I got started on some proper development work. I went down to Cork city and spent three full days working on a game prototype at the Workbench open work space.
I really enjoyed sitting in there and working, it was very nice and quiet and there was a kitchenette to get free tea and coffee there.
I got quite far with my simplified idea for my sidescrolling RPG. What I'm trying to go for is a game where it is just fun to do a simple combat flow, similar to the Batman Arkham games or the first Witcher game, where you have to time your attacks to keep a combo going. If the prototype for that is fun when it's a bit further along I think it's a pretty safe project to make a small hack 'n slash mobile RPG where you just go through little quests defeating enemies and collecting loot. My plan would be for the game to take 2-3 months to finish, but I'll need to actually see the prototype completed first before I'm sure I want to proceed.
Last weekend I went up to Dublin to take part of a weekend long game jam. It was a really good jam experience. I worked with a few guys I've met before and had a great time, I almost only did 3D-modeling for this game jam. Here is a collection of what I manged to put together, as you can see, the quality went up and down a bit based on my stress level (everything is set up in an eevee render here).
The game itself was a VR game for the Oculus Quest and ended up working quite well, it took so long to get builds working on the Quest, that we didn't have as much time as we would have liked to flesh out the gameplay. but the basic idea worked.
Here is a video of me playing a bit of it.
Now unfortunately the beginning of next week has ended up a bit overbooked, so I'm not sure how much time I'll be able to put into the game, but Thursday and Friday are wide open, so I hope to spend those at the Workbench working on my prototype. My plan for this week is to finish the prototype and send it off to some friends to get feedback on the idea.
I still haven't jumped into a game project yet, but I do feel I've had a really productive week, despite a few distractions.
I've been spending some time playing around with Blender, as I planned, though not nearly as much as I would have liked.
Here are a few of the things I put together, as you can see I took some things further than others.
I also spent a bit of one day down in Cork city centre in the open work space for start-ups called Workbench. It turned out to be a really nice space and I got some really good brainstorming done for a game, even though I was just there for an hour or so. When I'm fully in production on a game, I think I will try to spend two or three days a week down there as it really was a nice space where you had no distractions and could use their facilities.
Next week I'll mostly be making ready for the big game jam next weekend. I might do a game on my Oculus Quest, so I'll ensure that I have my laptop set up for VR development for it.
My girlfriend was off this week, so we spent this week relaxing together. We both needed some recharging I think, but especially my girlfriend.
So I have not been very productive this week, though I have done a bit. I've mostly been playing around with Blender and then I've been reading a lot. I've finished reading the second book of short stories in the Witcher series "The Sword of Destiny" and I got a good ways into reading "David Copperfield".
I've signed up for a weekend long game jam in Dublin in two weeks, so I'll be going up and staying in a hostel for the duration. Until then, I'm thinking about spending next week playing around with Blender and maybe coming up with a really good entry to the current Blender subreddit competition, since the winning price is an NVidia RTX 2080 Ti GPU. I don't think I would have much chance of winning with my rusty abilities, but it seems a shame not to enter when I have the time and it's good to get some more Blender experience anyway.
So plan for next week will be lots of Blender, lots of reading, some more practical projects around the house and then I'll try to get back to some exercises in "How to Become a Productivity Ninja" which I've also been reading.
So it's been a week since my last day at Apple and I have been enjoying having some time to just relax and do a few practical things.
This week I've mostly been fixing up our house and getting my office set up to have a nice working space, but I did manage a few productive things during this week as well.
Firstly since I had some more time I got a lot of reading done and read The Forever War by Joe Halderman and whoa what a read that was. I have heard about this book many times before and been meaning to read it, but I was still impressed with it, it's incredible that this has never been turned into a Hollywood blockbuster. I'm not going to go into plot details as I don't want to spoil anything, but suffice it to say that absolutely everyone should read this book, even if you think science fiction is normally dumb or silly, just put that thought out of your mind and read this masterpiece.
Secondly I found some time to play around with Blender. Blender 2.80 is almost out and I've been getting back into it with the beta. I stumbled on some videos showing off Blender's motion tracker and compositor, I had never really realised how full featured these were. So I gave it a go myself with a little video I shot in my backyard and the result was really fun.
Thirdly I also did a bit of drawing one day, something I imaged could fit into the 2D RPG I've been thinking about making.
So I've been feeling really relaxed and good in general and happy that I've also worked on a few creative projects, even if I haven't jumped fully into my game project yet.
All of next week, my girlfriend will be off work, so that will be our summer vacation, so I don't expect a lot to happen next week.
After trying to do game development in my free time for the last 7 years, I'm finally giving up and instead trying to do game developement full time. My last day working for Apple was Friday last week.
This has been something I've wanted to go for ever since I got started, but haven't had the financial stability or the courage to give it a go.
I'm not really sure I have that now either, but I'm giving it a go.
I have some money set aside and I'm hoping to get some tax credits and startup support later in the yest, so with those two things together, I should be ok to work on a game for around a year. Hopefully at that point I'll have something I can either sell or get an investment to keep working on it.
So what game am I going to make? Truth is, I don't really know. Over the last few months I've put quite a bit of work into an idea I had of a turn based 2D sidescroller with a Diablo like loot system. I liked the idea a lot, it was taking a lot of my favourite games and mixing them together, but I think I went too far into designing enemy, loot and ability systems without actually testing out whether the idea of a turnbased combat system where you are only controlling one character works well. As far as I can tell it doesn't, so it's back to the drawing board.
I've also been having a few ideas for VR games, so the first thing I'll do once I'm full time on game development will be a lot of brainstorming and prototyping to find out exactly what I'll be working on.
I've also started game development group and had two meetings with other people interested in game development in Cork. I figured it might simply be fun, but could also be a good way to stay motivated if you had someone to show your progress to.
Meanwhile I've let my webhosting of www.lonelygiantgames.com expire, though I still own the domain. I had way too expensive a hosting package considdering how little I used the homepage. I think for now I will leave it dormant, until I have something new I want to show off.
I'm also really hoping to spend the next few weeks getting a bit inspired. I've lived in Ireland for over eight years and I've seen very little of the country, so I hope to bring my sketchbook and a camera and go exporing the Irish countryside a bit and maybe find some time to read some good books.
This should also mean that this blog will become much more active. I think a weekly or fortnightly update about my game and working on my own, would be a great way for myself to take stock of how things are going.
I've wanted to make a post about game jams for a long time, but never got around to it, but now that I attended and won one last week I figured it was as good a time as any.
So what is a game jam? Basically it's a get together of people who are into making games, and you'll get a theme and have a set amount of time, generally a few days, but sometimes just a few hours.
I've attended a handful of game jams over the last few years, most of them single day affairs put on by GameCraft.it.
Sometimes I've been part of a group, but mostly I've worked on my own. It's always a wonderful creative experience to sit down with a bunch of people and just do what you love the most for hours. There are no excuses and the deadline forces you to get to it. Sure it's sometimes stressful and your resulting game will not always be great, but you'll always learn a lot.
So on March 16th I attended a game jam at St. James College in Cork.
The theme of the game jam was:
"There are two things you need for an adventure, a treasure map and someone dumb enough to go with you."
Which is apparently a quote from "The Young Offenders", which I have not seen. But it seems people in general just took the quote literally and made games about going on an adventure.
I was in the mood to work on my own, so I got started on brain storming ideas.
At first I was all about thinking up a cool map game mechanic and thought about doing first person where you were actually looking down at a map, but I couldn't really think of an interesting way of doing it that was realistic with the time restraints. I then had the idea of simply making the whole game board a treasure map. This fit together with another idea I've had to make a game in 3D, but with simple 2D billboards sticking out of it and being used for characters, with a camera that only pans, my thought has always been that you would be able to put together a nice look in a short time for a game jam like this, so I've wanted to give it a try for a while.
Secondly I was thinking a lot about the companionship part of going on an adventure and on foolhardiness etc. I quite quickly had the idea of having some kind of AI that you needed to proceed through the game. My initial thought was little guys around the map that you had to convince to follow you and then use up to solve different puzzles to progress in the map.
I quickly realised that having various followers and various puzzles would be way too ambitious and decided that you would have a single follower and use him as a weapon against simple enemies.
This was basically as far as my planning went, I probably used around 40 minutes brainstorming this and doodling ideas.
I figured I'd try and set up the world quickly and think a bit more about the game play details in the meantime.
I modelled a very simply map model and made a nice map texture for it. Then I drew a mountain and a tree texture and set it up in unity. This screenshot was taken later when the characters where added as well, but it's a good picture of the map.
The only thing that I'd really like to improve about the look of this (other than the shitty quick textures). Is the transition from the mountains into the map, I would love to figure out some way where they would fade in perfectly.
After I had the map more or less up and running I turned my attention to the player and minion.
The player controller was simply a rigidbody with force being applied to it from axis input, so it could be controlled by a gamepad controller.
Next the minion was made, also a simple rigidbody and this one simply moved towards the player whenever it was further than a couple of units away from it.
I then made a simple throwing mechanic: Pressing the "Fire1" input (A on the Xbox controller I used) would cause the minion's rigidbody to be kinematic and for it to be a child element of the player and located over the player's head. Then pressing "Fire1" again would cause the minion to go back to being non-kinematic and not parented and add force in the direction the player was pointed. Tadaa, you could now throw the minion.
At this point, both the player and the minion were simply made of cubes that made it possible to see what way they were pointed. This worked well, but they of course didn't look very good in the nice 2.5D world I had set up. More on that in a bit.
This had already taken hours to get working, Unity had crashed repeatedly on my crappy laptop and I was figuring out how some of these things should work along the way.
I hurried onto the Enemy.
The enemy ended up being extremely similar to the minion, as soon as the player got within a certain range of it, it would keep running towards the player. The enemy was slower than the player and the minion.
I set up a life variable of 100 for both the player and the enemy and made it so the player lost 30 points if it touched the enemy and the enemy lost 30 points if they got hit by the minion.
I also gave both player and enemy knock-back on taking damage.
This sort of worked, but was very buggy, sometimes many hits would be registered on top of each other etc.
I kept working on this and in the end I used raycasting to solve a couple of issues. I made it so the player shot a ray to check if the minion was in front of it and it would only work to pickup the minion if it was, so you could not simply call the minion back to you from wherever it was and I made it so the minion shot rays downwards to figure out when it was airborne and only did damage to the enemy if it was airborne and only moved towards the player if it was on the ground. This made the game feel much better to play.
At this point I had almost used up all the time of the game jam. And the player, minion and enemy was still just ugly blocks and I had no menu screen or game won screen.
I decided to go for making the look consistent and spent the last hour making some drawings for the player and enemy and in the end using the same drawing as the enemy for the minion as well. Since the player was now in 2D you could not see which was he was pointing in 3D space. As a quick solution I added an arrow what would indicate this, it looked a bit out of place, but no one seemed to think twice about it when playing the game.
So here is the final game in action. I was really happy with how it turned out at this point, but a bit sad that I didn't have time to make a menu and that I never got around to making some kind of "bridge" for going across the tear that was in the beginning of the map. Also life bars over player and enemies would have been a really nice touch.
So the incredible thing was that, dodgy as I felt the game was a lot of people really liked it, especially the art style, so the game ended up winning the game jam.
So here is me looking all confused and happy:
And here are the prizes I won:
If you dare to try this very broken prototype of a game you can get it on itch.io here: https://arnklit.itch.io/strange-company
Game jams a always a lot of fun and I always feel energised and creative after attending one, but winning one was even cooler.
I've been working a lot on some new projects lately which I hope to share soon and this definitely made me supercharged to work on my games.
So just a little general update. So as you might have figured out the Jousting game got put on hold and I have not done any work on it for a while.
I think I once again made two very common mistakes: 1. I didn't stay in the white-boxing prototyping stage until I actually had the gameplay finished, I just couldn't help myself and started working on graphics. 2. Even though I really tried to control myself, the scope got away from me.
So I took a little break from everything, but now I'm really getting back into several little projects and I will be posting a lot more in the coming months, including a little post a bit later today about Game Jams.
