Hey everyone, sorry as the title suggests I'm not doing a game a week anymore. For those curious I decided I wasn't going to continue at that pace last Friday as I was working on The Getaway. The primary reason is simple, I need to get a real job and these games are growing in scope.
I will now be posting every other week.
On one half I will be getting at least a part time job soon so I will have maybe half as much time to work on these games. Making games has honestly been the most fun I've ever had revolving around video games. Getting a new job will certainly not stop me from doing this, but I do need a source of income as my savings are starting to dwindle.
On the other half the scope of my games has grown every week. This may be do to my own lack of planning but it was difficult to jump straight from one project to the next with no break in between. I also put my previous projects on hold for the previous 5 weeks and it wasn't until last week when I gave myself a break that I had time to look back at any of those, and I made a ton of progress!
I will apologize that I won't be releasing every week. I am hopeful that releasing every other week will see a solid foundation for the quality I expect in my finished pieces, while also giving me the chance to work on my long term projects and support myself and my growing family.
Thanks for reading and I will see you on the 27th with a game featuring Bombs!
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Monday, March 13, 2017
The Getaway
Hello again. This week I made a game about running from the cops. The Getaway is a game where you've just robbed a bank and now you have to get as far as possible before you get run off the road and arrested.
Controls are simple, cursor keys to steer/accelerate/brake, left control or spacebar to shoot. M toggles music.
This weeks game was a little ambitious and I was hard pressed to complete all the features I wanted. I wanted there to be at least 2 enemies as well as civilians, but only 1 enemy made it in the game, and as it stands there are no civilians.
Infinite scrolling worlds are tons of fun to make and the effect is very nice, but I wasted a day and a half writing a procedural generator for the road system which included turns and varying road widths that I eventually just removed from the game due to the added complexity and how I wasn't happy with the results.
Collisions proved difficult as I didn't want to rely on dyn4j's built in collision handling, instead I opted for my own which matched the style I wanted to go with more closely. This was a major time sink though and probably accounted for a third of the work, but the game does play how I envisioned it so I don't consider it time wasted. On top of everything I decided to try multi-threading with the collisions. This lead to a solid day of de-bugging and odd behavior that took awhile to sort out. The magic of ecs made this a lot less painful though and I'm glad I tried it.
The other big time sink was assets. I like 3d models and I can whip out the mesh in maybe 2 hours for one of these cars, but textures eat alot of time for even very basic paint jobs. Particle effects are also very time consuming. I had no stock images to work with so I wound up having to run some simulations to get the effects I have now. Most of this should be easily re-usable for future projects though, which is a plus.
Ultimately this week proved tough for me as I had very high hopes for this project but in the end I had to remove large segments of what I was working on just so I could finish something by Monday. I'm pleased with the amount of work that went into this one though, and behind the scenes this project is easily twice as complex as any I've done yet.
Tools used: jMonkeyEngine, Zay-ES, Lemur, Dyn4j, Blender, Krita.
Download URL
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bz4nByoX2Ks7MGNHMVdGYkVRM3c?usp=sharing
Controls are simple, cursor keys to steer/accelerate/brake, left control or spacebar to shoot. M toggles music.
This weeks game was a little ambitious and I was hard pressed to complete all the features I wanted. I wanted there to be at least 2 enemies as well as civilians, but only 1 enemy made it in the game, and as it stands there are no civilians.
Infinite scrolling worlds are tons of fun to make and the effect is very nice, but I wasted a day and a half writing a procedural generator for the road system which included turns and varying road widths that I eventually just removed from the game due to the added complexity and how I wasn't happy with the results.
Collisions proved difficult as I didn't want to rely on dyn4j's built in collision handling, instead I opted for my own which matched the style I wanted to go with more closely. This was a major time sink though and probably accounted for a third of the work, but the game does play how I envisioned it so I don't consider it time wasted. On top of everything I decided to try multi-threading with the collisions. This lead to a solid day of de-bugging and odd behavior that took awhile to sort out. The magic of ecs made this a lot less painful though and I'm glad I tried it.
The other big time sink was assets. I like 3d models and I can whip out the mesh in maybe 2 hours for one of these cars, but textures eat alot of time for even very basic paint jobs. Particle effects are also very time consuming. I had no stock images to work with so I wound up having to run some simulations to get the effects I have now. Most of this should be easily re-usable for future projects though, which is a plus.
Ultimately this week proved tough for me as I had very high hopes for this project but in the end I had to remove large segments of what I was working on just so I could finish something by Monday. I'm pleased with the amount of work that went into this one though, and behind the scenes this project is easily twice as complex as any I've done yet.
Tools used: jMonkeyEngine, Zay-ES, Lemur, Dyn4j, Blender, Krita.
Download URL
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bz4nByoX2Ks7MGNHMVdGYkVRM3c?usp=sharing
Monday, March 6, 2017
Bork Pawtrol
This week I was challenged to make a game themed about internet memes by my wife... I'm not entirely proud of this one, though looking back at it I realize it has far more assets and stuff going on than any of my previous games. This week I bring you, BorkPawtrol...
So what is BorkPawtrol? well for those who don't know Bork is the sound a Doge makes... apparently... and Pawtrol was a fun play on words apparently... Originally I was asked to clone MoonPatrol, which I wasn't opposed to but I thought I had enough space-themed last month so I wanted to try something fresh. I went with an infinite runner where you control Doge, bork other internet memes and try not to fall in holes by turning into a corndog...
Controls are simple: Right arrow fire a bork. Borks will kill any meme they hit. Holding Up arrow will transform you into a corn-dog. Corn-dogs can fly, but corn-dogs cannot bork. Corn dogs will fly over pits, but will run into Shoop Da Woops. Press M to toggle music off.
What troubles did I run into this week? Mostly animation, and not game engine related. Blender wanted to fight me every chance it could. Mostly with the ogre-xml exporter which I had never tried before. I'm fairly sure I understand it's issues now and will be able to avoid these headaches in the future.
Tools used: jMonkey, Zay-es, Lemur GUI, Blender, Krita
Download URL
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz4nByoX2Ks7OEQtRGhpSDJhSXc
So what is BorkPawtrol? well for those who don't know Bork is the sound a Doge makes... apparently... and Pawtrol was a fun play on words apparently... Originally I was asked to clone MoonPatrol, which I wasn't opposed to but I thought I had enough space-themed last month so I wanted to try something fresh. I went with an infinite runner where you control Doge, bork other internet memes and try not to fall in holes by turning into a corndog...
Controls are simple: Right arrow fire a bork. Borks will kill any meme they hit. Holding Up arrow will transform you into a corn-dog. Corn-dogs can fly, but corn-dogs cannot bork. Corn dogs will fly over pits, but will run into Shoop Da Woops. Press M to toggle music off.
What troubles did I run into this week? Mostly animation, and not game engine related. Blender wanted to fight me every chance it could. Mostly with the ogre-xml exporter which I had never tried before. I'm fairly sure I understand it's issues now and will be able to avoid these headaches in the future.
Tools used: jMonkey, Zay-es, Lemur GUI, Blender, Krita
Download URL
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz4nByoX2Ks7OEQtRGhpSDJhSXc
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