Outside the Box - Development 01

So for the past month I've been working on Outside the Box, a collaborative game being developed for mobile. It has been making steady progress and thought I would share a little of what it's about.

First off, Outside the box is a puzzle game that features 3d mazes and random maze generation. These are presented as two separate game modes. The 3d mazes will be level based and will give the same experience to every player. We hope to achieve 50 or so levels before release. The random maze is a re-playable mode with each creation of the level being a new maze and each new maze expanding by 1 unit to the width and height. Below is a short video demonstrating the random maze generation.

Preview of the random maze generation

The game is making great progress and I hope I can release it by the end of this year. All that's left is to create the rest of the 3d mazes, 3 have been completed so far, and work on a variety of cube skins and backgrounds. These can be purchased with the coins collected throughout the game.

Class Game Project

It's been a while since my last blog post, but this week I would like to share another game. Yes, I have been working on a few two many games as of late and slipping behind schedule although this game was developed in the span of two weeks through the contribution of the entire games class here at Central Tafe and I'm quite proud of what we achieved.

The game came into fruition after Andy, our lecturer here at tafe, organised a small game jam between the two game classes to compete for glory. The theme picked was 'Get Your Arse to Mars', a rather odd theme from which the idea for the game was conceived.

 Gameplay image of the launch pad.

I was assigned the role of co-programmer working alongside Max and Adam, who are also skilled programmers. Working in separate projects to start, we built the foundation of the game using the Unity Engine and C# as our scripting language. We then moved on to combining the projects into one where a few issues arose but managed to get everything functional in the end.

Another Gameplay image flying through space

I feel we achieved making a great game in such a short amount of time and hopefully the late hours were worth it in the end. This has been another great learning experience for me working alongside other coders and seeing how they organise their scripts. Working as a team has also been very insightful into what it may be like working for a larger game company.

If you want to try out the game you can play it over at GameJolt:
http://gamejolt.com/games/space-butt-delivery/92095

Have fun!

Ludum Dare 33 Game Jam!

So Ludum Dare was last weekend running from August 22nd to 25th. Me and a small group decided we would partake in the jam this year and smashed out a small game with the theme of 'You are the Monster'. For those that haven't heard of the jam, Ludum Dare is a yearly competition for game developers to produce a short game in the span of 2 or 3 days. This usually means for those few days sleep is not recommended.  
Using the Unity engine the four of us spent countless hours making assets, programming, texturing and sound editing. I was tasked with programming and actually learned a lot of useful code practices while making the game. The final result was a high score game with random generated levels. The aim of the game was for the player to harvest the souls of dead MMO characters and send them to the game over screen, all the while avoiding the angels.

 Short gif of the game in action

Here's the link to the games download if you're interested to give it a shot:
http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=56691

Also thanks to Mark, Luke and Max for collaborating in this jam.

Check out their blogs!

http://armsinmotion.blogspot.com.au/
http://irys12.blogspot.com.au/

https://manstie.wordpress.com/

 

 Maybe I'll compete in next years jam too.

Mobile Game and Kingdom news

Haven't had much of a chance to update my blog this week as tafe has been keeping me busy face rigging, sound editing and game prototyping. In the meantime I've started collaborating on a new game called Outside the Box. We plan to make an interesting maze game for mobile that will keep players coming back. The game features simple controls with the ball moving towards where the user presses.

Here's an early screen shot of the game working on a mobile device.

I've also been busy working towards the next update for Kingdom which I hope to include a new game mode with boats. The first boat, a Roman styled row boat, was modeled and animated yesterday. Today while programming the boats movement I stumbled across an amusing glitch which sent the boats sailing towards the sky.

GameJolt Kingdom-V 0.7

The second build of Kingdom, version 0.7, is now live on GameJolt!

After a week of polishing and bug fixing Kingdom 0.7 is finally ready to be released. You can find the latest build at: http://gamejolt.com/games/kingdom/76851.

So a lot of things have been added in this release which became a little hard to keep track of. I've compiled a list of the most important changes in this update.

Major Updates
- Defend Game Mode
- Free Battle Mode
- Map Screen
- Settings
- New Hud Design
- Seige Tower Machine
- 2 New Maps
- Battle Music
- Unit Placement Music

Minor Updates
- Grass models
- rock models
- Fps Counter
- Camera movement smoother
- Wooden Planks Texture

Bug Fixes
- Improvements to A.I reducing lag
- Lowered Physics quality to increase performance
- Camera can now be controlled with mouse in windowed mode
- Balancing of units

And that pretty much covers everything. Have fun.

Kingdom Progress 3

Lately I've been busy working on the next build for Kingdom and thought I would share a bit of it's progress. Most of my time has been in designing the map for Kingdom. I found this really great tutorial for creating parchment (link), which most of the design is from with a few extra details added in. The island will be split into multiple territories later in the games development but for now it's just the continent itself. I wouldn't call the map complete yet as I need to finish of the roads and adding some more environments like a lake or swamp.

  This map is a lower resolution of the original

Another thing I would like to share is the new HUD that will be coming out in the next build. Not much has changed functionality wise but the entire UI has been given a visual upgrade. I replaced the old buttons with larger ones that show what the units and machines look like. The standard buttons have also been replaced with a much nicer button, like the attack button. I'm still working on the influence bar at the top but what has been changed is it's now displayed in the new UI system instead of through script.

I'm still currently working on the defend mode, with most of the scripts finished I just need to work on the environment. Another mode I would like to add is the free battle mode. In this level the player will be able to place down troops for both armies and simulate the battles. I've been using this level mostly for testing purposes but thought I could include it in the build for players to try as well. The level cap for this mode is whatever the user sets it as, meaning you can simulate larger scale battles if your computer can handle it.

And finally, Kingdom will feature music from Endiii. His soundcloud profile can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/aqbass98
So far there are two great tracks which will be included in the next build.

GameJolt

A few days ago I decided to upload Tron 2, a game I made in Unity4 last year, and Kingdom to GameJolt. Tron was practically complete with a few levels and Kingdom was just a demo but I  thought I would share it online. I was surprised by the amount of downloads it received after only two days, already passing some of the games I uploaded to Yoyo Games that have been available for five years now.

Link to Games:  http://gamejolt.com/profile/hungryum/426168

I'm currently working on another level for Kingdom that involves the player defending their own castle from siege towers, as well as a new unit type the spear-man.