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A member registered Jul 01, 2018 · View creator page →
Creator of
tank controls but you can shoot to anywhere based the camera
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Action game where you dodge for a bit then time stops allowing you to play cards to attack!
Card Game
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It is what it says it is
Role Playing
A tunneling machine finds itself injected into a body resembling a human.
Survival
Dying here would severe the constant anticipation. But what I found in this place was much worse than life or death.
Survival
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Generally don't have a lot of time to work this jam but the deadline is a little more lenient I can squeeze a small game in. While the theme implies the setting of 70s-90s and beyond at least for the mascots I like the idea of a 70s restaurant chain being hopelessly tied to the 60s with Jambon being a Beatnik. Sorta like A&W using a classic Hanna-Barberra branding.
Gathering up a moodboard of 60s graphic design and the trends at the time, I see a lot of teals, browns, orange, and swirls it sometimes blends in the 70s territory with how surreal the choices can be but still has the post-WW2 optimism that the 50s had. I'd like to really go into the spy aesthetic. Whether the secret government research is a branding or actuality I'd like delve into the conspiratorial/paranoia aspect that seems to plague most of the Cold War era.
Then I realized that, fast food chains in the 50s and 60s also had a boom in car culture due to the highway being more prominent. Fast foods would often have drive ins where you could eat at your car. Sometimes it wasn't about the food but to show off your new ride at a typical hangout for teens. I recall my grandparents talking about how their friends wanted to work at A&W just so they could roller skate food over.
One thing I'm noticing the most is the absolute over elaboration on signage. In excess the American highway seems like a giant drive-thru mall full of wonders. So I think I'll set the game in this particular location.
So to keep the game simple I'm going to have it be a first person game where you're stuck in a car and can't really move. Instead you're spying on customers and passerby's that go into the restaurant. I haven't really thought about the how or whys of it, but generally want to communicate a contradictory state of optimism and paranoia. 
Right now I just have mouse control tied to camera turning and some colored cubes. Grabbed a free 3d model of van that was vaguely 60s enough. Though very hard to find cars of a specific period of low poly so might have to make them myself.
All I got for now.
Not too much the report I've fallen behind on some stuff and still have the last bit of level 1 done, but with the last 5 days or so off I decided to slap all of the tasks on the whiteboard and look at it from a lateral progress angle than a vertical one. I tend to bounce between the two but it's hard to get out of the habit of being very vertical and making everything super linearly.
I also tested the game with some folks and level 1 probably needs work balance/onboarding wise but I think worst case I just have a default easy mode where you merely take a penalty to score if the game ends up being too hard. It took 3 weeks to get a solid foundation and level 1 done but I think I'm just going to have do a little bit of corner cutting to get 2 levels done in a week. It's really a matter of how polished/varied the game will be that's the big question mark. I think I just want to live up to the music though as Cowberry's been doing a really solid job with it.
So I've modeled a basic enemy with vertex colors painted on as opposed to UVs. That one shader i talked about with making the sprites pop out from the background wasn't wasted. The ones on the left of each pair has a custom shader i made to make the lighting affect the colors much less. Making them pop out more from the background.
This isn't an artstyle choice so much as a readability thing. I might be overthinking it though. As long as the humanoids are the only thing moving and the environment is relatively simple. It shouldn't be too hard to point out what's relevant. Having said that it's also why I've been trying to keep the environment fairly Doom wad-ish. I plan to make anything that's modeled to be interactable to some degree, and the rest will likely be baked into whatever I manage in the quake editor.
Before rigging and animating I tend to just throw the models into the ingame scene because I never know what something looks like until it's ingame. The enemies are a bit generic but I'm liking how they're brining back the Virtua Cop influence, the lack of any complicated detail I think will help with standing out. This model is actually based on the protagonist but just puff the chest up to look more stocky and bam there ya go. I'm probably going to reuse the hell out of this model though.
Next up is rigging and animating these fools
So in a chaos of directions I... decided to use realtime 3D for the characters for a list of reasons, but that meant concepting, modelling/rigging/animating stuff so I hit the ground running. 
For some reason i had it in mind for her to be like Iris from MMX4 but then I realized thick long hair is a huge no no in 3d modeling so I went for an anime pony tail thing. Then I had it in mind to go not just low poly but early PS1 segmented limbs and potentially vertex colors. This is something FF7 was known for doing for enemies, which involves assigning colors to vertexes as opposed to UV textures which became more dominant as 3D became more understood. I see it as an excuse to avoid having to do extra skin weighting and get some nostalgia points. I'll likely use faceless enemies with no textures to cut down on any UVing.
Tiringly enough this means weighing each bone to each body part specifically as I'm using Rigify to speed up the rigging process. There's probably a method to auto binding the individual meshes to only one bone each. I still need to figure out the hair as it's one solid piece but it might be more interesting to make the hair into a poly segment snake and animate it manually via programming since the auto rig doesn't provide custom options.
we in business
So just got off work and it's thursday here's my plan for finishing the game cutting up the environment texturing/modeling into 30 min chunks. Then switch to actually making the dang game 8 pm onwards til 3. I'm doing all of this quickly to make any time for the anime opening which might just be characters standing around who knows.
So today was Victoria day (a work day off holiday for Canadians as far as I know, not really in UK for some reason). So me and Cowberry the composer decided to work together in the same room for some good ol fashioned local game jamming like we used to before the pandemic. I got animations done for Avergmus and got them sort of okay blended together in the movement (some things seem to be missing from the run cycle somehow...). Truth be told there isn't much platforming in this, it's mostly an excuse to bounce between VN/dating +shooting segments. Some things came really well together, I also took a stab at animating a storyboard sequence for the anime opening and Cowberry timed out all the parts reall well as you can see in the devlog.
THE PROBLEM, is I forgot that doing ingame cinematics is a fucking nightmare especially when timing it to music. There are multiples ways of charting it out but since Godot's animation editor isn't as robust as say.. premiere where you can scrub through audio, it's really hard to line things up. I had to export the animation to 60 fps and did simple tests to make sure a cut would line up based on the exact frame, but no dice, the frames seem to be off by 7-8. At 60 fps this can get a little annoying so I'm considering at least trying for 24 fps to narrow it down, even if the output will do 60 fps (and EVEN if godot has a really bad measuring method). That's not even getting into syncing into the audio which is a bit of a headache along with the editing.
This isn't even getting into the animation part which I think I can handle. It's just a matter of making the characters and giving them simple posing and getting the most out of smart camera work. Lot of anime in the 80s tend to just have characters standing or walking in place (due to budgets) but also sometimes it was just impressive to animate a character spin around... which is easy with in-game cinematics and full 3D. Anyway you can see me complain about this in the devlog, and also listen to my cat meow to the music almost on beat (also I had no idea she was scratching the door, because I'm hearing impaired and with headphones).
So this is pretty much the run cycle finished... hopefully the rest of the animations such as jumping and landing will be pretty basic. Most of the animations are basic, I haven't had time to really inject the actual character and personality of Avergmus into the animation, but that usually adds 10+ hours to the animation process (and potentially a lifetime of professional experience).
Against my better judgement, I have about 2 hours of footage of me making the entire run cycle (though some extra time after recording was spent polishing aka 3 hours of tweaking graph handles). It's mostly me fumbling with Blender but hopefully this gives some insight on how 3D game animation is made: