Name Your Kids After a Cocktail

I've been keeping on the down low since I haven't created any new art that was worthy of sharing recently. The game is progressing and I've started blocking out the level design with the limited resources I have at my disposal. I caved a little yesterday and Matt started having a go at Unity as well, dealing with the glamorous task of making Platforms move around and helping me tweak the character so she didn't feel so "floaty".

I'll take some screenshots tonight maybe so you can see how the prototype looks at the moment. But for now here's a great parenting tip. Brought to you by Kristof & I. He's a relatively new kid on the block. You'll see his name crop up a lot more since he's working right next to me now.

*Disclaimer, naming your child "Peach Tea Daisy" will result in him inevitably joining the glee club, or alternatively, if you give this name to a girl she has a high chance of becoming a stripper. If symptoms persist talk to your healthcare professional.

Sergeant Punk 5

So a lot happened this weekend, including finding out that I have a ton of people in my life who are far too cool for their own good, even to the point that they'd throw me a surprise party and give me a mint video camera. All of yous are gonna have to get your own post, hopefully when I get all this slow motion footage edited into something that's actually watchable.

ANYWAY, onto game dev stuff. Sunday evening was super productive. I moved my PC out into the lounge, and while the lack of internet was disruptive in terms of trouble shooting Unity issues it did mean that I had zero distractions to pull me away from finishing up the walk cycle. I finished the 4 keyframes I talked about in the last post then made the tweens. Which had a little less thought involved as I was just drawing the pose between each of the major frames.

She spends exactly half her time one pixel lower to create the bobbing effect. So 2 frames high, the 2 low, 2 high, 2 low again, around and around. Although this effect is somewhat lost in the game at the moment as I had to manually adjust where the center point was on each frame of the spritesheet. As you can see she doesn't take up an exactly square spot in space. Even more apparent in the following run animation which was even more a pain in the butt to center.

When I did the initial sketch of her running Becky asked why her boobs weren't doing anything. So I'm not ashamed to admit that I spent a while getting the boob physics right. I'm expecting a call from the Dead or Alive crowd any day now. Now I need to look into blending between standing and moving etc, so it doesn't look so flickery and ugly when I start and stop moving. Also coming up is jumping and falling poses. Eventually I'll probably come back and see if I can animate her hair a little on the run animation, at the moment it's a little too static.

Sergeant Punk 4

 So I'm going ahead with Unity. I figure it's going to be my best shot at getting a little game done and bringing my pixel art style to life. So for now the site is going to turn into a dev log.

Based off Sergeant Punk from a while ago. I think she will do nicely as my character. I don't feel entirely comfortable showing my WIP walk cycle off, but I feel it might be interesting to some to see how my process looks about a third of the way through. I'll colour her legs in, making changes on her as I go. Once I'm happy with how she moves in these keyframes I'll add tweens which might mean another four frames to make her move nice and smooth. I added the straps to her legs cause I thought it would add a little shape to her, to give a visual cue that she isn't dead flat. It was the one thing I took away from the Tomb Raider animation I did.

Resist the urge to tell me what's wrong with this. It's like telling a mum her unborn child doesn't have a degree yet. Hmm, Looking at the animation I kind of dig that she's bald. It could fit quite nicely into the future aesthetic I have in mind for the rest of the game.

The checklist for the finer points of what I want to do in Unity include making sure that the character doesn't stick to walls and being able to pluck objects out of the world. These are about my largest coding hurdles I need to succumb for the project I'm prepping. I'm using the Beta Sample Assets & prefabs as my jumping off pointa and I was kind of hoping that it wouldn't have the wall stickiness. Perhaps downloading someones complete project to dissect how they did it could help.

First Time With Unity

I'm someone who's always fetishised about making a game. I think that's a common dream among gamers. Making that game that you've always wanted to play, but when probed about it the dream is usually a vague idea along the lines of "an MMO version of whatever game I'm into at the time."
Well I always wanted to make a platformer, and after playing WormHunter and a few other of the Ludum Dare games I noticed the Unity logo popping up an awful lot. So I figured I'd look into it.

I eagerly opened up the Unity site and read all about how they're doing all this 2D stuff now. Sweet! Sounds like exactly what I want. I read that it only takes a "small amount of coding knowledge" Hmmm. I only have a small amount, are they underestimating how little I know? They use Javascript and C#, neither of which I knew. This put me off for about a week.
Then I decided to throw caution to the wind and dive in. Unity is only about a gig anyway. One of my friends tried convincing me to get UE4. But I was turned off by the subscription fee, the lack of things it easily exports to, and the fact that I don't particularly need the 3D rendering prowess of Unreal Engine. It's squandered on me. I just want to drift pixels around the screen.



First up I did Brackeys pong tutorial. Im not going to lie. When i first heard his voice I thought it was a piss take video and he was about to smear spaghetti on the screen. But it turns out he's pretty cool! I followed along, although only barely comprehending the coding wizardry. I was instantly impressed with how simple it was to get a paddle on the screen moving. Adding gravity was also a sinch. Last time I encountered gravity was when my friend Matt was wrestling with Actionscript, building gravity from scratch and smashing his head against a wall because slopes are so much harder than they sound. In unity I got slopes going within seconds by just tilting the boxes or drawing my own hit lines.

I was surprised to find that C# looks exactly like the actionscript I was used to when I was a kid. Something familiar! Yay! Still 80% of what was said went over my head, and I wrestled with bad capitalization a lot, instantly breaking the script.



After I endured making pong I stepped into the real meat and potatoes of what I wanted to do. I was blown away by how crazy fast it was to create levels and have the character running around, literally done in minutes. Within another half hour I had Parallax scrolling going as well. This is seriously awesome. As a relative noob I managed to trail along and get things working.

If you're a noob, I recommend you check out Unity. It's not gonna scan your brain and instantly shit out the game you want, but it's definitely fun to give a good crack. Also if you're already a pro it can cut corners for you so instead of trying to figure out character controls you can get straight into developing new concepts.

As someone whose seen the sweat and tears that goes into building something from scratch I can appreciate the amount of work that's gone into the free assets. At the same time, all these premade crutches doesn't limit you to one prefab game. I'm pretty amped to finish up these tutorials and see what I can cook up.

Now I'm off to do some character concepts.