Party Animals - Mario Party clone

[HemiMG1]

Update #2: Party Animals now has an alpha demo version out. I would really appreciate opinions on what works, what doesn’t, and ways to improve: Party Animals Alpha Demo file - IndieDB
Update: Sportsball Party is now Party Animals, and has animal characters instead of balls. Details in post #6

Hi everyone, since money is running out quick and I’m waiting on other people before I can finish my game show game, I decided to make a mini-game collection like Mario Party. It came about after a marathon session of Mario Party 7 at a friends house when I created a mini game with her 9 year old son to teach him a bit about coding.

I hope to put it in early access when I finish 10-15 games and get a Points Race mode (similar to Mario Party’s decathlon mode) in place. I figure at that point it will fit in with YamaYama and Party Panic and hopefully alleviate some of my financial worries so I can get both projects finished with a bit less stress.

So far, I’ve finished four mini-games. The AI isn’t done yet, but of course that will be done before anything is released. The four games are below:

Bumper Balls is a sumo style game where you gain points for knocking the other opponents off of the platform. Points are deducted if you commit suicide by rolling off of the platform yourself. This is the game I made with my friend’s son. It was originally going to be teddy bears in hamster wheels but we couldn’t find a suitable teddy bear model and before I got home to make one, the step-dad recommended a variety of sports balls instead. Since there needs to be over 50 mini games, reducing the workload of animating characters made that sound like a good idea. There will still be some levels when you are in vehicles or other props, just like Mario Party. I may also give the balls arms and legs, Pac-man style, for the board game portion so that the player avatars can have a bit of character to them.

Bumper Knockout is just me lazily using the exact same code, pretty much. In this one the goal is to be the last ball standing, rather than to get the most points.

Pinball Slalom is similar to a ski slalom except you are avoiding pinball obstacles. The first wave is just the blocks that you see in the screenshot. After that come a series of bumpers that will knock you around a bit if you hit them, and finally at the bottom of the run is a set of flippers that will knock you back upwards if you don’t avoid them.

Roller Derby is just a traditional race around the track game. The first to complete three laps wins.

I realized after I cropped the screenshots that I forgot to change the balls. There are many more choices than the five balls represented in the screenshot. With the exception of the baseball, all of the balls have different color options. (Baseballs are boring, they pretty much only come in one color. Maybe I’ll make a yellow softball.) Not shown are the dodgeballs and soccer balls. At a later date I expect to add (rounded) American footballs, a tennis ball (tennis balls are boring too) and some wooden croquet balls.

The plan is to finish the 15 or so 4 player games before moving on to create the board game portion. After one board is done I’ll create the 2 vs 2 games, then another board, then the 1 vs 3 games, etc.

I’m hoping to create something that will do something near as well as Party Panic. According to Steam Spy, that isn’t making the creator rich, but it is earning him a living. Having never done any network coding, I’m a bit concerned how, and if, the Unity physics will play over a network. If never having online play is a requirement, then it might not fair as well as its competitors. Time will tell though.

[HemiMG1]

I made another minigame yesterday. They won’t be coming as fast as things progress because there are things that I’m not doing currently before moving on, such as adding sound and AI and things of that nature. After each minigame I mark a few of those things off the list for each of the completed ones and then consider them something that must be done before moving on.

This one is called Big Ball Bash

The goal is to touch that giant ball-that-people-knock-around-at-concerts ball. When you do it will turn the color of your player’s score box. The person who keep the ball colored their color the longest wins.

This one is also the first one to move from a 40 degree FOV to 50. I wanted to keep the aspect ratio consistent across all games, but it just fit better at that ratio. I don’t suppose it matters too much, as long as it doesn’t get crazy with the differences. There will always be a 2d screen of some sort in between the 3d scenes, so the change probably won’t be too noticeable.

I also added a dodge ball and a soccer ball to the screenshot. The dodgeball doesn’t look as good in this game as it does in some of the games where the balls are a bit bigger on screen.

Today is going to be spent cleaning up the code a bit. Because of the spontaneous nature of the project, things aren’t a modular as they should be. I need to organize all the code that I am copying and pasting a lot and make it into reusable components, hookup more than in code rather than the inspector, things of that nature.

I’m also hoping to get the sound added for all of the games. Right now the only sounds that occur are when the balls hit each other or the floor. For some of the minigames I just need to add that sound to the non-rigidbody colliders. Some of them, like the one with fire, will have some extra ambient sounds.

I lost some time today because I realized that the newest game, and probably many more to come, need to be locked at 16:9 to look right. Getting the camera resizing code up and running was easy enough, but the UI gave me difficulties. The Aspect Ratio Fitter script doesn’t seem to do anything if you go to a wider ratio. Even if you change it to height adjust width or whatever it is called. The value changes in the inspector, but the screen looks the same. At least in the editor, I don’t have a 21:9 display to test it with. After messing around for too long trying to figure out what was up with that, I finally just added code to the camera resize script to get the canvas components that turns off the aspect fitter and adjusts the width/height ratio of the canvas scaler. I wish I’d thought of that earlier to save myself some time. I still need to add the letterbox camera, but my coffee is getting stale so I’m going to finish that first.

I’m hoping to put in on Greenlight after 6 or 7 minigames and the AI is finished because that should be enough to show off how it looks and what it is all about. I also plan on launching a Kickstarter. Originally I was going to ask for enough to get through the first board game and release on Early Access when that is done. But that will take a lot of money and I’m afraid it won’t make the goal. So instead I think I’ll just ask for a couple thousand or so to get the decathlon mode up and running and release that on early access. Maybe the larger goal can be a stretch goal that will get Kickstarter backers access to the decathlon mode before Steam users get the one with the board game.

[HemiMG1]

I’ve got a new mini-game finished. This one is called Log Stampede:

The goal is just to avoid the logs and be the last man standing. I had some troubles with this one. I’m using the temporal anti-aliasing in the new post effects. It turns out that it tries to anti-alias things that are under other things, causing horrible ghosting. The meant that anytime the logs rolled under the deck, the deck and barrels would have the outline of the logs show up. I solved it by setting triggers on the deck and only allowing motion vectors to be on if the logs are outside of the triggers.

You can see that the balls are in their carts for this one. I made the carts for games that will require more precision, or would be ruined by the ball physics. This one would be exceptionally difficult without more fine grained control. You can’t tell from the angle that this particular game is at, but the carts roll around on caster wheels so you can move in any direction. The base with the wheels is also separated from the body with the headlights. The base doesn’t rotate, but the body will spin around to match the direction that you are moving.

I’m not going to make any more mini-games for a while. I want to finish up all of the things that need to be done for each mini-game, like sounds, intro cameras, results pages, optimization, and AI. Hopefully I can get all of those except for the optimization and AI done over the weekend. Then next week I want to alternate between working on those two remaining things and designing and modelling the first game board. As I said before, I want to release on early access when the Points Race mode is done, before the game board is. But I also want to try a Kickstarter and I think it’ll be easier to kick start a party game if I have the graphics of the board to show off.

Also during the past few days I cleanup up the project a bit and made some base classes prefabs that make it much easier to just drop some things into the scene and have bare bones functionality.

[HemiMG1]

I’ve got the results page and a proper finish to the mini-games in place. I really thought that I would get a lot more done this weekend. I’m not sure how it took me as long to get a results page coded as it did to make any of the mini-games, but it is what it is.

When the game ends, a text pops up telling them who won. The winning player(s) also bounce up and down. I’m not sure I’m keen on keeping that as the finish yet. It doesn’t actually make sure they are grounded before freezing things and having them pop up on down, so it may look really artificial. However, the bounce already looks a bit more like a pulse or something than a proper bounce, since they are just lerping between positions. So any artificial-ness comes across as intentional. I’m just not sure how happy I’m going to be with that as time goes on. The screenshot below shows Socrates the soccer ball bouncing. It isn’t really obvious that he’s doing that from the still shot though. It kinda just looks like he’s on the other side of Bill the Billiard ball. (Oh yeah, the balls have silly names now so I’d have something to put in the text. I also want them to be more character like in board game mode, so they were going to need names eventually anyhow)

A screenshot of the results page is below. This is what took for seemingly ever. Don’t ask me why, it looks super simple.

Eventually I’ll get some video posted, which would make that screen slightly more interesting. The ticket counter animates up, the press to continue label flashes and there is a very subtle gradient overlay in the background fading in and out.

After the results page comes the scoreboard, which shows the standings for the overall board, as well as some arrows to tell you how your rank was affected by the mini-game that was just played.

As you can see, the color of the background matches the color of the player who won the mini-game, or is in the overal lead, depending on the screen. I’m not sure how happy I am with how Socrates’ yellow color looks in that background. I’ll probably see if I can’t brighten up the yellow without it looking too bad in the score boxes. If it does, maybe I’ll only brighten it for the scoreboards.

In the game, trophies will be the same as stars in Mario Party and tickets the same as coins. Both images used in the screens above are rendered in Unity from the 3d models. The ticket model is a bit too high poly to be used if there are ever going to be lots of them in the game, around 570 triangles because of the ridges at the end. So I also made a lower poly version of those without said ridges. I really don’t know if there will be an instance where there are enough of them for it to matter. But I figure it’s best to have the option.

The ticket model isn’t particularly interesting, but I have attached snapshot of the trophy in Substance Painter below, so a better look at that can be had. I think it turned out pretty well.

All of the code supports the 2 vs 2 games and 3 vs 1 games even though none of those are made yet, so everything the should be nice and drag and drop from here on out.

The weekend isn’t over yet, I’ll still be up for a few more hours, so I’m going to try to get the opening camera animations for the 6 mini-games done before that time comes. I’m giong to try to come up with a series of standardized motions so they can be reused in future mini-games with minimal effort on my part. The shear number of mini-games means every hour saved on each is pretty important.

I still have to do the sounds, AI, and optimizations for each of the mini-game. But tomorrow I’m going to start work on figuring out how I want to handle displaying the board and doing whatever modelling and texturing I can for that.

[HemiMG1]

I mentioned that I wanted to get the basics of a board done in preparation for a kickstarter. I got that done late last night. As you’ll see from the screenshots, all of the spaces are blue. Unlike Mario Party, the team games will be decided by the draws to see how many spaces you go. There are also green spaces to indicate where the trophy space is, and red spaces to indicate that something bad will happen if you land on it. But those aren’t represented in the screenshots. There is also a yellow space that I was going to use to indicate a space where you have to choose a direction, but I didn’t like the way that looked. I think the board may get confusing without some indication though, so I’ll figure something out if that time comes. Mario party uses arrows on the board, but I don’t know if I want to do that.

Anyhow, here is a screenshot of the overall board in the scene view, and another set of shots at various places in game view.

IIRC, the forum limits the number of screenshots you can add to each post, so a more detailed version of how the board was created can be found at the IndieDB page: First board started news - Sportsball Party - IndieDB

An addendum to that though is how I created the splat map. RTP is supposed to let you save the splat map as a file, but I kept getting a null reference error. Since it was only 512px, I just enlarged the preview pane and took a screenshot of it. I wanted to have more control over the blurring between segments and to add an overlay of clouds to mix between two different grasses to reduce tiling.

I think I’m going to switch the board over to using a more patchy grass. The selection of grasses I have isn’t very large and I think the golf board would be better suited to the more full grass textures.

[HemiMG1]

Sportsball Party is now Party Animals with the creation of these four guys:

I have varying degrees of satisfaction with the character models. I think the cow looks adorable. The hippo looks pretty much like I wanted it to. The bear is on its third iteration and still looks too much like a teddy bear at some angles. The tiger is in its second iteration and also looks off in some angles.

The animals have spherical bodies because they morph into balls to keep the mechanic of the game going. The morphing is animated and will be shown in a video at some point.

Here you can see them in their morphed state playing the Bumper Balls game. As I add more animals, I’m hoping to create some that aren’t fur based so the variation in materials can be similar to what that of the sports balls where.

The animals won’t always fully morph into a ball. Sometimes, they may not morph at all. Here there are in Log Stampede with their heads still visible and their arms only partially morphed. The heads look around as they are moving, but I hope to improve that further when the AI is in. I want them to look at nearby players if they are close enough and at an appropriate angle.

In addition to the characters there is now an animated camera intro for each mini-game that will also be shown in a future video. Shown in the screenshot above is the new ending for the mini-games. I wasn’t happy at all with the simple bouncing ball. Adding characters helped a lot because they can unmorph. But the camera also moves to a new position, which really adds to the visuals. I didn’t notice until posting this screenshot that the hippo and the tiger are floating above the ground. That will be fixed.

The final screenshot shows the new icons for the characters in the results page. I’ll eventually be giving the animals actual names, or at the very least call the tiger a tiger instead of a cat.

I’m really interested in opinions on these characters. I think they’ll add a cartoony charm that wasn’t there with the balls.

[HemiMG1]

I got quite a bit of work done in the week since the last update. There is now AI in place for all of the completed mini-games and the sound is done for about half of them. When the sound is fully finished, I’ll finally make some gameplay videos so you guys can get a better idea about how the game looks and plays.

Also finished during the past week is several menus. Below is a shot of the game selection menu:

Party Boards will be the Mario Party style board game. Points Race is a mode where you play a number of mini-games back to back and the player with the most points at the end wins. Memory will be the card game of the same name. You have to win a mini-game to get a turn. Players continue playing mini-games until all of the 12 cards (6 pairs) have been claimed.

The player select screen is below:

Once all the human players have joined and selected a character it will switch to the CPU player selection mode where the first player can select the computer players and set their difficulty.

Finally, I got the instruction screens done. You can see one below. Of course the background will change depending on the game being played. Like the scoreboard backgrounds, it will change color depending on who is currently in the lead.

I’m hoping to finish up the sound for the rest of the games today or tomorrow. I’m also going to be working on getting the Points Race mode fully functional. Part of that will be creating a scene to show who the winner is. That scene will replace the current winner shot in the mini-games as well because I’m not quite happy with them. Many of them zoom in closer than textures were intended to or expose more of the scene than was intended. So replacing them will hopefully improve the final quality.

[HemiMG1]

I finally got the animations in. It was a bit of a pain for a number of reasons, but the next post should finally have some video. The first problem I had with the animations is that my characters eyes popped out of their head for seemingly no reason when I added the idle animation. It took a while to figure out, but Mechanim was confusing the eye game objects for eye bones.

I then had a problem with the mesh moving outside of the bounding box and causing collision problems. That also took a while to figure out. I set the root motion to all of the various settings and nothing fixed it. Finally I just disabled root motion. I don’t think I’ll be using it. Even with root motion turned off, the problem came back when I set up an animation transition. The second transition would move the mesh within the bounding box again. This time I solved it by setting the Y position of the animation from original (or whatever the default is) to feet.

The final problem, which I’m sure will be ongoing, is that Blender likes to overwrite my keyframes for some reason. So if I move something around and don’t set a keyframe, it still somehow keeps that position and screws up the animations. I haven’t figured out what causes that. But it is very annoying.

Until I get some video up, I do have some new screenshots. The new winner screen is done. When a minigame is over, the players will see this instead of switching to a new camera in the minigame’s playing field. As mentioned in the last post, the textures and levels weren’t really designed to be viewed from random angles, so that method looked ugly.

Even though they aren’t in motion in an image, it’s still nice to show a screenshot where the characters aren’t in an A-Pose. The bear is nodding, because he won. The others have dropped their shoulds and heads and are shaking their heads in dismay. There are also blendshape animations that have been in for a while. The winners eyes open wider and they smile. The losers eyes close a little and they frown. For whatever reason, these animations aren’t particularly obvious when the motion plays. (The weren’t particularly obvious before the motion played either).

For the final winner of the game, the scene starts with the curtain closed while a public domain version of The Honors March by John Philip Sousa plays.

Once the music really kicks in, the curtains open and the lights on those tall standing boxes and the stars on the arch start flashing in time to the music. I’m a bit concerned that some people will find the flashing annoying, so that may change as the video, and later the game itself, comes out and feedback starts coming in. I have played it with the lights off and it didn’t seem overly annoying to me. So it might be okay.

I didn’t notice until I just uploaded that screenshot that I happened to grab it at a time when the lights are off. That’s mildly annoying. I guess Enlighten will have to wait until the video is done to show what it can do.

I have a few more little things to take care of and then I’m going to record the video to make a Greenlight trailer and Kickstarter video with. With the changes coming to Greenlight I don’t know whether to submit and hope it gets approved before they take Greenlight down, or wait and get the refund on my submission fee that they offer if you haven’t submitted a game yet .The lack of communication from Valve regarding timelines and pricing for Steam Direct make it a bit hard to make an informed decision in that regard. But as of now I’m thinking that if Greenlight can drive $100 worth of donations to the Kickstarter than it will have been worth it regardless.

[HemiMG1]

Party animals is now on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1118877725/party-animals

I’ve also put in on Greenlight. I debated not doing that because it means not getting a refund on the $100 fee to go towards Steam Direct. I thought it would drive traffic to the Kickstarter and make it worth it. Instead the 82% no votes have me feeling dejected. The page is here: Steam Community :: Error

I’ve finally got some videos of the character animations and the camera intro animation to show. Youtube really did a number on the videos when it compressed them, so I’m not really happy with how they look. But I don’t know how to get better quality unless I have to upload uncompressed files, which my bandwidth allowances will not allow for.

Party Animals Minigame - Big Ball Bash

Party Animals Minigame - Bumper Balls

Party Animals Minigame - Bumper Knockout

Party Animals Minigame - Log Stampede

Party Animals Minigame - Pinball Slalom

I’m going to start on the next minigame today. But first I think I should research what a normal percentage of No votes on Greenlight is and reevaluate whether I should spend time working on the project or go back to looking for contract work before the bill collectors get too angry. Maybe I just need to give it more time…

[HemiMG1]

Some of the feedback on Greenlight mentioned that the animations didn’t look very good in the game. That is a very valid criticism, so I took the time to replace some of them with Mocap data. I don’t like to make posts without much to show, but I’d really like opinions on the new animations:

Animation Improvements

There’s still some work to do. It looks like the hippo is hitting the cow, so I need to shuffle the players around a little to account for the wider animations. I also have to remake the animation that plays right before the roll up into a ball. Finally, I want to add more lifelike animations to the characters as the roll around in the cart.

Hopefully those changes will help minimize the impression that some greenlight users have that the game is shovelware. I should have done it this way right from the beginning, so I’m kicking myself right now.

[carking1996]

Looks great!

[HemiMG1]

@carking1996

Looks great!

Thanks! The people on Tigsource have also said nice things about the game, and I was excited about it, but the response from Greenlight has been demoralizing.

[manpower13]

Hi there,

I really like party games and this looks like something fun. There are some things missing though. People on Greenlight already mentioned the Graphics and animations. Something else that looks a bit strange is the mini-game where you have to push people of the map. I get the idea and it’s a fun idea, but it looks really slow. Maybe some interactive parts with the map rotating or moving? Or faster movement? I’m not sure, but it might need some attention ;).

Take the comments as critique and make sure to listen to them, they’re very useful.

[carking1996]

Oh, also might wanna go for something cuter? For graphics instead of realism

[HemiMG1]

@manpower13

People on Greenlight already mentioned the Graphics and animations. Something else that looks a bit strange is the mini-game where you have to push people of the map. I get the idea and it’s a fun idea, but it looks really slow. Maybe some interactive parts with the map rotating or moving? Or faster movement?

Do the animations in the newest video up above look okay? The animations definitely needed improving, and hopefully the changes I made are a step in the right direction. I still need to make a new animation for when the characters ball up, and I think I’m going to have them walk up a few feet to the ball up spot to bring a little more life into the scenes. I also used Dynamic Bone on the spine when they are in the cart to have the bobble around a little bit. It’s a rather subtle effect, because if not it looks horrible, but again, hopefully it will bring some life to the motions.

The speed on the balls for the bumper balls game was set based on Play testing, but I have speed them up considerably, from 7 to 12. Until I have some humans to play with again, I won’t know what effect it will have on gameplay but maybe it’ll look better in the video. Having the platform rotate was also a nifty idea, and I’ve implemented that as well. At least for the one in the water. The one in the lava doesn’t look right rotating. Maybe, since they are similar, getting rid of that game entirely isn’t a bad idea. I’ll make a decision on that later in the process.

@carking1996

Oh, also might wanna go for something cuter? For graphics instead of realism

Yeah, people have mentioned that. I think it’s a big hurdle in my way, but I’ve tried stylized, cartoony graphics many times and I’m just horrible at it. When people complain about the current graphics on Greenlight, I’m not sure whether they simply mean it doesn’t match the style, or that the game looks ugly regardless. If it’s the latter maybe ugly stylized is better than ugly realistic. Trying stylized graphics would take me completely out of my wheelhouse though.

[carking1996]

Well go low poly, like those simple games. Not blocky minecraft, but something like these…

Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making

[HemiMG1]

I’ve been getting a lot of feedback that things don’t seem very “alive” in the game. I’m beginning to realize that focusing on the ball mechanic first, while efficient from a coding standpoint, wasn’t a great idea from a marketing standpoint. I have a minigame that I’ve already started on that has the players in a vehicle, but after that one I plan on doing a couple where they run around on foot.

In the meantime, I have setup a character controller for the animals and put them into the basic board that I had created. I’ve also added some trees to the board to decorate it a little bit. There is still some more decoration needed, I plan on adding patches of flowers, something in the back where it is currently just open fields, and perhaps some buildings as the board game portion develops. But I wanted to put together something that shows the animals in their animal form and moving around a bit.

Party Animals Board Preview

It has also been bothering me a bit that the grass in the Log Stampede game didn’t match all that well with the grass used in the board game portion. In the interest of consistency I’ve replaced the grass texture. You can see the screenshot below, although the difference isn’t huge.

I also plan on adding a boat or something to break up the horizon line in the intro to the Bumper Balls mini-game. I don’t like just having a flat horizon there, even if it is only shown briefly.

[Aiursrage2k]

Look at mario party where everything is bright toony and colorful. So rather then focusing on the balls, have the characters on the balls.

Even in the overworld you got flowers animated, flags waving, rollercoasters in teh background, boat turning, even the gombas are bouncing up and down etc

Mario Party 10: Part 01 - Mushroom Park (4 Player)

[HemiMG1]

@Aiursrage2k

Look at mario party where everything is bright toony and colorful. So rather then focusing on the balls, have the characters on the balls.

Even in the overworld you got flowers animated, flags waving, rollercoasters in teh background, boat turning, even the gombas are bouncing up and down etc

Yeah, there’s going to be a lot more movement in the final board, I just wanted to show the characters moving more for now. I may revisit the ball games, but since they will only be about 25% of the total games, and the morph into a ball mechanic will come into play later as a “ground pound” style attack, I’d rather wait until they are seen in the full context. I think starting with them was a horrible, horrible, mistake because it gives the impression that they are always going to be balled up. Even when the characters were balls, they were going to have arms and legs at some point. Though at that time they were going to look more like Pac-man.

I’m not sure whether to continue with the project or scrap it now though. I’ve tried over and over and over and wasted hours trying to do the cartoony graphics and I can’t do it. If the game won’t work without them then wasting any more time and money on it doesn’t make financial sense.

[MonkeyPuzzle]

Looking great! The colors and challenges look really good. The art is tight. Part of me wonders what it might look to see things pushed in more of a ‘toon’ direftion - Great effort overall!