Category Archives: Game Jam

21/03/2025 – Global Game Jam 2025 & Other Things

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Apologies for the lateness of this post. I’ve been quite busy during the past month.

Also, this post has taken longer to write than usual, and as such is filled with corrections and changes. Comments that are striked through are the original text that I’ve left in.

But yes, Global Game Jam happened again, and I made a new game and helped my friend make… His thing.

As you can tell, I made a GameBoy game. In GB Studio, like I said I would. This year’s theme was “Bubble”. I struggled to come up with something interesting around that theme. And due to various circumstances (that I will elaborate on later), I didn’t have much time to brainstorm ideas.

So I decided to make a basic platformer. Which is what GB Studio excels at. It’s very easy to get up and running. The game has the player stuck in a bubble; if the bubble pops, they die. Unfortunately, someone (me) has placed spikes around the place. And so the player must navigate through seven perilous levels.

Initially, my character was meant to have a more significant role. But I didn’t get around to doing everything I wanted to do.

Building the levels was fun. I got to use a program called Tiled, which lets you make levels using tilesets. I made a very basic one with platforms, spikes, and a couple of other bits. It worked well enough for making levels. Tiled itself takes a bit of getting used to. I jumped into it without much of a tutorial, but I got the hang of it quickly enough. Making a test game before the jam started definitely helped getting me prepared.

Finally, I wanted to note that I got the game working on my Analogue Pocket. Which I think is neat.

You can play the game below.

Hot on the heels of finishing that, I immediately began helping my friend with his game. Which he hadn’t started yet. 18 hours before the deadline.

Using Godot, of course, we cobbled together a bunch of poorly made assets that were vaguely Frutiger Aero-related and slapped them into a level. Combine this with the code from a previous GGJ game we made, “If Only The World Was So Black And White“, to handle player movement, and you get… This.

It’s an unfinished mess, but you can check it out if you want. My friend really needs to use his time better. At least I had an excuse for my lack of time.

Now for the reason why I had as little time as I did. Well, at the beginning of that week, I finally received the last of the replacement parts for my PC, the PSU specifically. The moment it arrived, I decided to get cracking at swapping things out. I’ll get into those details in the next section. Regardless, it took 3 days to finish doing that. Then I got one day of solid development in, where I made the player sprite and started work on building the early levels.

And then Storm Éowyn hit the day after. Knocking out my power for the whole day. I didn’t have much water either, making things even more difficult. Unable to use the computer, I decided to draw the levels on squared paper.

I didn’t get power again until the day after. At which point I resumed development up until the point where I pivoted to helping my friend.

Freezing half to death, having little to no water, and having no way of charging my devices made me realise I should spend a bit of money on emergency supplies. As such, I bought a wind-up torch & radio that can be used as a power bank. It didn’t cost too much, but hopefully it’ll work when I need it.

Rebuilding My PC

My previous PC case was old. It was a Lian Li case from 2012. From when I built a PC that I used at Uni. The fans on it were failing, with the rear fan requiring me to stick something between the blades and kickstart it back into moving. Plus the rattling and noise of it. The front panel was held on with tape. And the LEDs were failing too. So I decided last year that I should swap it out for something newer. A Fractal Pop XL Air.

Besides that, I was now using a Ryzen 7 5800X3D but still using the stock cooler from my Ryzen 7 2700. Which was pumping out heat to the side of my case and generally being hotter than I was comfortable with. Which led to me considering an AIO water-cooled solution. I decided to get a Be Quiet! Silent Loop 2.

After ordering those two parts, however, I started having issues with my PC, and after some time, one of my SSDs disconnected. The one I was using for gaming specifically. Initially, I replaced the drive with a newer one and transferred the data to it. Although in doing so, I noticed that the drive was actually fully functional once connected up with USB. Either way, after the transfer, there were a couple of weeks of little to no issues. Until it started failing again.

No matter what cable I used or SATA port I connected it to, it wouldn’t work. But USB connection did. The only consistent factor was the power cable. Seeing as the PSU was a number of years old, I decided to replace that too. And got an 850W SeaSonic PSU.

Beginning the 3-day process, I removed the motherboard from the case and removed the heatsink from the CPU. Then cleaned all the old thermal paste off. Getting an AIO on wasn’t the easiest thing, but the mounting process was easier than the previous heatsink. Getting it bolted down properly was the harder part; suspension on the screws made it more difficult than it probably needed to be. Mounting the fan to the new case was no problem at all.

Following that, the PSU fit in snugly. But after that were cables. This is where the Fractal case is less than great. It’s a massive pain to get through the slots, particularly the thick cables going to the PSU. But I managed.

Unfortunately, my motherboard is so old that it doesn’t have any ARGB headers, just RGB ones. Meaning that the lights on the case don’t turn on. It’s not a huge deal for me, however. The lack of USB 2.0 ports on the case, however, was a problem, as my capture card requires it. Without it, it crashes after 15 minutes. This issue has been fixed since, with the purchase of a separate USB bracket.

Once everything was together, I connected everything up and turned it on. And it worked… For the most part. Some of my drives were missing. I spent a bit of time disconnecting and reconnecting them until concluding that one of the SATA ports was dead, the power cable for one of the drives wasn’t connecting properly, and the cable may also be busted. I got a new cable from my dad and swapped the power connector. Then used the last free port. Then it worked. And I’ve been using it since.

I’m Making An RPG (Which I Promised I’d Never Do)

Following Global Game Jam, I was itching to keep toying around with GB Studio. And then I remembered how much I wanted a game that was like Dungeon Meshi. With a bunch of monsters, cool dungeons, weirdness around things like magic (Mana sickness), and so on. Now obviously, it’s not possible to put all of that into a GameBoy game. So I settled on making a Roguelike.

Specifically, it would focus on the battle, rest, and food balance. Instead of using levels, it would use strength. The party strength would increase if the player won fights, kept themselves well fed, and rested often enough. But it goes down if the player rests without eating or with extreme tiredness. There’s also a stamina bar that indicates how much a player can move around before they start to feel the effects of fatigue.

I’m trying to make it a dungeon crawler, but I’m struggling with the generation element of it. With the unique way GB Studio handles scripts, it’s very difficult to have a lot of control over something like that. I thought maybe I could use tile swapping in order to make it but ran into the tile limit immediately. So I’m looking into alternatives. I’m now building levels manually. I need to make about 50 of them.

Tile swapping is a very powerful tool in GB Studio. I use it for multiple HUD elements. I found it to be easier to use than handling it via actors. Unfortunately, the documentation for GB Studio is awful, so finding examples for how to use tile swapping effectively is difficult. Thankfully, someone on GitHub put me on the right path.

Menus for the game ended up being difficult to manage. Initially I used the built-in menus, but then I realised that they paused the game every time they were pulled up, and I thought that would be a problem for updating things and animations. Then I built my own menu, but the performance took a massive hit because I was updating multiple things every frame. Following that, and a considerable amount more research, I settled back with the built-in menu, with a better understanding of how the loops work.

The amount of nested if statements concerns me. There’s no lookup tables or dictionaries, so you have to use if statements for any comparison. But the more annoying is the inability to dynamically make options for menus. The amount of menu items has to be set manually, along with what each option says. And then you need to use an if statement for each option. The problem is that I want to be able to swap out party members with different classes and skills. But I can’t update the list of skills. Instead, I have three skill slots and then use an if statement for the choice they made in the menu, and then another series of if statements for what skill is in that skill slot (which you can only find out by choosing that menu option), and then another menu asking the player if they want to use the skill, and then another if statement for the selection on that menu.

Complete madness.

I also rewrite chunks of code over and over in different places, because I can’t move it out into a reusable function.

Turns out you can move code out into scripts, with parameters and such. This has made my life so much easier, as I can now reuse code and only pass along the relevant variables. For example, I’ve moved the skill system into its own set of scripts. One for the menuing and others for each character class.

GB Studio is fun if you want to make a simple game. But once you get into more complicated designs, it gets very challenging to work with quite quickly. You can export the engine as code and modify it that way. I haven’t given it a shot yet, but if I were serious about fixing the shortcoming of the engine, I might look into it. For the time being, I’m going to keep trying to get it to work.

Twitch’s Bullshit Hour Limit

Twitch, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to impose an extremely arbitrary limit of 100 hours of footage that can be archived on Twitch. How far above the limit was I?

1300 hours above the limit.

This means that all the collections on my Twitch page need to be moved on to YouTube, and then I need to delete all of those collections. Currently, I have moved most of those playthroughs. Some stuff like the Yakuza games, Death Stranding, Ghost Of Tsushima, and Tales Of Arise; have been removed without being moved to YouTube. So those are gone. The remaining collections are still up as of time of writing this, but will likely be deleted by the time this has been posted. All the collections have been deleted, and playlists of the moved videos will be made on YouTube soon.

As you can imagine, I am not happy about Twitch giving me more work to do. But also, I’m an Amazon Prime (Twitch Prime) user. Meaning I give these chucklefucks money. But everything that they’ve been doing as of late has been making me seriously consider not paying for this trash service. Screw you, Twitch and Amazon.

SMG Model Release

This is the same SMG from 7DFPS 2024, but now textured and with some alterations to the animations. Feel free to use it on any of your projects.

Plans For The Rest Of The Year

Jan 2025

  • Fix PC
  • Global Game Jam

February & March 2025

  • SMG Asset Release

Spring 2025

  • Weapon armature Blender tutorial
  • Video about the Project Fighting Styles

June 2025

  • Cybersurfer demo, rebrand, new title
  • GB Studio Dungeon game demo release

Summer 2025

  • Cybersurfer early access release?
  • Untitled 2D Godot game

Autumn 2025

  • 7DFPS prep

I just wanted to give a slight update to the plan that I made in my previous post back in January. Things are progressing well so far, although this new GameBoy project has definitely put a spanner in the works in regard to Cybersurfer’s development. But progress is being made on that front.

Anyway, I will post again soon. Hopefully, I’ll have some good news to talk about.

-Adam

01/01/2025 – 2020+=5

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Here’s the video for 7DFPS. It’s not great, but it covers the important bits. I’m still not too happy about the whole affair. I achieved what I set out to do, but I’m not satisfied with the quality of it. It’s just not much of a game. Whatever, I ain’t going back to it.

So what’s this blog post about? Future plans, of course.

I’m just gonna bullet point the current plans for the year, with dates where applicable.

  • In the coming days: Year end roundup post
  • Jan 20th: Global Game Jam
  • February: SMG Asset release
  • June 4th – 6th: Demo Day 62, new Cybersurfer demo
  • Summer/Autumn: Cybersurfer Early Access release, new branding, and title also
  • December: 7DFPS

That’s the brief overview of the year. There will of course be other things than Cybersurfer and game jams. I’m hoping to catch up with side projects like reworking Rotaction and learning more about Blender. Doing more projects with Godot and possibly GB Studio are also planned. But none of these have definitive dates associated with them. I’ll get to them when and if I’m available.

This is year is make or break for me at this point. I need to focus on what I’m good at get stuff out there.

As for other things, well, I’m replacing my PC case at some point in the next week or two. I got a Fractal Pop XL Air case to replace the 12-year-old Lian Li one that I have. The fans and LEDs are dying on it, and it’s falling apart in places. With the Ryzen 5800X3D chip inside it getting extremely warm while using the stock cooler I got from the Ryzen 2700, it really is time for me to switch it out.

I’ve never done water cooling before, but the AIO solutions seem simple enough to install these days. I hope it all goes well. But I’ve been through this before, and something usually breaks.

I hope you look forward to my year-end roundup post coming in the next few days.

-Adam

10/12/2024 – 7DFPS 2024

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I’m never making another VR game.

Last year, I made a VR game about moving through a level as enemies spawned to a beat. It was an experiment to see whether or not moving a player along automatically would cause any form of motion sickness. It wasn’t the most full-featured thing, but it did prove a point. That said, I wanted to go further with the idea.

This year’s game is a two-level game that expands on the ideas a bit, focusing on a more traditional action game format. In terms of player handling, the weapon system has been improved. You can now eject your magazine at any time and put in a fresh one, allowing for tactical reloads. You now have semi-functioning hands, although no real use for them. And you can now switch weapons. The new gun is an SMG I made.

Switching weapons actually involves putting your hand on different parts of your body and pressing the right grip. My understanding is that Boneworks already had a similar system, so it’s not as novel of an idea as I thought, but my implementation works well enough.

As for the levels themselves: The first level is a standard action level where the player moves through a dance club as enemies spawn around them. There’s a part in the middle of the dance floor where the player stops and enemies spawn around them. They then proceed through an office before eventually ending at the last room. Fairly traditional stuff, mostly there just to keep testing that moving the player along doesn’t cause problems.

The second level is the real stress test. The player is standing on the bed of a pickup truck as it drives through a city. Enemy cars spawn as they chase the player, and the player has to shoot them. The increased speed and turning might cause more problems for players, hence why it makes for a good test bed. Originally, there was going to be a helicopter sequence, but in testing that, the up-and-down motion of it made me feel really unwell.

There’s not really much more to it than that. Feel free to give it a go if you have VR.

The SMG that was made for it will be available for purchase at a later date. I need to fix and improve it a bit. There was also another gun that was cut because my friend couldn’t get it done in time due to personal problems. We will get that one ready at an even later date.

So what’s coming up next? Well, a video about 7DFPS to begin with, which I’m currently starting on. After that, the usual end-of-year blog post where I talk about all the games I’ve been playing.

In the new year, things are going to change a bit. I’m going to stop putting unedited first parts of playthroughs on my gaming YouTube channel. It gets bugger all views, and I want to clean out my folders of videos that I, quite frankly, don’t need. I might do more highlight videos or something, or just change the content of the channel entirely.

Global Game Jam is of course coming up. I might join it, but negotiations with the friend I usually do it with have not gone terribly well. I want to use GB Studio to make something, and he wants to use Godot because he hates anything that isn’t 3D. Despite the fact that Godot’s 3D capabilities are less than satisfactory. But we’ll see. I might be able to compromise.

Next year is going to be a wild time. Cybersurfer needs to start being a lot more playable; early access by next year is a goal for me. But it’s going to be difficult.

-Adam

31/01/2024 – Global Game Jam 2024

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Global Game Jam has come and gone again, and I made another game for it. This year’s theme was “Make Me Laugh”. I spent a good chunk of January learning Godot for this year’s GGJ, and as part of that, I made a quick prototype of a 2-player robot arena game. I made it because my friend and I were discussing the lack of Robot Wars-related games and thought about making one for GGJ.

As it happens, the theme fit quite well with the idea, so we decided to fill it full of ridiculous items instead of robots and hope that it would be funny. We thought it was silly, but when we presented it to the sleep-deprived audience, it didn’t get much of a reaction.

But anyway, here’s an outline of the game. 2-player robot arena. You can choose a character body, which will have a set amount of weapon placement points each. You then pick a weapon, and then you spawn into the arena. The arena is a 20m x 20m area. There’s a pit that can be activated via a button on the wall and a dropzone where random items drop.

Here are the body models. I’m personally quite fond of the man holding axles model, as it is way more horrifying than I expected it to be when I came up with the idea. And I quite like the box, too. But I should probably note that I modelled both of those while my teammate did the cheese and the toilet. But I did the textures for all of them.

With a bit more experience with Godot, development this time around went a lot more smoothly. However, that’s also because I was in charge of the programming for the most part. Not to say that I’m a better programmer than my friend, but more to say that I spent a lot more of my time doing the work.

Either way, I used the C# version of Godot 4.2.1 and found the programming side of things to be OK. But there’s still a lot of issues I have with Godot, predominately the general hierarchy of things. Accessing nodes is the biggest pain in the arse, and prefabs don’t really work in the same way they do in Unity. You can’t drag and drop something from the files into the inspector; you have to load it as a packed scene and then convert it to the correct node. But not every node is accessible through code. If you wanted to instantiate a vehicle body via code, for instance, you couldn’t. Hell, you can’t even access it.

I also had issues getting information on the root node of an object, and for one of the scripts, I ended up using GetParent() five times on one bit of code just to get the name of the player object. However, soon after the event, I remembered that Node Groups existed, and I probably should have used that instead.

But the more pressing issue with Godot is just how buggy some of the node types are. For the game, we heavily relied on the VehicleBody3D node to drive the player models. But for the first few days, the wheels on the player models simply went through the floor, and I couldn’t figure out why. And after researching, it turns out that the node by default doesn’t really work how you’d expect and suffers from many bugs. That said, I did eventually find a post that suggested altering the stiffness of the suspension plus some other values until you got the behaviour you wanted. After about 30 minutes of tweaking the values, I eventually solved the issue.

I have no real complaints about the art side of things; Blender is pretty robust these days, although I did learn that the GPU compute option wasn’t configured correctly, and after fixing that, rendering stuff took literal seconds instead of minutes. What bothers me is that this option was always there, but I hadn’t set it up properly. Considering I upgraded my PC primarily to improve productivity, I wonder if I had checked the right boxes, I could have saved a bit of money.

That’s really it as far as GGJ goes.

As for the new stream layout stuff, I finished greyboxing the gaming part of it, and now I just need to set up the textures. I also need to get started on the game dev scenes and the transition animations for both.

Hopefully, I can get all this sorted out by March. I don’t really want to be working on this instead of playing through Dragon’s Dogma 2. On the gaming side of things, I’m making my way through Infinite Wealth and having a blast. I also gave Graven ago and had mixed feelings about it. Persona 3 Royal and Granblue Fantasy Relink are coming soon, with the former being on Game Pass. Relink is a bit too expensive for me at the moment, so I might wait for a sale.

Anyway, till next time.

-Adam

09/01/2024 – 7DFPS And Future Plans

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7DFPS happened again, and I submitted a new game. And this one is better than that god-awful zombie game from last year, I promise.

Making a VR game was easier in some ways than I was expecting, and weirder in some ways. I definitely didn’t like being tied to Unity’s pre-built systems as tightly as I was. That said, although the game isn’t as fully developed as I’d like, it’s definitely an improvement.

I’m not gonna write too much about the game because I made a video about it, along with some other info about stuff I’m working on that I’ve previously written about. Here’s the video:

Plans For 2024

My plans are a bit of a mess for 2024 so far due to some things taking a bit longer to do than I expected. However, for January, my focus is on Global Game Jam, which starts on the 22nd.

Alongside that, I’m working on improving my stream layout with new art and transitions. It’s going to be quite the challenge. But things are looking good so far with some of my early brainstorming.

Beyond that, I’m gonna focus full-time on Cybersurfer. I’m really close to a breakthrough with it, and I can’t wait to get back to it after GGJ. And in regards to game dev, my stream schedule for it is going to change. It’s still going to be on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but now I will stream in the evenings as well. It won’t be consistent because of how my evenings can be, but it will give me more time to work on stuff.

The gaming streams are going to change a bit. Alongside my regular playthroughs of games, I’m gonna try doing one-off variety streams with many games. I’m then going to take those streams, cut them up on a per-game basis, and put the videos on YouTube as scheduled releases. Probably just one a week to give me some time to make content. I’m not sure how frequent these streams will be, but I’ve got plenty of weird ass games I want to check out.

A bit of a short one, especially after the bloody long post that the end of year one was. Keep tuned into my Twitch and YouTube channels (Both of them), and I’ll see you guys next time.

-Adam

07/12/2023 – Everything Is Broken

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Last week was bloody terrible for me, and the entire month has been a bit shit. But I’m here to give you an update… After nearly two months of silence.

Upgrading & Breaking My PC

The big thing that’s happened since the last blog post is that I finally upgraded my PC. My old system was running a Ryzen 7 2700 and a GTX 1070. They’ve served me well the past few years, but as I’ve gotten more into 3D production, I’ve needed a lot more horsepower. Plus, I’ve been struggling to run a lot of games lately. And very recently, that GPU started becoming the minimum spec for a lot of new games. Anyway, the new CPU is a Ryzen 7 5800X3D and the GPU is a RTX 3060.

I went with the 5800X3D as I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, and it’s likely the best chip for the AM4 board. It’s also the last chip for the AM4 board. So if I do need to upgrade again in the future, it’s gonna be a full upgrade. I’ve definitely seen a performance improvement with it, and OBS is throwing up less of a shitfit when I stream games now.

Getting the chip in was more of a headache than I thought. First of all, it didn’t come with a new heatsink, so I had to use my old one, meaning I had to clean up all the thermal paste and re-apply it, using some old paste my dad dug up that was almost finished up. And then I remounted the fan, but without removing the motherboard from the case. I ended up with a solution where I took a few bits of non-static packaging and a tissue packet and used them to keep the rear bracket from falling out. It worked out in the end, but it took more work than I was originally expecting.

As for the RTX 3060, well with this, I can now do raytracing to a reasonable level. This will make material creation in Blender MUCH FASTER. Working on materials previously was a massive pain in the arse. Plus, it’s nice to know that I should be able to throw any mainstream game at this thing without issues, at least for the next few years.

  • RTX Off
  • RTX On

I played around a bit with the raytracing stuff, mostly just messing with Minecraft and Quake II RTX. I might give Portal RTX a go at some point.

Getting the GPU in literally took 5 minutes and was probably the least painful part of this experience.

But anyway, the performance boost is really nice, and better productivity is always a good thing… Or it would be if EVERYTHING DIDN’T BREAK.

Shortly after getting my rig up and running again, my 4TB media drive which contains a lot of my video footage just straight up fucking broke. Inaccessible. There was about 3TB worth of stuff on there. I’m going to try and get it sent off to a repair place, but it’s likely going to cost me a fucking lot of money.

In the process of replacing parts, my PC was moved around a bit, among other things. This was likely to be the root cause of the problem.

Following this however, I decided to take advantage of the Black Friday deals and get myself two new SATA SSDs. One to replace the media drive, and the other to clone my documents folder.

It took a few days, but when I got them, I started by putting in the new media drive. I left it in for a few days before doing anything with it, and then decided to download a whole bunch of shit. And then it eventually stopped accepting downloading, and some of the files it did download were corrupted. Following that, I couldn’t access the drive at all.

But when I booted the machine the morning after, I could access the drive again, and all the files that had been downloaded properly were fine. The corrupted ones were still busted, but I just deleted those and re-downloaded them. So I’ve decided to just take it slow when downloading stuff to that drive.

I also cloned my documents drive onto another SSD, which for some reason didn’t work when I first tried the process, but did work the second time around. I waited a few days as this was during the issues with the new media drive, but this morning (5th December when I write this) I finally swapped it over.

It didn’t replace my original drive immediately; I had to go into disk management and change the drive letter from Q to F. Once I did that, it worked, but then the SSD I have for games was no longer showing up, so I restarted again, and Windows gave me a blank screen. One more restart later, and everything finally booted up properly.

However, that isn’t the end of this story. I still have a 2TB NVME SSD to install, which I will probably do later this week.

But this whole endeavour has ended up costing me A LOT of money. I don’t like begging for cash, but if you’re reading this and appreciate the game dev work I do or generally enjoy my streams, and have a few bob to spare, consider donating to me on Ko-Fi.

CyberSurfer Progress

A lot has actually changed in the past couple of months in regards to the project. Last time, I mentioned all the rail grinding stuff. Well, that’s actually been changed significantly. Using the Spline Utility part of the spline package, I’ve rebuilt the whole system so that it can finally follow curved rails, or bezier curve rails. There’s a video tutorial a little later in this post, but the results are much improved over what I previously had.

But the big thing that happened was the first public demo of the prototype. Here’s a video of me talking about it, alongside some other things.

The demo didn’t go over all too well with players. Most of the complaints were about the speed. Players didn’t like having to slow down for obstacles; the placement of them seemed poor; collisions were a bit messy; and so on. I didn’t get too many complaints about the game feel. The only complaint I got about the grinding was about how jumping between the rails kills your momentum, which is something I thought I fixed, but in further testing later on, when I increased the speed of the grinding, it became clear that it wasn’t fixed.

The game as it is now is quite different compared to the original GGJ game. Especially the aspect where the player can move however they want, compared to the original, where they were limited to only left and right. But that change brings about a very different form of level design, which I did not account for. However, instead of adapting to that change, I’ve decided to go back to the original idea of pushing the player down the track like in the original game.

However, this time, I will not be spewing waypoint triggers along the track in order to rotate the player. This time I’m going to use splines to create the track and rotate the player’s aiming based on it, similar to how I handle rail grinding.

After a bit of work, I can finally generate tracks from splines. In addition to this, I can generate colliders on the sides to keep the player within bounds. So now I can have non-flat tracks with the correct colliders. I haven’t fully tested the track generation, but it should be fine for most scenarios.

Well, when I say it’s not flat, I mean the track as a whole. But I am thinking about having the actual surface be curved, especially around corners, and maybe even having half- or full-pipe sections. But that’s going to require even more complicated programming, and I barely understand what I’m doing as is.

Finally, the rail grinding tutorial.

Pretty basic stuff. The differences with my old code were mostly the spline utilities stuff. I am calculating the direction of the player slightly differently. Instead of using the dot product, I’m calculating the angle between the player’s forward and the spline tangent (Read as: Forward) of the point of the spline the player is in contact with. It seems like it works better. There’s a GitHub repo linked in the description of the video if you’re interested in seeing the code.

With the track generation stuff in a good place, the next thing I’m likely going to be focusing on is level design. And following that, a lot more animation work. I’m not sure when I’ll be working on an overhauled trick system, but that’ll definitely be part of the upgrade.

VR Development

In preparation for 7DFPS, I decided to learn how to develop VR-specific stuff in Unity. Following their starter tutorials, I built myself a room and placed a few objects in it. Including a mirror.

The tutorial covers things like locomotion, grabbing objects, objects having correct physics, and socketing. The last one is the act of placing objects in specific places, like putting a hat on a hook or on top of my head, like in that image there.

It’s given me a good jumping-off point for learning how all of this works, although I must admit, it is a little jank in places.

7DFPS

Following that jumping-off point, I decided to get started on building the 7DFPS game. To give a general overview of the game I’m going for. Imagine Pistol Whip but with your own music, and the gun handling of Half-Life: Alyx. I mentioned it in one of the videos I linked previously.

But for my idea, I’m setting up a spline, splitting it up into a random number of sections, and turning each section in one of three directions. I should also note that each section is the same length. That’s just to make my life a bit easier. After that, I have the player use spline animate using the song’s duration as the total time it takes to traverse the spline.

To top it off, I spawn a few cubes to act as buildings along the sides of the path. In theory, these were meant to act as cover points, but as I’ve been working on it I’ve gotten a bit lazy, and now they’re just decorative. The enemy generation is soon to follow, but I haven’t quite gotten it to work yet.

What I just recently started working on is putting the gun in the game. It’s actually been easier than I thought to get the model and animations set up. It’s not fully done yet, but it’s getting there. Following that will be enemy spawning, enemy AI, and then finally loading in user tracks.

There’s still a lot to do, and as of writing this, I’ve still got about a week left until the originally set deadline. But it’s my understanding that it will be extended out to the end of the month, like last year. Hopefully that gives me enough time to really make this something worth people’s time. And hopefully enough to give it a decent amount of paint so it doesn’t look like a mess of placeholders like it currently does.

Well, there’s your update. I’m working on the year-end GOTY list stuff like I usually do; hopefully it’ll be more on-time this year compared to last time. But I still have more than half of it left to write, and I’ve still got games to play. So maybe don’t expect it in as much of a timely fashion as I hoped.

Till next time.

-Adam

07/03/2023 – Content Content Content

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Here I am again. I guess I’ll fill you all in on the things I’m working on.

Remember 7DFPS? The game jam I made a game for back in December? I’d forgive you for forgetting, the game I made was utterly terrible. However, there was one aspect of it I thought I could do something more with and that was the guns.

The models themselves were made and rigged by a friend of mine, but I did the materials and animated them. But I figured it would be a waste to have these guns made and not use them for other things, but I’m not really in a rush to make another FPS, so I figured I should release the assets… For a price.

I’ve redone all the materials, a lot more detail and wearing added. The model UVs are now way less of a mess, meaning much better texture maps to use for Unity’s materials. The next stage of these at the minute is re-doing the animations. A lot of the data was lost, so I need to either try and re-import them from the old files or remake them from scratch.

UPDATE: Three of the guns have finished animations now.

Not fully sure where I’m gonna be selling these, Blender Market, Itch, Unity Asset Store, and my Ko-Fi page are all viable options. Possibly all of them at once. They should be available near the end of this month, keep an eye out.

“How’s the side project?” is something you’re probably thinking of asking.

A small taste

Well, I’ve been making a bit of progress. I’m juggling my time between it and tweaking SICKHACKS.root so it’s not quite as far along as I would have liked. But you can run around, shoot a bow, and ride a hoverboard. Which is like half of what I want from the gameplay side of things.

Actually, GGJ helped me figure out a lot of the problems with the game, like how to properly separate the collision and animation stuff from the aiming target, which was a source of a lot of my woes with this project for the past couple months. The bow stuff needs so much more work, it’s a surprisingly complex animation when you consider that the arrow has to go from the hand to its place on the bow, and then disabling that when the arrow is shot, which is actually just an instanced object being shot out.

The hoverboard isn’t great. It’s quite floaty in the air and the collisions aren’t very precise. I’ve dropped through the level more than once. I have a few ideas of how to fix it, but I’m concerned that Unity’s physics system will break it some more.

There’s a demo if you want to play it, but it’s very, very basic. You can check it out below.

Now I’ve mentioned it a couple of times now, but I have made some small tweaks and changes to SICKHACKS.root.

The most serious of issues were FPS dependant movement where you would move slower at lower FPS or if there was an FPS drop and the camera jitter as the player would move down the track on the first level. Some fairly simple fixes. The original movement code didn’t use delta time so it heavily affected by the FPS. As for the latter, well I replaced the transform.LookAt code with some Slerp code instead and that seemed to help a lot. However, it is still affects the downward trajectory of the player, but I’m working on stuff that should address this issue.

On that note, I’m experimenting with different methods of turning the player towards the track waypoints. I’ve managed to create a system of turning the player via torque and allowing the physics to do its job. It does somewhat work in my prototyping level, but I haven’t fully sent it full the ringer yet with different terrain types, but that’s probably the next phase. But once I get the game to that point, I’m gonna make a decision about whether or not I’m gonna continue with this game.

Check out the updated version here:

As a last point on this, I finally finished the technical(-ish) video on the game, so give that a watch if you want.

It’s not the best video in the world, but it covers some of the stuff I wanted to talk about. It’s harder to make a video in that format than I thought. I eventually settled for reading a script with what I wanted to say and then mushing together the clips that are related to it. I think next time I’ll write the script first along with notes on footage I need and then edit it that way.

I’m not done making videos by the way. I have at least two or three more videos I could make from things I learnt from making SICKHACKS.root, especially on the Blender side. I’ve got about a dozen or so ideas for Blender related videos as well as Unity stuff.

Blender tutorials are going to be rough for me because I’m not super experienced with it, but I’ve gotten alarmingly decent with the shader material tools and there’s a few things I couldn’t find info on that I ended up having to learn how to make, like the sunset skybox in SICKHACKS.root, which is a cube map. Not only did I have to learn how to make the visual effect, I had to figure out how to get it on a cube map. So that’s probably the next video, among many others.

Now Sand Surfer is a side project, and it will stay a side project, and I need a new main project. I have been thinking of taking SICKHACKS.root (I’m getting really sick of writing this title out fully everytime) and turning it into a full game (With a new name, obviously). But that is likely going to be a very heavy project for me, from design, to building, and developing. It’s gonna be a lot of work, especially as a one-man-band. I really want to make more of it though, it’s just fun to play.

Another project I’ve been thinking of doing (Or even going back to) is Rotaction. Specifically making a sequel to it or updating it. I really want to re-do the enemy spawning code because the game is a bit bland after a while, there were also enemy types I never got to implement properly and I want to have another shot at them. Plus, I figured out a way to do multiplayer, but that almost certainly requires a sequel, not an update. But I do need to fix the phone version because the controls are pretty buggered and controller support doesn’t function correctly.

I’ve got a lot to think about, but for the time being, I’m just gonna get done what I can.

Right, I’m not sure how long it will be before the next post, and I’m not gonna attempt to guess, but I’ll see you next time.

-Adam

Global Game Jam 2023: SICKHACKS.root

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Global Game Jam happened again, and this year’s theme was “Roots”. I started pretty early on this one, basically the day after the theme announcement, which happened on the 28th of January. To be honest, the theme kinda stumped me a bit at first, partly because I was doing some prep work prior to the jam that was focused on a hoverboard mechanic.

A small test of the hoverboard stuff.

Eventually, myself and my friend struggled so much for ideas that we just looked up the definition of “Roots” to if there was anything that would give us any inspiration. And I happened to stumble across the following:

ROOT
COMPUTING: A user account with full and unrestricted access to a system.

Putting 2 and 2 together, I suggested making a hoverboard game in cyberspace.

First downhill test.

Early on the idea was to have a player constantly go forward down a track, avoiding obstacles. That was a pretty general core plan. Problem one: downhill movement. As you can see in the video above, it kinda works but it’s slow and stutters a lot. Furthermore, the original turning code from the previous prototype would go against the constant downward trajectory I was looking for. But more importantly, the track I made wasn’t straight, so the constant forward force I was applying would send the player off the track soon after.

There was one solution I knew would work well enough to keep the player on track, and that was to place waypoints along the surface of the track and aim the player along those, while maintaining a forward force in relation to their rotation.

My first implementation was pretty horrible. A lot of stuttering movement and the player curving into the waypoints excessively hard, killing the speed and handling. My first implementation relied on rotating the player’s forward using Vector3.RotateTowards(). After some changes, I switched it to Transform.LookAt(), and that worked significantly better. But there was still a problem. In the original test, from the video above, the board would match the downward slope of the map and match the slopes on the side. With the new implementation, the downward slope is matched, but now the player stays upright when on the sides. There’s also still the issue of the player turning into the waypoints themselves, but it’s pretty rare.

The curved/uneven map used in the first level ended up being a real pain for me, partly due to the restrictions I placed on myself. The waypoint system was just the first problem, the second issue was scaling. Simply put, importing the level directly from blender was too damn small so I had to scale it up, and then rotate it a bit. But when it came to placing objects on it, that was just a crapshoot. Every obstacle on the first level is placed and rotated by hand, and each one has different values for rotation due to the unevenness of the model. It’s way the placement is so messy.

Gravity was the big issue. The short of the issue is that the player cannot get down the slope on their own gravity fast enough. So I did two things, added the forward force (Previously mentioned) and a downward force. This kept the player moving at a good speed and stop them from going flying off when they hit a ramp. It isn’t perfect though, it’s still very much possible to go absolutely flying.

There was something I discovered while rewriting the code, and well here’s a video of it.

Rewrote the code and made some changes so I could perform tricks.

While I was adjusting some code, I was looking at my turning code from my original hoverboard code from the first video on this post. It works by applying torque on a specific axis, the Y axis (Or Vector3.up). As a bit of a fool around, I changed that axis, and noticed that it that it would make the board flip around as if I was doing tricks. But with the first implementation of my code, I knew it wouldn’t be possible to do. So when I rewrote it, I made sure to accommodate this feature. As you can see, it really elevates the gameplay. It’s my favourite feature.

I previously mentioned that I was working with my friend on this, well that isn’t strictly true. Most of the game is a one-man-army effort on my part. Although we started early, my friend decided that his contributions to the game would be minimal until the absolute last minute, so in the extra week or so that we had, he spent 4 or 5 days doing nothing. This was a problem, because my friend and I have an arrangement where we switch roles for each game jam we take part in. This time it was me on the programming and him on the art. Unfortunately, when you require specific assets, like a track or obstacles, and the person in charge of that isn’t making them, it slows down development.

So I made most of the assets myself. Which was interesting. I’m not a great modeller, and you can tell that the assets below are pretty simple. What I have been getting good at is the material work. So despite the low detail look, the materials look pretty good.

I know it seems like I’m moaning about my friend here, but I was very frustrated at the time and I’m still upset about it because I think I could have done more if I wasn’t forced to spend my time generating art stuff.

After learning some lessons from making the first level, I decided that the second level should be a flat plane. There’s only one waypoint, right at the end of the map, so the camera no longer breaks and stutters trying to follow each waypoint. It also fixes a small issue with the lateral movement occasionally being slower than it should.

The big benefit though is significantly easier placement of obstacles. I no longer need to adjust each object individually to fit it correctly to the level’s surface, and additionally, I can bulk edit large amounts of obstacles easily. Level generation become much easier once I switched to this model.

But, it is less interesting to look at. With further experimentation, I might be able to find a good middle ground to have interesting downhill tracks but with the ability to add obstacles to it much easier. That said, I really can’t say enough how much better the second level feels to play compared to the first.

The last level is just a cutscene due to a lack of time. It’s also the only real contribution my friend made to the game. And it was a massive pain in the arse to implement. In fact, I actually finished the last level before making the second level.

But let’s get into what it is and the implementation, it’s quite a story.

The level is a rail going up a tree root. Not interactable at all, more-or-less a cutscene. The rail is a normal mesh and on top of it is a bezier curve. Here’s the problem, Unity doesn’t recognise a bezier curve as a mesh. So I had to find a script to export the curve as a series of coordinates into a CSV file, load it into the game as a text file via the resources folder, convert those coordinates into Vector3 data, making sure to swap the Y and Z axis for each one. After that, I then can to scale the vectors based on the scaling of the objects it needed to be planted on, and then convert it into world space.

Now, all of that is easier said than done, but it took me a considerable amount of time to get working. It was worth it in the end, but I really should have figured it out days prior. I had to make it with less than 24 hours before the deadline.

I like to say that a lot of what I do is a “Learning experience”, and that gives me some motivation to challenge myself during these events. And this was a pretty big learning experience. I learned a lot of manipulating the physics system, generating assets and models for a game (Moreso than the 7DFPS jam), and generally how to build this type of game.

Since GGJ ended, I’ve had this game on my mind and I want to keep working on it weirdly enough. At the very least, I want that first level to play smoother and fix the issues with the waypoint system, or find a better solution to the problem. Perhaps I’ll experiment a bit.

Anyway, that was the game and some of my experiences with GGJ this year. All in all, probably the most productive GGJ so far. If anyone reading this thinks I should continue developing this game, let me know. I would love to get more feedback.

That’s it for this post, bit a long one. Till the next one.

-Adam

18/12/2022: 7 Day FPS Jam

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I made another game for another game jam, check it out.

It’s not a great game, but it’s my third attempt at a first person game, and my first attempt at an FPS. Unfortunately the date snuck up on me quicker than I expected, and I spent late November and early December being unwell to the point that affected my productivity. So a lot of the ideas and mechanics in this are a little rushed and half-arsed. But as a proof-of-concept, it has some charm. If nothing else, I made a Liminal Space Meme Game with guns.

As I said, I was sick at end of last month and the beginning of this month. Literally the day of the last blog post was when I started to feel poorly. By the evening, I had a really bad fever and even vomited. Very unpleasant. It ended up lasting for about a week, although the coldsores lasted a little longer.

Well from one depressing thing to another, England got beaten by France in the World Cup. I really am not going to live to see the day they’ll win again. I could complain more, but it’s not really worth it.

Now for something completely unrelated; I’ve been getting a considerable amount of Blender tutorial videos from YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. Mostly ones about materials. I’ve been thinking about getting into making textures and stuff, maybe try and sell them as asset packs for Blender/Unity. That said, I probably need to find some unique ideas of things to make to compete with all the existing stuff out there. Maybe I’ll make some assets to use in Godot as well.

I might harvest the stuff I made for the recent jam game and sell off some of that. I imagine there would be a market for the guns in there. But I will need to split the profits with the friend who made the models. Although first we need to improve and fix the models a bit, give them correct sights and improve the animations and such.

Right, last thing: Rotaction is 25% off until the 2nd of January. Feel free to grab it at the reduced price if you want to support me.

I am working on the year end blog post with all the games I played and the top 10s, so look forward to that. Later.

-Adam

28/11/2022 – Analogue Pocket GET

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  • The Pocket in the dock.
  • The screen is nice.
  • OpenFPGA support means I can play Neo Geo games.

Hello again. A thing I bought a year ago finally arrived, and it’s pretty sweet.

The Analogue Pocket is an FPGA emulation device that specifically plays GameBoy and GameBoy Advance games. FPGA is hardware emulation, not software, so it leads to greater accuracy in terms of emulation. This generally means less visual glitches but also has the downside of emulating the slowdown in games that would suffer it on real hardware.

Although you can play real cartridges on this thing, the OpenFPGA side is the most interesting part. You can just load FPGA cores made for it and then boot games off the Micro SD card. I have Neo Geo, NES, SNES, and Mega Drive cores on mine. Pretty much all the games I’ve tried have worked perfectly, and GameBoy games especially look gorgeous on the screen.

My major issue with the thing is that I don’t find it particularly comfortable to hold for long periods of time. Much like actual Nintendo handhelds. It’s not as bad as the 3DS or Switch JoyCons, which cause literal circulation problems for me, but there’s still things I would have changed.

I mean there is one more issue; the price. I think I’ve spent £400 on the thing all-and-all. It was £300 for the thing and dock, plus shipping, then the FedEx tax was £70 (Customs charges are a fucking scam), and then another £40 for a Micro SD card and UK USB-C plug. Yeah, it comes with a US plug. Be fair warned.

But I like the thing, and I’m gonna enjoy playing it. I actually did a stream soon after I got it where I played a bunch of games, check it out:

In other news, Indie LIVE Expo is happening soon. Why am I bring up here? Well Rotaction is going to appear during the first day when they discuss currently released games, so keep an eye out for it. But this is the first time one of my games has appeared at a major event, although it’s the second time it’s been promoted. The event will be streamed on the 3rd and 4th of December. Check it out, there’s loads of cool games.

Now, I’m going to talk about what I’m currently working on.

7DFPS (7 Day FPS) Jam is coming up in December, and I’ve decided that I want to take part. So I’m putting together a few things to practice and learn how to make stuff for it. I’m looking at stuff like Probuilder and Pro Grids for fast generation of levels, and learning how to do raycasted bullets with appropriate effects, as you see in the video above.

Now I know what you’re thinking, the Jam hasn’t started yet and I’m over here making stuff. Well, there’s no rule that says I can’t work on stuff a little early and most of this work isn’t going to be used in the Jam game. But it’s better I figure out these problems now, rather than during the Jam.

As for the side project I’ve been working on:

Well, progress is slow. I can shoot a bow now, but it’s a giant mess. Unity’s Rig Builder tool is such a giant mess to use that making it this far is generally surprising for me. But to explain the issue, layers upon layers upon layers. At some point I had to undo a lot of work and replace it with a canned animation, which is how I got the bow aiming and firing to work. Although I can explain some of that as well. When I started with the rigging, I was basing it on the idea of driving the player animation in relation to the bow. That was dumb, now I’m driving the bow animation in relation to the player, which is simpler to implement and has lead to better results.

Well that’s it from me for this time. Now I have to publish this before my power goes out. Which is a thing that’s happening today. Fun times. At least I have some books to read.

Till next time.

-Adam