pzeronow

A few days ago I decided to join A Game By Its Cover gamejam and give it a shot with some 3D FPS.

For those unaware, AGBIC is a non-competitive gamejam where the goal is to make a game inspired by any of the Famicase covers from this online exhibition. I picked up this cover art below by Samuel Boucher:

Which turned into the following initial composition:

I set up a new project in Unity3D and created an environment similar to that of Devil Daggers (heavy inspiration here at least in terms of gameplay):

Here you can see the initial brainstorming results:

By far the biggest issue will be the implementation of the genetic algorithm. Fortunately in the past few weeks I’ve been reading and watching a lot of stuff about the subject (I recommend The Coding Train’s series on genetic algorithms and Kryzarel’s C# implementation on Unity). The idea of enemies evolving and adapting to the player’s strategies sounded quite appealing. I will write more in detail what I’m planning to do in another post but don’t expect a very complex system (more like an evolution of the snake’s attributes, or the frequency of sudden movements evolving over time to avoid the player’s projectiles, something like that). Perhaps I will even scratch that idea, who knows.

After two days of work I got the following:

ScepterCroc minivlog #1 - Indie DB

Progress done so far:

• Player movement is done (minus some tweaks here and there once I test the ‘whole’ product).
• Charge and release projectile is done: the bigger the projectile the more damage it does, see video below.
• Art wise let’s say I find the results acceptable, but I’m constantly thinking about retexturing or simply going for a ‘solid-color-for-each-model-face’ approach (I’m sure this style has a name but I’m not aware of it). The snake will be animated programmatically so no need to do anything other than rigging it and that’s been done too.
• AI: not started but thoroughly thinking about it every day.
  
  

ScepterCroc charge&release; - Indie DB

That's all for now. During next update I will explain how the snakes' attribute evolution is planned to work and write about general player/enemy interactions.