Category Archives: My Projects

26/09/2018 – Not Much Going On, Continuing On.

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For the sake of having something to post, I guess I’ll talk about how things are progressing development wise.

So after some turmoil with trying to get custom inspectors to display the data I wanted, I’ve finally gotten back to actual development. This week I’ve added new artwork to the game in the form of sprite work for item pickups, and changed the colour scheme for the game to make it more uniform.

I’ve also added a few new enemy types which are actually just altered versions of existing enemy types.

So yeah, stuff. Have some images to look at:

As you can see, it’s not the greatest piece of artwork, but it is finally starting to take some shape.

A new demo is slated to come out in the first week of November provided things go well.

That’s all for now. Feel free to continue following development at itch.io page.

Later.

-Adam

“Paddles, Ball, & Pegs” Now Back Up

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“Paddles, Ball, & Pegs” was temporarily removed from the Play Store due to some very sudden changes in the developer’s Terms Of Service. It’s back up now, but if you were wondering why it was missing, there you go.

Additionally, I will be making the APK available to download separately from the Play Store sometime in the near future, on the off-chance this happens again or if it gets removed permanently.

On an unrelated note, if you wish to stay up to date with progress on my new game, please go to my Itch.io page. I will try and get a new demo out before October.

15/11/2017 – UI Design and Flashcarts

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Hello again.

I’ve been busy working on the new game, so I haven’t really had much to discuss for this blog. Again, if you want to keep up to date (Or mostly up to date) with that you can check out the itch.io page. But the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a sort of content creator which lets me make stuff for the game without having the code everything. Unity’s UI is decent enough for the job even with a few weird bugs and specifics. It does remind me how much I hate Unity’s hierarchy system because it doesn’t let you access the children of an object without jumping through some hoops.

Anyway, UI design is difficult when you only have so many tools to work with. You have to jerry-rig it a bit and try and mash different UI components in a way that kind of makes sense. In the system I have, there’s a thing where I define what happens on each specific lane, and to do that I originally had the idea of using tabs, which Unity doesn’t natively support so I had to build my own version of it. Then I realised that for later parts of the game, there would be so many damn tabs that you wouldn’t be able to navigate it. So I settled on a drop down menu instead.

Persistent data was another thing I thought about. One issue was keeping data contained in input fields to stay, which I solved by just toggling which containers of game objects that contained all the additional menu stuff would be enabled at a given time. The other issue I made for myself was whenever I generate new waves, lanes, or lane sequences; it would delete all the information that was there, and put fresh new objects there. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get around to fixing this issue though.

In the grand scheme of things, pretty small stuff, but surprising in what it does to the user experience especially considering how convenient everything is nowadays. Stuff really needs to work and be presentable. You can’t just do one or the other.

Moving on, I got a GBA Flashcart. This one.

I haven’t given it too much of a test drive because I’ve been busy with other things, but I can at least say it works. I have a 4GB Micro SD loaded into it, and considering how small most GBA games are, I don’t think I’ll be replacing it. The good news is that I can now play Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance without the game deleting my save because the battery on the cartridge died.

There’s other stuff to talk about but it’s mostly anime and games, and I should probably save that for The Den. Whenever I get around to a new one of those. I will say (And I sure hope I didn’t previously talk about this) that I read the book Masters of DOOM. And if you haven’t read that book, you should. I found it very difficult to put it down. Excellent read.

That’s all for now, till next time.

-Adam

04/07/2016 – Happy America Day!

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Although being in Northern Ireland, there’s not really much reason to care.

Not a long post today, mostly just gonna talk about my project. Progress is going well, albeit a bit slowly at the moment. The itch.io page has links to the development long if you’re looking for specifics. That said, I want to talk about feature creep and individual systems taking more time than they should.

The latter first. So a system I’ve been working on a sub-system that picks that an enemy distribution pattern in the game based on the player’s progress. This has taken me a good two weeks to get to the point where I can get something to work, and that mostly comes down to me overthinking its implementation. When I first thought about it, I wanted to build a system that read in from a text file and would generate all the waves of enemies in the game from that. There were two problems with this system:

  1. Each spawner in the game world can take a variety of arguments that defines speed, timing, and what object is spawning. Because of that, if I was to get them, each spawner on screen could require a minimum of 3 arguments. Which considering there could be a dozen or so on screen at anytime, that ends up being a lot of overhead, which Unity is terrible at handling.
  2. In relation to the first issue, I thought a good way to negate it would be to use asynchronous game objects to handle it. However, Unity being Unity, didn’t make that particularly easy. Specially, the more recent versions of .NET allow for Async reading of text files. But Unity, being .NET 3.0, doesn’t have this option. So I had to abandon that idea. The alternative was to use threading, but I’ve never really had much experience with it, and at that point I figured it was more effort than it was worth.

So in the end, I made a hard coded variant that just told the spawners in game what to do. Currently I’m altering that version to take the update cycle into consideration.

Feature creep is something I’ve commented on before, and I’m not gonna say too much on it. But basically, I went from have two notes on my whiteboard to having 5 of them, all filled with additions I want to add to the game. My notebook is also full of them. What’s happened is that I’ve come up better ways with how I want to game to play, but without noting anything technical of how I want to build it.

To be fair, the biggest set of notes is just a list of game modifiers. Regardless, there’s probably stuff I’m either going to cut, or this game is going to take longer than I would like to make. Guess we’ll find out.

Right, that’ll do for now.

-Adam

P.S. Gaming Den post soon.

08/05/2017 – Project Update and Itch.io Dev Log

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Hey there folks.

I will probably be using itch.io’s new dev log page for my game to distribute news updates on it. You can view it here. Note that the page is using a secret URL because it isn’t public yet. I’ll probably make it public once I have some useable art assets. You can now view the page publically, but it’ll be generally unlisted if you search for it on the site.

As for the first dev log post, you can view that here freely.

24/04/2017 – Working On A New Project

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As I decided to write this, the date changed from the 23rd to the 24th. I am currently starting to write this just past midnight, whether or not I finish writing this tonight is yet to be seen (Somewhat likely, I don’t write much for these).

I can’t remember if I mentioned in my last post that I started a new project. If I did, then my apologies; if not, well guess what? I started a new project.

It’s a game, this time a 3D one that focuses more on traditional control methods (PC/Console friendly), and as such has opened the door to a slew of bullshit wondrous new avenues in Unity’s development tools. Well, sort of. The difference between the 2D and 3D tools from a programming perspective is negligible at best. But, I do feel the development toolset lends itself better to this perspective.

So what is the game? I can’t talk too specifically yet, but it’s a bullet-hell game. Which considering it’s a genre I am terrible at, is pretty surprising that I’m actually doing somewhat well in constructing it.

Now, I’m not quite ready to show any gameplay yet, but I assure you it’s coming along well now. I’m gonna talk about how the progress has been so far, and I am deeply sorry that I cannot go into specific detail about certain scene, scripts, or game objects. It’ll make more sense once I start showing the game I assure you.

When I first started it, I ended up over-thinking a lot of the base principals that would construct the game. Everything was very singular and separated, but still required to communicate with each other. This way of development continued for several weeks, and became harder and harder to work with, and made progress incredibly slow. I didn’t get player movement working on that system until maybe late February or early March.

Sometime after doing the player movement stuff, I got sick and had to take a couple weeks off (I may or may not have also been playing the crap out of Nier Automata by this point, but lets ignore that detail). And after I came back to work on the game, I realised something; Everything I was doing was very convoluted and difficult to manage, especially considering how Unity manages hierarchy of objects in the game scene.

Once I realised this, I broke down all of my previous code and bundled up a lot of the objects that I was generating separately into two slightly different objects (And then made another two based on those), and then generated the game scene based on those. This amendment caused a significant increase in my efficiency and made the other tasks for myself considerably easier.

For example, the player movement code that had taken me several days to make and work properly, now worked within a matter of hours and was much easier to obtain the components I needed from certain game objects.

One of the other issues I had was a little more specific to Unity. I found a need to destroy game objects in a scene, but said objects were being collected in a list. However, Unity’s GameObject.Destroy() function only operates at the end of the frame and not immediately. Which meant that the list I was storing these objects in said there were more of them than there were, which actually broke the player movement system.

Unfortunately, the WaitForEndOfFrame() function didn’t work as I had intended, so I had to resort to rebuilding said lists in the Update() method which is expensive. It’s kind of been nagging me, so I’ll likely end up fixing it at some point in the future. Additionally, the bug can still occur if the player is positioned in a specific way, but that’s also something I’ll fix.

That’s about as specific as I can currently get. Hopefully by the time I write my next blog post I’ll have some images and video to post. Although my next post will likely be a Den post.

That’s kinda all for now.

-Adam

P.S. Persona 5 is hella rad.
P.P.S. Nier Automata is also hella rad.

10/1/2017 – Time To Talk About What’s Going On With My Projects

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First off, it’s no longer 2016. Secondly, as always, my apologies for not posting more regularly.

My project, the one I’ve been working on since 2015, is cancelled. You can view what is was here. So, let me discuss exactly what happened with it.

Around July of 2015; I have the idea to make a game, and I figured a platformer would be easy enough. I still had some left over code from Global Game Jam of that year and figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to make something playable relatively quickly. In all fairness, that part went fine. I made something playable in about a day or two. The point after that is where the problems begin.

I figured I wanted to make something with an under-lying story. Told through thing you would find in the environment. Then I thought, maybe put important things like codes and stuff into those pieces of story documents. And then I thought, what if playing the game poorly means you can’t access the real ending of the game.

OK, getting a bit complicated, but I still built the foundations for these systems with relative ease, and they actually worked quite well at tracking how the player was doing in the game. For the record, I got up to 500 deaths while debugging.

But then I decided, I should put enemies in the game.
And make it a stealth game.
And add even more types of enemies.
And then have all the enemies swarm you if you alert one of them.
And so on.

Over about 5 months, working almost everyday, I managed to get one enemy type to actually get in and out of alert states and follow the player. Along with a bunch of other tweaks.

Around January, I decided to work on a side project, and that took about 4 months away from this project.

Once I got back to it, I felt somewhat unmotivated to continue, even though I had learnt some new techniques from that side project that I should of ideally implemented into my main project. I carried on regardless, and implemented a new, stationary enemy type. While doing so, I realised the why I was handling AI was wrong, and that I really should be doing some inheritance-based structure for my code to make things a bit easier. Which never got past the early implementation stage.

Then I just played video games because I was lacking the motivation to work on it entirely, and because I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing. The sheer amount of work I had made for myself become far too daunting.

At some point in December, I decided to say “Screw it”, and play video games until the new year. Once the new year came, I looked at what was done, what needed to be done, and what the game was supposed to be; and considered it to no longer be viable to complete within the time frame I had set myself.

And so, here we are.

Overall, nothing significant was made. Frankly when you look it, it doesn’t seem like much. It was my first real Unity project though. But yeah, it looks like something other people would probably make in a couple weeks. As a learning experience, both from learning Unity and in general, I gained a lot of knowledge that will be invaluable for future projects.

Speaking of which; I have started a new project. This time, I decided to actually design what it is supposed to be from a gameplay standpoint, and will not add to it until the base design is implemented and it is absolutely necessary to expand upon it.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I learnt something. Designing the game is something you should do before you start building. Doing things as you go will probably lead to feature creep, and then it’ll just become a nightmare to work on as you add more and more on. Going forward, I’m going to try and avoid that.

The rant on the Xbox One can wait a little longer.

And because everyone loves top-10 lists, here are my top-10 video games of 2016…

10. Senran Kagura Estival Versus
9. Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End
8. Zero Escape III: Zero Time Dilemma
7. Digimon Cyber Sleuth
6. Odin Sphere Leifthrasir
5. Steins;Gate Zero
4. DOOM
3. Titanfall 2
2. The Last Guardian
1. Final Fantasy XV

Honourable Mentions: Hitman (2016), Trackmania Turbo, Amplitude
Released Games I Wanted To Play or Play More Of: Quadrilateral Cowboy, Redout, Dishonored 2, I Am Setsuna, Dark Souls III, Furi, House Of The Dying Sun

And my top-10 anime of 2016:

10. Lupin III Part IV
9. Keijo
8. Shokugeki No Souma S2
7. Fune wo Amu
6. Bungou Stray Dogs
5. Koyomimonogatari
4. Yuri On Ice
3. Uchuu Patrol Luluco
2. New Game!
1. Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu

Special Mentions: Kimi no Na Wa, Sansha Sanyou, Sakamoto desu ga?

Pretty good year for both those things. Now to get back to work.

-Adam

11/10/2016: Things I’m Doing These Days

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That’s a good five months between posts? My bad.

First things first, I released that shitty pong clone I was working on, it took me 3 months longer to make than I thought, and 2 months longer to mention the fact I released it. Either way, you can go play it now. I’ll be making a page on this site for it at some point. Here is the site page for the game.

Additionally, I still intend on updating the site with all the stuff I did at Uni at some point.

Now on to what I’ve actually been doing.

I’ve been working on my game, or at least half-working on it. And when I wasn’t working on it, I was going to the Enterprise Centre to sort out my business plan; which is now more or less sorted, I just need to fix it up a bit more. Unfortunately, my game isn’t ready to show yet, probably won’t be until sometime next year once I get the art ready and have something to play. I intend on releasing a demo on itch.io when it’s ready, so people will be able to give me feedback on it.

As for video games, I’ve been playing the new Destiny expansion, Forza Horizon 3, Dark Souls III, and the Japanese version of Persona 5. I’ll probably give my impressions of them when I can be bothered to do so. Although do expect a post where I rant about the Xbox One in the somewhat near future.

But yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing. See you whenever.

-Adam

20/05/2016 – Mobile VR 2: Electric Boogaloo, Uncharted 4, and Dealing With Boredom

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Hello again.

So that previous mobile VR headset, well turns out that the lenses were fucked. On the inside of it, the plastic was corrugated, so everything I looked at was blurry as shit no matter what I did. So I ended up replacing the thing entirely. Now I have the VIGICA RIEM 2.

This headset actually has a magnet switch (Albeit on the wrong side, so I had to switch it), lense adjusters, suction cup grip for the phone, and generally fits better. But most importantly, the lenses are smooth plastic.

It certainly an improvement over the previous piece of crap I had. Actually it’s so good, since I start using it, my previous complaints about getting motion sick have been minimal at best. So I imagine the clearer picture helps a lot with that. Additionally, it’s Google Cardboard compatible out of the box, although the model I have didn’t have the QR code, but luckily someone had generated one.

That being said, I still can’t see the point of it outside of being a head-mounted display. A decent one at that, but only that.

Now. Uncharted 4.

After the disappointment that was Uncharted 3, I didn’t have that high of expectations going into 4. And after playing a good chunk of The Last Of Us and despising it for it’s animation systems and combat, I really thought it was going to have the same issues.

Thankfully, Naughty Dog have learnt and improved.

Pretty game is pretty.

Pretty game is pretty.

The gameplay systems have been improved where combat is concerned. Gunplay is relatively tight (Although they decided to reinvent the wheel and change how aiming and recoil is handled AGAIN) and enemies a little less bullet spongy. Additionally, other than maybe 3 areas of the game, you can use stealth to get through all your encounters. You could do this in Uncharted 2 as well, but the systems have been significantly improved here with indicators showing when an enemy sees you and so on. And should you want it, you can turn these features off.

The dialogue is good, general quips are still pretty interesting and the interactions between characters works in a believable way. The main two villains aren’t great. The main guy is kind of an arsehole in a “I’m a rich guy who wants to become famous, despite already having fame and fortune from my parents” way, which OK, it works but come on. The other is a woman who just seems over-powered for SOME REASON, but ultimately does the “You guys are crazy I’m out” thing right at end of the game. And frankly that just makes her existence seem pointless.

My biggest problem with the game is that it’s not very memorable. No particular events stand out in my mind like Nazi stuff in Uncharted 1, or the train level in 2, or the desert scene in 3. This might change as time goes on and I think about the game again, but who knows.

The in-game graphics filters are great.

The in-game graphics filters are great.

Well, that’s my two cents on that.

The other game I started working on is near completion now. Just needs some adjustments and extras and it’ll be ready for release on Android.

It should of been finished weeks ago, but unfortunately I’ve been having a problem with keeping myself motivated. I’ve barely been doing anything. I just sit in my chair and browse the Internet all day sometimes and listen to the same songs I’ve heard before and then complain about how bored I am. I can’t even be arsed to go through my staggering backlog of games. So if there’s something I can give Uncharted 4 credit for, it’s making me motivated to do SOMETHING other than slowly dying in front of two LCD monitors.

Now that I’ve gotten past the mental block, maybe I’ll actually be productive again.

And I’ll call the Enterprise Centre soon. I sent them an e-mail a few days ago but never got a reply.

-Adam

P.S.

I’ll be updating this site with stuff I’ve done from Uni soonish. I need to clean up this damn room first.