[Christmas Update]

Christmas Update




Hey guys, I guess it's been a while since my last update, so I thought I'd do something before I go away for the holidays.

We've finally released our first Pre-Alpha build to those who've pre-ordered Buildanauts. So that's kind of exciting (it's my first time ever releasing anything to anyone, so maybe I'm more excited about that than I should be).

I've mostly been working on implementing the User Interface and starting on the AI for our NPC system (they're pretty dumb, but they at least walk around, follow the day/night cycle, pick other buildings to go into and that's pretty much it so far). Eventually I'll be giving them a desire system where they try to fulfill tasks/needs like entertainment, groceries, fitness, etc.

Here's a bit of a VIDEO of where we are now, it doesn't really show the NPCs unfortunately, but I'll try to get something up with them eventually. (The video kind of stutters for the last minute, sorry about that).

As always, any votes on Steam Greenlight are appreciated as well:

I really like the style of your characters and the over all lighting setup. It's very appealing and pleasant to look at. Looking forward to your future updates. Good luck!

Thanks.
The character concepts were already there when I began the project. But I've been pushing for a... I don't know if there's a name for this (I'm assuming there is though), but a cartoonish realism. We have pretty goofy characters and simple textures, but then stick on detailed normal maps and other things to make them look more lifelike. I find things look kind of like they're made out of plastic, which isn't really bad in my opinion - bright colours, reflections and everything (if the game does well we've talked about marketing out for toys, so that should translate extremely well). It makes for an interesting style visually. Unfortunately, even at 1080p the video doesn't quite do the colours justice though.

Hopefully I'll get the NPCs in within the next 2 weeks and then a revamped UI on top of that to show off by the end of the month.

[Painting]

Hey everyone,

I've been pretty busy the past ~2 weeks. My primary focus was on the building design for the game. I managed to get both the painting and stairs in finally we've also upgraded to the Unity 5 beta (it isn't perfect, but the lighting and new Standard shader are pretty awesome).



Painting
The painting as a bit trickier than I had thought it would be. I had to rework my design system to support multiple meshes for materials, remove unused mesh/materials and set up a UI system to make selection a bit easier. I'm still missing a few features I'd like to implement eventually. Namely dragging to paint over multiple surfaces, and replacing an entire material by holding down a single button. Both of those will be implemented in the future, but probably on the back burner for a little while.

Stairs
The stairs went in surprisingly easily however; we haven't textured it yet, but it's ready for that now (I modeled and UV mapped it myself, and I'm pretty pleased lol). The most difficult part was getting a mesh to generate beneath the steps (this can be toggled). So the UV mapping had to take that into account as it connects to the side of the step seamlessly... I hope. The system isn't perfect, and I'll need to add a few more checks to the area around the base of the stairs. But in general it seems to be working quite well so far.

Upgrade
Unity 5 is pretty interesting so far. It broke far less than I thought it would. But the biggest problem we've had is it no longer works with the Edy's Vehicle Physics plug-in. He's working on an update though, so I'm leaving the vehicles in a broken state until it comes out (he's estimating January, but hopefully it's sooner). Unity 5 has a revamped wheel collider which is causing quite a few headaches with that system unfortunately.

Video
I decided to play around with the game and record it this evening, so here's the video. It's a bit long but gives a decent idea of what we've been up to. The house design starts around 5-6 minutes in.

Gameplay Footage

Coming up next
The next thing I'll be implementing is NPC generation and pathfinding, along with a reworked UI for our Pre-Alpha release in December (so it's a very busy time right now). Hopefully I can get everything working and stable before Christmas.



Kickstarter
Unfortunately, we didn't reach our Kickstarter goal. But we did get a decent amount of coverage and we'll try our best to find other means for funding. We've opened up pre-orders in hopes some people might be interested in grabbing a copy for half price early (it will grant access to our pre-alpha in December and all builds after that). It's something at least while we look at other means.  Greenlight is going quite well, but still a ways away from the top.

I've edited the above post with a lot more information about my current tasks and what's left to work on. Writing the original on < 3 hours of sleep probably wasn't the best idea.

Let me know what you guys think. I'll be happy to answer any questions or go into more detail about things if you're curious.

[You can view our Trailer HERE]

Hey guys,

I'm Jeremy the developer for Buildanauts. I thought it would be a good idea start my own DevLog about the game here.

Currently we're about 40-50% complete right now. I'm still working out a few larger features and then need to tie everything all together, but it's coming along quite nicely so far, I think.



Buildanauts is basically a (simplified) 3rd person Sim City with elements from The Sims, Animal Crossing and Minecraft tossed in all covered up in a rather colourful and childlike package.

You can view our Trailer HERE

Your goal in Buildanauts is to build a city and keep your townsfolk happy. This is done in a variety of ways, but mostly comes down to the efficiency of your roads/sidewalks, the distance to necessities (grocery stores and things), decorations placed around (think of The Sims and how you'd decorate a room for maximum appeal) and overall cleanliness of the city (garbage pickup for example).


You'll be designing all of the houses you build yourself. This mode is more like the Sims than anything else, but we only worry about the exteriors of the buildings. In essence it could also be compared to Spore, where you select a purpose for your building and then design it to look how you want.

Here are some links to some videos we've done thus far to show off certain features of the game already implemented:

• Initial Road & Sidewalk Placement with some Traffic movement: Link
• A bit of Vehicle stuff and showing off early Traffic Lights: Link
• A start to our City Decorating/Prop Placement: Link
• I just find this one funny: Link

If you're interested, Check us out on Steam Greenlight as well:



CURRENTLY WORKING ON

My goal right now is to get our house design system feature complete. At the moment we can place walls and add doors/windows to them (mostly, this should be fully implemented today). The next features to add are as follows:

• Paint walls - This feature actually holds more detail than you'd think, as the materials you use will (hopefully) effect the way the house itself is constructed (ie If it's a brick or wood material)
• Place Staircases - The use of this feature is we'll need to require a house has a 'path' to the 'main' entrance. This is so NPCs will have a way in and out once they move in. This will require a clear path to the Sidewalk to be valid.
• Other Decorations - Namely these would be things like balconies, fences and railings
• Roofs - Probably the most complicated and lease necessary part of the process. I'd love to use a Straight Skeleton algorithm to generate these, but it might be a bit too advanced so I've been looking at Delaunay triangulation as an alternative. I'll probably leave the roofs for later and get other game mechanics in place first. They do; however, add massive visual appeal to the game. So it's unfortunate to not have them right away

FUTURE GOALS

The next big step will be to implement both the NPC System, City Scoring, the User Interface and finally the Construction of buildings.

A bit of details on each section:

• NPC System - As we'd like to include an Animal Crossing style NPC, where they're quite animated and display a 'unique' personality, this system is quite important. We want your city to feel alive, and we'd like the houses you design to reflect the sort of people that move into them. So their personality/look might reflect the decorations/materials you use in designing your house/city. Lots of Nature/Long sidewalks might get you a more active person where a condensed populated area might get more business-person style NPCs. It's still somewhat up in the air, but that's where my head is sort of at with it right now.
• City Scoring - This is the overall accumulation of 'points' in the city. Based on civilian happiness, appeal of the city, number of homes, etc. It's really the system that will tie everything together
• Construction Mode - This probably won't make it into our Pre-Alpha, but it's probably the most unique portion of Buildanauts. This mode will take your house design and break it apart into supports and scaffolding and materials that will then be assembled by your Construction Team. Your team gains experience over time as they work, becoming more skilled at specific tasks. You'll control/supervise them through an RTS style mode, but you could just leave them to their own devices and they'll get the job done... eventually. Based on experience and personalities some might become lazy and slack off without your supervision. But the buildings will be completed in time... probably. You might leave the area and come back to everyone sitting around eating lunch/napping and the building only partially completed, but this can be fixed by leveling up certain traits.

Hope you guys found this interesting, I'll try to keep posting updates from now on as I progress. Hopefully in a week or so we'll get a nice video of a basic house design.

Worked great for me in Firefox. It generally hovered around 59fps.

I found movement and aiming a bit of a pain. The main issue was that I had to get near the edges of the screen to hit most enemies, but if the mouse cursor left the play area then my control would disappear. Locking the cursor to the play area or giving players an alternate control option would be nice.

One other issue I had was with Firefox not allowing the right-click context menu to be disabled (at least, not by default). Every time I released the fire button, the menu would pop up. My guess is that a lot of people won't know how to allow that feature, or won't want to go messing with "about:config" settings.

Is level 3 procedurally generated? It looked very different the first time I played it than it did the second and third times.

Thanks, the game is meant to be for mobile later on. So the left/right click isn't a huge concern really. We'll be putting in a crosshair of sorts in eventually too and then tweaking the movement ranges as well to make things a bit less awkward.

Yeah, the idea was to have some levels be randomly generated as you go through them. We were hoping to have a story mode where things would be more linear and then a survival mode that just has you fly for as long as you can (which would use the random generation algorithm). All the level pieces are being made to fit together like that so no matter which is chosen it should fit with already chosen pieces.

Unfortunately, real work has been taking most of my time so development on this has pretty much stopped for the past while.

Hey guys,

This is my first project I'm doing on my own. It's a space shooter (Star Fox, Kingdom Hearts, KOTOR - style).

I've recently implemented my own object pooling system, and I'm trying to optimize in other ways as well. The artist I'm working with has been too busy with other things to provide much stuff, and i'm awful at 3d modeling and texturing unfortunately.

I'm curious if anyone can get this to lag or crash though. Since I'm attempting to optimize I threw in an FPS counter to the top left. Controls are written on the bottom of the page as well.

Here's the Link:http://bitly.com/1duS6Dn, and a Screenshot of the first level (Press Q for the second level)

The main thing I'm looking for is FPS drops (to validate that object pooling works at least somewhat).

Note: if you're in level 2 and get to the giant room circling around an orb, you need to kill the orb (Boss HP bars will come with an actual GUI - someday), press 'C' to switch to the mini-guns and fire with 'V'. It should only take 2-3 bursts to destroy (The barriers around it currently don't block bullets).

Hey guys,
I'm Jeremy, a relatively new programmer to the industry (I graduated with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree in August of 2012). I've only worked on one professional game, which I unfortunately can't release information on as of yet.

Previously my focus has been on mobile games, but I hope to break into the console scene pretty soon (new job prospect in the near future will hopefully see that happen).

I've been a gamer for about as long as I can remember and tend to prefer jRPG's over most other games (the story to me is usually the most important part when playing a game).

I mostly came here to share ideas and get feedback on my own personal projects that I work on in my free-time.