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.

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. 

Generating the Big Apple

So. Back in the bus again. It's been a couple of days. I made some progress in refactoring of the object generation for my terrain and I also now have a little apple model to have the characters interact with. This is important because the plan is to have default behaviour for the characters to try and satisfy their needs. Apples are here to satisfy the need for food. Can you believe it?

Before my refactoring, apples were actually functionally the same as rocks. They appeared on the terrain in a pseudo random way. This made for weird situations where there were apples around and not a single tree anywhere. To fix that, I moved an object generation method to the object script for the tree object. Trees spawn apples like they're supposed to. No trees, no apples. I don't know yet how I'm going to trigger the generation, but for now, yes get one chance top drop an apple and that's it.

I also decided not to repeat myself instantiating objects, so I moved all instatiation methods to a central script and run or with parameters. That took some debugging, but I think it works well now.

There was something off with this image, but the generation worked alright. All I had to do is make the model smaller in the prefab.  In the old system, spawning apples worked well because the scale was set from the script. Now there is not going to be much variation in apple size, so I'd better not do to much with it. So I fiddled a bit and this is the result:

Those characters better like these apples if they know how much work it was to get them there. 

Pillaging the amphoras

So, yesterday I was working on a bit of 3D modelling for Holocene. I was frolicking around with Blender and made this amphora.

This amphora tells me I'm pretty happy with my getting better with Blender, because, even though it's not difficult to make an amphora, it does look neat. I also learned that this one was not right and I needed a different way to make it.

The above example is made of a hollow cylinder. This means that it does not have an inside.  Now you can't see that in Blender,  but once you put it in Unity and you point a camera to it from the top, you can see straight through it. I spent over an hour trying to make an amphora that looked like this one, but found the handles on the side difficult,  so I went to bed.

Amphoras also gave me an idea for a new kind of worldobject: storage. Games like Age of Empires have storage buildings, but they don't have a maximum capacity. This means that, with one mill, you can have millions of tons of grain (and deer meat).

Storage objects in Holocene will have a capacity,  so there'll be a change in the delivery mechanism.  If an amphora is full, workers will need to bring their food somewhere else. If all amphoras are full, you can't get more food in your stockpile.

I'm not sure if I will implement bringing mechanisms like in The Settlers where workers bring wood to a building site and so on, but I will include pillaging. Amphoras can be broken, leaving the food to be gathered. This will bring extra options for warfare.

You see it's not fleshed out yet, but the ideas are there and I'll let them simmer for the day until I get to implementing them in the game.

Worker is too lazy

Good morning CET. An update on what I've been doing yesterday. I told you there was going to be 3D modelling for the gathering mechanics.  We have the rock and the worker that is supposed to mine the rock. We also have the mining mechanics,  but once the worker has enough stuff, there's nowhere to go to to deliver it.  So insert s simple 3D hut that I made in Blender. 

As always,  this hut is placeholder,  but I'd like to have it look like a hut and not some cube or something. I think I succeeded in that. I put the model in Unity, gave it a collider and building script and put it in the scene. Next I gave it health to prevent it from being destroyed right at the start of play mode (something I struggled with when I introduced a warrior). Good to go.

Well, no. That was because there was something wrong with the rock. Somehow I had that specific one yield gold instead of stone. And the hut only accepted stone, so the worker's not going anywhere. Well, fixed that. Still not going. This means there must be something wrong with the AI state picking thing and it is. The worker finishes mining, switches to walking as it's supposed to. Then it goes idle.

Being lazy myself,  I get that. Sometimes you just go idle, but not this time. We're talking algorithms and they are supposed to do what I tell them to do. It hurts to say, but I guess I could have made a bug then. Let's fix that. Next!

Actual goats and improved gathering

Alright,  Monday morning.  I'm on my way to the office again.  What did I do this weekend? Well, mostly modelling the goat in Blender.  It's not rigged yet, so there might be some revisions later, but it looks like a goat and that's more than I expected at the outset.

This goat model is now also linked to the goat prefab and the dead goat prefab in Unity. A goat is a unit and a dead goat is a resource.  Goats are replaced by dead goats once they die. These are the things one needs to explain a conputer. Visually,  right now, a dead goat is a goat flipped to the side. Might revisit this later.

The next thing I made progress in, is the thing where resources cannot be brought to just any building. The little white domed building to the right is a Mill and mills are good for bringing food. Even though it's the closest building to the tree,  when the tree is cut, the resources are brought to the Zigurat. Food can be built to the mill. That kind of thing.

The other thing was fixing a bug. When the dead goat is emptied, the workers went looking for living ones to kill instead of the dead one nearby. I fixed that. Then I found that the guy started gathering the goat food a couple of meters away. Had to fix that too. 

For now, I'm pleased with how it goes. Some of the core features work now. I have these points that I mentioned the other day and there's the combat system coming up. Next, I'll see how the stuff works on a terrain instead of a flat plane. Next, there'll be the enemy AI to think about, then starting to replace placeholder things with better things to have it look and feel better, as well as review the GUI. 

This sounds like it'll take 2 more days. Well it does not.

Old man, idle

I'm ill, so I'll keep it short for today, because I've been Blendering around the last couple of days to replace the creepy maze guy. Well, I have one now and with some Mixamo animations, he does look kind of creepy, but better. I found out the maze guy is very old. He looks like Gollem in that pose, but this is called progress. I got myself a new placeholder.

What I'm going to do with this man is have him stand around like this and notice that when the player comes near, he starts whining for the player to accept his quest and fetch his whatever-it-may-be. I'll  go back to Blender later to make the animations myself so I can have more flexibility, but this is a nice start.

Graphics...

I told you, I'm a programmer, not an art guy, but indiegame development makes people at least jacks of all trades. Or try to be one because making a game means... making a game.

Most of the posts I wrote up to now were about programming and I think that is what i'm doing best, but secretly I think I like making graphics too. Especially pixelart animations for the 2D game, but I'll need some 3D and vector stuff in the big game, so I ran a little Inkscape course on Udemy and downloaded Blender to make a character for my game.

It's not finished by any long stretch, but it is starting to look humanoid:

No head, nor feet, quite literally, but starting to get better. I might have to start all over again later, but at least I learn to work with programs and now I know what "extrude" means, so win-win.