30/03/2021 – ThreeThingGame Easter 2021

I sure hope I don’t get sued.

Another ThreeThingGame happened, and once again I decided to join. Having learnt absolutely fuck all from the last TTG; myself and my friend jumped right in.

We decided to go into the jam this time with a basic idea of a game rattling around and use our words as a theme for it. We joked about making a slightly more elaborate Pong clone.

Once we got our words: “Bunny”, “Kicking”, “Throwing”; I was suddenly reminded and subsequently inspired of the legendary NEO-GEO game from Data-East, Windjammers.

Seeing as I was doing the programming last game jam, this time my friend was doing the code and I was in charge of the art. And instead of Unity, we were using Godot again. As expected, it ended up being the bain of our existence for a multitude of reasons.

Godot continues to surprise me with how certain aspects are really half-baked. One of the first issues we encountered was with the controls, where we couldn’t separate Left Ctrl and Right Ctrl keys, Godot only defined it as one key. Seeing as we were making a multiplayer, this was a bit of a problem. The solution: Hard coding the controls.

The art side of the game, which was entirely my responsibility, went fairly well. The bunny sprite I made was a bit low effort in hindsight, but I really wanted to spend time on playing the game and giving feedback for refinement. But I was fairly pleased with how the points popping up on screen looked. The music choices were pretty bloody great, thanks to OpenGameArt.org.

It wasn’t perfect, but I feel better about this game than the Global Game Jam and last TTG games.

Anyway, if you want to check out Bunny Jammers, you can do so at the link below.

Despite the jam only being a few days ago, I already have an idea for the next jam, but I’ll keep that to myself for now. What I might do in the meantime is port Bunny Jammers to Unity to see if I can get it to play a bit better. But that’s a big maybe.

Till next time.

-Adam

02/03/2021 – FIST-EM

Yes, the game’s title is dumb.

I started making this game in order to prove a point to my friend about how I thought directional inputs in fighting games suck for controllers, and despite a lot of bumps, progress is getting made.

You can follow development below.

This is only intended to be a prototype though. Don’t expect this to get turned into a full game. I do however intend on getting roll-back netcode working with it. But that will come much later.

A fair few challenges working on this so far. I gave up on trying to do the 3D animation myself and instead relied on Mixamo for the animation so far, but I did setup all the animation states and the programming relating to it. And anyone who watches my Twitch streams likely knows how much pain the camera was to finally figure out.

So that’s the 3rd project I’m working on. The GGJ game is binned, I’ll make the game page public eventually, but probably won’t upload the game. The music visualiser is on hold until I can find a more suitable C++ library to use as SFML is a bit more of a pain than I would like. I might use Godot with Native Script.

-Adam