Connorses's Arts (s)

Prototype of a new style of puzzle, you have to hit the button without falling into the hole, by bouncing off the wall!

Updated my 2-player soccer game Spaceball. Try it out on the Pico-8 forum!

Workin’ on an idea I had

I only learned gamemaker maybe a week ago and I’m using it for my Gameboy Jam 5 submission. :L

I found a cool royalty-free font for the scoreboards in my game.

SUMMER GAMEDEV LOG #7:

I have implemented textures! This is a big deal for me and I’m excited to experiment with it more… I don’t know that all the levels will look like the above photo, however, because I don’t want to make a lot of polygons matching the surface of a texture. I would rather make textures which are more homogenous so that I can make any shape I want and add texture to it. I will most likely use a lot of polygons on top of textured polygons to create surfaces (a dirt-textured block with a grass texture stuck on top for example). I might use some large images for textures/backgrounds in minigames, though!

This week I messed around with ideas for levels a lot, but I need to go back to doing more engine work. I’m pretty close to having moving platforms and hazards, and once I’ve done more work on those I will have all sorts of options for traps and puzzles and things. So that’s the next priority. Moving platforms!

Hey everybody if you’re reading this it means I’m still alive and I’m still trying to write as many words as possible without any actual meaning to them before I actually start the log.

Perhaps I’m giving up too easy, but I have abandoned Unity for use in my 2D physics game in favor of the original, adorable game engine Love2D.

I lost about 3 or 4 days screwing around with Unity and actually got a surprising amount of things sorted out. The main reason I wanted to try Unity was that I thought it would work as a sort of level editor, but I found that it was severely lacking in the 2D graphics department. I was able to figure out how to draw polygons in real-time, but there were other issues. I couldn’t draw polygons in the editor and it was a pain to edit boxes without changing the size of the box and it’s sprite separately. The debug draw wasn’t working at all. But the worst thing about it was that my physics were drastically different with the new blob design. The love2D version of the blob just looks cleaner, smoother and less buggy.

I have made significant progress since the last log. I really ought to have been writing more of these... Here’s a summary:

Blob can now stick to things if you hold z!

 - Springs are created at point of collision, but only if the gameobject has the tag “stick” (i can make some things slippery)

The scale was tweaked, jumping is now easier

There is a death animation of sorts

 - Upon touching a deadly surface, blob decomposes and after a second or so the scene re-loads

There is a spawn animation!

 - When the scene loads there’s a brief slo-mo effect and the blob is created with nodes close to the center, giving the illusion of the blob growing out from the center.

SUMMER DEV LOG 3: VIDEO EDITION

This blog is as much for me as it is for the Internet, but I want to track my progress on my latest projects so I don’t feel like nothing is being done. I’m trying to push myself harder, and one way I’ve increased my productivity is by setting a stopwatch whenever I do a session. It makes me want to focus more, somehow, and toggl.com keeps track of the hours which makes it feel better to get things done.

I have begun recreating the game I made in Love2D a while back, with the blob that rolls about and jumps and sticks to things. Turns out Unity uses the same Box2D physics engine! I had to learn how Unity handles the connecting of joints, but after I worked out the kinks I was able to spawn a softbody. I can’t control it yet, and I might need to invent my own joints to do the job right, but it looks squishy and bouncy so I’m on the right track.

TO-DO LIST:

 - Continue searching for optimal settings for scale, mass, joint frequency etc. to make the blob look and feel better

 - Find a new way to make the blob roll (The technique originally used in Love2D was unsuccessful in Unity)

 - Learn how to draw a mesh which fits the shape of my blob.