Project Nucliobrain

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Hi all,

It’s been a couple of months since I finished and released by first game, CATALCYSM, which you can check out (for free) here. I still have new stages coming for that game, but I’ve also been feeling the creative itch to move onto the next big thing for me. Unlike my previous game, I want to start this WIP thread from the beginning of active development, so I don’t actually have much to show for this project yet.

This is the game idea that got me excited about the idea of making games about ten years ago-- well before I had any idea I might be able to really do it someday. And, to be honest, I’m not 100% sure I can pull it off as I’m still a one-man “team”, but I’m ready to take a stab at it.

Anyways. The game is a 2D stealth/puzzler with obvious (but hopefully not too obvious) inspiration taken from the first two Oddworld games. The hook is that your character, a zombie, can take himself apart and control his body parts remotely. You’ll be doing things like taking off an arm, throwing it into some darkened area of a hallway to lure an armed guard towards it, and then sneak up behind him with the rest of your body to get the sucker’s brain.

But this zombie (I’ve been calling him “Brian”) doesn’t actually have any malicious intent. Rather than eating his foe’s brains, he “liberates” them. This is the primary goal for the game-- to liberate as many brains as you can. Many will be in glass liquid-filled jars, often at the end of branching paths through levels, but some will be collected from enemies. With the basic, human enemy, you’ll sneak up behind them, grab them by the throat and mash a button to squeeze. After a good squeezin’, the enemy’s head will burst and the formerly “imprisoned” brain will be yours for the taking. You’ll have to take brains to one of the brain escape hatches in the level, which will likely be labeled with a flashy neon sign saying “BRAIN ESCAPE HERE”. You can carry/throw brains, or you can use a simple gamespeak system to call them towards you (or tell them to stop).

One of the big challenges of this project is dealing with Brian’s animation on account of his arms and head being detachable. I’m quite sure that many of you would insist that I use Unity’s animation system, and tweening. But I’m going to stubbornly try to do it my ridiculous way first: The head, and body are separate sprites, as are the arms (though both arms are identical, but they’re separate game objects). I’ve written a rudimentary animation script that each body part will have many of. Each animation component is assigned to a public AnimationScript member in the inspector. When, for example, the body walks, it checks each body part to see if it’s attached, and calls “PlayWalkingAnimation” on each one. I only have one working animation at the moment, but it appears that everything syncs up properly.

The name, Nucliobrain, is what I’ve called this project for years, but I’ve realized that it’s absolutely terrible. The first name that came out of my recent brainstorm (hah) is “Cerebellion”. I Googled it and found that it’s already in use as an obscure prog metal band’s name. I’ll have to read up on the copyright laws when it comes to two completely separate products sharing a name. It’ll be a very long time before any of that matters, but I thought I’d let it be known that I have a better name in mind than “Nucliobrain”. hah

Here’s a short demo of the animation and basic limb gameplay working. The arms and legs will be coloured and detailed once I’m confident the movement all looks right. What do you think?

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I don’t usually think so much about the aesthetic of the games I want to make, but this one has always had a bunch of specific animations attached to it in my mind. One of them is the “brain release” animation. I always pictured it being a little less grotesque and a little more silly. But now that it’s done, I’m quite happy with it.

It should go without saying, but I still haven’t coloured in the limbs properly, and the guards don’t do anything except die.

EDIT: And now the choking works more specifically as intended: You must mash the choke button instead of just holding it. It’s a little more fun that way, I think.

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Once I fully realized how annoying it would be to add a ledge grab/climb feature to Nucliobrain, there was a brief moment when I considered if I really needed it. That was when I knew I had to try to make it work, regardless of whether or not I end up using it (and I definitely will).

I definitely had a difficult time detecting ledges, and I still need to add one more check to make sure a given ledge is not just grab-able but climbable as well. I’m pretty sure the current code would let you climb up into a tunnel only an inch high. Or perhaps it won’t let you even grab a ledge unless there’s enough room to climb it-- I forgot where I left that. Anyways, it kinda works, and that’s awesome.

The real achievement for me here is getting the animation to work. I know it’s not beautiful-- it’s rigid, not properly coloured, and the head climbing frames need more animation-- but on the bright side: The body parts don’t explode away when you climb. See, normally, my “body” sprite fits snugly in its frame with only a few pixels to spare above it. So, I had to use a separate sheet with much space per frame (adjusting the image center in the Unity import settings), and then figure out how to position the arms and head so that they would line up. It wasn’t nearly as intuitive as I expected either. I couldn’t just copy/paste my body frame into my head/arm sheet to use as a guide either. I’m sure there’s a good reason, but I had to adjust each arm and the head over and over. Man, it was annoying. That’s what I get for designing my animation system this way. The real kicker is that the whole point is to allow one body animation to be used regardless of which limbs are attached, but I later decided that you should only be able to climb a ledge if you have both arms anyways. Ha!

After all of that, I’m taking a break from dealing with the climbing stuff. I drew up a shooting animation for the guard which I think looks pretty good, especially considering it’s only two frames. However, I don’t have death animations for the zombie, so perhaps I’ll go on to that next.

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I was just about to make a new thread for this project. I’m glad that I checked to see if I had already done so (nearly two years ago!)

I haven’t worked on this or much of anything else in a very long time for multiple personal reasons, but I’m feeling the need to create something once again. I’ve made a little video that basically shows what the previously-posted videos already show, only with my voice explaining everything. Check it out if you like.

Otherwise, I’d like to hear any feedback that more experienced developers might have for me. I’m aware of many of the challenges I’m setting up for myself, but perhaps there are problems (and solutions) that I haven’t considered that you could bring to my attention.

Thanks, and I hope to be updating soon, even if just for something minor.