Unnamed but great project (WIP)

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by HeshamAmiri, Dec 15, 2013.

  1. HeshamAmiri

    HeshamAmiri Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2010
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    #1 HeshamAmiri, Dec 15, 2013
    Last edited: Dec 15, 2013
    This is a game I have been wanting to develop for a long time. A Robotron (Minotron on the iOS) like game with psychedelic effects, 80s samples and a whole lot of retro fun. I’m using Unity to develop and it would be my first real foray into using both the Mecanim animation system and Substance for texturing. Up until now I have stuck to the legacy animation system and just regular textures.

    A lot of things that need to be done behind the scenes are almost complete, like the “scene manager”, basic AI and the art assets. Last night I also got the bullet system firing in one, four and eight directions, and I’m now ready to start adding enemies, obstacles, pickups and so on. My goal is to have 99 levels for the first release.

    And now for some screen shots:

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  2. HeshamAmiri

    HeshamAmiri Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2010
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    A lot of progress this. One major decision was to use a separate scene for each level in the game since I need to pre-bake the navmesh for each level. If there was a way to dynamically update the navmesh in Unity I would have still considered re-use of one scene for all the levels.

    Another great tip I got through twitter was the Anchors in NGUI. It really made things much more simpler, especially that I will be targeting a universal release. Not sure though why it is a marked as a legacy feature! I hope it probably means that something better is in the works.

    As for other things in the game, I’m still refining the meta-level or the template level I will use through out the game. Things have gone very smoothly with the bullet/laser system is up and running. Thanks to the extremely easy setup of navmesh agents, I have cats and enemies running around the level and avoiding obstacles beautifully. There is also ambient sound and sound effects all over, though I plan to make this game even noisier :)

    Particles. I got a few packages from the asset store and I think I wasted so many hours just playing around with all of the effects. The possibilities are endless and are just so gorgeous. Money well spent.

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  3. The cartoonFX packs are my favorite, I use them for prototypes all the time.
     
  4. Destined

    Destined Well-Known Member

    Aug 11, 2013
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    +1 and they are good starting points for effects you want to put your own graphics on too
     
  5. HeshamAmiri

    HeshamAmiri Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2010
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    All most all the major ground work has been done, this includes the scoring system, bullet system, the pickup system, the enemy generators(3 kinds per level), Enemy AI and a lot of other things that make setting up a new level just dead easy. The philosophy here is to spend time now on this to save time later on when designing levels. Everything is generic enough and flexible enough so that it can handle any new crazy enemy or obstacle ideas I come up with down the line.

    One of the nice things that I got setup pretty quickly is the social sharing stuff, I used Prime31′s Social Networking plugin and got it working in under 15 minutes. Was dreading doing this but I’m glad it turned out to be such a simple thing.

    Just one more thing I need to do before I consider the ground work 100% is setting up GameCenter, but before I do that I need to decide on a name for the game so I guess that will have to wait for a little while.

    Enough of the talk and here are some screen shots:

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  6. HeshamAmiri

    HeshamAmiri Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2010
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    Agreed, I use that pack and others too. Huge time savers and huge time wasters as well :)
     
  7. HeshamAmiri

    HeshamAmiri Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2010
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    Another week and another update. I spent most of the week designing the first 22 levels of the game. The components I wrote seem to be behaving well. Things have not gone broken and haven’t had one of those bugs that makes you WTF! (yet). I think pretty much the scene manager class can handle any new crazy idea I can think off without too much hassle. Like I said last week, I put in a lot of work in the ground work to make my life easier down the road and it is sure paying off right now.

    Since I had these 22 levels ready I also thought it is probably the right time to do some profiling. Sure enough, I discovered some areas that needed some polishing or architecting. There were a lot of small things that actually gave me some pretty respectable performance gains however two things were big problem areas:

    1.NGUI and Label text changes. From the profiler it seemed that changing labels was costing me performance and noticeable stutter in gameplay. I changed from using dynamic fonts to bitmap fonts which greatly improved the situation. I also had to rewrite the score update component so it would only change the labels if there was a change to be made. Previously I was updating the labels every frame (bad).

    2.The audio manager package I was using was also costing me. Though it is geared for mobile games but still there were unwanted spikes, plus I need someway to specify specific FX to specific scenes rather than have all the effects in one big container. There was no way to do it so I ended up switching to Master Audio. Not only the code is more efficient, but specifying global and per scene effects is trivial.

    As for the screen shots, I decided to record a video with me playing the game so far. I edited the parts were it is obvious that I suck at my own game :) But I like how busy it is and all the Chromatic Aberration stuff and really cool blur effects courtesy of Aubergines PostProcess Effects

    Link to the Video
     
  8. HeshamAmiri

    HeshamAmiri Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2010
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    embedding the video properly this time:

     
  9. HeshamAmiri

    HeshamAmiri Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2010
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    I wanted to do a video for the this weeks progress but I just didn’t have time to do so and I really didn’t add much content wise. There are 8 new levels with Robots, all kinds of robots, crazy robots, stalker robots and exploding robot and shooting robots. The levels are pretty challenging but I think I will go over them design wise again, I think they need some more work.

    However, behind the scenes a lot has been done. Now all the baddies are derived from a single class. This will make changing common behaviour pretty easy, plus code duplication is a sin! The level manager class received much needed love as well. It much more streamlined and efficient (If you are using Unity Pro there is no excuse not to use profiling)

    There was a nasty bug where eight way shooting was doing something weird. It took me about 2 hours to track it down and at the end it was just a matter of me missing a minus sign somewhere in my code. I’m surprised that it took thirty levels and countless plays to actually notice this. On the plus side, this lead to refactor the Player class to be much cleaner and much more efficient.

    From the feedback I got here and other places, I also tamed the sound effects so they are now less annoying but still retain that arcade feel. I admit, I like my games to have busy visuals and audio effects, hopefully after the changes they won’t be over the top.

    Now for the Screen Shots:

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  10. HeshamAmiri

    HeshamAmiri Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2010
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    #10 HeshamAmiri, Jan 18, 2014
    Last edited: Jan 18, 2014
    At the 70% mark and it feels good. The levels are coming nicely and the good news there are only 30 more levels to go. However, while designing these levels I thought of why I just didn’t go the procedural route? It would have cost me sometime initially to get the generators just right, but would have made level, well, it would be almost no work at all. But then I wouldn’t be able to dead simple-to-implement navemesh navigation that comes with Unity. Maybe be a thought for another project?

    So what is planned ahead?

    • go back and tweak the levels to get the difficulty/rewards just right.
    • add polish and visual/audio candy here and there.
    • Thinking of adding a reoccurring sneaky soft of enemy to add some variation.
    • Decide on a name for this game already.

    Here are the screen shots:

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  11. HeshamAmiri

    HeshamAmiri Well-Known Member

    Aug 19, 2010
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    Finally the 99 levels are complete. I also got the win screen done today as well, so all around really good progress. Did some code cleanup and found a few issues that needed fixing. To be honest, I thought I will get to a point were I will need major optimisaztion but it didn’t happen. I guess Unity can handle pretty much anything if code things the right way and use pools effectively.

    So what is next? Go back to Level 1 and start polishing stuff until Level 99, plus I have a few ideas to add more variation to the gameplay. I’m not really sure how long will it take me but I don’t think it will be more than a week or so. Plus I plan on releasing another video demo sometime this week.

    Once things look the way I want it on the iPhone 5, will start testing on the iPhone 4s and iPad2, iPad3 , mini iPad and the retina mini iPad. Probably another week or so to get things settled with those things.

    Here are the screen shots for this week from the levels 80 to 89:

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