Board Game

At first, I thought of this blog as a corner in the web, where I would present to you what I have accomplish and learned about game programming. Now I realize that it should be about all I've learned about games, game design, and of course also programming.

From Martin Hagvall, an awesome great teacher I had, I learned the basics of game design. In one of the classes with him we had the opportunity to face the challenge of creating a board game. A one month assignment that taught us a lot!

So this time I want to show you a bit what me and 2 other classmates came up with.

I present you Shift Rifts!

This game is about planning your moves and placing your pieces to gain the advantage and control specific points on the board to win the game. This is a 3-4 player game and is purely strategic.

As you can see in the picture the game has a strange shape. What you see is actually 3 boards matched together. On each board you will see purple tiles which are the points you want to control with your pieces.

I won't go deep into the rules, but basically you take turns and use your actions to move your pieces around the board or spawn units with currency you get every turn.

Every 3 turns circles the game enters a bidding face to gain the privilege of shifting the boards. This allows a player to choose one board and rotate clockwise 1 position. Moving a board will make the piece move with it. As you can imagine this can greatly affect the flow of the game.

The game ends when a player has control of a determined number of Control Points (purple tiles) or a board has reached a full cycle.

This was a great experience! I always remember it fondly and feel grateful that I had the change to have him as teacher while at school.

Thanks again Martin for sharing all that knowledge with us. This was an amassing game design experience that taught me a lot.

[j]

Better use 1

Hey there,

We had another, more classic, approach to the controls. This time I'll present you this little video (sorry about the quality) with a single pad and 2 buttons. I do realize that using a copy of console controllers looking inputs on a touch device, but well, we are working with it because it was going to be a pc games first then for learning purposes became a mobile game I think... 


Anyway!


With this layout I engaged on a new challenge. I wanted my touch inputs to work in an specific way. 
First, let me say that Unity touch inputs are not that great. So for this part I wanted to create a way to detect touches on my GUI textures and associate that touch with that texture so you would not be able to hold that touch, drag it and end up touching and activating a different button. So if I tap the pad and happen slide my finger all the way to the jump button, the  jump button would not react to that touch. I also added to this system a way to detect if my interface button (not the touch itself) was pressed, held or released.

Uff.. it wasn't as simple as I thought at first, but I got it and am so happy to have been able to create my own system for this!

(The silly music is to cover background noises, nothing is said so you can just mute if you like)

Can stop having fun with this things!
Till next time,




[j]

2 Pads?!

Today I managed to get 2 Pads working on my iPhone! Totally exited about this!

The hardest part was to understand the way that Unity handles screen touches and be able to control both separately. At first I was getting problems with the ids of touches and the way I was using them, but I did find a way to make this work. 

Had so much fun and it was so exiting to see the result work!

This isn't the final layout of the controls, it was just my first attempt.

Hope you like it as much as I'm enjoying it!

[j]

[1/3]

And so, a month past.
We did things right and we did things wrong. We spend more time than needed on many things we had to work on. We made mistakes. We found problems.
But we also learned a lot. We organized ourselves. We saw in our mistakes an opportunity to learn and improve. We found solutions to our problems.


It was good month!


Biggest challenges this month are the touch controls for the phone, and innovate and create the levels.


Still exited!




[j]

Make progress every day

Just like a dear teacher of mine said, "Make progress every day".

Today I wanted to create the controls for moving upwards on walls for our character. 
This , once again, is something I've never done before. Still, after 6hrs of non-stop work and some 3D math refreshing, I managed to make my own system to accomplish this.

This is how I pictured it.
First I must say, that our character moves (when he is small) by pushing with using the physics engine of Unity3D. Now, I needed to find a way to push him parallel to the surface with was standing on at all times. My thought was to use the normal of the contact point of the surface to then generate a force in the perpendicular corresponding direction. I have no idea if there are advanced Unity function to do this, so I made my own.

I'm so happy to say that I did manage to make it work! Our character can climb all the surfaces with wanted to.


That's today progress, until next time.



[j]

Green Lit!

That's right! My project idea got the "Go" to become our final project!
I'll be working with 2 other classmates and we will work on an idea that was born out of the "Love O Love" prototype. Gladly it won't need to be love related this time (no game-jam that needs to be matched to) and it will be related to water.

The idea is that you will control a drop of water that can change it's size and become steam, water and ice to destroy the buildings of the bad guys.


Heres is a few concept art of the main character.

The goal is to make it work for a mobile device. This is something totally new to me and I'm very exited about it. I'll be working as producer, lead programmer and lead art. Here is an interface mock-up (you will provably recognize the map from the prototype).

I won't spoil it too much, but I'll keep you posted ;]

[j]

Me lately...

It's been a while since I post something, so I decided to update telling what I been up to.

In the current class, we been working on a small prototype. This time I worked in a group and we decided we wanted to build a 2-4 player game for console with split-screen.
I'm working a lead programmer and producer, and I must say, it's been lots of fun!

As with every challenge, I like to start from scratch, not using any outside scripts or code. Everything went normally when it came to the controls because I already had learned a bit about mapping controllers to Unity. This time though, my script detects if the game is been play on MAC or PC and changed the inputs accordingly.

Success!

The biggest challenge was to make a game where depending the amount of player the screen would split in the right way.

Success!!

After having that I made a simple character to start testing animations and a few animations for the character to use.

The animations are very raw (just a few hours of work) and are currently implemented in the game. Happily we get to see our blockie test character run around the stage!

So... currently we have a prototype that includes 2-4 player split screen, menus, character selection and hero selection (we have 2 things player have to pick, even though there is no impact in gameplay with the selection), projectiles, spawn/respawn, timer, score, sound and music management, inputs mapped for MAC and PC. All this was done during April.

I would have uploaded builds, but the prototype needs controllers to be played currently. I plan on making a raw version of it were a single player can play against a stationary character just to get a feel of the prototype.

[j]