Happy holidays everyone,
Over the holiday weekend I decided to take a break from Caddy Whackers and jam it up with a little exercise project. It doesn’t have a name (any suggestions?) and it’s pretty rudimentary but none the less fun on pc and android. I used a plugin called LeanTouch+ to handle the android controls. Other than that this was all created over two weekends whenever I had time. (99% of these graphics are place holder). Enjoy.
As promised here’s a more in-depth look at the game Caddy Whackers, I talk a bit about the inspiration behind it and the directions I’d like to take with this project.
I’ve spent the last few days working on this awesome little sports game. It’s basically RocketLeague meets Mario Cart. Whack a ball! Pickup items. Mostly you just jiggle around like a lunatic!!! enjoy. More updates soon.
Working on a new (restarting an old) project. This time with a better view. More to come.
I just published Fidget Blocks, my submission for the 2017 Kenney Jam. Check out the itch.io page here!
I decided to do a jam this weekend, hosted by Kenney.nl the theme this time is “It’s a feature, not a bug!”.
What’s a game jam? It’s a competition (but not really competitive) to create a game with certain parameters within a specified timeframe. The rules of this comp. are simple; use any/all Kenney.nl assets to create our game. Sound and fonts we can bring but all sprites and UI must come from them.
I started playing around with the assets this morning and spent most of today just thinking of random possible scenarios.
(See you in 48 hours)
This project still doesn’t have an official title. It started, mostly a sandbox for me to experiment with Rust/pubG game elements, but as I played around with this idea came to me: The concept is a super-flat world where the procedurally generated elements will float above the surface. These floating mountains would be a refuge for farmers and/or criminals. WHO: You play a person from the lowest cast of society “scav” short for a scavenger, these are a group of people wander the surface looking for anything of value. WHERE: This is an alien planet that humans have sucked dry of all ‘harvestable’ recourses. WHY: Your character has been given a chance to enter a competition, one that evolved out of desperation. It’s solo Iditarod style race that starts and ends at two extreme distances. Along the way, there will be O2 and Water harvesters (you’ll need to find in order to survive) as well as checkpoint base stations.
Spent some time this week learning Cellular Automata the first part of Unity live training course on procedural generation.
using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
using System;
public class MapGenerator : MonoBehaviour {
public int width;
public int height;
public string seed;
public bool useRandomSeed;
[Range(0,100)]
public int randomFillPercent;
int[,] map;
void Start() {
GenerateMap();
}
void Update() {
if (Input.GetMouseButtonDown(0)) {
GenerateMap();
}
}
void GenerateMap() {
map = new int[width,height];
RandomFillMap();
for (int i = 0; i < 5; i ++) {
SmoothMap();
}
}
void RandomFillMap() {
if (useRandomSeed) {
seed = Time.time.ToString();
}
System.Random pseudoRandom = new System.Random(seed.GetHashCode());
for (int x = 0; x < width; x ++) {
for (int y = 0; y < height; y ++) {
if (x == 0 || x == width-1 || y == 0 || y == height -1) {
map[x,y] = 1;
}
else {
map[x,y] = (pseudoRandom.Next(0,100) < randomFillPercent)? 1: 0;
}
}
}
}
void SmoothMap() {
for (int x = 0; x < width; x ++) {
for (int y = 0; y < height; y ++) { int neighbourWallTiles = GetSurroundingWallCount(x,y); if (neighbourWallTiles > 4)
map[x,y] = 1;
else if (neighbourWallTiles < 4)
map[x,y] = 0;
}
}
}
int GetSurroundingWallCount(int gridX, int gridY) {
int wallCount = 0;
for (int neighbourX = gridX - 1; neighbourX <= gridX + 1; neighbourX ++) {
for (int neighbourY = gridY - 1; neighbourY <= gridY + 1; neighbourY ++) { if (neighbourX >= 0 && neighbourX < width && neighbourY >= 0 && neighbourY < height) {
if (neighbourX != gridX || neighbourY != gridY) {
wallCount += map[neighbourX,neighbourY];
}
}
else {
wallCount ++;
}
}
}
return wallCount;
}
void OnDrawGizmos() {
if (map != null) {
for (int x = 0; x < width; x ++) {
for (int y = 0; y < height; y ++) {
Gizmos.color = (map[x,y] == 1)?Color.black:Color.white;
Vector3 pos = new Vector3(-width/2 + x + .5f,0, -height/2 + y+.5f);
Gizmos.DrawCube(pos,Vector3.one);
}
}
}
}
}
I’ve been messing in Unity3d building a survival racing adventure game and spent some time the other day messing with particle system. Eventually I want it to look like this but, also keep the Cost on the CPU down. This is a super early attempt.
While researching how to implement a dialogue system (vomit emoji) in Unity3D I randomly ended up finding this awesome blog post about Billboard orientation for 2D spites using 3d cameras in perspective mode. This shows some of the quick experiments I whipped up after implementing his ideas. Pretty elegant solution for an annoying problem.
<code>
// BillboardSprite.cs
using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
public class BillboardSprite: MonoBehaviour {
public Transform MyCameraTransform;
private Transform MyTransform;
public bool alignNotLook = true;
// Use this for initialization
void Start () {
MyTransform = this.transform;
MyCameraTransform = Camera.main.transform;
}
// Update is called once per frame
void LateUpdate () {
if (alignNotLook)
MyTransform.forward = MyCameraTransform.forward;
else
MyTransform.LookAt (MyCameraTransform, Vector3.up);
}
}</code>
