I think you have a fun idea here and I enjoyed playing it! I think I would have liked to have seen more variance for the obstacles, or some slight speed control for when I didn't seem to be on cycle for them.
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Progress
Started today with doing some 3d modeling for my 2d little game. I wanted to see if I could drop in a spaceship model and give it the same 2d collision and have it work, and short to say; it -could- work, but would require a fair bit more work all already to get going. I got it rotating but it wouldn't fire or move correctly. Being outside of scope, I still had something else I could do; take a render of the 2d model and use that for the spaceship! It certainly is a lot sleeker than the rapid drawing I did.
I really do like doing 3d modeling, and I think if I had the time I would redo the basic walls, background, turrets, cores, keys and doors. Not improbable but I want to focus on finishing things off first. I did go ahead and make my own starfield to replace the desktop background I was using for space, and the result is also quite a bit cleaner and also tiles much better as well.
The background has a few very bright stars which should make finding the player position much easier, and in addition I added a rotating planet to the background that should be a nice big obvious landmark that'll be hard to miss if a player is trying to 'refind' the level within the generous boundaries. I was fortunate enough to remember too I had a planet texture I made back in 2008 perfect for the occasion; essentially just a mixture of blue and green cloud filters set up to layer and then tiled. I'm going to put a pin into making a handful of those for future reference.
For one last addition, I have now established scenes for and fully written out my cutscenes! I think the basic narrative I have will re-inforce the theme enough to give the project a sense of completion. Just having time to breath between levels alone already makes things much smoother. Word count for the plot comes out to 1600 words between 3 scenes, so just shy of the about 2000 I'd write if I was running a ttrpg session. The roughest part was figuring out precisely how wide I could get with each line and making sure to pre-write in a very forgiving way to the space, all for the sake of a starwars-esque title scrawl.
Final Goals
Since we're in the last week and nearing the end of the project, the last big thing to do here is to create the 3rd level. There are still plenty of tweaks and final additions I want, but everything is now optional. Sounds and effect for the players power, music for mission success, a full 20 bars of musical theme, a cinematic theme, a defeat theme, having a player hit-effect, a healing item just to reduce the difficulty, and setting the self-destruct timer to be more generous and appear on screen are all on the table. Additionally I'd love to be able to do all of the artwork in a 3d render style.
Just a few more days to go!
Progress
Back at it again today and things are going swimmingly in terms of progress. While I'm still a bit staggered by UI CSS at the moment, I did still find a simple method of displaying a bit of text on the screen about the mission. We have "Mission Failed" when the player explodes, "Mission Success" when the player blows up the core and leaves, and "Self Destruct Activated" to tell the player to leave once they exit the core. So while the game doesn't quit and close out on you, it will at least tell you that you won which is a huge success.
Today I also implemented two simple gameplay elements; a door and a crusher. The door is simple; if you destroy the nearby core "keys", the door changes states and opens. The Crusher meanwhile starts at one position, moves to another, and does so every X seconds. When it comes to creating a cycle or tempo to the game, I can make sure it syncs up in multiples of seconds with everything else. I decided to simply make the entire thing active and damaging, and pretty severely at 5 damage right now compared to the players 10 hit points. Calling it some sort of force-barrier thingy that damages seemed sci-fi enough and simpler than trying to go for specific-sided hurt boxes during motion or some such to actually crush the player. Two of these together would still get the same job done.
Enemies now will cease fire when the player is not in range! This might prevent a few friendly fire incidents where a more distant turret is firing at the player through a nearer turret; this can also be prevented with game design by putting blocking terrain, but I felt it important to not have a future large group of entities all making more calls when they won't be doing anything useful. In light of that, I also decided to turn every enemy onto a global firing time. Instead of personally tracking the last time they fired, every enemy will fire at a designated cycle if it can. If these are made into multiples of each other then we can get some staggered firing going on with different groups of turrets, and create that cyclical feel we're looking for to meet the theme.
I think the most interesting thing today though was a stab at some music. I found a sequencer (https://onlinesequencer.net/ ) that seemed like it had a variety of options, a simple interface, and import/export functions. I've played music before, I have a very very basic idea of musical theory, and I've heard people talk about composing before; so short to say I knew nothing. I looked for a synth instrument, set up a minor scale, and had the top and bottom of the scale play an appropriate chord and that fit about half of what I needed. It's not the worlds greatest art but it was pretty servicable. I added a competing descending scale in opposition to the ascending minor scale I had, put it into big long whole notes and set it to a harpsichord and it gave the whole thing a little extra oomph. It felt a plenty spacey and a bit clockwork; ultimately a very simple 4 measures but it felt very slow. I would compare and contrast the sort of slow methodical energy I had found against this track for an old favourite game of mine
There's a lot going on there that's a bit above my composition level here, but I think half of what gives that track its energy is that it has a beat and mine really doesn't. It's not complicated either; two short beats and a longer one. There's more complicated stuff happening there too if you listen in but i think that's enough to yoink and try to add in some energy, and wouldn't you know it, it merged together kinda nicely. If you want to listen to the current theme, you can use this link: https://onlinesequencer.net/3527930Checklist
There's a lot more I can do for the game now, but I think we've hit the lowest bar now for this being a completed game. It has the bare necessities to actually be fun on its own. That said we have plenty more work we can do, and levels we can design too which aught to be extra fun. To round things out, this is the list of things I'm thinking of next.
- UI Element for players health
- A Main Menu for the game
- A player controlled stop/slow power
- Crusher collision noises
- Player hurtSound
- Crusher appearance
-- Everything could use a replacement for their filler look
- Make it more obvious that the core does something with the laser dish and that's why it's big and important. Means a dish redesign.
- Make the door key objects look different than the core. They probably should end up color coded with doors as well ala Doom keys and dors.
- Give the player an "engine" sound when manuevering, and maybe an engine flame effect too.
- Background needs objects that the player can use to orient themselves and not get lost in deep space. Deep space likely needs a technical boundary as well.
My First Game Jam: Summer 2023 community · Created a new topic DevLog: "Blow up the Death Star, again"
"Who are you?"
Hi, I'm GriffinVarro on various platforms. I've been coding for over a decade but haven't managed to produce a full game in that time. I want to use this game jam to push myself to make a complete product, and pick up some more skills along the way. Unity is a fun and easy engine to use and will be my focus, and ideally by the end here I'll have practiced some basic art a bit more and learned how to make sounds and songs for any future projects.
Game Thesis: Blow up the Death Star, again
After some thinking on Day 1 I decided on a few things. With the theme of "Cycles" I want to hit two marks; the first is the meta-narrative with the work-in-progress title above. The player will be a space pilot infiltrating a large space station with a giant laser with the intent to blow it up. For the very light narrative, this circumstance happens again and again; the player will have to defeat several to end the game, but probably not end the narrative cycle. The second mark I want to hit is Cycles as a game mechanic in some way. Obstacles operate on some sort of rhythm, and the player should have some ability to control it. Perhaps the player could slow down the cycles of the machine to get through dangerous obstacles, or speed it up to get to a desirable point.
For the actual gameplay, I figured I'd attempt a space-physics drive top-down shooter. My first attempt at making a space-physics style game similar to this was with the LOVE scripting engine back around 2010-2012, so it's been on my mind before. Unity is very handy when it comes to very rapidly making a game if you want to make it physics-driven entirely, so the choice is easy. Players then should be able to move, stop, shoot, and use their ability. The game will also need obstacles like smashing zones or turrets firing at the player for the player to destroy.
If and when we get to level creation, I think this idea would work best with 3 possible levels; a simple introduction to the idea and challenges, and two more increasing in difficulty. In an ideal world maybe these could be procedurally generated forever but I don't think that's within scope for a gamejam, at least not my first one.
Actual Coding
With some free time Sunday and the basic ideas in mind from Saturday, we've made some progress! Our first goal was to get a our player moving about which took just a moment; WASD to apply force in any direction with gravity set to 0 worked perfectly for the feel of preserving momentum in space. I quickly made up a prototype ship to slot in since I'd need to know what direction it was facing; actually getting it to face the right direction proved a bit of a challenge but helpful gamejam folks pointed me a bit more in the right direction. With the ship turning and moving properly it already felt like a space game, but the strafing + mouselook combined feels a bit awkward and results in some very quick and unpredictable spinouts as the ship ends up tracing a very very wide circle. That's something to put a pin in to tweak later.
I decided to set up a turret next; I quickly drew a drone-looking spirte and could copy over the code from the mouselook function to have it face the player at all times. Firing a laserbeam is pretty straightforward, but positioning was trickier than the previous rotational trouble I was having. I needed to spawn the laserbeam object at a short distance from the turret, in the same direction as it was facing. I started with a hunt for trigonometric solutions but couldn't quite get anything to work until I discovered the Ray object had a function to get a position X units down its length at will. As long as I could point the ray in the same direction as the turret, I could spawn the object anywhere infront of it that I wanted. The important lesson I learned here today is that if a function calls for a normalized vector, it doesn't need a normalized vector at all; target - ourPosition inserted will get the correct result for a direction Vector3.
To finish things off, I made sure the newly spawned laserbeams would die after a few seconds, and die on impact as well; the first prevents garbage piling up, the second lets me insert future functions for damaging the player or producing other effects. The laserbeam uses a AddForce function to push itself through space at the player and I think around 30 units of force seems about right to start being a threat; the default 5 I set is almost comically slow.
The final look
Ultimately the result of today is pretty basic, but still a successful day of getting something out the door and functional. Hopefully once new features start popping up it'll look quite a bit more like a game.