Project Happy - Dev Diary 2

So it's Sunday again (actually early Monday) and where are we with project Happy?

I have been trying to plan out the rules and think about game on a higher level reading through some of The Art of Game Design again. But I haven't really nailed down the design yet, but I did get a bit more of an idea of the game.

I made a drawing of a simple landscape I could start out with:

I then did some research on making terrain in Unity and using some of the standard textures and some primitives build this little map. As you can see I went for no trees thinking it would be a pain with the camera colliding with them etc. But it turned out to be easier than I though to hide part of a tree when the camera collided with it. You can see this in the video test at the end of the post.

I then started doing a bit of modeling of the Triceratops and the Stegosaurus and after a short while I realised how nice it would be to have a three dimensional reference. And then it hit me: Dinosaur toy figurines! I went to a local euro store and for €4:50 I got these three (Yeah I know one is a velociraptor, not a Tyrannosaurus, but that was all they had for some reason).

I then got a bit sidetracked. I just wanted some simple models for the Triceratops and Stegosaurus, but I ended up basically taking the Stegosaurus to final quality because it was so fun to work on.

High resolution model:

And the low resolution model in game with normal map:

And here is how it currently plays. Basically there is no gameplay at the moment, you can just move around, and not very well. Since I'm pushing the player around with the rigid body it feels like you are controlling a rolling ball rather than a character, so I'll have to get that set up correctly. But you can get a bit of an idea and see the nice triceratops in the game and the test trees that are hiding when the camera gets to close.

Tasks for second week:

• Make the real Tyrannosaurus model.
• Make idle, walk and run animations for the T-Rex and implement them in game making the character move correctly.  
• Start looking into AI for the other dinosaurs.
• Keep working on finalizing the game design.

See you all in a week.

Project Happy - Dev Diary 1

Introducing my new project. Codename "Happy" at the moment. This will be my first game developed in Unity and my first 3D game. I have decided on what direction I'm going in and done some prototyping.

Here is a video showing a prototype with the basic gameplay idea:

So the game is similar to Spore or Hungry Shark. You are a small dinosaur and to grow bigger you have to eat other dinosaurs, but be careful of dinosaurs bigger than yourself. The game will be for android and using a virtual directional pad for controls.

I'm hoping to keep the scope pretty reasonable with only three or four dinosaurs on release and have the landscape you move around be pretty small. I can always expand it later.

I've set up a rather ambitious development schedule:

12/04/2015 - Alpha development

26/05/2015 - Beta. Functionality lock, start serious testing / polish

12/06/2015 - Release date

Hopefully this is doable. I'm planning to try and spend as much as my free time as possible on this for the next two months to make it happen.

Tasks for the first week:

• Plan out all the game interactions
• Skim through The Art of Game Design and ensure game has a decent Aesthetics, Mechanics, Technology and Story balance.
• Plan out the size of the game world and get a simple landscape working in Unity with the prototype dinosaur running around in it..

The plan is to follow up here on the blog every Sunday with the progress on last weeks tasks and a new set of goals.

Busy With Games and Busy With Work

So I've been back from my vacation for a little while now and I've been quite busy ever since.

I'm still working on porting over Jungle Jumper to a libGDX version and I'm quite far along. At the moment it is mostly just a lot of boring copy paste work that is necessary to set up all the different screens. When that is done there is some more complicated work of getting Ads and Play Games Services back in there, but hopefully it is not too far away. I don't have a huge amount of time at the moment so it is not going as quickly as I would like.

At the same time I'm doing a complete re-factoring of the code for Space Sheep and fixing some bugs. I really wanted to rewrite Space Sheep so the code was better and it has become a bit of an involved project, but it is moving forward, at the same time I would like to implement a couple of new sheep for the next update.

Meanwhile I'm quite busy at work. This week I'm during training in VMware, which prepares you to do a quite comprehensive certification, VMware Certified Professional 5 – Data Center Virtualization (VCP5-DCV). So that is really exciting and I'm learning a lot.
I've finally gotten serious about taking advantage of the free certification program at Dell. Two months ago I took my first certification ,Comptia Network+, which was a lot of fun.
I'm now scheduled to take, Oracle Certified Associate in Java, next month. And I've requested the first certification in the Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate for Windows Server 2012. So I'll be busy studying for the foreseeable future.

Well that is all for now. Hopefully it wont be too long until I have either the Space Sheep or the Jungle Jumper update ready and when both those are out the door I can turn my attention back on Jorvis and the Sea Rats.

Jungle Jumper Progress and Vacation

It's going really well with the conversion of Jungle Jumper to libGDX:

As you can see the game is now able to run as a desktop application. I'm running into several issues, but I'm handling them quite easily. It won't take me long before I have all screens and strings displaying correctly. It will probably take a bit more time to figure out all the implementations (Admob, Google Play Game Services ...).

So everything is looking good for a soonish update to libGDX. But I am going on vacation, back in Denmark, for a week tomorrow. I will be bringing my laptop and might do a bit of work, but we'll see.

That is all for now.

Space Sheep Reviewed

Playandoid's review of Space Sheep is up and it is very nice. There is a nice 10 minute video of them showing off the whole game and they generally have very favorable comments about Space Sheep.

Read and watch the review here.

Meanwhile I've gotten started on porting Jungle Jumper over to libGDX and it is going way easier than I had feared. I think in a day or two I will have the gamescreen running with all game interactions and graphics. As soon as I reach that point I might export a browser version and put up on lonelygiantgames.com.

That is all for now.

Post Space Sheep Update

So I released Space Sheep two weeks ago and it has been great to release another game, even if it is not doing very well at the moment.

The game has only been downloaded 21 times at the moment. But there are several reasons for this.

Since I released Jungle Jumper it seems it has become way more difficult to get visibility in the Google Play Store when you launch a new app. I thought there was a lot of spammy games filling it up back then, but it has become way worse.

I have not been able to display house ads in Jungle Jumper about Space Sheep like I had hoped to. The reason being that Admob has been updated and I need to implement the new SDK before this can happen. The problem with that is, that I have still not gotten around to updating Jungle Jumper to libGDX like I had planned and it will just be a lot of unnecessary work if I updated the Admob SDK, that I would have to do again after the update to libGDX.

I've also not been able to get much free PR. When I released Jungle Jumper, there were quite a few places that were willing to show off the game on their homepage / blog, but a lot of these places have closed or changed their policies. However www.playandroid.com is still doing reviews for free and are doing a review of Space Sheep that will hopefully be out soon.

It's a bit sad that I've gotten so few downloads, but I'm still really happy that I managed to get a second game finished and published, even if it is just a little silly game and I feel way more motivated to finish more games and get more serious with the PR.

So with all that in mind here is my plan for the near future:

• Quickly update Jungle Jumper to libGDX. No real improvements or new features, just running on the new engine and new Admob SDK.
• Do an Amazon version of Space Sheep with Amazon IAB and leaderboards rather than Google Play.
• Finish the sailing game. I've shown this game of earlier, it is quite far along and I should be able to finish it in the near future, at the moment the working title is "Jorvis and the Sea Rats"
• Acquire an iOS test device and start working on iOS versions of my games.
• Start working on my new game which I plan to be a 2D platformer.

In other news I've updated Space Sheep, fixing a few bugs and improving the graphics and there is now a web version available on my homepage. Try it here: www.lonelygiantgames.com/space

That is all for now. Hopefully there will be lot of updates in the near future.

Space Sheep

Tadaaa! I finally managed to finish and publish a game. Its not really all that great a game, but atleast I finished it.

Download it on Google Play!