of times. But now it works.
My game is initially made as a PC game with mouse control and Esc and the pause key to access menus, so I know there need to be some changes to the game to make them playable for mobile.
First, the screen is very small, compared to the wide screen of my monitor. This means that, with a screen covering the goal, the gloves are very small and it's very difficult to stop the ball from going in. I'll make the gloves a lot bigger, probably twice as big in any dimension. That'll not take too much time and effort. The same applies to buttons and text in the menus.
Secondly, while the mouse movement is ported to swiping, which I was planning to do anyway, the gloves will be quite far to the right of the finger, making them difficult to control. I I'll find a way to control that. I guess this will be more difficult. I want the gloves to be right on top of the finger.
Thirdly, there'll be a leader board to track who is best. Games like this can get boring quickly if the core mechanics are under control. A leader board should give it little more longevity.
The work I'll be doing anyway, is the sounds. It does not matter which device is used to play the game. I need sounds. I also need some background sprite to block the view of the Unity blue void. Those will be made soon. Now of to work. Till next time!
Yesterday I had a little more time, although my favourite team had extra time in the cup, which I was not expecting. And there are farmer protests worth being annoyed about. I'm not so much into alt right climate denier stuff. Anyway, the game.
What I did yesterday was finally get Unity Remote to work on my phone. I have no idea what an SDK, NDK or JDK actually is, but it seems that I needed to click Browse Three times before Unity understood it comes with this trio. I also had to tap the build number on my phone a couple of times. But now it works.
My game is initially made as a PC game with mouse control and Esc and the pause key to access menus, so I know there need to be some changes to the game to make them playable for mobile.
First, the screen is very small, compared to the wide screen of my monitor. This means that, with a screen covering the goal, the gloves are very small and it's very difficult to stop the ball from going in. I'll make the gloves a lot bigger, probably twice as big in any dimension. That'll not take too much time and effort. The same applies to buttons and text in the menus.
Secondly, while the mouse movement is ported to swiping, which I was planning to do anyway, the gloves will be quite far to the right of the finger, making them difficult to control. I I'll find a way to control that. I guess this will be more difficult. I want the gloves to be right on top of the finger.
Thirdly, there'll be a leader board to track who is best. Games like this can get boring quickly if the core mechanics are under control. A leader board should give it little more longevity.
The work I'll be doing anyway, is the sounds. It does not matter which device is used to play the game. I need sounds. I also need some background sprite to block the view of the Unity blue void. Those will be made soon. Now of to work. Till next time!
Monday, 16 December 2019
It's a game now!
Good morning everyone. Here's another installment. I notice that while I'm not working on Holocene, the devlogs are further in between. I even found out that I don't have a name for my new goalkeeper game. It does not matter to me really. There may just be less to talk about this game.
Alright, over the last couple of days, what have I been up to? Well, I kind of made the game. The schedule was to have the main mechanics ready by the end of week one, which is last week. This week would be for the GUI and mechanics around new games, pauses and the like. That's what happened. Yesterday was a GUI day. I made this:
I know. It does not look like much but the different texts and buttons are part of four panels that can be turned on and off: the main menu, the pause screen, the game over screen and the game screen. These panels are shown when needed.
What else am I going to do? First, I'll study ways to build leader boards. The game will laat be ported to Android and iOS and it'll be fun to give the game done longevity by adding the competitive edge. I don't worry the game won't quit after a while, because some of the shots are difficult to stop, especially the high ones.
Next, I'm going to add sounds and probably done background drawing with fans or something else, because a penalty box does not typically float in a space that looks eerily like a Unity scene. When that's finished, the PC build is ready and focus will shift first to Android and then to iOS.
Alright, over the last couple of days, what have I been up to? Well, I kind of made the game. The schedule was to have the main mechanics ready by the end of week one, which is last week. This week would be for the GUI and mechanics around new games, pauses and the like. That's what happened. Yesterday was a GUI day. I made this:
I know. It does not look like much but the different texts and buttons are part of four panels that can be turned on and off: the main menu, the pause screen, the game over screen and the game screen. These panels are shown when needed.
What else am I going to do? First, I'll study ways to build leader boards. The game will laat be ported to Android and iOS and it'll be fun to give the game done longevity by adding the competitive edge. I don't worry the game won't quit after a while, because some of the shots are difficult to stop, especially the high ones.
Next, I'm going to add sounds and probably done background drawing with fans or something else, because a penalty box does not typically float in a space that looks eerily like a Unity scene. When that's finished, the PC build is ready and focus will shift first to Android and then to iOS.
Wednesday, 11 December 2019
Fire the ball!
Good morning. Just a little update on the tiny game that I've stayed making a couple of days ago. My plan is to totally finish the game in a month or less and release it on PC, Android and iOS. Well, what's the plan?
I'm making a simple football goalkeeper game. There's a penalty area with a goal and one of these shooting machines that pump out balls to fire them to the goal. In the goal there's a couple of gloves that try to keep the ball from going in. You're controlling those gloves.
There's a couple of mechanics at work here. First there is the machine, the red and black thing that needs further modeling in Blender later. All it does is have a spawn point for balls right in front of the black nozzle part. The spawn point rotates to make for a random direction within the goal to fire the ball when it has to.
Firing a ball happens 2 seconds after it's been fired before. The spawn point calculates a new rotation and the ball changes location and rotation to that. Then it gets a boost forward.
The third mechanic is the goal. There's an invisible collider just behind the goal line that'll catch the ball when it goes in. Every time something that is a ball hits the thing, the score is increased and so it the force the ball gets next time. A similar thing is there for the gloves, but then the saves count is increased. It'd be totally random of the saves count increases, because the gloves can't move yet.
Sho what it's the plan for now? First up, I am going to have the gloves move by mouse. By moving the mouse, you'll directly move the gloves to that location as if it were a mouse pointer. The rotation of the gloves will be so that it'll will always point away from the center of the goal, fingers out, except when the gloves collide with the center of the goal. Then it'll be facing up.
Next week I'll focus on two important things: a game over mechanic with some UI. The game will end once a certain number of goals is scored. I'll have to find out how to do that, but I'd like to have a leader board and a personal record for this. No idea how difficult that'll be, but most important right now it's to have an end to the game. I consider this the minimum viable product.
Next, I need sounds like shooting sounds, bouncing and glove sounds. I'm not going for realism but for fun, so the microphone is ready. Thirdly, I'll see what I can do remodeling the machine, because it looks like crap right now. I just downloaded Blender 2.8 and it's very different from the version I'm used to, do I need practice anyway. For the game, though, it's not that vital.
In short, tonight I hope to make this into a game that I can let my wife play. I like having my wife test my games, because she's not a gamer and she can be brutally honest at times. I hope she likes it. Next week will be the finishing of the game. Then I planned two weeks for testing and building it for PC, Android and iOS. That'll be fun.
I'm making a simple football goalkeeper game. There's a penalty area with a goal and one of these shooting machines that pump out balls to fire them to the goal. In the goal there's a couple of gloves that try to keep the ball from going in. You're controlling those gloves.
There's a couple of mechanics at work here. First there is the machine, the red and black thing that needs further modeling in Blender later. All it does is have a spawn point for balls right in front of the black nozzle part. The spawn point rotates to make for a random direction within the goal to fire the ball when it has to.
Firing a ball happens 2 seconds after it's been fired before. The spawn point calculates a new rotation and the ball changes location and rotation to that. Then it gets a boost forward.
The third mechanic is the goal. There's an invisible collider just behind the goal line that'll catch the ball when it goes in. Every time something that is a ball hits the thing, the score is increased and so it the force the ball gets next time. A similar thing is there for the gloves, but then the saves count is increased. It'd be totally random of the saves count increases, because the gloves can't move yet.
Sho what it's the plan for now? First up, I am going to have the gloves move by mouse. By moving the mouse, you'll directly move the gloves to that location as if it were a mouse pointer. The rotation of the gloves will be so that it'll will always point away from the center of the goal, fingers out, except when the gloves collide with the center of the goal. Then it'll be facing up.
Next week I'll focus on two important things: a game over mechanic with some UI. The game will end once a certain number of goals is scored. I'll have to find out how to do that, but I'd like to have a leader board and a personal record for this. No idea how difficult that'll be, but most important right now it's to have an end to the game. I consider this the minimum viable product.
Next, I need sounds like shooting sounds, bouncing and glove sounds. I'm not going for realism but for fun, so the microphone is ready. Thirdly, I'll see what I can do remodeling the machine, because it looks like crap right now. I just downloaded Blender 2.8 and it's very different from the version I'm used to, do I need practice anyway. For the game, though, it's not that vital.
In short, tonight I hope to make this into a game that I can let my wife play. I like having my wife test my games, because she's not a gamer and she can be brutally honest at times. I hope she likes it. Next week will be the finishing of the game. Then I planned two weeks for testing and building it for PC, Android and iOS. That'll be fun.
Sunday, 8 December 2019
Small games
Good morning people. It's been a busy week and that's why I have not been able to write a blogpost yet. Yesterday was my wife's birthday and now I'm in the bus again.
Let's just say this up front: I'm putting Holocene on the back burner for a while. This does not mean I'm quitting it. I'll pick it up later. But there's some things I want to fix first.
I have a day job where I'm away from 7am to 7pm every day, so I get to have about two hours of gamedev if I'm not tired, after dinner and before spending time with my wife in front of the television. Regardless of how much I'd want this, I'm not a full time gamedev right now.
Now Holocene it's a big project, a very big project with a lot of stuff that needs to be done and this is where a problem arises. It's kind of my dream project, but after months of hard work, I am not making and gameplay yet. I know, procedural generation, basic UI and navmesh integration are vital. Don't get me wrong, but it feels like I'm not making progress no matter how much effort I'm putting into it.
About a year ago, I started to learn game programming and I thoroughly enjoy it, even the non-gameplay part of it. I'm really glad that I did this. But as long as this is not my profession and I don't get to pay my mortgage doing gamedev, I have to treat it as a hobby that I spend a lot of time doing.
Returning home tired or semi-frustrated after a long day's work makes you want to do fun things. While my wife is watching the singing contests on the telly, I'm going upstairs to make my game and you know what, I want to make a game.
This means that for a time I will focus on making smaller games that I think I can make in a couple of weeks. The day before yesterday I started a little football goalkeeper game where you're the keeper who needs to stop shots. Quite easy physics game. I'll make s ball and a goal and a couple of gloves with collision detection and that should be it.
I also have some ideas for a top down shooter and a platformer in a ancient Sumerian theme, like the Ur Standard in the British Museum.
Another thing I'm considering right now is to have the Holocene project I'm working on be Holocene II. I'm thinking of a Holocene version in 2D it 2.5D, like Civilization. Not sure how that would work, but it's an interesting thought.
Someone on Twitter also put the thought of trying to get a team to build Holocene or a similar game. That's interesting too, but depends on some things. Maybe I'll find a nice group of people that kind of share my view about game making.
But first I'll be making some small games just to make games, finish them and recover. I found out that in 2019 I've been ill for 17 days which is about two weeks more than usual and while gamedev had nothing to do with me getting ill, it'll help me not getting ill.
Let's just say this up front: I'm putting Holocene on the back burner for a while. This does not mean I'm quitting it. I'll pick it up later. But there's some things I want to fix first.
I have a day job where I'm away from 7am to 7pm every day, so I get to have about two hours of gamedev if I'm not tired, after dinner and before spending time with my wife in front of the television. Regardless of how much I'd want this, I'm not a full time gamedev right now.
Now Holocene it's a big project, a very big project with a lot of stuff that needs to be done and this is where a problem arises. It's kind of my dream project, but after months of hard work, I am not making and gameplay yet. I know, procedural generation, basic UI and navmesh integration are vital. Don't get me wrong, but it feels like I'm not making progress no matter how much effort I'm putting into it.
About a year ago, I started to learn game programming and I thoroughly enjoy it, even the non-gameplay part of it. I'm really glad that I did this. But as long as this is not my profession and I don't get to pay my mortgage doing gamedev, I have to treat it as a hobby that I spend a lot of time doing.
Returning home tired or semi-frustrated after a long day's work makes you want to do fun things. While my wife is watching the singing contests on the telly, I'm going upstairs to make my game and you know what, I want to make a game.
This means that for a time I will focus on making smaller games that I think I can make in a couple of weeks. The day before yesterday I started a little football goalkeeper game where you're the keeper who needs to stop shots. Quite easy physics game. I'll make s ball and a goal and a couple of gloves with collision detection and that should be it.
I also have some ideas for a top down shooter and a platformer in a ancient Sumerian theme, like the Ur Standard in the British Museum.
Another thing I'm considering right now is to have the Holocene project I'm working on be Holocene II. I'm thinking of a Holocene version in 2D it 2.5D, like Civilization. Not sure how that would work, but it's an interesting thought.
Someone on Twitter also put the thought of trying to get a team to build Holocene or a similar game. That's interesting too, but depends on some things. Maybe I'll find a nice group of people that kind of share my view about game making.
But first I'll be making some small games just to make games, finish them and recover. I found out that in 2019 I've been ill for 17 days which is about two weeks more than usual and while gamedev had nothing to do with me getting ill, it'll help me not getting ill.
Wednesday, 4 December 2019
Ghosts on the navmesh
Good morning. I'm on my way again. The last couple of days I have been working on my characters for Holocene. First, I was building models in Blender, which took a lot of time without being successful really. Especially weight painting is terrible, when you try to keep things low poly. Shoulders are terrible to get right. After some days of trying, I decided to halt the character modeling for a while and use my proven primitive shape model in Unity.
Now that I decided that, I set that up. I have my tiles with a navmesh surface component to them, so the agents know where they can go. When I drop my guy on though, it does not really catch it. I think that is because the navmesh is above the surface somehow, making it difficult to work with. By changing the agent's offset and applying that to the prefab, I get this unsatisfactory result when I send the agent to the player position.
While I'm writing this blogpost, someone on Twitter just suggested I create a navmesh myself and that is certainly a thought I'd entertained for a while. It'd instantly fix the surface thing, I just don't know how to get any decent path finding to work then. Possibly with waypoints al over the surface if that does not take too much resources.
The Twitter guy said he'd send me his scripts so I'll wait for that. I really hope it helps me set up a good system without Unity's navmesh system which is giving me trouble every step of the way. I'm really looking forward to creating the actual game mechanics, so I'm hope to get the necessary technicalities over with. If this all works out, I found myself a new hero!
Now that I decided that, I set that up. I have my tiles with a navmesh surface component to them, so the agents know where they can go. When I drop my guy on though, it does not really catch it. I think that is because the navmesh is above the surface somehow, making it difficult to work with. By changing the agent's offset and applying that to the prefab, I get this unsatisfactory result when I send the agent to the player position.
Note that this is not a ghost game. Floating characters are not what I need. I went to bed frustrated yesterday because all I really want is to have the navmesh right on the surface and have the agents just attach.
While I'm writing this blogpost, someone on Twitter just suggested I create a navmesh myself and that is certainly a thought I'd entertained for a while. It'd instantly fix the surface thing, I just don't know how to get any decent path finding to work then. Possibly with waypoints al over the surface if that does not take too much resources.
The Twitter guy said he'd send me his scripts so I'll wait for that. I really hope it helps me set up a good system without Unity's navmesh system which is giving me trouble every step of the way. I'm really looking forward to creating the actual game mechanics, so I'm hope to get the necessary technicalities over with. If this all works out, I found myself a new hero!
Sunday, 1 December 2019
Plans plans plans
Good morning. It's Monday again and there weekend where I planned to make some progress in my game is over. What happened?
Well, Unity's been asking me to install their newest update for a couple of days, so before breakfast on Saturday, I decided to do so. I found out there is a thing in this version that I could use, so let's go for it. When I returned, there was an error message because Unity was not able to remove something. I didn't think much of it, so I just ran Unity and found out it could not start. I rebooted, same problem.
After a bit of googling and asking around on Twitter, I found that Unity needed to be reinstalled in another folder, so I did and that worked well. That was similar lunch time. I hooked up the scripts that I had and loaded the models that I made. Then I went for a sandwich.
By the end of the afternoon (!) I finally got everything to work. My procedural generation requires a lot of parameters to be set in the inspector and I apparently forgot one of them that made the entire world have a "very wet" moisture rate which gave me a rainforesty world with no desserts, tundra, savanna and the like. It took so much time to find out what caused this and fix that.
Later, I also found out I forgot to set the ground to a certain layer so that trees could find a good place to set their y-coordinate and not float over or sink into the ground. Anyway, that was done by the end if the day. I did not feel like working on the game so I called it a day.
Sunday, I decided to work on another tree model because I did not have a tree for the savanna region yet. Now that I found a nice trick in Blender to make trees more easily, it did not take too long to make a nice Acacia tree.
I'm pretty pleased with how much these tree models improve over a short period of time. I know that I'll make some more and remake some of my earlier ones and I'm happy that that should not be much of a problem.
I also continued with the humanoid model that I've been working on lately. I tried to rig and animate it in Mixamo but I couldn't get it to work correctly, so I decided to rig it manually in Blender. When I went to bed, this is what I had.
It's getting near a complete rig and then I will have to add weights to different places to make sure the guy does not move weirdly in the check or the neck when lifting the arm. Last, I'll make four animations: an idle one, a walking one, one for picking up objects and one for dropping objects. Maybe I'll also make a working one at this point. Maybe later.
Anyway, I had a lot of plans for the weekend, but most of it got into recovering what I already had, which is annoying. Yesterday evening I found out I could open my old project too all of a sudden. I could now take some of the procedural level generation parameters if I need to, do I'll not delete it yet. I also set up a source control for my project.
Note I'm off to work. Hopefully I can get the rigging of my humanoid finished tonight. Then I can get to work getting the guys to life.
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