Monday, February 6, 2017

Jousting in Virtual Reality - Week 5 - Horses and Tilts

So I've been working quite a bit on the game, but didn't really finish much. I basically finished the horse and the tilt divider. See before and after of the horse below with the tilt divider in the background.




Obviously I'm way behind my schedule and it has now been further disrupted by some vacation coming up in march.

At the pace I'm going now I think a more reasonable schedule will be to finish the playable demo of the first level before going on vacation on 10th of March. I'll need to make a new schedule though.

I'm planning to spend most of next week doing some programming and see if I can get the game to work a bit better and maybe make the replay system work.

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Jousting in Virtual Reality - Week 4 - Time Out



Nothing much to show this week. I did get some work done, but the week mostly disappeared in a family emergency and some quality time with my girlfriend.

The schedule is definitely slipping further though. I'll have to see where I'm at, at the end of next week and plan accordingly.

Monday, January 23, 2017

Jousting in Virtual Reality - Week 3

Another busy week comes to an end and another week where I fall further behind my schedule. I think I did a lot of good work this week, but everything is just taking way longer than I had hoped.

First of all this weeks work:

I jumped around a lot in what I worked on to not get stuck on anything. I worked first on the horse and went back to it several times. The base mesh is almost done and ready for sculpting and texturing and making armour. The big reason I didn't finish is that I have not decided how I will handle the mane which will be a pain if I want it to look nice. I could definitely have called this done at an earlier point, but the more I get into this project the better I want it to be.


What I spend even more time on than the horse was the knight. I decided to go all out on the quality of this model, since I will be using the same model for the squire model which will have a face and uncovered hands.


In between struggling with the horse and the knight I worked on other little things like the tent, which I decided to spend a bit of time taking almost to completion to get an idea of how my final assets would look. I'm pretty happy with the result I was able to get with some clever modelling and cutout transparency for some of the cloth.


I also spent some time doing some tests on making sky-boxes which I have never done before and feel like I found a really good way of making them, the current one is just a poorly made one out of some images I found on google, but I think it shows the idea.


As you can see in the above image I also added some temporary trees which are just simple planes with another googled image on. I actually spent a few hours playing around with building my own detailed trees and I went about it in a horrible way. I'll revisit this later if I need real trees, otherwise I'll just paint a good 2D texture myself and do planes.

Other things I worked on that are not really worth showing yet was a barrel and the tilt divide.

So I'm a bit disappointed with my results this week, hopefully next week I will have a bunch of finished assets to show off instead.

So onto the schedule, obviously I'm falling behind, so I'm pushing the schedule a week, here is an updated version:

Schedule

Week 1-3: Done

Week 4: Finish all the modelling and texturing of the knight, the squire, the horse, the lance, the shield and the quintain. These are all the models that are close up and will affect functionality since they will be rigged. If there is any time left, start rigging or work on the remaining models.

Week 5. Make a version of the game with the two mini games, and the first arena with real graphics (use hero knight for both players) and a menu. Put the game on itch.io and have people on Reddit try it out.

Weeks 6-9: Build the rest of the game. Model the remaining models and implement the different knights with different difficulty. Game should be feature complete. Upload updated version to itch.io and get more feedback / bugs.


Weeks 10-12: Implement sound and music and polish and fix bugs. SUBMIT GAME!!!

So as you can see I've basically just stolen a week from sound and bug fixes to have another modelling / texturing week. Next week looks pretty unrealistic as well, but I do know that I'm over the worst modelling wise with having basically finished the good base meshes for the two most complicated things.

The current week 5 is where things will get really hairy, just doing the rigging and animation for the horse, the knight and the squire, will take a lot of time and then I should actually also make the gameplay work quite a bit better before I show it off to anyone, but I really want to get to a place where I have pretty decent graphics and gameplay and I can show it off...

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Jousting in Virtual Reality - Week 2

Another busy week, I didn't work on the game as much as I had hoped, but I still get quite a bit done on the design. Get ready for lots of pictures.

I Started out with some helmet designs, thinking that that would be where most of the personality of the character would come from.


I then tried for some full armour, I ended up going simpler and simpler, thinking that you start out as a poor knight with crappy armour before working your way up.
 Tried with some horse armour... I don't like drawing horses.
 Ugly squire
 Overview for the first tilt-yard.

A quick sketch of the first tilt-yard.

Concept for the stands.

I then made a simple box version of the tilt-yard in Unity and grabbed a screenshot.

I then did this final concept of the tilt-yard on top of it.

So there you have it, I wish I'd gotten a bit more done, especially a full concept of the knight could have been cool. I did not do as much work this week as last. I had to force myself quite a bit to sit down and draw instead of just working on the game or starting with the modelling. But I'm happy I did this.

A few things I didn't get around to, I didn't do a design for a second level as I had initially planned, from what I'm learning along the way I think it will take too long to make two levels for now. If I feel differently later on I will have to revisit it.
I also didn't design any audience. I'm pretty sure at this point that the audience will only ever be seen far away and will be some kind of sprites. So obviously they don't need a lot of detail, but they do need to be different. I haven't exactly planned out what to do about them yet, but I don't think I need to worry about full designs really.

So next week will be utterly insane as far as I can see. I'm supposed to model, texture and rig: The main character, the horse with armour. The stands, the tents, the trees, the landscape, the sky box. We'll see how it goes.

Sunday, January 8, 2017

Jousting in Virtual Reality - Week 1

What a week. I've been putting in as much time as I could on the Jousting game this week and I almost got to the point I wanted.

I managed to get to a point where you can joust against an opponent and knock them off their horse and they can do the same to you. You also both have shields.

There is a point system, you get one point for breaking a lance on the shield and two points for knocking the opponent off. And the first to get 5 points wins, if both get 5 points in the same round, it goes into sudden death.

I also rewrote all the code I had written in the first prototype in a way better way after thinking about the logic of the game. This is actually the first time I really feel I've started writing code in a way that works well with Unity's component based approach.

The big things that I did not manage to make work was:

  • That the enemy doesn't change it's attack at all, I don't think this will be too bad, I just didn't get around to it. 
  • That there is no playback of the collision afterwards. This will be really difficult, I want this to be in the game, but I'll need more time.
Here is a video of the game at the moment:



Next week will be design. Maybe I'll work a bit on the prototype/alpha as well, but mainly I'll be doing all the concept and design drawings in 2D.

Monday, January 2, 2017

Jousting in Virtual Reality - Week 0

So I finally found a project I really want to sink my teeth into. Here's the rundown and my schedule for completing it.

So I got Touch controllers for my Oculus Rift in the beginning of December and I've been thinking about ideas for games ever since. Over the holiday break I finally put together a prototype for a Jousting game in Unity.


I posted about this on Reddit and got really positive responses and I've had a lot of fun building this.

So I've decided I want to turn this into a real game and if possible publish it on Oculus Home, either as a free game or a low priced one, €3-€5.

Scope

  • 2 mini game levels: One with a training dummy and one catching rings on the lance.
  • 4 matches with different knights.
  • 2 detailed jousting arenas, one in the country where you play your first two opponents and you also play the mini games and a fancy one at a castle where you joust your later opponents.
  • No multiplayer. I think multiplayer would be great for this, but I have never made a networked multiplayer game and I would not be able to test it. If I manage to finish this and people like it I will try and do a multiplayer mode.

I'm giving myself 12 weeks to finish the game. Deadline: March 26th 2017.

Schedule

Week 1: Make one prototype match work completely gameplay wise. You can break lances or unseat your opponent and he can do the same to you and points are counted and a winner declared.

Week 2: Design the look of the game. Decide on the specific armour style we want to go with and design the horse(s), the two jousting arenas, the main character, the 4 opponents and the ring and dummy. And some ideas for the crowds etc.

Week 3: Model, texture, rig the horse, the main character knight, the first arena and the rings and dummy.

Week 4. Make a version of the game with the two mini games, and the first arena with real graphics (use hero knight for both players) and a menu. Put the game on itch.io and have people on Reddit try it out.

Weeks 5-8: Build the rest of the game. Model the remaining models and implement the different knights with different difficulty. Game should be feature complete. Upload updated version to itch.io and get more feedback / bugs.

Weeks 9-12: Implement sound and music and polish and fix bugs. SUBMIT GAME!!!

This schedule looks the right amount of insane to me. I really want to do this, it feels like a great game idea and a great opportunity.

I will be posting updates on this blog every Sunday.