Subatomic Kangaroo dev log
Tyrus Peace
Tyrus Peace
I didn't spend quite as much time on this as I'd hoped and I ran into
a few too many problems with Blender 2.5. So far the problems are
mostly my fault. It's definitely better than Blender 2.4, although I
don't think I've benefitted much from that yet since what I'm doing
here is so simple. I almost finished my player model, though. It's
rigged and UV mapped, so once I texture it I can spit out a quick art
test and start animating.
I don't plan to have many animations, but I can see myself getting
carried away. I've got to start coding soon.
I talked about the game design with my wife. It's still less concrete
than I'd like, but it seems like it'll mostly be based around battling
electrons and ripping apart nuclei via mortal wombat, which will then,
of course, result in a nuclear-powered super kangaroo. That matches
the initial concept doodle pretty well.
-Ty
Tyrus Peace
This seems good enough to start, though. I've got some pretty sweet
kangaroo box animations. I'll have to see how well jump-to-move
animations mix with arcade-style movement controls.
I definitely googled "do kangaroos walk".
Tyrus Peace
My most visible achievement today was definitely the art test I posted
earlier, but I did get my actual Unity project started. It now hosts
a crappy player controller that moves the player left and right before
he falls to his doom off of a Hydrogen nucleus. I've also created
run/look/idle/jumping animations for my player model. They'll
probably have to do regardless, but I hope they look good in game.
I was planning to at least get my animations/player look during
movement working tonight. Unfortunately my brain is entirely off so I
went and got a fresh repo going for this in Mercurial instead. It's
definitely nice to have things versioned and backed up.
I also decided to go with a CharacterController instead of a Rigidbody
character for this game (think Mario physics vs. LittleBigPlanet
physics). Hopefully that won't bite me later.
-Ty
Tyrus Peace
I was pretty productive today, if slow. Got animations playing at the
right times for running, jump charging, and jumping. I tweaked the
hell out of my standard run animation and fixed a pretty hilarious
animation glitch where my kangaroo was always staring upward while
running.
I also got the kangaroo's jump _kind of_ working. I definitely need
to change the jumping physics to be more realistic, but I've got a
basic click and aim style going that I'm finding pretty appealing at
the moment. That control decision's quickly becoming the core of the
game designs dancing around in my head: combo-based electron hoppin'
to build up an atom smashing attack. All for mad points, of course.
I also got my kangaroo's face working. I attached the possible
expressions for some reason.
Tyrus Peace
Only managed to set aside a couple hours today.
Got jumping working correctly, had a moment of despair wondering about
how playable the concept will be without some kind of time-dilation
(which would itself take a chunk of time to add). I made it so I can
collide with and kill electrons to get a boost upward (screenshot)
which is fun and makes me feel better about things. If the game ends
up being too tough to play there are lots of other things I can try.
Time time time.
Next up: allowing for and telling the player about multiple jumps
before landing. Then my basic jump-combo gameplay will be done and I
can get to spending time on the really hard stuff. Flying grampa
kangaroo and proton combat, anyone?
From my player controller's BoostWithVel() code:
//TODO: maybe some rainbows? Maybe ALWAYS RAINBOWS.
Tyrus Peace
Today felt very productive. I tweaked the hell out of my jump/falling
logic and got a count/display going right next to the mouse cursor at
all times. Picking up electrons gives you one more jump and you reset
to 3 whenever you land. More importantly, the subatomic kangaroo can
now shoot rainbow stars. Death by Knowledge.
This all definitely took a while, though. I only had time to watch
two episodes of Phineas and Ferb :(. Today was probably another 3-4
hours. More weapon logic, health, enemies and levels are the biggest
fish I've got left. After that it's polish and sound.
-Ty
Tyrus Peace
I hardly got to work on the game today; 20ish minutes at work to fix a
bug that allowed me to fall onto electrons and land on them rather
than pick them up, maybe another 20 at home to design and fail at
modeling "enemy" electrons that shoot the player and wear hats. Hats
are dangerous.
Tyrus Peace
Obviously didn't get as much done yesterday as I'd hoped. Today was
better, but I'm still feeling pretty far behind. I spent a bit too
much time nicing up things, adding notifications that the player
should run into disarmed/dead electrons and telling the player when
they get an extra jump.
Added enemies that shoot at you and can be killed. You can jump off
them, but you can't pick them up until you kill them. It's pretty
damn fun, actually. A lot of my screenshots here are me abusing an
exploit that lets you shoot tons of stars in slow mo. I don't allow
that any more, but it looks pretty rad.
Not sure if I'll have time for much in the way of sounds or my guide
tomorrow. I've definitely got to focus on weapon upgrading and
scoring if I'm going to have a game here at all. And I worry about
the hats for the damn electrons.
Been rocking trash80 like no other. I'm wondering if this music will
be appropriate for this game (much of it is CC).
Tyrus Peace
Done! Putzing around with the app icon and such while I wait to get
sleepy. This sprint to the finish was pretty damn fun; it's really
something to make a game come together like that.
My todo list for today is attached. 'nuff said.
