I have been working on this wee game for a few months now, unfortunately only in my spare time as I have a ‘real’ job that I have to keep going to to feed my family!
Its still very much a work in progress, but so far I have the key elements in place, and the game is actually playable now (full UI, character selection etc).
Lots of work to do on level design and graphics, but I think its time to put myself out there and see what people think!
Its basically a 3D angry birds concept (like Catapult King). Storyline is that the Queen Chicken has been stolen by the farmer (probably for christmas dinner) and now you have to battle his evil minions (currently a pig and scarecrow) to get her back.
some screenshots below, and a few videos here:
Would love to hear peoples thoughts on:
The genre (something people would be interested in…too similar to other games etc)
Ideas for gameplay
ideas in general
Thanks for taking a look, and I will try and update this thread as I make progress
Okay so I havent made much progress in the last few days, but I had to share the reason as a bit of a warning/reminder to back up your project and organise your folders in a better way.
Yesterday I managed to delete the folder (within the Unity editor) that I keep my materials in, and I didnt have a backup of my project. I wasnt concentrating and I thought I was deleting one material, but deleted the folder instead! For the most part this wasnt too bad, as my textures were in a different folder, so I just had to recreate materials and re-apply them to all my objects…annoying, but not disastrous. Unfortunately early on I had put my UI sprite sheets in the materials folder, so I lost those completely! So, last night was spent just getting the game back to the state it was before I deleted all those assets
Lesson learned - I have taken a backup of my entire project, and also moved the ‘working’ files for my textures and all my 3d models to a folder outside of the project, and I just save the final versions in the project itself.
So - a timely reminder (that I am sure most of you dont need anyway) - backup your project regularly!!
Oh, and a couple more screenshots just because:
Selection Screen - planning on having many different characters you can choose from (Crossy Roads style). Currently no special abilities planned for these, but each has its own style and animation, so more of a ‘collect them all’ thing rather than a gameplay thing. All characters can be earned by completing certain levels, or in some cases by solving a ‘secret’ like destroying enemies in a particular order on a particular level, or hitting a certain static object etc. Characters can also be bought with in-game currency too.
Details of the enemy pig - each enemy has various animations that will play randomly during gameplay.
Okay not sure if this is the right forum for this, so please feel free to suggest somewhere else I can post it!
My game has a lot of levels (looking to start with 40-50), but I am not entirely sure how to go about creating the world. So far I have decided on a single basic world (that I will probably make a persistent object), and each level will just have the catapult in a different position/different rotation. I have modeled a very basic (IE just cubes and planes) version of the world to test the theory (see below for screenshots taken with the catapult in a few different positions around the world) and it seems to be okay. Is this an acceptable way to go about this though?
Im also having trouble with the boundaries of the level, and what the player can see ‘off the edge’. My current solution is to extend the world out and have a non-playable region where I just put static objects…hills, trees, buildings etc (The world is about 500 x 500 units, with a ‘non-playable’ border of about 150 units). The camera can never follow a projectile in to this area because of bounding boxes with trigger colliders - hopefully the image below will help explain. Is this a reasonable approach, or is there a better way to deal with a finite world and what the player can see in the distance?
Okay after peoples opinions here. My main characters are basically eggs, but with legs/arms. I have been having trouble animating them the way I want (some will play guitars, do various different moves etc) so I decided to try a version with detached hands/feet instead. Screenshot of the two here:
and a quick youtube video of them in action is here:
I would love your thoughts on the ‘detached’ version. I like it, but I think thats partly because its going to make my animations so much more flexible/easier!
Quick update - the project is still going…slowly…I think I have all the coding sorted so the game plays the way I want, now I am just trying to develop enough assets to put together an initial working demo. Quick screenshot of a few of the ‘egg’ characters I am going to include (NOTE: screenshot is from the scene view, text added post-screenshot)
I decided that the ‘Eggs’ needed more variation in shell colour/design. Most of the colours and details are WIP still - just proving to myself that I can create the variations I want first. This is my first real go at textures/3D art so still testing the waters!
A few more characters added. Getting close (thats part-time-dev close, so anything from a few weeks to another couple of months!) to getting a working demo up and running.
Another small update…slowly crossing things off the list!
Individual character animations done - these will be used in the selection screen. As each character is shown on the selection screen its animation will play.
Would love some feedback as the game is getting closer to being ready. Quick video below showing characters in the selection screen, and a couple of shots to destroy the enemies. Also shows the ability to move the catapult left-right and up and down.
im interested in your game art how did you make it, i have WIP the skeleton of the game is done but i can not post it to any market because it doesnt have proper characters, or levels
Hi kingarri,
This game was my first intro to creating 3d game assets so i might not be the best person to ask!
I used Blender for all my asset creation including modelling and animations. I used photoshop for the textures. It was a lot of youtube tutorials and trial and error. I think the current ‘egg’ character is about the 8th version. I scrapped the others because they didnt look right, were too high poly, didnt animate well etc.
Having a firm concept in mind (the egg with wings and feet) helped a lot as it gave me a focus for my learning
Getting closer and closer to a release now. Would love to hear anyone’s opinion, or to be honest, just get any words of encouragement that might help me push past the last couple of hurdles to actually complete this game!
Here is a quick rundown of what I have so far, and what I need/want before I go live.
What I have:
full in game functionality sorted - the catapult works just as I want it, fires well, breaks blocks, kills enemies, gives the player points etc. actual gameplay is pretty much sorted.
Character selection including ability to unlock or purchase new characters
level selection
‘special’ bullets that you can purchase during gameplay that will assist in completing levels
functional store where you can use real money to buy in-game currency
‘look around’ mode giving the player limited scope to look around the level…move camera any direction, rotate camera and zoom in and out.
‘points’ system that rewards player for completing level, and also gives extra credit for a few simple extras. completion of levels gives player in game currency that they can use to purchase characters/special bullets
several areas where levels can be based, giving me the groundwork to build the first set of (hopefully 40-50) levels.
What need/want to add and or fix:
Sound
Ads
add other non-critical assets (trees, shrubs, fences, barrels, rocks etc) to fill the levels.
quite a bit of work still to do on textures…lots of ‘placeholder’ textures being used currently
Okay - I have built a playable web demo. Its missing a few things, and there is obviously a lot still to be done (particularly with textures), but gives an idea of gameplay. Unfortunately all the purchasing ability is android specific so none of that is working in the demo. I really just made it to send to a few friends to get a first impression.
Some things to note:
level 2 and 3 are the same, but just with the catapult in a different location. Level 2 and 3 also have 3 of the ‘special’ bullets pre-loaded (because you cant purchase them in this demo).
I probably need to add some screen tips to the early levels, but the basics are click and drag to pull back and aim, release to fire. There are levers either side of the catapult that can be used to adjust the catapult up and down as well
Usual caveats with a web demo - requires the unity webplayer plugin and only runs in IE (I think).
If you do try it out then I would love any feedback - I have a bunch of changes in mind that need to be done pre-release, but I would love to know what other users opinions are. Think you should be able to play the demo here:
Slowly building up the finished assets - several variations of the ‘blocks’, a wee brick wall, some small bushes - they are a bit of an experiment as they are just planes with a cutout material applied, not something I have used before.
I really feel like this is starting to come together, just have to remind myself to just keep pushing!
Really starting to enjoy texturing items and building up the scene - its nice to see the difference between ‘placeholder’ textures and the potential in-game version. I thought this part of the process would be the most difficult/frustrating for me (I havent designed 3D assets before, and Im no artist either!), but so far I am quite enjoying it. Maybe its because the effort put in gives a pretty instant reward
For those interested, the house has 166 verts / 298 tris and uses a 512 x 512 texture (shared with the little wall in front of it). Not really sure how much a mobile game can take with textures/verts etc, but so far this one is running smooth on my galaxy s4
I just played through the demo and it is quite a fun and simple game. I read through some of the above posts quickly and here is some feedback I have for you:
The only bug I noticed in that game is that there is a slight flicker were two cylindrical meshes are intersecting each-other on the bottom of the catapult. Not a big deal but should probably be fixed before release.
Without having tested this at all on a phone, it seems like an option to use the phones tilt to control the angle and pitch of the catapult could be a nice feature.
I feel that the world needs some more decoration. Flowers, different types of trees, windmill on a hill are what first comes to my mind. Also possibly some kind of blur/fog could work to blend out the background.
If you are planning to build many levels you may want to consider building some type of level editor/tools to speed up the process. I would also love to see a built-in level editor.
This is a fantastic game and I would be happy to help with further testing. If you need me to test future builds feel free to send me a private message to let me know.
Thanks,
Aiden
EDIT: Also wanted to let you know that it will run and Firefox and most other browsers, just not Chrome.
Thanks for taking the time to test the game, and to offer such good feedback. Firstly I am glad you enjoyed the game.
Thanks for noting that slight bug, one i hadn’t noticed so i will fix that pre-release.
I did consider using tilt as a control method, and having someone else suggest it does reinforce it as an idea, maybe as an option that can be turned on/off
I agree, lots more decoration needed in each scene -something up on the hill is a good idea too. I had thought about fog or some sort of blur, but to be honest i am so new to unity/game dev that i haven’t learned how to do it yet. I think it would improve them look though so it’s on my pre-release list.
A level editor may become a requirement i think, i hope to have a lot of levels in the final build!
An in game level editor was on my initial brainstorming list, but i culled it to keep the project in a somewhat realistic scope! I may look at it as a post-release update if the game gains any success.
Thanks again for your positive feedback, it gave me a bit of a boost to be honest. I will be sure to let you know when i have the next beta version ready for testing
Oh and a little dev note - ironing out some small issues, but release date for a test version (full functioning, but only a few levels) should be pretty soon
Time for a quick update. I have been working on getting my ‘enemies’ a bit more efficient. I found once I had 5 or 6 enemies on screen the framerate would drop significantly, to the point that it was unusable. I need to have between 10-15 enemies on screen in some levels, so I went about learning what might be causing the issue.
Firstly, I simplified the meshes as much as I could, removing some vertices that were not necessary, and in some cases redesigning parts of the character completely to cut back on verts. I also reduced the size of the texture both enemies share. (I just literally halved the size of it from 2048 to 1024 - made very little difference to the quality). That gave me slight improvement, but still not enough.
Next I looked at my rig - I had used rigify in Blender to create my rig and my animations. I wondered if it was just too many bones, so I did some tests with just a single bone, and that seemed to make the most difference.
So as a solution (that so far seems to be working) I created a very simple rig (14 bones) for each character. I have thrown in some very poor animations as a test, and it appears to be working okay. I can have 20 enemies in my scene now and the framerate on my Galaxy S4 sits around 30-35fps, and feels fine to play.
If anyone has any suggestions on ways to optimise animations then I would love to hear from you!
