Hardboiled Games

Alright, so we’ve finally ended work for the project ‘Rocket Basebrawl’, at least for the foreseeable future, and I find myself lacking in regrets about it. Would I have liked to do more with it? Absolutely, however, the point that it has reached does fill me with some measure of confidence regarding the future I may have in gamedev, as well as some direction to where I can take my studies further.

The team has reached a decision that Rocket Basebrawl won’t be fully publicly released until it is in a more complete state, or otherwise fully updated to the height of our concept, and there’s also the chance it won’t be publicly released for some time, if at all. I was fine with that in all honesty, its a student game made by just three people within six months, it’d be a bit too much to expect a fully fleshed out game given the breadth of the concept we agreed on within that time, but I’m glad we scaled back appropriately for our assignment, and I’m even happier that it was agreed upon early. All in all, I feel good!

Anywho, I’ll likely be showing off some stuff here on this blog in the future, just small projects with things here and there, but not a big project like RBB at least for a while

It’s been a while since the project started, and we’re nearing ever closer to the time of initial release; I’ve shown a lot of what I’ve done, even though admittedly I wasn’t super great about the dev-blogging process. I don’t hold it against myself very much though; its all in the name of learning. Still, I’ve had fun, and the next post you’ll see from me will be about release; and have a post-mortem thoughts included!

So we’re finally here, at the point where I can showcase with confidence; the player character’s animations! See, I had to put a lot of focus into this one for multiple reasons; namely being that it was the one the player would control, but to also expand my skill set, my perspective on animating a player character, which was something I kind of dreaded in some ways, but was always excited to eventually get to doing. Without further ado, here he is; Rocket Basebrawl’s player character!

This idle animation is, as I’ve said, the basis for the Cheetah fielders idle animations, though of course the motion here is different in that I’m accounting for two things; the character is excited and ready to move, and they’re holding a jet propelled bat.

Here we have two perspectives of the running animation; I wanted to nail this one in particular as I’ve mentioned before, and I feel like I’ve definitely achieved that task, I’ve referenced cheetah movement physics while also keeping in mind that this character is bipedal and an extreme athlete

Next up is the standing swing animation, a simple swipe ready to go and knock stuff straight outta the park!

This one, on the other hand, is a bit more interesting, it’s intent is to account for the player moving and also batting, so I went with a sort of ‘blend’ and mix between the two with a light sliding feel

and speaking of slides, could I really justify not having a baseball slide as part of the animation set? Absolutely not; I had to have this too; this is our stand in for a dashing animation!

In addition to sliding, I’ve also got a funny spin move, it looks a bit janky on its own, I will admit to that, but it’s another one that shines more in-game with the context of the other animations. Essentially, the idea here is if the player is dashing while batting, this animation would trigger, as you can see the character extends the arm that’ll have the bat in it outwards to link into this.

Finally, we have the taunting animation; I first had a ‘come and get me’ sort of gesture going initially as in a prior post; but that felt weird to have such minimal movement, the character’s personality isn’t exactly fitting of the ‘come and get me’ gesture, rather than inviting a challenge in that way, they are more of an impatient and speedy character, so giving them an animation that says ‘hey, I’m bored, you’re boring me; get faster’ instead, is something that held more significance; as I also had the bat that they would wield in mind.

For now, this may be my last pre-release post with content to show, the next few posts will be related to assessment of the project and the release of the game.

Here we go, the Cheetah team has arrived with their animations!

Here we have a simple idle, it takes guidance from the player character’s idle animation, the difference being is this one wasn’t made with wielding the bat in mind, so the right arm’s motion was instead with the idea of being ready to throw a ball.

Much like the bunny team, this team has their initial throwing animation; something nice and simple, a good swing with a countermotion in the tail.

Their following ‘taunt’ levels of throwing incorporate different exaggerations of ‘speed’, for the first its a bit of stretch into squash

the second level has more secondary movement in the legs and the tail moves faster

the final level speaks for itself, it’s wicked quick as the theme of this team is their impressive speed; they employ jet engines into their theme after all!

Speaking of... Their pitcher has arrived! This gnarly dude has a whole metal jet structure on his pitching arm, a metal support glove on his left and a wilder style of fur, shown in both the tuft of fur over his face, bigger ‘bushier’ ears and more spiky hairstyling, hes also a little bit larger than his teammates. he also has a popped collar, for coolness points.

Here we have his idle animations, theyre intentionally similar to the other cheetah’s in that hes ‘ready and raring to go’, this is also assisted by the fact that he has an active jet engine clamped to his arm; and that thing is active so it’ll push itself up and forward completely if this guy isnt keeping it together.

Here we have his reaction to being taunted, smashing his fists together in response, showing that he really means business and that his team won’t take any snark lightly!

Finally, we his pitching animation, where the idea is that the engine revs up and goes into overdrive while he tries to reel it back before it blasts forward, the ball-holding hook on top of the arm’s mechanism shoots the ball at the player!

Next up, I’ll showcase the player character animations, so,

As I mentioned in an earlier post; due to some rigging issues, I had to redo the bunny team pitcher’s animations; so I took that time to make revisions, tweaks and add in more of the personality I had in mind!

First up, the idle animation, as I mentioned before, I wanted to add more of a personality to it. Given that this is a bunny/rabbit character, allowing them to do a little ‘bunny hop’ was fitting.

This is simply a remake of the original ‘introduction’ animation, more decisive movement and pauses in movement made this animation feel better, and convey its intent as a sort of challenging pose.

These of course are the pitcher’s throwing animations; the spring loaded cord arm being swung around before being launched was a big thing that I wanted to have; and having the arm be pulled back in a big fast spiral and have that one last ‘pop’ back into place gave the animation and character more power, I will say that there are possibly more tweaks to do with this one, but it is at least 95% there.

Next up I’m going to show off the Cheetah team, which I also had a lot of fun with!

As promised, here we have some particle effects work! It’s been a while since I showed off something regarding these since I was mostly doing animation and various rendering tasks in the meantime that were of a higher priority.

Here we have the prefab that contains the ball that the game would create once the player hits a ball; it was initially just a sphere with a trail renderer, but now it has bursting flames (to emulate a rocket burst), a trail to show where it was going and an expanding ring as well to emulate the idea of a ‘sonic boom’ effect so that the power of the players swing and the style of the game could be emboldened.

Here we have some extra particle effects intended to go on the leaderboard UI where one’s score and ball hit data would be displayed, the above particles would play when the badges for each ball hit would appear and stack on each other.

 These two are intended to display next to the numeric value of each ball type hit as well. I’ll be showing off the final animations for the game’s characters after this one now!

Continuing from the prior post, here we have some more animations!

Here we have the main Bunny Pitcher’s concepted idle animation; it was eventually changed for something more springy; but at this point it was quite casual and suave.

This animation was intended to be a sort of ‘intro’ animation; where they would be shown pulling off this pose at the beginning of the match; later on the purpose of this animation was changed to be a reaction to taunting instead.

Here we have the first version of the throwing animation; I had to end up redoing and changing this one entirely due to a bone and mesh issue, but it served its purpose conceptually so I feel quite good about that; so I didn’t mind redoing it eventually. I’ll be showing the results in a later post!

This is a concepted taunting animation for the cheetah player; I liked it to begin with, but as you can see it was a bit twitchy in the wrist (and there was also some goofy skin weight issue that I didn't see until later), so I changed it into something else later on.

Next up I’ll be showing off some updated special effects!

Alright, here goes part one of showcasing some more animations! First up we have a few animations for the Bunny Team’s fielders! Not much more than that, so lets get into it!

Here we have our idle animation, I’ve gone with something that I hope feels ‘springy’, the intention behind that is to allude to the desire to leap jump and bound, because these characters are rabbits after all!

Here we have their base throwing/pitching animation, yes thats right, the base animation! It’s pretty standard, they just throw, simple! But here comes the spicy stuff!

When a player ‘taunts’ the other team, the team is intended to animate a bit differently, each level of taunt; the fielders are intended to throw more aggressively, this is the first level.

Here we have the second level, as you can see, its far more springy and intended to propel the ball super hard.

Here we have the final level, as you can see the character is absolutely going nuts, as if they were just constantly throwing as much as possible, springing and freaking out.

Next up, I’ll be posting some stuff from the bunny pitcher and an extra Cheetah player animation concept

Alrighty, here we have some upgrades to the shader!

Initially, I had it go through an unlit master node, and I geared it to accept lighting, this was featured in my second post near the start of the project. It was good, and I was proud of it, however, we ended up needing more features than an unlit master node would provide...

So, I ported it over into a PBR master node! It was a bit strange at first, and essentially what this does now is allow a PBR based material to act sort of like an unlit material, and accept lighting how the first shader did, but in addition it could accept shadows better, and...

I also managed to get the outline to be part of the shader instead of a script that goes on objects, or a rendering feature that affects all objects uniformally! With this little addition, I would be able to tweak the outline thickness, depth and normal sensitivity on each object that had the shader on it, so that the field (which had its own version of the shader on it), wouldnt have the top part of it turn black due to the angle of the camera.

As we can see here, these are all the exposed editable features that this shader allows, using the Cheetah player character as an example!

and here, we have some example gifs from the game, showcasing all of the above alterations! Next up I’ll show off some more animations and some edited particle effects.

Greetings! As promised, here we have some stadiums modelled out by yours truly that’ll be featured in the game so far! Just some basic turnarounds for the moment, you’ll get to see them in greater detail and proper majesty soon when we have everything up and running!

First we have the Cheetah Field, a gunmetal dieselpunk styled field with pipes absolutely everywhere, around and on the field.

Second, we have the Bunny Field, a boombox and battle-of-the-bands style field with two giant stereos and lots of smaller ones on the edges of the pitch!

Here you can see the style that were playing with for the Cheetah Field a while ago, things ended up being recoloured and changed around later on, but for the most part the pipes remain the same sort of blue!

Now here, we have a quick look at the Bunny Field, we are intending to go with a blue-pink pastel sort of feel with it; I’m still working on some extras for it, like perhaps some slight animations in the speakers as if they were playing music, but for the most part I’m working on the elevation, spacing and placement for now.

Here’s a quick (admittedly very choppy) gameplay gif that should at least put forward the basics; this is an outdated style since basically everything on screen is either unlit or just has the cel-shader I got working on it, which as you can see is a bit odd- not having shadows makes the space and depth of the scene a bit shoddy.

Rest assured this was changed very soon after, I managed to get shadows and extra styling working quite nicely along with some other visual upgrades, which will be what I show off next!

,Howdy everyone! Going off of the last development post where I showcased some of the WIP Bunny Team Pitcher animations, I feel like it would be a disservice to not show off some of the older WIP animations I had worked on for the player character, so without further ado, here are some nifty little GIFs! These are older animations that I worked on, and I’ll show off the newer ones later!

First up we have our idle animation, the idea here is that since the player character is a Cheetah, that they’re rather impatient and wanna get moving as much as possible, this is a first pass sorta version of the animation, trying to get body movement looked at before going too far into secondary movement.

Here we have a simple batting swing; what I wanted to do here was get a good swing going, but it was later determined that the windup was unnecessary and a few of the movements were a bit choppy. I had also originally segmented it into 3 stages, windup, hit and follow through, but the team decided to go for a programatic approach to hit-freeze if we were to ever get into it, rather than have what could be a clunky animation set, which made perfect sense to me, so this animation was eventually changed.

Lastly, we have a running animation, this one I was actually the most proud of out the gate. I saw this one incredibly important to get right as running would ideally be what the player does for a majority of play, so it needed a lot of attention. I spent a fair amount of time on it in trying to make it look good and feel good to see happening in game; with exaggerated movements and quite a bit of bounce; this animation ended up having the least amount of changes in the end due to this.

That’s it for the moment, next up I’ll be showing off some world design in the updated and refined Stadiums, so keep an eye out!

Hey everybody! Just letting you all know that I’ve been working hard- I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t been as consistent as I may have liked with devblogging; it’s rather new to me actually so getting the hang of it while focusing pretty hard on the biggest project I’ve been a part of is a bit hard for me to do. I kinda just keep working yanno? Maybe I’m odd, but that’s okay because I’m still learning about the process of gamedev!

That being said, I have been documenting what I’ve been doing; so I’m gonna have a few things to show off over the time I’ve been silent, so you’ll be able to see what my progress has been like for a bit. I’m gonna set up some posts to automatically come out as part of the queue while I continue working in the background!

Hey everybody, its been a while since my last entry on this blog, I’ve been on break for quite a while but now I’m back to work! I’d like to show off some work in progress animations for a pitcher character from the game!

They’re a member of the Bunny team, and they have a spring loaded coil robot arm; which is pretty sick if you ask me!

Here we have a work in progress idling pose, I’m planning to give it a lot more secondary movement, but the main thing here is a bit of a sassy attitude, just idly throwing and catching the ball.

I also have a rare idle animation done up that’s also WIP; the idea here is sometimes they won’t consciously account for the strength of their robot arm and throw a bit too hard, then grab the ball out of the sky as it comes down.

Here I have a WIP ‘challenge’ pose/anim for use in a mini cinematic when the character is first introduced.

Here they are with their wind up, the coils in their arm rotating quite a bit- this is also a WIP as I want to add some more exaggeration to the movement as the robotic arm is quite powerful.

And finally, I’ve got a suuuuper WIP throwing animation, I might rework this one entirely, but the idea is it will link into the wind-up animation above it.

So that’s what I’ve got to show for now in terms of an update after gettin’ back to work, I hope to progress smoothly through these in the coming weeks so I’ll have cool things to show when I make another post!

Hey everybody, the local egg returns once more! I’ve just got a few relatively small visual updates to show you!

First and foremost, building (hehe) upon my work with making assets for the game’s hub world, I’ve been set to work on a testing scene for exactly those purposes. It’s a bit messy and chaotic, as that is pretty on point with the vibe of our game but this is mostly a test to see how well what I’ve made meshes together!

Here are some perspective shots from within the player’s POV As you can see some of the extra buildings are using simple materials for the moment, but that will change soon.

Here I have 8 varied various buildings set up; the fun think about these is each segment is modular! Aside from the ground floors and rooftops, which are purposefully made to occupy those spits, everything inbetween can be rearranged and stacked for various effects as shown here! I plan to make a few more variables, but that won’t be very high on the priority list. So, I’ll more than likely have some different stuff to show you all next time!

Howdy, everybody, the local egg returns with some more updates! last week I only did some working-level pipleline things and minor tweaks to what I have already shown you so I didn’t post anything that week, but this week I’ve got a bit to show off.

I have been working on some assets for our ‘hub’ area, creating several buildings and props; apartment buildings and some more strange modernist things as well as a cafe + vending machine (what does it dispense? Well, you’ll find out soon enough!)

Hey there everyone! Once again the local egg is here with some updates! Its some pretty simple stuff today.

First off, I’ve updated the polycount and features on the two current models, as there were issues with how the outline renderer was acting when the camera got close enough to the objects in-game, with the higher polycount, this has become far less of an issue.

I’ve also updated the textures for the moment; there are some further updates to come later on still, but this will be foundation for those updates, such as remaking the UVs manually so that the cel shader works nicer, and texturing is easier.

Additionally, I’ve created a “power shot” aura effect for the initial batting scene to play up the style quite a lot.

My next task is to remake the UVs for the current models, re-rig and reanimate them for next time.

Hey everyone, the local Egg is checking in to show off some progress. Last time after working on some important rendering effects, I also started on other in-game effects. As promised, here are some results!

First I have the Shader in the works for the swing effect that will add a bit of subtle uniqueness in each swing, as fast as they may end up being, it will cut down on the monotony.

Here we have the first rendition of the swing effect, just a few preview swings to show off just what I mean.

I also worked on a secondary and tertiary swing effect with some minor differences in how the shader works and which textures were added to make things feel a bit different.

For all three swings, they are a series of layered particle effects, a primary swing effect, a secondary swing effect both and a simple black particle with similar settings to give the illusion of an outline which will link nicely with the custom renderer for non-particle objects.

In addition to this, I also created matching on-hit effects for the swings, yet again a series of particle effects grouped together.

So, that’s all for this week!