#missmoocodes

So a couple more Friday Code nights happened...

(this was from yesterday! yummy belgian waffles at my favourite cafe place - a treat so I could handle implementing UI in Unity)

...and this is where ShmOOp is at so far!

Behold my start screen featuring a 5min logo and Unity's ugly buttons!

This was basically my first time making other screens and working on different scenes. Also setting things up and making my first build! Just a bit awkward but pretty straightforward I guess. This helped a lot (which again is the tutorial I'm using for making this whole thing and cheating you guys into thinking I can actually code anything).

I also implemented sounds and had a go at creating my own sound effects with BFXR - now that was fun! :) as for the music, I grabbed a little nice chiptune released under CC here. I had a bit of trouble working out the sounds for the enemy shots so I ended up taking it off: they are all shooting at the same time for now so no matter which sound I put in it adds up and makes my ears bleed, besides sounding boring and repetitive. I know there are ways to randomise shots and change variation of pitch for the sounds but that's too much for my brain to handle yet.

Adding in buttons and screens and working out a game over also happened. I'm still on Unity 4.5 (heard UI is way better on 4.6 so I'll just update as soon as I finish writing this), so not sure how this compares to how things are now.... but yeah definitely been a bit annoying to figure out, and I hope the whole GUI skin having to be called over and over again has gone away. I would love being able to add things and tweak them visually in an editor - I know there's probably a way or some helpful framework for that, it's all good. I do enjoy going through this whole process and finding out easier ways of doing these things.

Last but not least, I really wanted to just publish a web game version of how are things so far just for the sake of it (and yeah for getting a little bit of the taste of putting something playable out there!). So behold, here is...

>>> SHMooP <<<

Controls are arrows to move and spacebar to shoot. Good luck and I'm sorry. No really. I am.

I don't mean to spoil things for this super complex game but if you manage to avoid that ridiculous wave of badly placed enemies you are rewarded with infinite space, it's pretty rad:

(^ credits for this pic go to AlphaDelete :D thank you, that made me smile!)

So yeah, this is it so far! I wanna add in score and make enemies spawn properly, so there's still a lot of work ahead. I know it's all super simple and unoriginal, but at this point I'm just really trying my best to understand the coding side of it... I'll eventually get to the game design bits when I feel a bit more comfortable (been drafting ideas etc so it's gonna happen for sure!) :)

So sometimes life happens, things get tough etc but what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Coding learning might slow down sometimes but it won't ever stop. So this is me, picking stuff from where I left :)

Last Friday night I went to the nearest Starbucks for some coding fun!

For the record - it was pretty fun indeed, and after I got shooed out cause they were closing I found an empty table somewhere in the mall and kept working. *inserts here moaning about no 24h cafe place around Isle of Dogs*

I mean, PARTICLES!!! Fun fun fun!

So this is the bit of tutorial I used, although I tweaked things in a different way and used my own assets. Coding for it was the same so here's the result:

Um. So yeah. I still need to do something about the amount of enemies in this. Next time, next time.

GIF this time cause vine-ing myself playing a shmup is all sorts of clumsy. And for the record - getting GIFs to be a size small enough for Twitter is a pain. Here are the apps I used: GifGrabber (or Licecap, I tried both and both work pretty well) for capturing some seconds of gameplay, reduce size using GIFBrewery and then further optimize and reduce size with ImageOptim. Oh, and I was using a mac, jsyk.

Coming next will be implementing sounds and menus. Hopefully getting enemies to spawn properly, but not gonna push my luck.

Lately I've been going through this very cool tutorial and trying to make my own silly shooter - gotta be honest there's a lot code wise that's just not sinking in, and that's a bit frustrating.

Overall there's always a thing or two I end up picking up. Guess that's how it goes.

I'll keep going with this until it's decent enough for me to put a working build online here, besides sharing my project on github and all that jazz! :)

So this is where I'm at currently:

Enemies are not spawning yet, but both player and enemies can shoot, hurt each other and YAY PARALLAX. My brain is having a hard time understanding the looping bit tho.

We'll get there. Hang in there brain.

And okay, I admit: all assets are stuff I did for past game jams, thrown together. Crazy confusing art mix.

On a side note, I've started watching lectures from this C# course on Coursera. It uses XNA, but the point is it seems to go over many fundamental programming basics, which is always helpful for us beginners. The course is not ongoing at the moment but the entire video lectures can still be viewed at any time (really wished all coursera classes worked this way...I keep missing classes and access to lectures I wanna see!).

That's it for today!

Late post, I know. I'm still alive and still learning! But lately it's been mostly about going through Game Maker tutorials so I haven't got anything to show. Yet.

So guess what. Kinda did a little something for last Ludum Dare!

TL;DR: it was pretty fun and I obviously wasn't able to get anything finished in time. This post will probably be underwhelming.

But I did try and I'm happy I did! Learned a lot through it and had a great time brainstorming stuff at cafes etc. Also had a bunch of times in which I would weep, scratch walls, cry blood, roll on the floor and swear I'd never do something like that to myself again.

All lies, I totally will.

As the theme was Connected Worlds, I came up with a bunch of silly ideas and apparently picked the one that had less to do with being a game and a lot of unclear mechanics (yay!).

So this was it: a toy-game where you need to look after a garden and keep things alive by interacting with other things.

This was my first brainstorm sketch. After bouncing ideas off with friends this is what happened:

More focus on the garden itself and the interactive area became an underground little world.

Its system would basically consist in growing things that would provide you with resources for maintaning or building your tools.. which would let you keep growing things.

I aimed to have conditions like temperature, humidity and maybe an overall well being, like a mood gauge for the garden. You'd have to keep everything balanced in order to keep your garden healthy. All conditions however would tend to change on their own if left alone.

I have no idea whatsoever whether this would be fun or not.

So... what did I actually got done?

Take a deep breath, this is some heavy shit.

Yeah, I know. Embarrassingly little, and most of it I only managed to do through constantly bugging this cool dude to teach me things. I obviously tried to bite more than I could chew, but I kinda knew I was signing myself up for failure with this one. I was in for the learning. It was worth it!

I gotta say, making games is pretty rad. Really! Accomplishing something, creating an experience from scratch all by yourself feels super neat (collaborating with other people is awesome too!)

Really looking forward to the day I'll put a little game made all by myself out there and someone will play it and have a good time. That will be one awesome memorable day in my life.

So yup, totally gonna keep working so that happens! :)

Oops, a little late with my weekly log! So here's what happened last Friday (I think Friday nights are becoming my coding day of the week):

I'm still getting used to a workflow of committing stuff to git, so I forgot my Arkanoid project back at my desktop computer. As I was sitting at my fav cafe place, I decided to just start on something else, and pulled one tutorial (this one) for a tetris game and decided to give it a go. Now this one was slightly more frustrating as often I'd have trouble understanding what was actually going on. However, could still get a fair amount of learning from all the steps and things to worry about when writing code for specific actions of the game (and using matrices yay!). It's a whole lot of putting things in the right boxes and learning how to break down things in small bits. If something is not working, it's probably because you forgot to instruct the computer to do so. Which seems to be the tricky part to be aware of. I mean, other than knowing the exact way of writing that said instruction. All the magical little words and stuff. On hindsight, I still get surprised at the amount of stuff I can get wrong when all I'm doing is following a single tutorial! Lots of fiddling around, forgotten functions and curly brackets. Ouch. So here's what I managed to get working:

I'm calling it "Tetris with extra thinking time" :B Not to say I haven't tried getting the blocks to fall automatically, one unit per second. But alas this is what happened when I did:

Status: basic game completed! WOOOOO! In exactly a week! Maybe I can keep this up after all? :o

So my last Friday evening started with some happy coding in a nearby Starbucks - I was feeling shitty about some personal things and making stuff is usually one great mood boost so:

(now just picture a girl wearing big glasses and a Videogames Romantic shirt behind that computer)

I resumed working at home and basically tried stitching together all the tutorials for breakout clones I had found, which in hindsight might not have been the greatest idea ever... but then again it might just have been?

Basically forcing myself going through lots of different codes and ways of achieving the same thing, changing stuff as to fix conflicts, spot undefined classes and even doing some hacks of my own ended up being a pretty great learning exercise! Also a super confidence boost, hehe :D

Not even gonna go on about the whole hour I spent looking for a missing curly bracket. DEM BRACKETS.

But yeah, even though I still don't get a lot of the methods and things I'm using, I've been able to find my way around with a lot less struggle than before. Kinda like, slowly building more familiarity with the code and language :) Even just knowing how to search for stuff I need has been a lot easier.

Also, I can safely say implementing GUI in Unity is a hellish nightmare (looking forward to Unity 5! :O)

My coding night ended at 5am on the Saturday. I had barely noticed time pass and had a ridiculous amount of fun! This is what I've got so far (I'll edit this post later to add the link to the github project):

So what next?

I feel like I want to take this next week to review a few things and add some pretties to the game, just so I can see how juicer I can get it to feel. I also wanna go over the code and look up some stuff so I can understand better what was going on.

Completely forgot to post this - that's my arkanoid clone so far! :)

Last Friday night I had a fun evening at my favourite cafe place to code and tried to leave tutorials aside so I could apply what I had learned doing my Pong... as you can see I didn't get very far. Got stuck as when I turn gravity off and just give it an initial speed+direction my ball hits the ceiling and just... slides off to freedom without bouncing.

I know this looks pretty underwhelming, but felt like a big deal to me! It feels kinda rewarding just to make something happen by myself. It's gonna get more exciting than this, I promise.

Just occurred to me that making a breakout clone is a pretty cool next step, as there's a lot I can apply from what I learned doing that pong clone :) moving paddles, ball, the collision angles when the ball hits the paddle..

...there's also a lot of room to bend rules and come up with crazy additions! However I'll start with the simplest clone possible first, and tweak it from there. Let's see how this goes.

I was told it's a nice practice to leave your computer alone and start by brainstorming and writing down all the instructions you'll have to tell your computer. So this is my early codestorm!