Memories and other Stuff

Was talking to a friend and we reminisced about stuff we each did when we were younger. I was reminded that I had a lot of different story starts and one or two short stories that I have to translate at some point.

When I was in my late teens, I wrote a lot. Stories, Ideas and world descriptions for pen and paper roleplaying are stuffed in a folder on one of my shelves and catch dust. All of those are written in German and I want to translate some or all of it. There are two or three stories with quite a few pages (20 to 40) and one or two short stories that could be translated and published as is. One of the bigger stories I recently started to translate and already have five chapters finished. It is in a rough state and has no formatting or proofreading done. Parts of it might still be in German on a few pages and in the appendix. Here is a link to it on my google drive.

The translation is as slow as all my other projects even though I found a nice article about finishing writing novels with only a few words per day (how to push past the bullshit and write that goddamn novel a very simple no fuckery writing plan to get shit done). I just need to get my shit together and plan out my day better.

On the job front, I got a chance for a nice C# programming gig here in my city (yay, no moving) but it involves a test that will be send out next week and there are other candidates. I do not know my chances there as I am a bit rusty due to my long time being unemployed and only having done a bit of coding during that time. I have done different projects in Unity ranging from simple movement scripts up to plugins for the editor (parts of my adventure toolkit that I worked on), so I think that I at least know a bit about writing code for Unity. I will not make more predictions in that regard as I do not know what the test will be and I also do not know enough about the company to anticipate the scope of their projects apart from focusing on mobile games made with Unity.

As for what I do with my time, well the usual, gaming and watching american tv shows. The games I played recently were Creativerse and a game called "Timber and Stone" which is a bit like Dwarf Fortress mixed with Minecraft. Randomly generated blocky terrain and buildings as well as characters build out of small cubes. In a recent update they added slopes to the terrain and more detailed textures, it looked better for it.

Creativerse is switching to Unity 5 atm and they are reworking the movement system, so it is a bit different now but if that is good or bad, I cannot say yet.

I have not worked on Dork Tales as much as I wanted and Zombie Sleepover is officially on hiatus by now and could maybe call it canceled as well ;P

Still Alive and Kicking (or Shooting Zombies!)

Well, it has been a while (three month or so) but I have been trying to get my life back on track and Dork Tales is still on hiatus and the procedural terrain minecraft thingy is as well. Since Windborne basically stopped production I moved on to another game for my free time and it is another sandbox building game (who would have guessed, lol, like those too much) called Creativerse. Creativerse is a bit more like minecraft visually but not mechanically and I have about 400 hours sunk there since the end of August...

All that doesn't sound very productive and more like wasting time but it is not really because through the community of those two games I met someone who also wants to start out in game design and he has skills that I do not have and that are needed for indie development like an art and marketing background. We were playing a lot of coop and streamed that on his channel and we joked about starting our own company to make games. One day, he contacted me and introduced me to an old colleague of his who was willing to fund our first steps...

As we all played Skyrim and sandbox games, we want to make our our own mix of the two at some point but to start out with that would be a guaranteed failure! We have to start simpler and a lot smaller, so Loki, my coop buddy, came up with the idea to make a zombie fps. I am not a big fan of zombies in any kind of media but he convinced me and we started out working on a few level concepts and I started to write a simple shooter controller in Unity. With some assets bought from the store, we will be able to get a few levels set up in a short time and shoot some zombies. (Really like the asset store for Unity!)

Those are the little buggers!

They are cartoony and cute but can be quite deadly in masses as well:

The game is about shooting them and collecting coins to upgrade your weapons to shoot more of them... more or less ;P

The first part is nearly finished for testing, have to do the menu works next and do the weapon upgrades later. The plan is to have a working prototype (or vertical slice) up and running to test out between us and a few selected testers and with the feedback improve the game and then go on to Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight to get more eyes on it and a bit more funding to compensate us for the work done so far and finance the rest of development.

Development shot: Unity 4.6 with new UI system and a glimpse into one of the levels. 

How many level we want to have is not 100% clear yet but we are confident to produce quality levels in a short time frame to add a variety of different setups without going the procedural generated route .This approach gives us more control over the look and feels of every aspect of every level to include Easter eggs and different ways to finish a levels.

The types of levels we have planned at the moment are mazes, wave setups and boss arenas. There will be no open world and no crafting apart from upgrading weapons via coins. Coins can only be obtained in-game by killing zombies or collecting them in rooms, no option to buy them for real money in a store or stuff like that.

The game will be single player for Windows PC with the option to port it over to Mac and Linux. Multiplayer is not planned but could be an expansion later on with maps specifically designed for that. We aim for Steam as a platfom to get a lot of people to be able to see the game but will also publish it elsewhere like Desura or DRM free on Humble or GOG (long term goals, lol)

Student Project V: Adventure Toolkit - Progress and more

I made some progress with my Adventure Toolkit Unity3D add-on (ATK). The dialogue editor is feature complete and working as intended. I changed the look a bit and tried to integrate it more into Unity, I also changed the drawing code for the connection lines so that it displays the ids of parent and child nodes and omits lines that are going from the output of a node to the input of another node that is located left of the starting node. That change improved the visibility a lot and the added ids make the connections more readable.Another added feature is the comment on every dialogue line that can be used to describe emotions and other nodes needed for voice acting or other important notes for every single line.

more visibility by omitting some connection lines and better information on the links by added parents and child ids

The item editor is the next part of ATK that will be worked on and I intent to finish a first version by the end of the week. The item editor will include adding new items and combining items to other items. Unlike the dialogue lines, every item will be saved as a single file that can be opened in the editor and dragged into the scene for placement. There will be two different kinds of items, one that only exists as part of the UI and another that can be placed as mentioned. The second kind will get a mesh component and additional code for handling the pick-up process. There will be a base class that represents all the data needed for the item including an icon for visualisation. Compound items do not need a scene representation so the first kind will only be the base class.

The ingame UI will include a small inventory grid at the lower right of the screen where about ten items can be shown. If there are more items in the inventory, a scrollbar will be visible to scroll up and down through the whole inventory. On the left part of the lower screen there will be action icons for the available interaction types the game will have. There will be the classics like "walk", "talk", "pick up", "give", "look at / examine" and "use". If I include "push" and "pull" depends on the artists I get for my sample game (animations and characters). I will focus on Unity GUI but maybe add NGUI later on. My intention is that the user can use his own UI solution for conversations, inventory and ingame UI but there will be examples and a manual on how to integrate the parts into the mentioned UI solutions and ideas on integration into others.

On other news, the praxis test is finished and handed in. Since the last three weeks were consumed by it, progress on ATK is a bit slow and I am a bit behind my schedule, so I have to do some additional work on the weekend to make up for the lost time. But now, I have a prototype for a level editor that I can use as a basis for a "shippable" CookieX editor.

Cookie X - Some Progress and Plans for the Future

I started Cookie X as a side project to learn a bit more programming in C#. Unfortunately there was little time or motivation to do much while I worked on Toy Flyer. Especially in the end phase of that project I was happy to not code on the weekend and so Cookie X sank into some kind of dormant state. 

I worked a bit on collision and simple physics but the result so far is not that great. There is the problem that Cookie either flies or his jump is not even noticeable and some collisions are detected irregularly. So far I have only worked with simple sphere and box collisions but those will not work with the platform graphics that "Revenge of the Cookie" used. Implementing my own physics calculations is harder as initially expected and too much for me at the moment. If I want to finish Cookie X, I would have to use some kind of physics engine to help me out. The first project was started in Unity because of that but some disagreements let us to abandon Unity and switch to Torque2D. In hindsight it might have been better to stick with one engine and finish it there as we encountered the same problems as before.

Using a 3D engine for a 2D game might be a bit overhead but I have worked with Unity on two successful projects by now so I might switch from XNA to Unity. Another bonus in Unity is the integrated editor which frees up my time considerably because I don't have to write my own. In one of my classes at the Games Academy we will work on an editor for 2D games in Unity that will be separated from Unity. When it is finished I will integrate mine with Cookie X and could publish them together.

The progress is not lost because I can port my classes to Unity and continue from there. When finished I could even publish the game but that will only happen if I find enough time to recreate the original game and maybe finish it according to the design documents we made for the student project. When the mechanics are working and the editor is integrated I will give it to a friend who was level and game designer for the first game and he can build some levels. Maybe we will even recruit some 2D artist to create additional graphics for platforms or enemies...

Cookie X - Introduction

In one of my classes at the Games Academy we worked with XNA building a side scrolling space shooter. It featured a player ship, some enemies that spawn on the right side of the screen and the player shoots them for points before they collide with the player.

This small project and the fact that the platformer we tried to build as our first student project was never finished convinced me to start a new project, Cookie X. It is called "CookieX" because the original game was called "Revenge of the Cookie" and the new one will be coded in C# and XNA.

The brave chocolate chip cookie faces his sworn enemies, the vegetable armies.

Cookie X will be a simple platformer loosely modelled on Super Mario Bros. The player character is a chocolate chip cookie which has to get to the end of the level despite the vegetable armies trying to stop him.

The simple movement around the screen I could just copy from the space shooter but a platformer needs different kinds of movement and very basic physics simulation.

Student Project III - Post Mortem and More

My third game project at the Games Academy is finished and I did do some coding in C# in Unity.

I created a manager file each for audio clips and particles which provided the public variables used inside the Unity editor and the static files or functions to use in other script files throughout the project. Before the project my experience with C# was nearly non existent, I did some work with C++ or Java before, so the syntax was familiar but my feeling about .NET were kind of mixed. But after working for the project and some work in class in connection with XNA, I kind of liked the ease of work with it.

It was my second project in Unity and this time around it was much more fun to work with. Unity is a great tool kit and gives developers much freedom with their projects. A year ago, my skills as a coder or general developer were not good enough to master Unity but having worked with some coders with more experience than me helped me a lot to understand the ease of work and the freedom Unity offers.

In my free time I converted an old program of mine to C#. As a result I also tried out some WPF interfaces and was surprised by the capabilities it offers.

I am looking forward to my future projects and what might also come by...

By the way, look up Hadron on Facebook. It's the project I worked on :)