Those were our words this time around as we descended back into the depths of game jamming.
This time around I was a lot more prepared thanks to the game templates I had previously made. So during the design phase, when the idea was pitched, I could easily jump into Unity and have something playable within a few moments.
Alex & I were joined by an extra this time around. A music student from the Uni named Jordan. He did some pretty good work, taking over the sound and music production for us.
But on to the game. Called “Keep Warm”.
We went for a similar game to ill-fated The Feathered Stalker game that we did for Global Game Jam earlier in the year. The player gathers up items around an environment. This time though, players can now use items together in order to make progress.
For example, the player can find a lighter and use it with a pile of leaves in order to get an ending where they start a fire. I mentioned the Flash game “Don’t Shit Your Pants” when we were figuring out the gameplay aspects. The player’s actions leading to different endings being the point of contention.
The finished game has 2 ways of dying, and 2 ways of surviving. See if you can get them all.
If we had more time or wanted to expand on this idea I’d probably focus on more interactivity and tools. As well as more ways to die, both serious and silly.
Overall, the event went well. Game got finished, and I actually got to go sleep before day break. I’d call that a win overall.
If you want to play the game, here’s the link:
Other than that, I’m working on the year-end Den post and fooling around with Mirror networking in Unity. We’ll see how well those go.
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.
Tiny Towns!
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™️.
Slightly Less Tiny Towns!
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.
This time Windows decided to inform me that one of my HDDs was biting the dust, at first I thought it was an error on Windows part as it only came up once and then disappeared. Then when my bios started telling me the HDD was buggered I actually went and checked it, and sure enough, it was in a really bad shape. The noise of the thing while testing it was horrendous.
Anyway, this HDD was the one I was storing my documents on, so it’s kind of important that it worked. And so began my journey of trying to find software to clone the drive before it bit the dust.
I downloaded Acronis True Image and Macrium Reflect hoping one of them would work. As it happens, True Image only lets you clone the drive if you pay for it. Thankfully, Macrium Reflect would have done the job.
“Would have” is the key point there, as every time I tried to perform the cloning it would error out because the drive was so buggered that it didn’t have enough speed to start the operation and time out.
So I went to Plan C; format the new drive and give it the same name and drive letter as the old one, then manually copy over everything. The only reason this works was because I cocked up when initially formatting the old drive when I originally got it and setting the whole drive as “My Documents” folder. This ended up working in my favour, as once I got everything copied over, the programs linked to those original folders automatically found them again and started operating as normal. Steam also relinked the games back up.
It’s not completely perfect though; after getting back to my Unity projects, I found that several files were missing. Not too big of a deal as I had them backed up on my repo, but I am a little worried about the projects I never got to commit or didn’t have repos.
Space Cart might be in danger of being too messed up to continue development with. I’ll give news on that soon if that happens to be the case.
In the grand scheme of things, it could have been worse. But it did set my schedule back by about a week.
On that note, the Game Template Project is progressing. 4 templates are ready to be used, and several more are being worked on. However, my estimate of taking a month to make these was maybe a bit conservative. So I’ll continue working on this until at least the end of July. But I really don’t want to spend any longer than that.
That’s it from me. Don’t expect another post for a while.
Welcome back to my thoughts on video games and anime throughout the first half of 2021. Keep in mind that I write this post over a period of months, so aspects of it might not meld all that well together.
Persona 5 Strikers
I fucking hate this game.
Persona 5 was a great game, although it’s not my favourite Persona game. But hanging out with all the side characters and finding things to do was a blast.
Well you can forget about any of the side characters because you’re stuck with the main cast for this one. And the side activities revolve around resource gathering, fetch quests, and mini-bosses.
[HEE HO IN UNISON]
The musou gameplay isn’t the worst, but the magic use being extremely limited by SP and then having the bigger enemies be very spongy leads to a lot of SP item usage during boss fights. And I do mean a lot. Just simply attacking the bosses will lead to miniscule chip-damage that makes you wonder what’s the point of buying better weapons.
Another annoying thing is that there are checkpoints throughout the dungeons that you can use to save and return to the “Real world”. However, time does not pass when returning back to reality, and there’s nothing to do in the real world hubs other than to buy supplies anyway. So you go back into the dungeon soon after leaving it, sometimes immediately. This process is also the only way you restore HP & SP without using items. Why they couldn’t just have the checkpoints restore them instead of leaving the dungeon is beyond me.
The story is completely forgettable, but it basically doubles-down on the concept of adults being assholes and wanting to control people. But now there’s AI voice assistants involved and the overhanging association of the tech company that created it. Unfortunately, if you’re like me and hated the main cast of Persona 5, you won’t find anything being done or said even remotely interesting.
Even the novelty of going to different cities across Japan wears out its welcome once you realise just how boxed in you are and the lack of anything interesting to do.
At least the music is still banging.
Dead Or Alive 6
In my ponderous research of learning how to make a fighting game, I decided to install a few example games to take inspiration from. Of these, Dead Or Alive 5 & 6 ended up making their way on my PC. DoA 5 had a lot of technical issues and saving my game simply could not be done due to the fact the developers hardcoding the save file directory to be “My Documents”, which due to the setup of my machine meant that I would get an error everytime it attempted to save.
So this section is on DoA 6 instead. I see why people are upset with this game. The utter avalanche of DLC is extremely off-putting and also makes the base game seem extremely barebones. Especially considering that characters that were featured in DoA 5 like Nyotengu, Momiji, and Rachael are now DLC unlocks instead of just being in the game. The single player story might as well not exist, but nobody ever came to this game for a thought provoking narrative anyway.
The fighting system is still fairly solid, however the new attack moves that fill up a bar that basically give you easy counters and supers seems a bit excessive. I’m not really a fan of super meters and DoA didn’t really need them. I suppose it helps very casual players (People who are somehow worse than me) pull off flashy moves, but does make fights a lot easier now.
The new character Nico is extremely fun to play as, and I also quite like playing as Tamaki. In terms of how it affected my learning of how fighting games work… Well that’s for another blog post.
Puyo Puyo Tetris 2
There really isn’t anything significantly new about Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. It’s mostly refinement with some additional modes and the inclusion of boss battles in the single-player that lets you build teams with special abilities and such. It’s still a good game, but not really worth writing reams and reams about.
Vr Stuff
Played a few things in VR over the month, mostly demos.
Spider-Man Far From Home
I was kinda worried when starting this one about how much motion sickness it would give me. Weirdly though, the swinging wasn’t too bad, but the on-ground movement being locomotion based did make me feel ill. I also had the anti-motion-sickness settings turned all the way up.
Anyway, it’s super short experience. You swing around a city for a bit, then a boss appears, and then you waggle your shit around until it dies, because the tracking constantly goes to crap. I don’t really much care for it, but it is free.
Warplanes: WW1 Fighters Demo
Now this was the demo that made me hurl. I always find flight games to be the worst when it comes to my motion sickness with VR. Additionally, there weren’t any recalibration options, so my original stance of standing couldn’t be changed even after pausing and getting a chair to sit in.
From the gameplay perspective though, it pretty interesting. You’re flying a plane and manually aiming a machine gun in front of you, firing off flares from another gun you can pick up, and manually aiming bombs that you drop by hand. I like the idea of it, but unfortunately my motion-sickness put a pretty quick halt to playing it any further. I’ll check out the full game some other time perhaps.
Into The Radius
This is one of those VR games that has locomotion movement rather than teleporting, so I got real sick after playing it for a bit. I didn’t even get past the tutorial.
That said, there’s a lot of fiddly gun stuff in this. Ejecting mags to check on ammo count, storing things in specific pockets, manually adding attachments, etc. It would be cool if VR tracking was better than it currently is.
I might come back to this, and I was intending to before I published this post, unfortunately, other games got in the way.
Borderlands 2 VR
I tried to start this game and then it soft crashed after the opening cutscene. Again, I’ll need to come back to this one, but I don’t have high hopes.
Job Simulator
I was expecting this to be super short and underwhelming, but this is probably up there with Alyx in terms of fun VR experiences. It didn’t put any excessive wear on to me.
You get a bunch of levels about remedial jobs like office working, being a store clerk, car mechanic, etc. Of course these are extremely dumbed down and humorous versions of these. So you can throw trash into people’s cubicles in the office one, or fill a fuel tank with energy drink in the car mechanic one.
It’s more fun than you originally think it’s gonna be, which is great. And it didn’t make me want to throw up which is a plus.
Eleven Table Tennis
You would think table tennis would be VR’s “Pong”. A basic game that would easily help people to understand the potential of VR and get them comfortable in using it. Unfortunately it runs into the same problem a lot of melee weapon-based games do; a lack of tactile feedback.
In table tennis, the paddle essentially acts as an extension of oneself, but there’s still a weight to it and a certain way of holding it that making hitting the ball back and forth a comfortable experience. In VR, the paddle is now a relatively heavier controller, and you’re not holding in a similar way. Furthermore, with tracking being what it currently is, the amount of precision that you could use to finesse the ball is not really there, leading me to end up hitting it too hard or too softly. Sometimes the tracking would just fail on me and I don’t hit it at all.
That said, when I could get the rhythm down, it did eventually feel pretty good to play. But still not as good as the real thing.
So it’s not perfect. This game is also very expensive for what it is, even when bought at a discount. It’s very multiplayer focused, so if that’s your thing, I suppose you could get some fun out of it. There are a fair few options for practicing and various cosmetic options as well, if you like looking silly for other people you play against.
Sairento VR
Much like Into The Radius; this also has locomotion movement, and teleporting. At the same time. And melee combat, along with guns.
Again, I need more time with this one, but the locomotion movement and pseudo-parkour really did a number on me.
Borderlands 3
I gave my opinion on this game back in November, and I bought and finished this game since. And Christ is it a headache. I’m not even going to try and play the DLC.
Just don’t.
Forza Horizon 4: LEGO Champions
Cute.
Forza Horizon 4 came to Steam a little while ago, and after it was discounted I decided to grab it and the DLC. Although there was only one thing I wanted do with it and that was check out the LEGO island stuff.
Honestly, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.
The LEGO versions of cars are really cool and there’s a lot of the LEGO charm and humour that one should expect. But the island isn’t completely LEGO, there’s still a lot of real world materials and items, and the races are still done with real cars rather than the LEGO ones. That’s probably because there’s only half a dozen LEGO cars. The McLaren Senna, the Ferrari F40, and a Bugatti that’s a variant of the Veyron; to name a few.
There’s still some neat stuff, like pirate ships, a raceway, and a desert filled with crashed UFOs. And the LEGO specific events are still pretty fun.
Maybe they should make a LEGO Racer game proper. But with better handling because SimCade is still a terrible handling model.
It Takes Two
As someone who really enjoyed playing A Way Out with a friend, I had relatively high expectations for this one; and for the most part, it hit them.
It feels really good to play, very tight controls that compliment the variety of game mechanics that they throw at you. The mini-games can be hit and miss though, particularly when one of you has an advantage due to being on a keyboard. Surprised they managed to program a working chess game though.
I wish I could speak highly of the story though. Without spoiling to much, it seems like the two main characters would have been a lot happier with their lives if they never had a kid. And quite frankly the whole game makes them seem like fucking assholes to their child anyway. With some very dark humour to compliment that point.
Last note, there’s one easter egg that I very much enjoyed listening to. I won’t tell you what or where it is, but I’m sure you can imagine considering Josef Fares is involved with it.
GTA Online: Diamond Casino Heist, Doomsday Heists, and Cayo Perico
God, fuck this game.
Anyway, a friend of mine recently got his new PC set up (Minus a GPU, which I am currently letting him have an old GTX680) and he proposed to me that we should play GTA Online. I was curious about the new island they added so I agreed.
I’ll complain about GTAO in a minute, but let’s actually talk about Doomsday, Diamond Casino, and Cayo Perico. The Doomsday heist requires you to buy a facility for about $1 Million or so and then you get your usual setup missions, except it’s different this time. You get prep missions before the setup missions, and the prep missions can be done within the current online lobby, and other players can interfere with it. Another thing is that you don’t need all 4 players to do any of the missions, although you still need a minimum of 2 for the setup and heist missions.
The money is OK, but it does give you a price discount on multiple key vehicles, including a flying car. Although it’s difficulty in the last part is pretty damn harsh. I didn’t like it overall.
The Diamond Casino heist is similar, this time requiring the player to get an arcade. Prep is actually more important here as depending on how you scope out the casino you will gain access to additional approaches. This time there are only prep missions, but the heist still requires a minimum of two people. But the payout is considerably higher than the previous ones, although you are limited by time and the loot that you get, which changes each time you do the heist.
I enjoyed this heist, but it’s probably the most difficult to deal with. The stealth is bad, and the game is very inconsistent about whether or not it wants to knock out enemies when you punch them. But the approaches are probably the most interesting in the game.
And then there’s Cayo Perico. Which comparatively is fucking El Dorado. You can get so much damn money from this place and it’s a near literal cake walk.
So you buy a submarine, scope out the place, do some preps, and then go to the compound on the island and steal the target and a whole bunch of other stuff. But basically, if you scope out the drainage tunnel near the compound and then do the setups related to that approach; you can basically access everything on that island with ease. Do it with a friend, but you can get even more dosh.
THAT SAID.
GTAO STILL SUCKS.
Let’s say you play for about an hour. 15-20 minutes of that hour is spent in loading screens. Another 20 minutes is spent driving to the place you need to go because they always put it as far away from you as possible. And then the rest of that time is spent actually attempting to do the missions, until a hacker turns up in an invulnerable jet and kills you several times.
I can’t wait to uninstall this game again.
Nier Replicant Version 1.22…
Nier is one of those games where the less I say, the better.
Unfortunately, I went into the game after playing Nier Automata, so I knew about a couple of references, plus as friend of mine told me about several things in the game, albeit with certain details omitted.
That said, this isn’t your usual bog-standard remaster. There’s new weapons, new costumes, and new quests; plus an additional ending. The combat has also been considerably improved and is apparently a lot less clunky now, although I can’t vouch for that point because I never played the original Nier.
Additionally, they added the original Japanese voices. Which is probably the sole reason why I decided to wait for this remaster instead of playing the original (Although I still own a copy). That said, the English subtitles are based on the dub, so expect inaccuracies and Americanisms.
The PC port is also somewhat concerning. It does work better than the legendarily awful Automata port, and I didn’t have a crash during my whole time playing. But holy shit, if you’re gonna remaster a game, spend the time and make sure the game logic isn’t tied to frame-rate, especially if you have no plans on locking the FPS. So this game is very sporadic in terms of game speed.
That said, that’s kind of the only major complaint other than the performance. The game just doesn’t utilise resources properly. But it’s difficult for me to explain why, but I’m sure you can find videos on it.
Anyway, I enjoyed this a lot, even with the back-tracking. And now I need to play the Drakengard games.
Record Of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth
As far as Symphony Of The Night clones go, this one was pretty good. The game feel is fairly snappy and responsive. You become fairly overpowered pretty quickly, but despite that, the difficulty curve is still fairly wobbly. Bosses can jump between mildly annoying to a cake walk. It’s also pretty linear with it’s progression, not much in the way of exploring for optional bosses and such like you would see in SOTN.
The story seems to take place many years after Lodoss War as Deedlit is the only person still alive in the merry band of adventures, no doubt due to the fact she’s an elf and they live for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, my experience with the source material comes down to watching a handful of OVAs a few years back. I might watch the TV series at some point though.
I had fun with it, and I’m looking forward to playing Touhou Luna Nights, which came out before this and developed by the same guys.
Anime
Vlad Love
Mamoru Oshii’s new show. I was expecting vampires, ended up getting a homage to a bunch of movies that Oshii likes; Castlevania, Street Fighter, and Darkstalkers references; and a whole lot of weird shit.
It’s an interesting show. The OPs are excellent as well.
Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Season 2
How the fuck does an anime about real world horses and real horse racing end up being one of the best sports anime ever made? I loved every damn episode of this. All the horses have their own weird quirks and jokes, the emotional moments work well, the overall story of Tokai Teio beating the odds despite multiple injuries; it just works.
Yasuke
Yasuke is an interesting bloke. He went from a slave to one of Nobunaga’s retainers, and was devoutly loyal to him to the end. So how does the anime portray him as? Well, something akin to that, but then they decided to set it after Nobunaga’s death, add in a whole bunch of magic and mechs, and then centre the whole thing on some annoying girl with DBZ power level magic.
It’s a fucking horrid anime. And the fact it barely talks about Yasuke as a person and his history is an insult to him. If you want to see a better representation of him, play Nioh. On the plus side, the anime has some decent animation and some pretty good music. The OP is quite good especially.
That’s it.
That should cover half a year’s worth of stuff. It’s not everything but it is the most important stuff that I actually feel like talking about. Next Den post will be in December or January.
A new Den post is almost ready. Quite a lot of games to talk about.
Till then, I started another project. This one isn’t a game per se, but a series of game templates or starter projects. Basically, a bunch of barebones projects based around various genres and ideas.
It’s intended to help prototyping ideas or getting game jam ideas up and running quicker. This comes from my own experiences in game jams where even though the idea for our games were simple, we still had to split time between development and art. And it ended up hurting the core gameplay feel more often than not.
This was especially problematic when working on The Feathered Stalker back in GGJ2021, where as the person in charge of the programming, I spent an alarming amount of time programming the player character and having it work properly, but ending up not finishing the game as a whole due to the core features taking too much time, plus the monster never got properly finished.
So having a few generic gameplay systems would probably help my life a lot during game jam stuff, at least where Unity is concerned. And if it helps me, maybe it’ll help others too.
Probably not gonna spend too long on this project though, probably June and some of July on it. Providing I can be as productive as possible and not have to deal with real-life bollocks, I should be able to bang out a template every day or couple of days.
One of the more interesting things I want to work on is networked multiplayer, and have it work with the different game templates. Not sure how that’s going to go, but I will provide updates as I go along.
In terms of other projects; the fighting game prototype, FIST-EM, is semi-on-hold. I’m still working on fixing the camera and the movement system. I’m not even going to attempt to animate any combat until those two things are fixed. Plus I need some new or adjusted animations for what I currently have anyway.
As for the reason why it’s on-hold; Space Cart. Currently re-doing the station menus and everything related to it. As well as going to make new mission types. Unfortunately, I need to rewrite quite a bit of code because what’s there is basically the contents of a pasta bowl. And it’s taking longer than I would like to work on it due to not being particularly motivated. Feature creep Hell is real and will haunt you.
Not much else has really been going on, not surprisingly. Our dog has had a few problems since the last post, but nothing too serious. Now that sun is out a bit more, playing with her is going to be much easier, she’s been fairly grumpy during the very wet and cold spring we’ve had.
That’s everything I guess. Like I said, Den post soon.
