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Dev Update Wk4 – Details details

Getting closer to the end of milestone 1.

Lots of little details checked off, because I’m totally avoiding re-working the main character’s torso twist.

spider-reskinThe biggest work went to the spiders, they got a re-skin to something more shiny, can now do a jump attack which makes them much more of a threat, and make a nice splattery sound when they die.

The UI got a couple minor tweaks and so the respawn counter now works,  Still having some problems with the UI scaling seeming a bit odd but that’s not a critical feature.

Been playing with Shaderforge a bit but not having too much progress in getting a grasp on it.  Other than that, Spent some time trying to get a better look and feel to the overall game.  I added a player light and adjusted the global light to have bit of a different look and feel, but not quite what I’m looking for, but I think it’s a bit of an improvement.

Bsddod-M1-wk4

Milestone 1 remaining features:

  • Make music repeat properly
  • Fix player mouse aiming
  • Jucify player death and respawn.

Only problem is that there’s no more weekends, so it might be a bit of a squeeze.

And here’s this week’s Playable Build:

playbutton

 

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Dev Update – wk3 – sacrifice & surprises

Things are going pretty well.  The uncompleted ‘minimum required features’ list for the January Version is getting very small.

  • Corner pillars at outside corners
  • Fixing wizard shooting and movement (aka the Big thing)
  • Death effects and sounds etc.
  • Spider jump attack

Particles!

New stuff added this week:

  • Restart Button, Exit game button.
  • Bolt Particles and light removal.
  • Bug fixes with spider corpses falling out of the world
  • Jucifying impacts on monsters & spawners

Now as to sacrifice…. 

Well you get what you pay for… and that’s the problem with using Unity 3D free version… It’s looking like I really Really need deferred lighting to make the wiz-bang light effects on the wizard’s magic bolts.  In Unity Free I can only force a small number of lights to be precise. after a few they default to vertex lighting, which causes the odd lighting issues on the floor that we saw in last week’s build.

So, I had to remove the lights. and am replacing them with some particles effects for now.  Maybe someday the $1,500 unity pro fee will be accessible to me but for now it’s utterly beyond my budget.  (There is the 75/mo option, but even that seems excessive.. and at month 13, you don’t own anything unless you keep paying.)

So far that’s the biggest hurdle that I’m running into, but no doubt there’s going to be more design sacrifices due to inaccessible features.

Which leads to the surprise of the week.

Well… surprise for me.. nothing in-game yet… but Shader Forge came out which promises to have all sorts of benefits as soon as I figure out how to fully take advantage of it.  (In related news… I don’t ‘get’ shaders yet… working on it..)

playbutton

 

 

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BSDDoD! Week 2 – First (barely) playable

Bsddod-M1-wk2
It’s not much, but it’s an interface and it’s informative

Milestone 1, Week 2.

Well here we are, week 2.   Not  a bad week, progress wise, but never as good as I’d have liked..

This week I started cracking my head into the interface that is Blender, and walked away with a simple eggsack model to be used as a spider spawner (pictured below).  Maybe next week I can make it move.

The beginnings of a simple UI are falling into place,  when a room starts, the room title and the challenges in it (spider icon this month) appear for a bit, and there’s a kill counter and the beginnings of a re-spawn counter (shields).  Some odd issues with them not scaling properly sometimes, but eh.  That’s manageable.

bsddod_ss_eggsack
Look an Eggsack! Isn’t it cute.

But, the biggest news is clearly that the entire play cycle is in place,  player life, death, respawn and restart all appear to be marginally functional.

So to that end,  I’ve built if out as a Unity Web Player. So if you’re so inclined you can, try it here:

PLAY IN BROWSER

As usual, feedback/bug reports etc is welcome.

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BSDDoD! Reborn in 2014

BSDD0D 2014

The time to do this game has come.  So it’s gonna be done right.  No more Torque2D, Slick, or other homegrown from the ground, unproven frameworks.  Time to do it in something that’s got support, community, a track record and a workflow.  Aka Unity.  And while we’re at it, let’s make it 3D, physics enabled and extensible by the user to add new rooms to the pool of maze chambers.

And let’s do it as part of this year’s OneGameAMonth Challenge to keep focused.

BSDDoD-SS-dec-7-2013Oh and a list… let’s do a milestone list:

  • Milestone 1 – Single Room – boxes
    • Generate Room From Map File
    • Player Spawns
    • Move Player
    • Player Shoots
    • Monsters spawn in increasing waves
    • Monsters Move toward player
    • Monsters Kill player
    • Shots Kill Monsters
    • Monsters Drop Items (coins for now)
  • Milestone 2 – Maze Generation, Enemy Waves, alt fire
    • Basic level editor
    • Single path maze generated
    • Rooms have a level and determine waves spawned.
  • Milestone 3 – Powerups and Loot
    • Player attributes, health (shields?), Speed, Damage, Rate of Fire, second power manna
  • Milestone 4 – A wizard
  • Milestone 5 – Creatures – ? Alpha ?
  • Milestone 6 – Menu and Starting area
  • Milestone 7 – Decor and Juicify
  • Milestone 8 – More Monsters
  • Milestone 9 – Music and Sound
  • Milestone 10 – Weapons and Karma unlockables framework
  • Milestone 11 – Title Screen, High Score – Names of the dead?
  • Milestone 12 – Beautification of textures and new textures/models for deeper levels?
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DragonCrash Alpha Update

Not too much time this week.  Here’s the highlights:

  • parllaxing backgrounds are back and better.
  • the new House and system for adding terrain attachments is fast.  Total time was about 3 hours to add a new item to the game.
  • Improved Energy ui.
  • Particle manager for terrain effect.
  • Upgrade to GL2 base with potential hooks for shader effects.
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A slice of DragonCrash

Whoo, I love me some 3 day weekends!  Here’s a video of what’s new.

New Features: (bulleted list version.. it’s late, sorry)

  • Basic UI and Touch controls  (it plays on android devices!)
  • Proper life and death cycle of dragon  (no animations or effects but the world stops scrolling and you cant collect powerups)
  • Terrain Attachments and the first exaple of it the Basic Tower
  • Powerups (Gold and energy) and a fountain system that sprays / tracks the physical Box objects into the world.
  • Beginnings of Spine to Box2D integration.. the dragon now has objects associated with it’s parts
  • BodyReaper,  much better garbage and body remover for the world
  • Collision System Controller, parses collisions from the world and ships them off to the proper objects as needed.
  • Collision Filtering, some things now no longer overlap and cause collisions with other objects of the same type.

Overall, I’m extremely pleased with this for less than a week’s worth of work.  (granted it was a holiday weekend and I got the lovely and understanding Wendeflonia to cover for me for the day from the kiddos and I got to spend 8+  hours on DragonCrash today)

More goodness soon.

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A problem of scale…

So after a long 5 days of rebuilding, tweaking and altering things, I’ve finally wrapped my head around the oddness that is separating the screen size, world size , UI size and image sizes around what is clearly the ‘proper’ way.  Along the way, I’ve come to terms with the LibGDX Orthagonal Camera and the Box2d default renderer, all of which means in short english words.

I have a physics engine and an infinite scrolling dynamic world and I’m not above launching fireballs at it.

[Warning PLACEHOLDER ART!, you have been warned]

Seriously.. how cool is that 🙂 .. Hopefully I’ll have a complete vertical slice of gameplay by next week!

The game runs at 60fps on my old HTC MyTouch so far.. even when launching 10 particle laden fireballs bouncing across the landscape.

Now let me bore you with some details and gotchas that drove me batty for a while.

If you create your Box2d world and you just cant get things to move fast en0ugh, your scale is too big, there’s a hard coded limit in box2d on how fast things can go.

Now your first reaction is.. well that’s ok  I’ll just use the camera and zoom in to a smaller area.

And it won’t make a damn difference, because even though you’ve zoomed in.. Your physics bodies are still too big. and you’ve just altered the difference between the camera scale to the physics world scale.  You have to go in and change the size of things being created in the physics world and convert them to camera sizes.

Make yourself a Handy Static called something like  int PIXELS_TO_METERS = 32;  (adjust the scale if you need)

and divide all your physics values by that.

Good now set your camera to something like the size in Meters that you want to display (excellent Guide & Comment Here: http://www.aurelienribon.com/blog/2011/04/logic-vs-render-separation-of-concerns/ read the article and the 1st comment)

But now all your Sprites are GINORMOUS!

So you scale them with SetScale(float)

and then they disappear….

That’s because they scale around their Transformation Origin,  You can use SetSize(x,y) and it will keep the lower left point the same.

Here’s some other handy links that I found invaluable during this process

That’s it for now.  Time for some sleep and then hopefully adding collisions between the ground and dragon soon.

 

 

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Flap mr dragon FLAP!

Ok kinda scatterbrained right now so, let’s just get back into the blogging spirit with a short list of accomplishments:

Had to rethink some mechanics.. but the controls feel SO much better now.

The actual performance of the dive and flap buttons are undergoing constant tweaking, but the sense of control is coming along superbly.

Screen scaling is working.. but the size isn’t right on smaller screens.  I need to re-write the system to always maintain a specific horizontal distance and let it just create blue sky on top of the world for the extra space.   BUT IT WORKS..

The game is working on Android 2.3 (HTC MyTouch)  all the way to the Nexus7 and Asus 10″, smooth as butter. 🙂

I’ve been using Symphonical as my SCRUM list and I’m in love!  It’s just super easy to use.

Collisions are in (if a little buggy) ,  Basic Box for the dragon and per terrain tile polygons.

The dragon is now a fully animated Spine character  (16 different parts all animated) and is just a wonderful workflow.. Export from photoshop and it’s instantly in Spine, then a quick export directly into the JSON objects with an atlas and then a refresh. and the changes are live in-game..

Dragoncrash-8-17

 

Next up:

A little more work on the dragon animation

Then time to start adding in some terrain destructables (also Spine actors)

Then some UI work.

 

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RELEASE!

War Mages is out on the Play Store!

Get It HERE

SummonIcon256

It’s been one hell of a month. Since starting over in the 18th it’s been non-stop go go go to get this thing up and running.

Overall I’m really pleased with how well it turned out. I have a lot of little secondary features I want to add to it, but I think I need a week to recover.

It will be an interesting thing to see if the game finds any kind of an audience, I’m not aware of there being a whole lot of multi-player games on a single tablet yet.  However I think that it will be one of those kinds of genres where people can pop down for 5 – 10 min with a friend while waiting for the bus and play a game.

Time will tell.

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January Postmortem

Going to keep this short and sweet, can’t stop and reflect too much.

What went right:

  • Web editor –  having a web editor where I can make changes and just re-launch a level for testing was incredibly useful
  • Music – the non repeating drumtrack for in game music works really well wit the musical queues
  • Title screen fire – Damnit particles just make me happy.
  • Pathfinding and combat –  while it’s not the most dynamic combat (see what went wrong) it’s fairly well balanced.
  • Flexibilty of code – adding new UI elements and restructuring how combat works 4 days from launch and not a glitch.
  • Game website – Im really happy with the new https://drakkheim.com website.

What went wrong:

  • World rendering – having to re-write the world map rendering took a whole weekend of progress and as such required that things like traps, and ranged combat got cut. no Elves or Kobold archers.
  • Fun – the last minute changes to combat really improved the moment to moment gameplay elements, but really it’s not something you’ll be playing over and over.
  • lack of animation – lack of variety – essentially more time to create art assets would have been really nice.   I have a feeling this will be a recurring theme.
  • Broken analytics –  I totally messed up and forgot to install analytics on the website until 4 days after launch.. so I have no idea if anyone has even played it.

That’s it for now.

 

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Happy Easter – Week end update

Busy busy week.. all freelance debugging and we development..

So not much progress on the game.

  • Money rounding..  yeah.. lots of refactoring code.
  • Moving some more UI elements into groups so they render in the proper order and can be switched on and off.

Anyway here’s another beta.. # 7 now.

https://drakkheim.com/temp/BarnyardBonanza007beta.apk

Download Barnyard Bonanza beta #7
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Barnyard Bonanza – Week End Update

 

Woo good Week!

New Beta 6!

  • Better Odds manager (you can see it by clicking the puzzle piece on the Main Menu)
  • Reworked tons of the Odds and Money manager backside so money should be handled better.
  • Implemented adMob ads 🙂
  • Got a good start on painting the home screen .. then did it again as photoshop crashed. (FML)
  • Made the loading screen handle screen changes and stuff magically.
  • Reels are generated a bit more realistically and auto re-factor every 100 pulls
  • Started getting sound fx implemented .. not working on desktop .. sometimes on android.. :-/

Here’s Some screenshots, a link, and a QR to the apk

Download the latest beta (006) here https://drakkheim.com/temp/BarnyardBonanza006beta.apk

Next up:

  • Turning sound on/off :-/
  • Get the Powerup Buying working
  • Maybe a mini game!
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Yaay Death and Stuff

So while it’s only 2 new tasks complete, there’s 2 more that are 80% there and others are planned out.

Here’s a recap of new stuff:

  • PCs and monsters now shoot and damage each other with functioning ranged combat!
  • PCs can die!
  • Monsters can die!
  • Monster spawner behavior is 90% there
  • PC equip-able items / attacks are close to being there.
  • New portraits are almost done.. then we’ll have 3 different PCs
  • Project title finally announced:

And Here’s a new Screenshot showing some of the things that you can see:

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LOS Targeting

Minor but important progress. Holidays (and Skyrim) were not as conductive as hoped to progress.

Map entities (monsters and PCs) now scan for the nearest visible targets within their field of view and as within LOS on the level map.

Monsters now have a new behavior available on spawn which is to start stalking a Random PC.

The goal is to have several behaviors available for monsters to utilize what cna be mix and matched during levels.. (patrolling.. random walking, waiting,) and then have events and triggers switch them out asin-game events etc..

Next up.. either monster spawners or starting the prep work for combat mechanisms.