After 5-6 months of development, Rotaction is complete and ready for release on September 9th!

It will be available for Windows, Linux, and Android. You can buy the game from the Itch.io page or the Google Play Store page once it is available.

It’s been the most fun project to work on so far. Probably because there were few issues that I needed to deal with or just the fact that the overall complexity of the game was relatively low. That said, rarely ever does a game go from being an idea in my head to being a full product, and retains the art style and gameplay that I originally imagined.

I’m happy overall.

Yet Another Side Project

Over the past few months, the YouTube algorithm has been continuously feeding me various tutorials for things. It started with Blender tutorials for modelling, then shaders. The image above being a tease of the thing I’m working on. After that, the Unity tutorials starting coming. However, these were all about one subject: procedural animation.

I got interested, and decided that I want to make a playable prototype of a game idea using these techniques. However, I’ve underestimated the complexity of this project. To start off with, I have to build a 3rd person character controller with various movement options, and the have it interact with various objects and the large monster I’m going to put in it. This monster will be driven mostly by procedural animation.

The player was originally going to be driven by this system, but then I discovered Unity’s Animation Rigging tools that allow me to use IK targeting in tandem with the animations I already have. I haven’t started using these tools yet, but it should be interesting.

I’m going to try and document the development of this prototype, showing all the different systems and how things work. I’ll be streaming development on Twitch and posting it to my new game development YouTube channel.

That’s all for now, I’ll leave you with this.

-Adam

Enjoy the first trailer for Rotaction. There’ll be a proper blog post soon, I’ll talk about Rotaction and something else.

-Adam

The demo is out! Go play it and give me feedback!

-Adam

Happy St. George’s Day.

I’ve been working on another new game, although for justifiable reasons this this. Having made a bunch of game templates within Unity, I decided I should maybe try and make something with it. I had a small idea while ago while replaying one of my favourite games, Everyday Shooter, and thought about making a top-down shooter. But I also wanted to put it on my phone so I figured I should keep the controls simple. Around the same time, I was working on Global Game Jam and wanted to make an Ikaruga style game with colour switching, but as you now know, never happened. But I kept the idea.

And now I present, the new game.

It’s a rotating action game with colour switching as its core mechanic. Additionally, it has arcade style scoring. I’m quite pleased with how it’s coming along. There’s still work to be done, but getting it up to this point was surprisingly fast.

I do have a demo in the works (There’s a HTML version on the currently private Itch.io page), but I’m having difficulty getting the game on the intended platform I wanted it on, phones. Specifically, I can’t get Unity to build to an APK so I can test the game. Just to add insult to injury, the errors I get mostly amount to “Gradle Failed: 4 Errors” and then doesn’t elaborate. It’s infuriating.

I’m looking into solutions, but I’m getting rather pissed off at it. But I’ll keep working on it regardless.

On the plus side, I’ve learnt a lot about exporting and importing packages into Unity, and figuring out what dependencies I need for what game type. So when I eventually release the templates onto the world, it should be a smoother experience.

But just to cover some pros and cons: The templates can be somewhat rigid to work with and depending on what you’re doing may require a lot of additional work and changes. With this game, there’s a lot of stuff I needed to change in regards to what happens with collisions and I’m probably going to need to make adjustments to the spawning code as well. But on the positive side, I have saved days in figuring out various systems for things like aiming and spawning. Overall, I am fairly OK with the practical implementation, but at the same time, I’m curious as to how someone who has no knowledge with the codebase would use these templates.

Now, you maybe wondering what happened to making something with Stride. Unfortunately, I just could not get the engine to play nice. I tried my hardest to load the demo projects as well as empty projects, and it error out each time. And that’s a shame because I was really looking forward to using something other than Unity for once and getting stuck into a new IDE, and finally freeing myself of the chains of proprietary software. Alas it was not meant to be. So I’ll either wait or look into other engines. Not Godot though, that’s just awful to use.

That’s pretty much it from me. As always, you can find me streaming on Twitch. Lately I’ve been using my VRoid model in place of a webcam to see if it interests more viewers and change things up a bit. That model still needs more work though, it’s really ugly in places and desperately needs better textures.

See you next time.

-Adam

It has been a while, I’ve been keeping OK.

As you can maybe guess from the title, I’ve been messing around with PS1 emulation via Duckstation. Although it’s not the only emulator I’ve been fiddling with, I’ve also been poking around with PPSSPP and playing a few gems on PCSX2. Although a lot of work is required to get stuff working properly on the latter there.

I suppose what brought all this on was my desire to play through the old Drakengard games along with my friend linking me the opening movie to Wild Arms 5. All that just locked my brain into a place of wanting to play a bunch of PS1, PS2, and PSP RPGs as well as various other games I missed from my youth.

On PS1 emulation specifically, it’s nice to be able to play those games without the texture warping. It really cleans up the image and can make some of these games look really good still. Stuff like Wild Arms looks like it could be released today by some small indie studio or something. Although the actual gameplay and exploration design is probably a bit dated by today’s standard. But I’ll talk about that in my Den post later in the year.

Another point on the matter, phone emulation has come a long way. PPSSPP was on Android years ago and worked OK-ish. But now it and Duckstation both run pretty well on my Xperia 10 III. However, the experience of syncing up my saves between PC and phone could do with some dedicated support. Currently I’m using Dropbox for Duckstation saves. It works well enough, but you have to make sure that the PC application’s memory card settings are set to make a seperate cards for each game. The phone only gives you that option, and a shared card causes problems when importing.

Right, down to business.

The Game Template Project, the Unity assets designed for building basic game ideas without having to start from scratch every time; has reached a point where I’m fairly happy with it. I wouldn’t say it’s done yet, I do plan on adding documentation and general feel of the “games” isn’t quite right yet. But I’m happy with the amount of different genres covered. Hopefully I might actually finish this project. That would be refreshing. Whether or not it’ll make any money for me is another question entirely though.

Outside of Unity, I’m going to start experimenting with the Stride game engine. It’s an open source game engine made with C# that many say is a Unity-like IDE. My experiences with Godot was prompted my desire to check out other engines and such because I can’t rely on Unity for everything, and quite frankly Unity has been driving me up the damn wall in places. Having an understanding of how other engines and other people do things can only be a benefit. But I am worried about a lack of documentation.

As for what I’m building in it, well I’ll probably start with Pong as it’s the “Hello World” of video game development. Following that, I’ve had a small game idea pinned to my white board for a while now. It’s a very small game, so the scope should be small enough to use it as a reason to learn how to the use the engine. And if it ends up being too difficult to deal with there, I’ll port it back to Unity. Although perhaps at this point I should stop coming up with new ideas and finish the ones I already have.

There’s nothing else really to talk about for the moment. The Den post is getting filled in slowly, jotting down notes as I play through things and such. Again, that’ll be out come June. See you next time.

-Adam