protascenery

Idea

As I pointed out in the earlier LD-report, “You are the monster” was not among my personal top due to the fact it sparkled no ideas in me right away (unlike some others).

So I started with Wiki-search for “monster” to widen my perspective. The main takeaway for me was that “monster” is the label people stick on someone they find abnormal, hideous, scary. Like people with “abnormal” body traits or the ones with “abnormal” behavior or moral standards. Roughly put, you are labeled a “monster” if people are unable to understand you, to include you in their world view and - therefore - are afraid of you.

I’ve decided to make a little game where the player’s avatar (unpredictably named Monny, by the way) differs from everyone around greatly in how they look and what they are capable of - and they are called a monster among others for that. And then the players’ natural desire of being loved (we all have that, yep) motivates them to de-monstrate: turn to not being a monster anymore by showing folks you are essentially not evil and can do good/fun things. And the game enables players to do that.

Yet the ability to just smash everything and scare everyone was also included. Rendering your power on others or just letting the steam out - you do your own thing through the tools the game gives you. That’s what I believe interactivity to be about.

What went wrong

Time management. Unlike before, I even did some preparations prior to the jam, but overall - with that lack of sleep I got - time management leads this list. Even though everyone seems to get that in jams. At some point I want to make a decent game in 48h and feel great through all the process.

Planning. Since there was almost none. I’ve tried to line out some basic features I want in the game and what is just enough for it to be playable and fun. But then I’ve had some implementation questions I’ve decided to answer through trial and error, and ultimately it all went a bit chaotic.

Variety. De-monstration happens when the monster uses his abilities in a fitting context: when meeting cello fans, play the cello or bird-sing to it, but don’t smash it or just scream. But there were meant to be more. You’d run into a folk in the woods confronted by a wolf (use your smash on the wolf to make the folk happy). You’d encounter the folks dancing around some tribal idol (they’d cheer if you scream insanely to their dance). That kinda stuff. Never had time though.

Music. It’s a funny thing and I blame it on my little panic. The thing is I’ve made autotracker.py (chiptune music loops generator) work for me earlier that week before the LD. I’ve tested it, I’ve made sure it makes cool-enough stuff, I was all ready to generate random loops until I get something that fits the game. And then I was in such a rush I just forgot about it! That’s plain stupid.

User Interface. UIs are always the last ones to do, which puts them in the maximum risk of being not done. In what little time I had I just made the essential in-game tutorial labels, and then I’ve made the results label and fixed the results management in a fix after the deadline, but otherwise the game is UI-less. :)

Z-layering. Currently the layering is hand-adjusted inside the complex objects of the monster and folks (see #5 in the “right” list), but is taken zero care of on a scene’s scale. So you can see folks and wise idols over the monster’s face, etc. I even know how it’s done, I just didn’t do it.

What went right

Visuals. The most surprising part, which makes me blush and happy. I have almost no control over the lines and colors, so I was shooting for just some clean enough programmer art. All of a sudden I’ve impulsively decided to hand-draw assets for the game on my own in just plain black and white, and spent the most pleasant first jam’s day drawing away. And then the commenters came and said they really liked the visuals! And I was all like “what?! are you kidding me?!”. Hope they were not. :)

Gameplay. This is a game about socializing, basically: you could play nice or get nasty and have the others react to that. And there’s no “right” way to go, the only hint is in the name: “this is a game where you can de-monstrate, please mind that”. Judging from the comments, there were people going both ways and they all have enjoyed themselves in the process. Which I consider a thumbs-up for the gameplay.

Tutorial and words. People wrote about how they enjoyed the in-game tutorial, which gave me cheers. From the two letsplays I’ve seen as of writing this, though, I can see I could’ve been a bit more clear about the basic action controls: I've written “left-click-smash” there, while it’s really a “left-mouse-button-hold-smash”. Sorry, guys, cheated you there. :) Still I consider the tutorial to be more of a win. It’s also cool to see I’m not the only one to enjoy the wordplay in the name. Now I’m going to do even more of that!

Feedback. I like how the audio-visual feedback in the game seems to be working good. Every action has a sound and a simple animation, and the affected stuff and folks react to the action in a seemingly clear fashion, which makes one understand what they’ve just did. It could possibly use even more “juice”, simple particles and some screenshake, but I really like even what I have now.

Complex objects. I really enjoy this one. Monny and all the folks are complex objects constructed from several independent parts. Which enables:

easier control (folks’ reactions are just switching their faces),

multiple actions (objects have several colliders and triggers for different purposes),

customization (lads have bowlers as hats, while lasses are made by putting bows in that same “slot”),

actions animation (only the parts involved are animated)

and a nice tiny detail - the moving eyes. :) Several commenters seemed to also enjoy the latter: Monny looks at the mouse pointer (which gives you a clue about where he’s going to smash/grab) and folks look at what matters: their cellos, Monny or the town they run for.

Coding practice. I've had a nice real coding practice with this game. My main projects have me as a designer of all sorts of stuff, not the coder, so I like it when I can exercise in C#+Unity, come up with functional solutions to things and also try to make that code as healthy as I can. I’m already at the point, where I’d be using different managers for different tasks, and even deliberately split large classes into smaller ones if I see that as doable. I don’t want to sound narcissistic, but I really am a bit proud of that. :)

To conclude

I am still a week away from getting my final rating for the game, which was one of the main reasons I’ve entered compo-version, and not the jam-version of the Ludum Dare.

But for now - all things considered - I think "de-monstration” turned out well. I’ve not polished it enough and the variety is lacking, but the gameplay seems to be all right, and my design and technical solutions seem to give people some fun, which is awesome.

Thanks, LD33! :)

Editing sprite animations in Unity

Ways to create sprite animations are covered in their own tutorials (like the 2D Roguelike project), and work all right. While you make them right the first time and then never change them. It goes like this:

Have the gameObject for the upcoming animation ready and preferrably in the opened scene.

Select all the anim’s frames in the Project view and drag-n-drop them onto the corresponding gameObject.

This automatically creates (in the “Sprites” folder) an animation out of those frames and also an animation controller in case this gameObject does not have one yet. If controller’s already there, animation will be created and added to the respective controller.

Now you can manage animations in the controller, yada-yada, but then one of the animations seem broken or you want to add a frame to one of them - how do I do that, roguelike tutorial?!

Last time I asked it did not answer - I had to limit the animations edits, as they were all done through re-creating the animations and the wiring them to the existing states in the controller. Put short - it’s too much effort for this kinda stuff.

Yet today I’ve learnt how to do it and the Sun shed it’s golden light upon my forehead and there was happiness all over the world for a sec or two. :)

Provided you’ve created animations and controllers as shown above, do this to edit them (it’s gonna be so simple you’re gonna giggle):

Open the Animation window (not the Animator one) via Ctrl/CMD+6 or Window menu;

Select the gameObject we were talking about this whole time in your scene’s Hierarchy window - if it has a controller and at least one animation, the Animation window will show it like below.

Now you can drag around these frames of animation, copy-paste them, and even change them completely. If the Inspector window is open, you’ll notice: when you somehow change the animation, the “Sprite” field of the “Sprite Renderer” will have a red background. That’s because the animation changes the content of that very field. So you can as well select one of the keys in the animation or create-and-select a new one, and then drag some sprite into that field - it will go into the animation now!

Now you can edit your sprite animations! Ain’t it awesome?! :D

Just always remember to hit Ctrl / Cmd + S, when you’re done with the animation’s edits - and you’ll be safe and sound.

Player script

It seems too early for the Player script, right? What if tomorrow I want to make a game with no player - say, a strategy? Wouldn’t this script’s existense already limit my design freedom?

Well, first of all, the script is almost empty, there’s nothing to hold on to. Second - while it’s true there will be no player inside the game in the “strategy game” scenario - there will always be the one outside.

True, the Player script could be not performing operations to the player’s avatar in such a game. However, it could still be useful, as it also handles the processing for the player’s actions, which it seems unwise to store in other places: e.g. InputControl script could take the signal of the button pressed and launch the needed function in the Player script.

The Linkage

As you can see, chances are high all the scripts will be using each other’s parts quite often, so they need to have links to each other. At first it was common for me to have these long linkage lines at the start of EVERY interconnected script - for example, GameControl:

Don’t get me wrong, this works. But it’s pretty boring even copy-pasting those from one script to another. I’m no great programmer, but I talk to those sometimes, and about coding too. So I learnt this was pretty lame.

Here is what I do now instead.

First of all, I store all these “-control” scripts attached to one gameobject called “MANAGERS”. This way the actual linking is boiled down to just getting the component from a script’s own gameObject. Because they all share one. Smart, huh?

I like the second part even more though. :)

I’ve created a singleton script called “Hey”, which acquires all the popular links, and then stores them for everyone to use. And since it’s a singleton these “everyone” don’t even need a link to the “Hey” script in the scene!

"Hey” gets each one of the links the first time it’s asked about it, so there should be no problem with someone asking for a link while “Hey” does not have it yet.

And now to the fun part! With adding of a little something here and there you could be calling something like this from one of the scripts:

“Hey, sound control, play my cool track!”

It’s like talking directly to the machine! Ain’t it cool?! ^_^ Of course, it would be more common to write this in less lines (and to less fun).

On format and place

I know Tumblr is said to be the best for the images/gifs posts, not for the text. Should not be a problem: I’m intended to post those here too, amidst the text. Besides, Mike Bithell does text-only’s sometimes and it seems to go okay, so.

On the reason

The reason I want to do this is for both you guys (hopefully) and me.

See, I design games as a freelancer which in my opinion is pretty interesting. I also do jams and my own prototypes at times. And I generally do think about games and making them, and being in artistic crafts industry at all, etc.

But I need written words to clear all of those things at least for myself, and then it is my humble hope, that what I think and write could be of at least some use or help to someone else in the world. And if it proves itself true, that day would be the all-dancing day for me, I’ll tell you that. :)