July Update - Game Development, Covid19, Writing Short Stories and Teaching Blender

So it's been a while. And I guess the world has become a very strange place since my last update.

After I finished my trolloc animation, I tried getting back into some game development, specifically I was trying to make some small games using the Godot engine, since I've wanted to make the switch from Unity to Godot for a while. But I had a really tough time getting into Godot and the project I made wasn't really very thought through so it ended up fizzling out a bit for me.

I think Godot is a great engine and that I will get used to it, I think maybe I was just a bit worn out and didn't have a great approach to my last project.

At around this point, the Covid19 situation starting developing and while I was already working from home on my projects, it has of course given everything a very different feel. My girlfriend is working from home, which is very cozy, but sometimes makes it hard for me to be productive as I use her precense as an excuse not to work on my projects.

I decided to take a few weeks off from game development and try and do some writing, but this ended up being a much longer process than I thought and I've probably been just writing for 3-4 months at this point.

I've always wanted to write a fantasy novel, so I went back over some ideas and tried to plan out a novel, but kept running into issues with my outlines, after a while I put the novel away and decided to try for some short stories instead.

This was also really tough for me, but I've managed to write two fantasy short stories that I'm pretty happy with, one of which I've polished and yesterday I submitted it to "Beneath Ceaseless Skies" magazine and I really hope they will pick it up. Even if they don't, I should get a personalised rejection letter and have some infomation on what I can improve in the future.

I'm thinking I'd like to try and write a third short story, maybe a science fiction story this time. And I'd like to get all three stories to a point where I can have them out for consideration and then give another go at a novel.

While I've been working on this, one of my friends who teaches game development at a local college suggested I make a proposal for an evening class teaching computer graphics at the college. So I did and it ended up getting approved, so I'll be teaching a class this October which will be very exciting and rather terrifying.

https://www.stjohnscollege.ie/3d-graphics-beginners-blender/

At this point I need to start getting serious about the plans for my teaching in October, so I'll probably be doing a lot of Blender work, but I would also love to get back into some game dev work. Maybe I could find a game project, that didn't require too much programming, but where I could stretch my Blender skills somewhat.

I'll try and do more updates, but I'm pretty bad at that to be honest . . .

Winternight

So I finally managed to finish my trolloc project, here is the finished video

And here is a breakdown of the character and the animation

And here is a 4K wallpaper render I made in case anyone wants it.

This was a ton of fun to make, but my god it is a lot of busy work to make an asset in this high quality and to rig it and animate it and I've basically been working non stop on it for three weeks. So I'll take a few days break now.

Homepage back up, Cretaceous Cravings 1.01 and a new project underway

So I've been mostly taking it easy over the Christmas break, but I have been working on a few things

I finally pulled myself together and set up a new homepage for Lonely Giant Games. This time instead of going for a way too expensive webhosting where I had to do everything from scratch I went for a simple Wordpress site that I can easily update and which was a lot cheaper. The site is now up and the domain moved so lonelygiantgames.com works again.

Meanwhile both Jungle Jumper and Space Sheep had been taken down due Google's new content policies, so I had to do a bit of work to upgrade their listings and resubmit them, they are now back up.

I've also been putting some work into Cretaceous Cravings. I definitely shipped it in a pretty bad shape to get it done in the two weeks, so it's been really nice to go back to it and work on it in a less stressful way. There are a ton of things that still need to be improved, but here is what I managed in this first update:

• You now only need to eat a single enemy to grow when you start out and then every time you grow, you will need to eat more to grow again.
• Adjusted the sizes of the enemies so there is always a good challenge.
• If you do get hit by an enemy, it only kills you if your Eat Meter is empty, otherwise it empties your Eat Meter and makes you invulnerable for a few seconds. This means it's pretty tough in the beginning when your Eat Meter fills up quickly, but easier to survive when you are bigger, but tough to grow, since your Eat Meter will get emptied from time to time.
• Water improvements - I was really sad that I didn't have time to do nice water shading in the initial release, so I took some time to make a few nice shaders to make water that looked like it flowed and made little foam rings around obstacles.
• Fixed audio bugs that made the growing sound not play.
• Fixed a bug where the enemies didn't correctly change colour when their size compared to you changed.

I'm already thinking about the next update, which will be centered around refactoring, performance improvements and setting up some unit testing.

 And lastly I've decided to do another crazy project for the next two weeks. I'm going to create an animated scene in blender of a Trolloc bursting into a room.

In case you don't know what a Trolloc is, it is a fantasy creature from the Wheel of Time series that is half man half animal.

I've had the idea for a while now that it could be fun to create a realistic looking Trolloc with really good fur rendering and I then got the idea to make it an animation instead, of the Trolloc bursting in through a door, like you first see them in the book series when they attack the Al'Thor farm.

The animation will only be a few seconds long, but will hopefully look really good. I expect I will use most of the time making the Trolloc.

Player Graphics - A Game Jam Game - And a Completely New Game

I've been very busy since I came back from Denmark. When I came back there was a week until I was going to a game jam in Dublin, so I really wanted to put some nice work into the game that I could show off, so I mostly finished the player graphics and got them in the game.

After that it was onto the Game Jam where I worked on a small game on my own. The theme of the Game Jam was "Snow" and I ended up making a game where you are running around as a wood burning stove shooting coals at evil snowmen to defeat them.

It was a fun game to make and I'm pretty happy with how much I could manage to get done on my own in 8 hours, but I also think I made a bit of a mistake in making the game in 2D graphics using the same tools and packages I've been using for my current game, because even though I was very quick, it didn't really give me a change to try something new and crazy.

After the Game Jam, I felt empowered to try something crazy and decided to put my current project on hold for a week or two and see if I could make a tiny game and publish it no matter how broken it ended up being.

Enter Cretaceous Cravings! This was the rebirth of an old project I had worked on, though I started over from scratch with a clean project and new assets.

The idea was very simple. You are a dinosaur and to grow bigger you need to eat other dinosaurs that are smaller than you and avoid dinosaurs that are bigger than you.

I tried to go for a bit of a different art style. Using unlit shaders that displayed two different painted textures, based on the "light" direction you set on them. I think the effect was cool, but I'm not sure I really had the time to dial in the assets and textures for the look to shine. Part of the reason I went for this look was that I wanted the game to run really well, so I didn't want any real time lighting. This also gave me the chance to work with the Scriptable Render Pipeline and use the Shader Graph to make my custom materials which was a lot of fun.

In the end I just completely ran out of time. There are a million things I want to improve, but I forced myself to get it to a "complete" state where I could put it out and then I published it on Google Play.

The great thing is that now it's there and I feel like I could easily post small updates that would be big improvements.

I also made screen recordings of the entire process of making the game, so I'm hoping to make another "Making Of" doc video from that.

Well that's all from me now. I'll take some Christmas relaxation now and then decide what project to jump into when I've had a bit of time to calm down.

Quick Update - Rat in the game

So I've rewritten a lot of the enemy code, so I haven't gotten as far as I would like, but I am progressing, here is where the game is at currently. The enemy rat is in the game and there is now an Action Point Counter and cost to using a skill.

I'll be home in Denmark for a week, so I don't expect much to happen then. After that it's back to the player graphics, which I'm quite well into drawing at the moment.

Rat Enemy Almost Done

Another week of working on the game and I've had some good progress.

I started the week out working on an Action Point system for the skill casting. So you can no longer simply spam skills, you get an action point every 5 seconds and only if you have enough can you cast a skill. I have not yet decided exactly how you will get action points in the game. Possible you'll get an action point every time you do another action like an attack or a defend.

I then spent the rest of the week working on the graphics for the first enemy. This has taken way longer than I had hoped. It basically took two days to redraw it from scratch and then I've spent one day setting up the 2D rig for animating it. I had really hoped I would manage to get some animation done and have it ready in the game today, but I just ran out of time and energy. At least I'm very happy with how the design turned out.

Next up will be animating the rat and putting it in the game and then I think I need to get a version of the player character done as well. So lots of drawing and animating next week.

Catching Up

So it's been a while since my last update, I'm not going to try and summarise everything that's happened since. I've had a mix of busy, stressful and and frustrating weeks, but I'm finally settling down and doing much better with my projects, so lets see where we are at.

Project Flow RPG

My game is finally picking up some steam. I have had a really difficult time sitting down and putting in the work needed for it and the skill system has been very difficult to nail down. But in the last week or two it has really started moving the right way and become a tonne of fun to work on again.

I'm of course behind where I would be hoping to be, but it feels like I will progress now. The plan currently is to try and get a simple version of the game out before Christmas and then keep adding content afterwards.

Blending Away

I spent yesterday making a nice little scene in Blender for the October reddit Blender competition. I've been very inspired by all the info coming out from Blender Con this weekend and especially from Ian Hubert, who had a talk as well. His little 1 minute tutorials has really given me a different view on how you can quickly put something basic together and achieve a good look, rather than modeling, sculpting and texturing everything from scratch.

Coming Up

So the plan going forward is to spend as much time as possible working on the Flow RPG project and then when I tire of it, sprinkle in a few other things. 

Next month is National Novel Writing Month and I'd really like to participate and it seems if I won't do it now, I never will. I have a basic idea for a story I'd like to write, so I'll see if I can get into it starting on Friday.

Also I'd really like to spend another day doing another scene in Blender, so perhaps when next months theme gets announced I'll jump into that.

I'm also taking a week home in Denmark in November, so that will definitely set a limit to my productivity that week, but I'll bring my laptop and try to get some work done there as well.

I'm going to try and make a concerted effort to put up a little status update every Friday afternoon about how far I've gotten with the game.