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.

Student Project V: Adventure Tool Kit - Introduction, progress and more

It is the fifth semester and my last at the Games Academy and this time around I have not found enough other students to work on my idea (a point & click adventure in Unity) and the other projects were not what I wanted to do in my last semester. Apart from group projects we can also do solo projects in which we have a tutor who will supervise the challenge we set for ourselves.

So I really wanted to develop my own point & click adventure and now I am doing that alone. Unfortunately, without much outside help I am not capable to get my ideas in a game, so I decided to build a tool kit with which I might be able to make my ideas reality later on. The first part of the Adventure Tool Kit (ATK) is a dialogue editor with nodes for every line in the conversation.

My work started about three weeks ago and my first working prototype is ready:

Complex dialogue with multiple "hubs", I used the first dialogue of "Magic of Innocence" as an example node network.

Even though it might look ready yet, there are a lot of kinks I have to iron out before calling it "finished". As you can see in the screen shot complex networks with hubs can get kind of confusing to follow so far. There are some features missing that might be important but for that I have to meet with my tutor and show him the process and get his feedback.

The next part will be an item editor and after that I will implement a control system for mouse and touch interaction. The end goal will be a small game prototype were I used my tool kit for content creation.

If the tool kit works as I want it to I might even considering selling it on the Unity Asset Store. If I will provide it as a whole package or a set of components, is not clear yet.

Some artists I worked with have said that they might provide me with some art assets that I can use for my prototype, so it might not end up as crappy as I thought ;P

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...

Student Project IV - Post Mortem

The fourth student project at the Games Academy is at an end.

It was quite a challenging project, unfortunately not because of high technical difficulty but because of endurance and staying focussed. We struggled to find a vision we all could live with and could work on, which resulted in a lot of unnecessary work and motivational problem for most team members. We found our vision about three quarters in the given time and had all to work overtime to finish it. I initially wanted to work on Cookie X on the weekends but there was not time for it and I even had to cancel on parties and seeing friends.

The problem was that a helicopter is not really suitable as a vehicle in a racing game, so the game designer played around with different mechanics until he found the "taxi mode", where the player has to transport items from one place in the room to another. Ideas like a rescue helicopter or a real taxi helicopter were tested but not fun enough for us. We wanted something different. And that we found.

Why not build a city out of building blocks via helicopter. That idea was kind of strange at first but combined with a mechanic to pick up blocks and a kind of 3d blueprint of the building to build, it worked. The player controls the helicopter, flies around the room, can pick up blocks of different shape and size that are distributed all over the room, fly with them to a designated building place and drop the block at the right spot in the blueprint.

To accomplish that we build the mechanics and made play tests but the pick up process and the placing inside the blue print was quite difficult. With a target group of casual mobile gamers in mind, the controls were far too difficult. After a long period of time (one programmer being absent helping his wife with their new born kid), we managed to fix even that and in the end we had a nice little casual on the android platform.

Like I mentioned in the previous post, I worked on the UI, menu and asset integration. Unity has some problems with 3rd party revision tools like SVN, so we had some difficulties there but after some mistakes we managed to overcome that obstacle as well. Another curiosity is that 3d models imported into Unity are scaled down to 0.01 of their original size by default. There is a scale option but while importing a bunch of models it was overlooked, which had unwanted results and I was the only one charged with integrating all assets after that. For a mobile project we needed to limit the draw calls as much as possible but if there are two instances of the same model (which use the same material) inside a scene but they are scaled in Unity they will produce two separate draw calls. So, all models had to be scaled outside of Unity and the material had to be versatile enough to be used on as many models as possible. Unity is able to combine meshes that use the same material and that are switched to static (if it is not moved) reducing the draw calls and thereby boosting the performance on mobile devices.

Due to the short time frame at the end of the project we could not implement all the needed tweaks to make the game work with older or less powerful devices than my tablet but we will do so during the next few weeks.

Student Project IV - Introduction

The fourth semester started about a month ago and my next student project is nearing its first prototype.

The idea is to have one of these remote controlled toy helicopters and be able to fly around in a kids room. Our target platform is Android, mostly tablets but maybe we might get it polished enough to get it to work on phones as well.

There is a game in the Google Play Store that features a toy helicopter but it is more like a simulation. Our goal is to have a game were the player is able to fly through predetermined routes inside our level, collect points or other pickups and will have a control scheme that is easy enough to handle by 12 year olds (or clumsy people like myself ;P ).

We are using Unity as our game engine and my tasks will be UI and code implementation for audio and particle effects, like I did for Hadron. Additionally, my assignments will be performance and asset integration as well as tutoring some of my team mates in Unity.

To avoid any confusion, each new semester project consists of a new idea and a new combination of students. Most of the students that worked on Hadron were in their last semester and have left the Games Academy by now, so most of the students I now work with have never worked with Unity before because it is not part of our regular classes. Some had minor experiences with it but not on a full (student) project.

My new Android Tablet

Some days ago, I got my first android tablet. It was quite a good deal coming with my mobile phone contract, otherwise I might not have bought it.

After installing some apps I also had installed on my phone, I made an android build of Hadron for my own and it runs like a charm :)

The tablet is a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 and I am quite impressed with it. Not only does it run games and programs like a charm, its Stylus starts to replace my paper notepad and I am able to send my notes to team mates via email or skype.

This isn't a sales pitch, I am just genially impressed with the tablet...

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 :)

Game Ideas 02: Old School 2.5 D Point & Click Adventures

I am a huge fan of old school point and click adventures like Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max etc.

So my dream is it to design my own someday but the modern adventures are mostly action games or filled with quick time events. Both aspects detract from the fun of the adventure by introducing hectic events and the chance to die because of bad reaction time. An adventure game for me provides the player enough time to think about his decisions and does not hinder him with unintuitive controls apart from telling a good story and maybe having some laughs. Nowadays, most adventure games use controllers or the keyboard to navigate the characters through the game world. Why? Well. maybe because the world is in 3D and the character should move in 3D as well but how about proving the characters and the world in 3D and leave the presentation mostly 2D? In gaming terms this is called 2.5D and it is used in different kinds of games and genres.

It sounds fine but it is nothing new and not even innovative so why the hell do I want to do that? Well, mostly for the love of those classics I played as a kid and because point and click adventures are ideal for new platforms like the iPad or other mobile devises. They don't need complicated control schemes and can be as long as the developer wants them to be. Some good modern examples are the Telltale Games episodes of Sam & Max or the most of the games by Pendulo Studios.

There are some new 2D adventures by indie developers out there but I have not played any of them yet (apart from Machinarium) but having worked with some young artists at my game design school most want to do 3D work and not work in 2D any more. The 2.5 D game is the best compromise that I can think of in that case, so hopefully I can find some people interested in the small story I am writing as background for the game idea and my own old school adventure game can become a reality some day...

Student Project III - Introduction

A new semester has begun and with it a new project.

This time it is a 2.5 D platformer in Unity. There is not much to show or tell at the moment, so I just say that I will do some programming for the interface and maybe some particle effects...

There are some tutorial links I wanted to post:

• http://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/runner/ (a game prototype somewhat similar to our idea)
• http://www.unity3dstudent.com/category/modules/ (some video tutorials on different aspects of Unity)
• http://pastebin.com/TZM50gGY (a health bar in C#)