Summer has been pretty rough for me. The heat wave got to me pretty badly and made it difficult to do anything productive. Then it cooled down and I somehow managed to catch a cold which I initially thought was my allergies going haywire. The joys of being allergic to dogs and then deciding to own one.

Anyway, this isn’t a post about Townscaper, I figured I’d just use some screenshots to pretty up the thing.

The first batch of templates for the Game Template Project is done, or at least in a usable state. It mostly covers 2D game types. There’s Tennis (Read as: Pong Clone), vertical and sidescrolling shooter, top down shooter, top down shooter with a map, and so on. Plus a couple of 3D types; FPS, and Infinite Faller. And just to top it off, a generic main menu.

They’re not the prettiest looking templates, but they do serve the purpose I originally set out of having a “Starter kit” for getting game ideas up an running. Next chance I get to take part in a game jam, I’m sure they’ll come in use.

As for when I’ll publically release them; Soon™️.

As for other updates, I finally fixed the camera in FIST-EM (God, I need to change this name) so that it now rotates around the players without dodgy jerryrigging. And because I’m such I nice guy, here’s the code for it:

//You need to get the centre point of both players, referred here as midPoint. "playersCentrePoint" in an in-game object that is set at that midpoint. You don't need to do it that way, but it helps in visual debugging.

//This gets the direction of player 2, in this case on the right side of the screen.
Vector3 direction = players[1].position - playersCentrePoint.position;

//This gets the perpendicular vector of the previous direction
Vector3 directionRight = -(Vector3.Cross(direction, Vector3.up).normalized);

//Then set the camera position using the midpoint and perpendicular vectors, then offset it with the camera distance. Then set the camera to face towards the correct direction.
camera.position = midPoint + directionRight * camDistance;
camera.forward = -directionRight;

Now that’s obviously pseudocode, but that should help anybody looking to figure out how to do that.

But now that the camera is operating as it should, I can finally move on to the meat of the thing; the combat. I can probably fudge together some animations nicked from Mixamo, but getting them re-targeted and blending together well is a whole other bag of worms. At the very least, I’ve made a start on what the button combos are going to look like and what kind of moves occur in those scenarios.

Not much else to report on at the minute, and certainly nothing on Space Cart. Although I did mention I didn’t know if the project was missing things due to the HDD troubles I was having, and after a few quick tests and looking at the files; it seems like everything is in order. So that’s good I suppose. The next Demo Day is at the beginning of November, I’ll try and get something out for it, but no promises, I will very likely push it into next year.

There is one more thing, I bought couple of new mice. Both Logitech. A G502 HERO and another G300s. To use on my main rig and ITX rig respectively. The old mice were giving me terrible double click issues, so I replaced them. I feel like mice don’t last very long these days, the ones before were only a few years old at the most.

That’s it from me, till next time.

-Adam