Blogs - GREBENOTS

Just a quick update on my progress. I haven't made any! This is a really busy week for myself, as well as my wife. She's preparing report cards for her second grade class, and I have several projects due for my university classes. I haven't had much free time, and the free time that I have had, I've spent unwinding in the rogue-like, Darkest Dungeon. I'll be updating this again sometime during the week of Thanksgiving.

Keep it weird!

I've worked on getting a proper dungeon tileset going. Since I'm just putting in placeholder graphics at this point, I decided to use The Legend of Zelda for inspiration. It's quite similar as you will see. I did create the entire pixel image by hand however. When I placed the tiles in the Unity scene, I wasn't picky about which tiles I actually put on the walls, and you can see that the seams don't look pretty. I do have tiles made to fix this issue however, but it really isn't worth my time to lay them out at the moment, since the graphics are all temporary anyways.

What I really wanted to get working, was the room transfer that shows depth. You can see this working in the video. As our skeleton friend crosses between the rooms, he goes underneath the top of the door and out of sight. Little things like this make me happy. I'm burning out on creating the pixel art however, and I'm really anticipating getting into coding sections again.

Keep it weird.

I worked on things for most of the day yesterday. I began by compiling a new pixel art program from source. The precompiled program is $15 from the developer site, but he's made it open source and provided permission to compile it yourself instead of purchasing. You can buy ASprite for $15. I've ended up liking it a lot, because it doesn't treat me like an idiot. If I want to delete a layer, I click the layer and push delete. There isn't a confirmation prompt---it just assumed that I'm not a fool, and it really increases the speed of my work flow.

Speaking of such things, I'm very fed up with game design philosophy in video games nowadays. Hand holding, time crushing tutorials---they are the tools that have been used to dumb down video games for a long time now, and are things that I'm going to steer my own game away from.

As for yesterday, I worked on putting together a temporary player character. I gave him animations in ASprite, and then imported them into my Animation Controller in Unity3D. I also put together some proper sized environmental tiles, in order to start prototyping a bit.

Keep it weird.

Hi again. Once I got the movement controller kinda sorta working, I was able to move onto some other interesting things. I was able to put together a prototype graphic for a player character that I have named "RockGuy." Just as the prototype landscape graphics, RockGuy is completely unrelated to how the game will eventually look.

I used a program called "Spriter" to create the animation frames, which I picked up on a Humble Bundle for dirt cheap. It's actually really good. Once I created the animations, I exported them to .png files, and then pushed them through TexturePacker Pro, and then into Unity3D.

I was able to get the Animation Controller scripted onto the behavior tree as an Action, which actually works quite nicely. RockGuy is obviously too big compared to the landscape graphics, as the landscape was done with pixel art at a 16x16 scale, and RockGuy is a behemoth in comparison, at 1000x1000.

I think my next order of business is going to be to put together another version of prototype graphics that are all to the correct scale. If I get that done, I can build out some proper levels and start to build some enemy ai, combat, and other game mechanics.

I think I'll be developing tomorrow.

Keep it weird.

- GREBENOTS -

I've finally worked out the movement controller. Most of the delay is just because I have 101 things going on, and this was a busy week of classes. I got my keyboard over the week, and the clack is real. This is my third aftermarket keyboard purchase, and second mechanical. The Cherry-MX-Blue switches feel far-and-away better than the MX-Red that were in my old board. Not only that, but the new keeb has 3 programmable layers, which means that I can fully navigate a document without my fingers ever leaving the home row. It's awesome. Plus it's a 60% board, so it's nice and compact. I'll post some pics of it once I get my custom keycaps in the mail.

As for the video, it's small, and honestly isn't really interesting yet. I think my next step is going to be to draw out a prototype character to replace the gray box.

Keep it weird.

11/5/2017 Still working on the movement controller.

11/2/2017 Not much new to post here, sorry folks. I did get my new mech yesterday, and the click and clack is a dream come true for my typing! As for the game, I'm still working on the raycast movement controller. I'm running into some issues during bottomside collisions. Busy week though. I'll update when I can.

Keep it weird.

Got raycasts working for the behavior tree, but I can't post anything on them now. I have to get ready for my kids Halloween parade at school.

Also, getting Amazon.com

and omg I can't wait.

Keep it weird.

Busy weekend here folks. Weekends usually equate to a break from game development for me. Family first right? I have a busy week this week, with a minor project due for class on Wednesday, and a speech to prepare for on Saturday. I'll update this when I can.

Keep it weird.

I had slow but smooth progress this afternoon---my 1.5f year old seemed to need something just about every time I was able to sit down. Still, I've made progress on the controller that will handle player movement and input. I decided to use raycasting instead of built in Unity physics, and am building the raycasting engine such that it can be reused---whether for a player, enemy, or anything else.

The backend of the engine is powered by a

behavior tree.

I can't believe that I ever developed without using behavior trees by the way.

I have class in a couple hours, and I have to get a tasty roast out of the crockpot, and into the belly of myself and my family. I'll end the afternoon with a commit and push.

Stay tuned.

I had a productive morning today, even despite my lack of sleep---my mind was way too active with ideas. The things I completed this morning:

• I set up my private GitHub repo.
• I setup a local repo on my system, and then pushed the repo out to Github
• I created quite a few prototype landscape graphics.

With the new graphics, I can begin to lay out some different scenarios and begin tweaking my platforming scripts, and more importantly, begin programming some enemy AI. The fun stuff!

Time for !