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.