Lex Game Dev

Hey guys, another day, another small update! But first, how’s your day been?

So, in this update, I just wanted to work on something that will be necessary later, and that is making sure the ship can launch once being docked, as unfortunately, being stuck to a star base is not particularly fun.

These small changes, and a bit more polish on the basic systems will be necessary to be able to have a flawless integration of the diegetic UI. Once the UI is implemented, it does open a lot of doors up to be able to create fun and interesting interactions with the starbases. First order of business will probably be trading once that is established.

Good evening guys, hope you had a good day.

Didn’t have a crazy amount of time to do work today, but squeezed in the first person model for testing, so I can kinda get an idea of how I would like to make the diegetic UI, and also the camera.

Right now its a slow and steady push to getting something resembling a game for testing. I have been enjoying this a lot and getting back into learning 3D Modelling has also been great.

Hey guys, hope you had a good day.

So a small update today, I’ve been learning a bit more blender to make a decent star base but for testing purposed I made this simple ring to test landing on a star base. Second, I am working on the first person camera, I will need to work on modelling ship interiors to really make this experience immersive. Lots of modelling work to do!

So on the left we see the first person perspective and on the right just the game window which shows you how things look in the world so you can see how the ship moves.

Hey guys!

So, today worked on landing gear and detecting when the ship is landed. While its nothing glorious, it is an important part. This will pave way for interacting with star bases and allow to do things like trading and receiving quests.

Tomorrow I think I will do some work on the camera, allowing to move your head around in the cockpit, which will also mean having to work on the space ship model to allow the player to look out of it.

Hey guys, how’s it going?

So its certainly been awhile since I’ve posted, but due to a huge Sci-Fi binge I wanted to try my hand at making my own space sim or at least just making some basic stuff.

I’ve been a huge fan of Elite Dangerous, recently backed Star Citizen to try the alpha, and finally played lots of Stellaris. Playing these games and watching Interstellar (for like the 5th time) has made me want to give making a Space Sim a crack.

So here we can see my test space ship (which I actually modelled myself!) moving and rotating. My friend helped me out with some of the math behind the movement which helped tremendously make it smooth.

I envision this being played with a HOTAS, and will probably design most of the controls around that as well as a regular Xbox/Playstation controller.

Other than that, I am hoping to be a bit more active on this blog. I’d like to try putting my feelings on certain game design philosophy in words so in the future I can revisit the blog and see how my feelings changed on certain subjects, as well as get opinions from you guys.

Hey guys! Another quick update for today since I was pretty busy but still wanted to get something done!

So to expand on yesterdays work, I decided to add critical hits to the combat, since headshots are insanely fun! I created a fun way of doing this with exposing an array of static mesh components to the blueprints which can then be set from the blueprints. This makes a nice and easy way to set up which parts of an enemy are weakspots to get that juicy double damage!

Had to think a decent amount about how I wanted to make sure I am hitting the proper component to deal critical damage, but the simplest (and probably most efficient) way I figured to do it was to simply compare the pointers.

With this addition to the combat, I think next I want to work on different gun types, as well as adding raycast gun shots instead of projectiles for more “normal” guns and ammos.

Hey guys, I hope you’re doing well!

So, progress is slow and steady, today worked on making a shooting range and spent maybe a little too much time making these automatic doors... Unfortunately one small bug led me down a rabbit hole of an hour of debugging. But, these kinds of doors will be in the game later down the line so its not time wasted!

Other than fancy doors and a new testing area, I have built the basis of combat! This is all to lay the foundation down before I start making various gun and ammo types, as well as potential spells down the line.

While the shooting range looks quite empty now, it will be quickly fill up with items that will help me test the game and new features I will be adding into it over the course of the next few weeks.

My next goal is to expand the combat system to allow for weakspots which will cause your attacks to be critical which (for now) will deal double damage. An absolute classic mechanic which almost every shooter has, and that I feel really tests your skills to see if you can get those small points!

Hey guys, what’s up?

So been working on a new prototype for a looter shooter since I’ve been pretty into ARPGs like Diablo, as well as other looter shooters such as Borderlands.

I’ve been contacted about an interesting opportunity about a potential job using Unreal Engine to create simulations, so I am using this instead of my regular Unity. This will mainly be as a portfolio piece, but I wanted to still upload here to share what I’ve been doing.

So development with UE4 is a little slower than Unity since I am learning the framework, as well as relearning C++ since I haven’t used it much since graduating.

Here are the features I’ve added so far:

Sprinting

Basic ammo

Interaction System

Hey guys,

Second update on the new Traders Guild! I didn’t have much time between family plans and work therefore I decided to get something easy out of the way and work on implementing the Dialog System asset by Pixel Crusher. The tree and all the prefabs make it quite easy to get a Dialog going which is very nice and will be convenient for creating fun and interesting NPCs later down the line.

For now, some of the main uses for this will probably come in the form of quests, crafting and NPC shops, but once the fundamentals are implemented, we will certainly explore how we can make it better.

Just a quick one today, tomorrow will probably iron out a few kinks with this asset then move on to more interaction stuff.

Hey guys, its been awhile!

I’ve certainly missed developing games, and I’ve had a hard time getting into it throughout the pandemic. But now its time to focus.

If you’ve followed this blog, you probably know I love trading games, and one of the original games I was working on when I made this blog is Traders Guild. While the original idea for it is an open world game, I have decided it is time to scope down and work hard. My new scoped down game is highly inspired by Animal Crossing and Rune Factory, two games I have spent a lot of time with.

The main idea is simply making a profitable business, while slowly climbing your way through the ranks of the Traders Guild. This, and the decoration/building inspired by Animal Crossing I feel will certainly make a great game that a one man team can make.

So that’s it for the idea, now for the first update. I decided the most important part of this game will be interactions, so that is what I worked on. Here is an example of me interacting with a cub to change it color!

Whats up guys?

So I am here with a small project I am working on and it’s an MMO server.

Here you can see both the server and the client. The server is running on Unity since it has to calculate the physics for the clients. This process works by the client sending the direction the player inputted, the server then moves the player in the world, and sends the new position back to the client.

The server doesn’t have a camera, so I am using the scene view to make sure that the server is properly moving the player.

Next step will be to implement a chat system. This will be a micro service running on a separate server code. We do this to be able to split the load to multiple servers instead of having it all on one.

I will also have to implement being able to have multiple players on the server. Right now only one object is in the scene and only that object can be moved by the server.

After a lot of work this bot is finally ready to get out into the world! If you have a server keeping track of turnips, I would love it if you would give my bot a try! Also, since it’s fresh out of development there might be some bugs, reporting them would be a great help!

Hey guys, today I was actually going to give up on the bot but people showed interest and gave me some great suggestions so I had to keep going!

My bot can now keep track of the prices per day (am and pm), but most importantly it can actually display a PNG which displays the predictions for prices for that week!

These commands do have their issues so my goal is to patch them up before I release the bot out to the world. I also have to sanitize the data a bit more to make sure I don’t need to worry about SQL injections.

Once the issues are patched up, it’s gonna be getting some feedback on commands and flow of the bot so I can make the commands more user friendly. This feedback is pretty valuable since I have never really interacted with many Discord bots and this is my first time writing one!

After this is released I’m thinking of possibly getting a AWS to host the bot so it has a much better uptime! Also, this makes it easier to write new code for the bot as I won’t have two copies running on my PC.

Hey guys! So I posted this earlier but I wanted to post a better version since I did work really hard on this.

This is my bot, the Nookstreet Turnip Market bot or NTM Bot for short. It’s a simple bot that keeps track of everyone’s turnip prices so that they can easily tell when the right time to buy is!

It’s very early in development but the core features are implemented.

First you can register your island which allows you to put your buy and sell prices up in the database. 

When your island is added to the database, you can add your buy and sell prices. I ask for your island time so that I can remove prices that are out of date. The server updates the list every 5 minutes!

Next, you can select the best prices, and you can select as many as you want! This will give you either the best buy or sell prices!