Project Happy - Dev Diary 4

Today is my 30th birthday!

And it is going well with the project.
I managed to get quite a few things done this week.
I created a tree and a fern for the game, which has really improved the visuals.
I got some animation working on the stegosaurus.
And I figured out using Unity's navigation system for character control and AI.

The AI is still very simple. At the moment the stegosaurus is just selecting a location and moving towards it and when it get there, choosing a new location. This will of course be improved with other actions the dinosaurs can take and reacting to the player. But I am getting all the nice path finding etc.

Here is a video showing off the stegosaurus sped up and highlighted to show their behavior.

And here you can see it being played. I've sped up the player a bit to be able to cover more gound, but you get the idea.

So another productive week. So for next week I really want to work on the gameplay and logic so:

• Get game playable again. You loose health and have to eat dinosaurs to survive etc.
• Make herbivores act better. Run away from player etc.
• Plan out and implement some simple menus.

See you all in a week.

Project Happy - Dev Diary 3

So everything slipped a bit and I didn't manage to get this blog post written yesterday.

But everything is going well. I have been a bit sick this last week, but I managed to put in some good work anyway I think.

Firstly I modeled the real tyrannosaurus model.

Full resolution:

Low resolution in game:

I then spent a disturbing amount of time figuring out how to properly rig a character. I've never done this properly and it took a very long time. After this I made the following test:

After that I ran around in circles for a while trying to figure out how to best import animations and how to set up root motion.

Finally I sort of figured it out and made a walk animation and an idle animation and got them working with root motion in the game and here is the result:

Additionally after thinking more about the game. I've decided to drop the idea of growing bigger as you eat. You will simple have to eat as much as possible so you don't die and then you earn points of some kind that you can unlock bigger dinosaurs with. This will mean I will have to make more different dinosaurs though.

So everything is going pretty well. This next week I want to really start working on getting the game playable and fun. So I'm going to concentrate on getting enough animation for the T-rex and one herbivore and then work on the player controller and the AI for the herbivores.

• Make run animation for T-rex.
• Rig and skin stegosaurus.
• Make, idle, walk and run animation for the stegosaurus.
• Make a herbivore controller so stegosaurus can run around the landscape.
• Make T-rex able to eat them etc.

See you in another week :)

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.