Busy, Busy, Busy!

So over the past week or so I have done work on not 1, or 2 but 3 projects of mine! Third year sure makes you be productive.

Firstly I have started developing a AR AI companion app for my Final Project. Inspired by the real life (and super expensive) robot companions you can buy, my aim is to create something similar using the magic of Augmented Reality! 

I've already got a prototype up and running with Vuforia for Unity, coded some basic variables and animations to go alongside them. I am using the Unity-chan asset as she is a high quality, fully rigged model that already comes with a boatload of animations, and being mecanim, I can add almost any other kind to her easily. She currently has differing Idle animations depending on her mood states, and will emote when you feed or complete a game with her! I am currently looking into text input registration for her as well, so you can ask her questions and talk to her, and later, hopefully this will change into speech to text interaction!

Secondly, I've spent about two days working on a little game for a little game jam we hosted at the university (a casual thing) with the theme of  Contrast! Its uploaded to itch.io and you can play it here! Its a simple platformer that uses the Contrast theme to express mood changes, and how things for someone with depression can seem or suddenly turn ill favourably.

Its a extremely simple game, and I decided on the art side of things being a main focus to get the theme across, everything is hand drawn and coloured by me. If you do check it out, well thanks for playing! I am currently also looking at getting D.va Dash to work on there and hosted too if possible!

Finally I did some more robot modelling this evening and created the angry bulldozer himself, the mighty Shunt! He has no wheels because I will be throwing him into the robot game for funsies and i am also currently working on that Gauntlet arena I mentioned, but finding it hard to find time in between university work to crack down on it, lest assured the interest is still highly there and I want to continue it!

I'll try and keep this updated with any future endeavours and updates on all of these current projects as they progress!

Robot Wars Project and VR Development Tests.

Oh hey there! Surprised at myself for being able to make another post so quickly!

We have a 'Emergent Gaming Technology' module here at uni, which has given me the opportunity to experiment with different hardware! I've chosen to go with the awesome Google Cardboard VR Headset.

I chose this for a variety of reasons:

- Its cheap and accessible to anyone with a smartphone that can run VR apps (AKA have a gyroscope sensor)

- Its easy to develop for, as technically they are just Android built games.

- Its a great entry for VR development, being as I have no previous experience at all.

- Should be fun! Hoping to come up with lots of great ideas.

- The material is easy to customise.

I have already modified my own headset with extra elastic bands to secure my phone while playing, cut a hole out for the camera, as well as strengthening the Velcro tabs with some glue. Alongside printing off and making Realiteers RealControl 'RealTrigger' VR controllers. All made out of cardboard! They work by having the phones camera tracking a QR code attached to the controller. Coupled with headphones, the headstrap and the RealTrigger controller, this makes for a surprisingly decent and immersive experience, for way way WAY less than a Vive, Samsung Gear or the Rift, and thats what I love about it all.

In other news, my Robot Wars inspired game is coming along nicely! I try to do a little bit each time and be productive on it. I have a working arena Pit of Oblivion and Flamepit working, hooked up to some player health UI. I am currently working on weapon systems and have a good overall system I am hoping to attached to most weapons in order to calculate damage. The arena flipper is fiddly, as well as getting robot flippers to actually flip and not just lift, but I'll keep working on it.

All hail the Kingbot Robby! (inspired by a friends reaction to the bot)

I also have a wide variety of prototype 'base' bot designs, inspired by real world machines such as Tombstone, Firestorm and Hypnodisc. I set these up because they give a great playable robot base to build my own designs on, or even recreate them faithfully and experiment.

Developer Update! Semester Start!

-Gasp- Is that? Yes! Ladies and Gentle-bots, we have our first 3D draft model of a bot! Bow before the mighty axe of King Robby! Still in his early stages as I am still focused on arena hazards and a HP system before I dive into the fun modelling aspect of things, as well as being busy with university work!

In other news, our little group is going to enter a game jam with a Game Boy theme! 160 x 144 pixel resolution and MASSIVE 4 colour colour palette to pick from! We already have a idea and will hopefully be getting it done before the end of the week! The idea is a simple music themed rhythm game, which I made some concept art of tonight.

I'll keep trying to work on my Robots whenever I get the chance, hopefully I can keep ontop of university to do so! Final Project, why must you hate me so?

T^T

Robot Wars Case Study!

Sorry Anti Grav Racing.

So as a child I loved Robot Wars! Who didn't want to see 100kg bits of metal destroy each other to an awesome soundtrack and splatter bits of metal all over the arena? And don't forget about the Houserobots you had a awesome recipe for non-lethal robotic entertainment.

And a video game.

Now, the official games release between 2001-2003 while entertaining weren't exactly amazing games, not that they were bad either, and I'm certainly not saying I could do better! What the games were though was unique, and after replaying some of my own (and also that fantastic Robot Arena 2 Mod) it got my brain thinking on exactly how things worked.

Lots of the gameplay seemed to be physics based, with the ability to flip robots around and out of the arena, pushing them around and the like. Armour would fly off in chunks depending on the types of hits you sustained, and damage took. So i started my own mini case study on how these mechanics might be re-created in Unity. Things like the arena flame pit can easily be done with a damage over time collider and particles, the arena pit of oblivion would be even easier. i found from playing the games some more the robots themselves would be the harder part.

So I went ahead and created my own robots! I have two bots currently, a spinner and axe user. Both can be driven around and 'played with' I'd love to continue with this, as I'd love to model the arena and implement its hazards, maybe recreate the obstacle gauntlets from the earlier series and create something that resembles a game.

However with university starting again in the next few days and heading into 3rd year I doubt I'll have much free time for my own personal projects!

D.va Dash Live On Itch.io and Scirra Arcade!

Play here!
Itch.Io - https://katd.itch.io/dva-dash (Reccomended)
Scirra Arcade - http://tinyurl.com/gu5nmkn

Edit: I also uploaded it to my Itch.Io page! I'll be posting mini little games there like D.va Dash and Dsyphoria. Enjoy!

So I caved and uploaded the game to Scirras website directly. I didn't want to host it on the website as it seems even more awkward than hosting it as HTML5 through my Drive, but oh well... At least the game is back up and now playable again!

D.va Dash Problems.

So D.va Dash no longer works.

I'm not sure when or how exactly this happened, but I believe it might have something to do with Google Drive itself. Upon accessing the games link either on mobile or PC, 1 of 2 things will happen.

1. You will get a Google 502 Server error with little information other than 'Please wait for this issue to fix itself.
2. The Construct loading screen will display with a red (instead of green) loading bar, and the game will not load at all.

Looking into the webpages HTML code through Chrome, it seems that the 502 error is persistent there as well, either displaying a black screen and saying loading failed, or in the case of the Construct loading screen, it reports that it is unable to get and load images. (A quick search into this I found unusable characters in the asset names might be the problem but after double checking my asset names, none use any abnormal characters at all.)

I don't know any HTML so its very hard for me even try and figure this out to fix this, so I tried a simple solution of re-uploading the game under a different folder in my Drive and making that accessible in the same way as the first upload (under a googledrive.com/host) and this time I don't even get a playable version of the game, I get a list of the game files.

Has Drive stopped the support of hosting HTML5? Or am I missing something stupid? Either way the game now can't be played and I either have to fix the hosting or find a way to convert the game to a standalone app.

Anti Grav Racing Development Continuation.

So after finally finishing D.va Dahs, I can get back to working on Anti Grav, its been 2 months since I was last doing anything actively on it, so today I spent the day re-familiarising myself with everything I coded in the past, as well as making some small tweaks and comments to the scripts.

I imported the v2 version of Track 2, and because my AI is so simple, following a predefined path, I now have to tweak each AI's ships path so they fly realistically around the track. I only have 2 weeks before University starts again in which I wont have time to continue this project, so I want to get as much function in terms of gameplay done. These include:

-Modelling Track 2 (at least without textures)

-Implementing latest Game Manager script to Track 1

-Polish Main Menu abit more

-Adding AI to Track 1

-Maybe some basic audio

If I can get all this done with some time left, I hope i can fix the bugs that will no doubt come up. Wish me luck!

D.va Dash Version 1.1! Project Conclusion.

Play here!
http://tinyurl.com/DvaDash
Note: You can save the webpage to your homescreen via the Chrome browser by opening the options menu and choosing 'Add to Home screen' unfortunately you still need a internet connection to access it.

Patch Notes:
Added:
-Tire explosion animation and sound when destroyed.
-Sound on coin pickup.
-Updated pause menu.
-End game screen on death.
-Additional sound effects.
-Tweaked platform spawn. The player should now always have a reachable platform to jump on.
-Added doors in the background.

Known Issues:
-Main Menu music does not play on mobile devices.
-Can still 'fire' when game is in a paused state.
-Sound lag (Mobile only)
-Sound Effect of 'Are you even trying?' plays only after restarting the game, and not when the end game screen appears like it should. (Mobile only)

Project Summary and Conclusion.
D.Va Dash started off as a small project I started playing around in with in the Construct 2 Engine. Its my first game in this engine and also the first time I have done any 2D art or animation. So I feel just for a little game to waste a few minutes on it came out really well!

I feel the gameplay is simple yet engaging enough for a good few replays in one play session due to the random placement of the platforms, coins and tires, especially after tweaking how the platforms spawn. With the tweak, I also feel the slowness of the gameplay has been fixed as there is much more going on now.

I have lots of ideas on how this game could be extended further. More art, more gameplay elements, different events that happen when the player reaches a certain score, etc etc but as this was only meant to be a mini project its taken up more time than I expected for a 2 week game. I am eager to return to developing Anti Grav Racing. I also would love for it to be a standalone app rather than a HTML5 webpage, but as I have no experience in HTML or Android programming I think I will struggle creating this. HTML5 to Android APK converters I have used haven't been very successful (No music, black screen) but I will keep an eye out incase I do find a away to make it standalone, as I would love to.

I really enjoyed working on this mini project! It was fun to make a fan game of an actual game I love to play, and I might share it with the Overwatch Reddit page to see if people like it!

D.va Dash v1.0 Feedback.

More of a informal note to myself for fixes and changes needed to be made.

Version 1.0 is live here!:
https://6b13ebfd4795475fd7d0bdd54c04aad99d2e9703.googledrive.com/host/0B7BJ3arWr-thMDdEZnVsWXlKeVE/ (Built for Mobile, can be controlled via PC though too with mouse)

- Player needs a dedicated platform to reach higher areas.
Solution1:
Reworking platforms to have two 'sets' one that spawns in the upper half of the screen and one in the lower, ensuring the player always has a reachable platform.
Solution2:
Having a platform always spawn on a reachable level to the player.

-Layer/Clipping Issues
Simple Fix: Pretty sure this is just down to the UI not having its own layer yet, and clipping with the newly instantiated objects. Very obvious when using the pause menu.

-Gameplay Speed/Control
Suggestion: Either increasing the speed of D.vas running to make gameplay more engaging or adding 'speed up and slow down' control. Personally I feel increasing the spawn of the platforms and/or tires will fix this but we will see. Note: Was maybe going to implement increase in speed based on score value. (Higher score = Higher speed = Higher difficulty)

Polish to add:
-More/Improved background art
-Sound effect for picking up coins and destroying tires
-Animation (explosion or something) when tires are destroyed

Known Technical Issues:
-Audio problems when running via hosted, mostly on mobile. Main Menu music does not play and some sound effects are delayed. Not sure why this is, might just be due to the HMTL5 host? Problems aren't present in-editor previews.

Mini Project: D.va Dash!

So, I picked up Overwatch recently. Yes I know, jumping on THAT bandwagon I see. Just between you and me, I personally preferred Battleborn in the beta stages, but Overwatch is really fun still and worth the pickup! Plus I can be a Korean girl in a battle mech, which can fly and explode and destroy EVERYONE! Whats not to like?  So inspired was I by this little mechanic of being able to pilot the mech but also hop out of it and blast things with a cute pink pistol I decided to make a quick and easy 2D sprite based game off of it!

Made using the Construct 2 engine ( a free 2D based engine) in some free time I had, D.va Dash is a simple infinite runner/platformer where you control D.va out of her mech, collecting Overwatch medals and avoiding deadly Junkrat RIP Tires! Nothing amazing just something you play on the pooper or to kill some time! Construct2 doesn't have many great export options for a free user (No standalone support, ew.) So I currently have a test build being hosted on Google Drive (HTML5) on the below link.

https://d5e4338a7152d35cf6a85a1be9b0bfccab08e145.googledrive.com/host/0B7BJ3arWr-thTlcwQWVidjVEZGc/

Please note this is a TEST BUILD. Not everything is finished, and while I plan to add touch support for mobile devices, there is currently no touch controls. Its also worth noting that this is my first attempt at a 2D sprite based game, with all hand drawn sprites and animations, so don't expect anything flashy.

I plan to hopefully get a more polished build out before returning to AntiGrav but we will see, this was just a fun little mini project done in a week or so.