Post Mortem on Pollen Knight

  By Michael | September 19, 2011 - 12:40 pm |
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Gameplay

I'm happy with the results of last week's Game Prototype Challenge. Unlike my last Ludum Dare game, I had enough time to relentlessly test Pollen Knight to make sure that it was not only playable, but beatable as well. The trick in this game is not beating it, but in getting every pollen grain on the map in a single leap for the highest score multiplier. Every two or three levels, a new obstacle is introduced will hinder (or help) the player's progress. Really, the dust clouds were unexpectedly helpful at times when I needed to slow down my momentum.

Physics

Some of the maps are trickier than others, partly owing to the game's physics. The physics was a particular challenge, and is still not as tight as I would have liked it to be. I had to really fake it towards the end, no forces are really applied to the player until they lose contact with the stigma, and at that point collision between the stigma and player is ignored for a second to avoid the "grounded" state caused by contact between the two. It's playable and fairly consistant, but floaty and sometimes awkward. Perhaps I should have done the physics from scratch, rather than use rigidbodies.

Graphics

The flower was easy, I modeled it off of a picture of a tulip and slapped some textures on it in Blender, then baked it out. The background flowers are 2D billboards of the first flower, shot from multiple angles and placed beyond the camera's depth of field. The knight was… uh… a disappointment. I never modeled a human figure before in 3D, and still have never rigged or animated one. I used to do claymation back in high school, totally different process. With no concept art to go by, I just took some google images of medieval helmets and tried to create a cartoony guy from there. It could have been better. Because the art doesn't really communicate "knight" or even "armor", I feel that this part of the theme was not implemented well. I should have added some shield extra life power-ups!

Conclusion

Now that I think about it, Pollen Knight is the most sexually explicit game I've made so far. Tulip porn :) . My original idea that I spent Monday and Tuesday crafting was a FPS involving pollen monsters, a giant evil flower, and the protagonist in mechanized suit. However, I had already made first person games for my last few personal an publicly released prototypes. I wanted to try something side-scrolling for a change. I think the original idea would have turned out something like Under a Watchful Eye.

Regardless, Pollen Knight turned out to be a competent if simple item collecting game. It's another game for the portfolio, another thing to show graduate schools to demonstrate my ability to code, design, and create.

Yeah, so that project is done and I'm satisfied with the results. Now back to Against the Wall. This weekend I had to forgo the Mini Ludum Dare since I was too worn-out by the GPCv8. My sleep schedule is completely off too, I don't really sleep at night anymore! I'll be sure to go to rest early tomorrow. For those who are interested, I am currently working on adapting version a0.3 into a webplayer for wider distribution.

Pollen Knight

  By Michael | September 17, 2011 - 3:02 am | ,
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Pollen KnightHere is my release of the Pollen Knight, a game made for the Game Prototype Challenge v8. The themes were "Armor" and "Pollination." I made the game in the span of five days, from Monday to Friday of this week.

In the game, you play as a tiny knight who struggles to collect pollen for the flower that he lives on. The style of the flower retracts like a spring when you press the down button while on top of it. Releasing the button launches the knight into the air to collect the stationary pollen grains. The game is score-driven with a multiplier that increases with every grain grabbed on a single leap. To get the highest score, the player needs to grab every grain on a single jump in each level.

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My Second Pollen Knight Update

  By Michael | September 15, 2011 - 8:00 pm |
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So work on the Pollen Knight continues. I realize that I went for a rather obvious game with this one. I mean, Armor+Pollination = Knight helping a plant pollinate. No matter. My other ideas were not nearly as good as this one. Basic game mechanics are implemented, including a marginally useful jump function, and fully working style/plunger functionality. Also, I've textured the flower and worked on my knight some more. I'm no artist, and have never done 3D human on the computer before. I think he came out okay, though he still needs a lot of work. I am dreading the creation of his walk cycle animation, and may just give him four frames like an old school 2D RPG. Anyway, here is a pic of the flower:


My Game Prototype Challenge 8 Entry

  By Michael | September 14, 2011 - 11:31 pm |
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I've been making a game for the Game Prototype Challenge v8 since Monday at noon. The themes for this competition have been "Armor" and "Pollination". So basically I have a week to make a game using these two themes. After a number of false starts on Monday, I've come up with a simple game called "Pollen Knight." Let me sketch the gameplay for you: It is 2D platformer in which you play as the titular knight, a very small fellow that lives on the stigma of a lily flower. When he crouches down on the stigma, it coils back like a spring, and when he releases the crouch, the stigma launches him into the air.

The Pollen Knight's job is to grab pollen grains from the air above the flower and bring them back to the stigma, thus pollinating the plant. There are obstacles in the air, small insects, dust motes, and the like, that impede the player's pollen gathering. The challenge is in gathering as many pollen grains as possible on a single leap and still landing safely back on the stigma. Levels should start out simple, slowly introducing game mechanics, challenges, and power-ups.

My work on the game will actually halt Friday night when the mini Ludum Dare starts. Yesterday was a day full of coding the basic game mechanics, while today I focused on the art. Tomorrow, I'll do textures, animation (hopefully), sound, and power-ups. Friday should be focused on level creation, for the most part, and wrapping things up. I may have another development post or two, so check back soon!

September Jams, Site Migration, and a Progress Report

  By Michael | September 11, 2011 - 5:31 pm |
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For the 10th and part of the 9th, this site was down due to my now former web host dropping the ball when upgrading the servers. I spent much of yesterday first getting the site back in working order, then migrating it to a new host. Hasn't been fun. I reinserted againstthewallgame.com back into michaelpconsoli.com, there's no point in having two sites anyway, since I don't post that often. My only concern is for the SEO juice I may have lost in the transition and during the downtime.

Anyway, tomorrow voting for the Ludum Dare 21 ends, which means I'll find out how my product Under a Watchful Eye did. Also tomorrow is the start of the Game Prototype Challenge, a week long game jam for individuals. I'll be entering that and stopping on Friday for a Mini Ludum Dare that is starting then.

There are also two other Jams that I may submit my games to: The Super Friendship Club, and the Experimental Gameplay Project. The Super Firendship club is a month-long jam, September's theme is Mysticism (I studied religion in College, could use some of that expertise for this). The other Jame is a loose week-long one with the vague theme of "Story." I'll assume that this is theme is meta, that I am to make a game that is about stories.

Of course, these jams would hamper my progress on Against the Wall a bit. Last week, I finished the prop manager (for storing and retrieving non-brick objects), an object pool for bricks, and fixed some of the more egregious bugs that I have found. Looking at my checklist, my next step will be to actually fill in the world with some more content and create crumbling bricks. Also, Don Gray has posted a new video of the game that is basically an overview of what is available in-world.

That's it for now. Will update the blog for the next game jam.

Against the Wall (Alpha 0.3)

  By Michael | August 27, 2011 - 11:49 pm | ,
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Against the WallThis updated version of Against the Wall includes two destinations (lift station and a settlement), clouds, xbox controller support, overhauled chunk generation, an improved save system, three new brick types (static, short, medium), and a number of other bug fixes and tweaks.

A webplayer version is not available at this time. This game works on Windows PCs.

Download Version Alpha 0.3

The Unity Game Developers Meetup

  By Michael | August 7, 2011 - 4:58 am |
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So it's been a full week. The game was down for several days after a move from one web host to another. The computer I checked it on loaded a cached version of the game file, leading me to believe it was still up! Whoops.

Also, I went to the Unity Meetup in NYC and met a few other indie developers. Specifically the folks at Muse Games Dave and Janet Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games. The Gilberts are indie game developers that mostly work in Adventure Game Studio (Dave in particular has a decade of experience with it). They recently published a game called Gemini Rue, which everyone should check out. Here is a video of Gemini Rue by GiantBomb which goes through that title's gameplay.

Muse Games makes an assortment of different games. I beta tested their latest title Creavures several months ago, and received a spot on the credits! They are currently working on a persistent multiplayer diesel-punk airship combat game called Guns of Icarus: Requium (that was a mouthful). I've seen some of the in-development content and spoke with many of the people working on it, and let me tell you that I am more than a little enthusiastic for it.

I spent the rest of my time rewriting the level saving scripts. I took a lesson or two from Minecraft and dumped my cache, opting to save the game on my hard-drive rather than constantly store all world data in the memory. This took a lot of optimization to run seamlessly. This is perfect for downloaded copies of the game, but for games playing in the web browser, saving may not be possible given all the disc space that is needed!

Also, all the textures are now stored in texture atlases with DXT1 compression. This means that I can have chunk meshes with multiple textures and limited draw calls (All stationary bricks are grouped into 64×64 objects called chunks). The compression causes some problems with the mipmaps, however, causing unsightly black splotches in the distance. There's a way around this, but it means manually creating the atlases. Not fun.

There's more, but I'm rather exhausted now. Got to wake up early tomorrow and continue this quest.

Sound and Tangents

  By Michael | May 19, 2011 - 11:20 pm |
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Today was spent entirely on writing a sound manager that instantiates a small number of audio sources that are repeatedly used, for footsteps, the movement of bricks, etc. I've also given the world an ambient wind sound for good measure.

Against the Wall BricksHere is a screenshot. The lines on the bricks currently indicate the four levels that you can pull a brick out from the wall. The player will eventually be able to punch bricks into the wall, though this will take me a while to implement.