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[SF]

I know I'm late to the joke, but I want to remake that terrible Action 52 game:





Here's the remix I did of the game's main/only theme, with sheet music! Play along at home:





Here's the game's original manual entry, which is probably the only thing I can salvage for gameplay inspiration:

G-FORCE FIGHTERS
    Watch your fuel level. USe it wisely and escape the force that holds
    you. The enemies are strong but the G-Force of the planet will take us
    as we get powerless.

[SF]

A couple free assets from the Unity store and we're in the business

[SF]

I've decided to rationalize the ship's ridiculous colour by making it a byproduct of the engine's design:



Better not run out of fuel, then your ship won't be pink!

[SF]

Shots of the engine at various thrust levels. I'm considering making this either a general speed indicator, with a boost button being used to dodge attacks/ram enemy ships, or making it some kind of a combo meter. The more perfect your run, the faster you go, and the more naturally intense/difficult the game becomes.








The transitions between these effects are totally smooth and analogue as they're based on the intensity of a couple light objects in the same hierarchy as the particle system.

[PythonBlue]

I'm impressed! Nice flares!

[SF]

I'm impressed! Nice flares!

Honestly I can't take credit for those beyond parameter tweaking, they're pretty close to stock Unity assets. Hopefully they'll still add some dramatic....flare

[SF]

I struggled with some ugly quaternion-related math for a while before realizing I'm overengineering things and should just "orange box" the gameplay animations when I'm not committed to the mechanics yet. I'll probably do that next and waste a bit of time on more particles before implementing my cool enemy ideas.

[SF]

I got some basic 4-direction barrel rolls going using only the arrow keys. My self-righting system lets you do some pretty cool tumbles in all directions without straying from the single-tap-to-evade movement I'm toying with.

My clients at my day job are continuing to be dicks who defer the results of their crappy time management onto me so I might not be working on this again this week.

[Sustrato]

It would be helpful if you could size the screenshots to a resolution that wasn't over twice the width of the forum thread, at least in the future. Kind of hard to tell what's going on. :/

[SF]

It would be helpful if you could size the screenshots to a resolution that wasn't over twice the width of the forum thread, at least in the future. Kind of hard to tell what's going on. :/

I figured people would prefer a resolution where they can actually see what's going on, and just scroll horizontally, but I'll do something different from now on.

[SF]

False alarm, ugh.

So I now have the prototype dodge moves implemented and a very screensaver-y star field effect to give an illusion of motion.

Does anyone know of a place you can serve Unity demos from reasonably?

[WonderlandGames]

Are you trying to make it bad like the game or...?

[SF]

Are you trying to make it bad like the game or...?

No haha. Was something I said making it come across that way..?

That said I do want there to be a thick layer of irony about the presentation, and I'm trying to appropriate as many bizarre things from the game as possible (the theme music, the pink ship driven by pink sparkles and so on). If I didn't there wouldn't be much point to this.

[SF]

So I bought this ship model which bears a resemblance to the original game's:



There are a number of problems with it though:

• It's terribly made, and imports off-center at the wrong scale, rotated differently than everything else, requiring an additional transform wrapper to get it to line up
• This additional transform really messes up the rotations in my stunt code
• It doesn't look as acrobatic as the placeholder I was working with, and now that you can do flips all over the place it comes across a little strange
• The tail fin sticking up in your face in the chase camera is a bit of an eyesore

So I'm torn on which to use now. Maybe the player character is enough of an amorphous blob in the original that no one will notice if the ship has a different silhouette.

[SF]

Have a tech demo!

http://www.mediafire.com/?b6r64svv9oc6h

Download both files and open the .html

Arrow keys to do flips. Try to mess up the self-righting system, and FAIL

You'll need the Unity Web Player of course.

Edit: The ship doesn't need to fire its wing thrusters in the opposite direction of your movement because of space drag. Look it up.

Edit: Scratch that, I just Googled "space drag" and I don't recommend the results.

[SF]

So this is hilarious; I now have a reliable way to procedurally generate textures based off of sprite rips from the Action 52 environments.

Here's one of their ugly orange tiles:



I wanted an excuse to test out my trial version of Allegorithmic's Bitmap2Material, so I put a couple of giant planes up and tried to test the limits of what it could do with a 32x32 square as a source diffuse.

Some specular tweaks, creative applications of ambient occlusion, and heightmap generation (among other things) later, and suddenly I've gone from this:



To this:



Without drawing a single pixel by hand.

[deathtotheweird]

in the future you should put the files on dropbox (100% free), so you can directly link the html file and people can play. pretty pointless to do it any other way.

the background looks nice but those textures don't look much improved. also having the ship one single color isn't doing you any favors in the visual department either.

don't mean to be harsh, just some thoughts.

[SF]

in the future you should put the files on dropbox (100% free), so you can directly link the html file and people can play. pretty pointless to do it any other way.

the background looks nice but those textures don't look much improved. also having the ship one single color isn't doing you any favors in the visual department either.

don't mean to be harsh, just some thoughts.

Not harsh, it's helpful. I'm nowhere near done on the visuals and I don't plan to polish them until most of the gameplay is nailed down. This is just looking for cool tech to use.

I didn't know you could hotlink on Dropbox and have it work. I'll try that, thanks.

[SF]

So I'm having fun playing with grunge maps. They are allowing me to add some tarnished metal variety to the yellow matrices for one:



But much more interesting than that is the ability to use them subtractively.

Behold the ravages of age:

[SF]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/150625162/G-Force%20Demos/Stunt%20example.html

^^^^^^^^

Working webplayer movement demo. Thanks allen!