2D game assignment Dev Blog - Week 6 & 7

"So how's your project going?"

Me: 

Warren, who had vanished off the face of the earth, was tasked with making the levels for the game. But with him gone I had to do that myself, which was more work. Ray, who pretty much was in the same situation was Warren, wasn't in at all, despite the fact that he only had the simple task of making icons for the game. I mean he made the icons, just he didn't give them a transparent background, so I was unable to add them to the game without them looking like clip art.

Paris was on and off with avalibility, something would always pop up and she would be unable to do whatever task that she was set. 

Irina was the only one who turned up to each group meeting we had every week, when since week 3 no one else would come in. She also was the only one who would do tasks when set and deliver results in time. 

More and more I was starting to hate group work. I had to take over other peoples work because I could not get in contact with them, or because something would pop up and they would be un able to do the task.

Seeing as Irina was the only one with determination to work on the project, I set her the task of coming up with some concepts for some main villains of the game. 

Anyway that's all for this post. Until then, toodles.

2D game assignment Dev Blog - Week 5

So Warren turned up with something cool this week, a main menu for the game, and stuff.

Well that was the only thing he came up with really.

Yes that's right everyone, our game now has a main menu, one that is animated with flying cars, and what I can only describe as even more flying cars.

Even better was the fact that the menu buttons worked, they loaded levels too, woo.

Honestly when I first saw this I was quite blown away, the whole background with the menu design and moving cars looked so sleek and nice. 

And really that's all Warren did in terms of gameplay. Since then he's disappeared. Some say he's still out there, playing videogames and doing the odd drawing now and then. But in truth we'll never know.

Oh also I gave the character a health system. Awh yeah. Now the player can take damage from triggers (which can act as traps)

Jake (Another group leader who I really wish I was working with) showed me how to make some sweet stuff like enemies and other cool stuff like enemy health. I tied this into the health system which now allowed the player to take damage from enemies. Or as we didn't have enemies yet, giant placeholder images. 

I also tasked Irina to make a sprint system for the player, and she delivered the same day. She didn't just make a sprint system, she also made it so the player would slow down while taking damage which was awesome. 

Finally the game was getting somewhere. 

2D game assignment Dev Blog - Week 4

Week 4 we hit a road block.

And I mean a really, really big roadblock.

We had two major problems, well actually three but I was ignoring the third one hoping it went away.

The first was that we had a problem with the gun script. For some reason the bullets were not going were we wanted them to. Not in the way that they were flying about the screen like someone gave a toddler a uzi. Instead they were not hitting where we clicked. Somehow even though the bullets were going in the direction that the player was shooting, they weren't hitting anything.

This didn't make sense. At all.

Added to that we still had trouble getting guns to enable when the player activated a pickup.

The thing was we had tried out multiple ideas to get the gun to work after pickup. Like for example the gun prefab being attached to the pickup. Then again we were in experienced with coding, so none of the ideas worked. 

So like all great developers we asked Ewan for help.

Thankfully Ewan was able to help us sort out the pickup problem. Instead of the gun being a separate object to the player, we kept the gun attached to the player, but disabled it on game start up. It was only after the player activates the pickup that the gun is enabled. How cool is that.

Now the bullet problem, we tried a number of things to get the bullets to go where we wanted them to, like a bullet target that was attached to the mouse, and other things. But in the end nothing worked, the idea had us all stumped as to why the bullets would go in the direction we wanted them to, but not hit anything.

Then I noticed I was an idiot and had the bullet prefab rotated slightly, so it was going in the direction we wanted, just the aim was off a bit. 

Honestly though without Ewan we would not have been able to figure out the problem with the pickup script, and other code problems.

Bless you Ewan our savior.

[ARTIST CONCEPTION]

2D game assignment Dev Blog - Week 3

Aww yiss here we go

Ladies and gentlemen, we finally had guns implemented in our game. After three weeks in development, hopefully it was worth the wait. Now instead of jumping around and flying off into space, thanks to no ground check, we finally had a game mechanic that allowed the player to go postal on the game's non existent enemies.

Snippit of the gun code.

Thanks to endless web page searches and YouTube videos, I found out how to use raycasts to make bullets appear and stuff. I was pretty pleased with managing to get a working script that spawned instantiated bullet prefabs, that appeared from a firepoint. 

[VIDEO OF ME SHOWING OFF THE GUN SCRIPT]

Also Paris made a start on the pickup script, we now had an object with pop up text that would disappear if the player pressed "E" while in the trigger. 

Before I forget, I also added in a re-spawn system, that reset the player back to the start if he was an idiot and fell off the level somehow. Nioce.

We did have one problem though. How do we make an gun appear out the pickup?

2D game assignment Dev Blog - Week 2

Since our first week we started to work on the game. I assigned tasks to different people in the group based on what needed to be done. Warren was set to do the main menu, Irina more character concepts for the villains and enemies, and Paris was tasked to make a pickup script. We also had a new group member, Ray. Ray was tasked to make pickup icons for the game, while I set myself to make movement scripts for the character as no one else said they were confident with scripting. 

The first thing I set out to do was to make a movement script for the character, at the time I had a lot of problems. First thing was I had no clue what so ever how to code. I made a trigger work once on my own and that was it. Yes. One trigger. 

So as you can imagine I ran into a lot of trouble trying to get the character to move. Ages was spent trying to figure out how to actually apply force in one direction. The main problem was that I had no clue how to go about this as I was new to scripting. 

It took roughly three days of trail and error before I said "fuck it"and copied lines of the script that were used in a standard unity project, and wrote them out in my project.

I the end I (somehow) managed to get the player to move, so now the player could jump around and stuff woo yay wow well done yippie yay.

[REENACTMENT OF WHEN THE SCRIPT MANAGED TO WORK]


Also I went about making some more concept art images for the game. The first one was a concept of what one level in the game could be like, while the second was a cover for the game itself.

Personal work, B17 concept art

This one just really came out of the blue when I was bored one night. 

Behold, the process of making the final image.

First we start with a photo of two sassy bombers from the internet.

Then we cut the bomber in the background out and add some hue to the image to change the color, as well as a background to match the tone. 

Then we fuck up by saving over 30 minutes of progress so we can't go back to show how it was done.

Add some fancy prototype Horten ho 229's, because Bf109's are so 1942, and some more US planes to the scene, maybe even start to add some trails in to help give off the illusion of speed. 

Pushed the fighters into the background and add a bit of color to them to make it seem like they are further away, made the tail of the front bomber look like it took damage. Remove the out of place smoke effect at the bottom. Also add a smoke trail to a B17 in the photo, because it is important to show one B17 getting shot down when depicting a B17 bomber group in any form of media. 

Then I thought the burning bomber was stealing the limelight from the bomber in the foreground, so I moved it away a bit. Oh and also added a bit of color to make it look like it was in the distance. also I removed the terrible flak effects that littered the photo.

I wanted to then add two things, color to the image to make it look like light was coming in from the left side of the photo, and vapour trails to make it seem like there was a dogfight going on in the photo.

The clouds were then changed to match the lighting in the photo, also details on the foreground bomber were changed to give it some personality. Also changed the color of the pilots shirt to match that of bomber pilots of the time. 

The color of the clouds was also changed to match the background.

Also the nose art on the foreground bomber was finished off, snazzy.

Finally I added shadow to the bomber in the image to help it look like sun was coming from the left side, also some propeller blades were added that were missing. Ta-da!

Personal work, Firewatch inspired art

I made these drawings around the time Firewatch came out, and although I didn't really post them online, apart from my obscure Deventart account, I was quite happy with them.

You've probably already seen this one if you've read my earlier posts. mountains yo. 

Birds and more mountains.

I tried to copy the color Platte of the concept art that you can find for Firewatch, kinda think I succeeded but I think there's way more room for improvement. That being said I am happy with the outcome.

Firewatch concept art for reference. 

Personal work, Fallout mod concept art

While eagerly awaiting the release of the mod tools for Fallout 4 I have been dabbling with some ideas to make into a mod for the game. One idea that I'm very keen on making is a mod that tells the story of the Enclave, a faction in the Fallout universe.

For one level of the mod the player would be chasing some enemy soldiers from the Brotherhood of Steel (Another faction in the game) By vertiberd. Although they would be close to catching the BOS soldiers, they would be then led into a sandstorm and would be forced to fly though it.

God I love landscape drawings.

Hopefully this idea would become reality, especially with Fallout 4's engine having major technical upgrades from Skyrim. That being said I'm not sure the creation kit engine would be able to handle a seamless scene change like this without messing it up. 

It would be cool to see this happen, a moment in the mod that will make players shout out "Holy shit!" when the sandstorm first appears on screen, just like in Mad Max; Fury Road. 

You can't blame me for wanting to do something as awesome like this.

All this is well and good, but the concept for the mod still needs to be fleshed out, along with the concept art to help develop the idea for it, so it can hopefully be made in the future, 

Visual arts Steampunk Assignment

As a homework task Steve set us the task of making a Steampunk based concept art.

Initially I wasn't pleased with the task because Steampunk was my least liked style. Never the less I started with the homework.

At first I played around with ideas to do for this task. After much brainstorming I decided to draw an airship. Mainly because airships look cool, and the fact that Steampunk and airships sort of go hand in hand. 

For inspiration I looked at Steampunk airship designs, and real world zeppelins such as the Hindenburg.

After inspiration was found, I then started to draw. 

The first thing I did was make sure I had a nice tone for the setting. As I wanted to draw an airship I decided to make clouds act as the backdrop for the image. I also tweaked the colours to make it look like it was dusk.

After that was done I then made the outline of the zeppelin itself.

To avoid the tedious effort of trying to draw detail into the body of the balloon, I cut out and used a photo of the Hindenburg, and pasted it onto the image using the overlay effect.

Once this was done I then added shadows onto the main zeppelin, and the clouds surrounding it, to help make it look like a real object. After that I then added shineyness to make it look like light was bouncing off from the sun.

To help achieve a sense of scale, and liveliness  I added in biplanes with smoke trails into the image. After that I decided that a city would help make the backdrop more interesting, so I used an image of London which I then edited to fit the scene.

Smoke and steam was then added into the image to make the ship feel alive, and that it was being used in a combat situation of sorts. 

after this was all done I was quite pleased with the image and It's outcome.