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(4 edits) (+1)

Hi Nazandr, thanks for your feedback!

Happy to hear you enjoyed the feel of the shooting, this was something I was particularly proud about because it was the first time I had written firing like this and I loved how well it worked(I am always going to push myself to do new things in jams). It uses a combination of raycasting, illusionary particle effects and object pooling for those particles to get the fire rate up high and the fps stable(The particles you see travelling to target are a total of 5 objects being recycled). I could've pushed the fire rate to the moon with this but the problem was the sound, I would've needed to do the sound effects for the shots in a different way because it becomes too much for the ears. I was happy with how it came together though, maybe I'll do a youtube tutorial for this kind of firing system some time! It was still missing screen shake, muzzle flash and mech barrel animations though but there were more worrying things to address.

So let me dive into the beef of your comment - what did I do.

The assault mech (protagonist). The model and walking animation I took from the store, however none of it is linked to behaviour, the code you get with it is written for the purposes of the demo scene that shows it off. This model was actually not so great to work with because the rotations do not align correctly with Unity's coordinate system. So when I used Quaternion.lookrotation and slerping to rotate to the aim target, it was all wonky. This is where I learnt that you can "Add" quaternions together by multiplying them together, but it is not commutative, so the order matters, that was an annoying little lesson! So I was able to offset the spastic model direction and that got it right.

The model textures were also quite realistic, really nice for a high quality project but out of place in the low poly world I was putting together. I created a new material from the flat cell kit shader to "cartoonify" it up. 

It also didn't come as pieces. So in order to create the intro scene where Dom is working on it all broken up, I had to get it into blender, but it was some kind of "ASCII" FBX file, so I had to use an autodesk converter to do so. Even then it shows up in blender as one piece, no hierarchy. So I had to tear it up into the pieces I wanted and then patch it up and reimport it.

The walking animations for the model while great, did not come with any kind of logic I could borrow from. So I created an animator, took the animations I wanted (just walk+run+run_jump) and plugged it into my control system. The animations weren't blending together well at all though, this is where I had to learn what a blend tree was, very cool! They were also read-only so I had to learn how to get around that as well. 

Before I even went to this mech I spent a lot of time in Blender making and animating my own mech, and it was about there but the animations were really difficult to get right and I am still brand new to rigging and animating in blender, at some point in the process I decided to drop it and go with a store bought model, purely to be able to get walk animations.

Next the jumping/jetpack - the trickiest thing to get right was the jetpack power, to have it strong enough to accelerate the player up when already falling to the ground, but not so strong that the player could jump, immediately use the jets and fly to the moon. I ended up using a raycast to the ground to help mitigate both sides of the equation but ultimately I don't like where it ended up. I think I would program the behaviour differently if I had to do it again.

The biggest "steal" from the assets I used was the map itself. I spent about 3 hours writing a random map generator using the synty city buildings as prefabs and while it worked pretty well to place buildings of the same size, it was really difficult to get it right with buildings of all various sizes, while still looking aesthetically pleasing. So I decided to drop the custom map generation and instead cut a corner piece out of the synty city demo scene, patched it up a bit and then wrote+applied the necessary destructible scripts and layering to the map objects.

In terms of modelling - the only thing I did myself was the rocket car. This was modelled from scratch in blender. I also animated the tires for driving but never had the time to actually implement movement on enemies.

It took me 4 days to get the player controller/mech playing and feeling right with flying/jumping/shooting/slamming. A day and a half to do the intro and learn timeline. The last day and a half to sort out the map/enemy logic/enemy spawning(incl. that flying drop-in aircraft logic - I enjoyed that a lot)/boss logic/death+victory cinematics/game state+scene management/bug fixing/balancing.

Anyway, I hope you can see that although I did borrow a lot from store assets, I did a lot more than just "glue stuff together".  Thanks so much for your feedback and I hope this gives you and others with the same concerns a better understanding of the work done.

(3 edits) (+1)

Hi, thank you for so big answer)

"I did a lot more than just "glue stuff together"" didnt mean to be an offense or like indicator of low effort. On the contrary i think this is a good skill to have because you can use (and i don't count it as stealing if you credit accordingly) result of others work which can save you time and bring better quality. I think this is even more important skill than doing everything from scratch because imho it how it works in real job. So i actually appreciate your job especially because you did much more that i was initially thought about. Looks like you have a lot of experience already, isn't? If not a secret can you share short review on that? :)

My only concern is paid stuff. It's not accessible for everyone especially in jam so it's like "pay to win" in games. Other than that good job!

P.s. Could you tell can i skip intro? I'd like to play again but don't want to sit through this again. I saw hidden button on the left bottom but it does nothing with it unfortunately

(+1)

No worries, no offense taken!

I would argue that there is enough free assets out there to showcase your skills just as well as there are paid assets. Paid assets generally come in better looking but if people are being honest about what they pulled in and what they made themselves, then the judges have all the info they need to judge accordingly, so you shouldn't feel worried about "losing" based on this. Further to this point though, jams aren't really about winning or losing are they? It's more about practicing your craft, getting feedback and building your portfolio, they're all about your own progression, so you really shouldn't be concerned about what others are paying for or not.

I have a few years experience as a hobbyist, most of it was focused toward a small mobile game I shelved shortly after launching, but that project gave me a strong base of knowledge to work from. By trade I am a developer, not a game developer sadly but coding is one of my stronger points so I can crank stuff out pretty quick usually :)

Sorry I really wish I spent a few more minutes on that secret 'skip' button you mentioned, I don't think I ever remembered to wire that button up, my apologies :'(

(+1)

I'm not sure about free assets but i have not that much experience with it. I know that when i was trying to find simple (non-fantasy, non-shooter) 2D character i've failed. But on the other hand when i have tried to find it now in paid stuff it's not there either (at least in about 2-3 pages)... So mb you are right here

About "losing" - i'm not that hopeful for winning, i don't know if we even have prizes here :) But if i will have good results it can help at job interviews as style points :) I meant that there is like unfair competition this way if judges will not consider this ofc and there are a lot of work for them even without it so they can accidentaly miss this. And there are different participating goals for different people including having prizes so it can be important for someone. Anyway i'm not into arguing about this, so if you want to have last words on this topic i'm ok with it)

Really cool job for this amount of experience) I have similar experience but including a bit of gamedev job. Thanks for sharing! Wish you the best

It's ok