I just played this for about an hour and never got passed level 2. I couldn't beat the cow boss.

I upgraded the living shit out of the first door you unlock and trained a bunch of perks, but every time I got to the cow boss, I'd keep getting hit and run out of time imeadiately, no matter what items I had.

It was a really really good game for the first half hour until I got stuck there and got really fucking annoyed.

Ok I'm adding the ability to take damage today, and the thing I mentioned before about whether or not I'm having a HUD is do - or - die now. Being that I've come this far without one, and some of the more cinematic stuff does look decidedly more bitchin' without one, I'm gonna shoot for it.



HHMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!


..hhhhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

Wait why the fuck am I not clicking the weapon select icons in and out as you hover over em?

In other news I added some very cool stuff that I'll show later, and for now here's the raptor's slash attack animation:



That's a 2D hand-animated effect, son!



Incase you didn't notice; why yes! The enemies ARE bigger now! Fighting them was a splashy noisy mess, which definately felt fun, but you literally couldn't see what was happening. So now you can clearly see when an enemy wants to attack, and I don't have to give up my sweet effects.

Well I prototyped this idea:



It's got me thinking of some cool sweet bosses from this perspective, but I'm not sold on it not being just some dumb thing that annoys people and slows everything down.

Oh ok, that's interesting. That's gonna make things hard to figure out, now, if my enemies ever get too unwieldy.

I have a thing right now where halfway through the game, enemies start mutating. This usually means they turn purple and get 1 more type of attack to use. So maybe that'll be enough and I should just stick where I am.

And there are like 15 enemy types, I just don't wanna burn em all on level 1.

The enemy placements are scripted, that's what that chart is up there. It's left-to-right a plan of which enemies come in. It's pretty basic though.
They have to be scripted, I have to introduce each new enemy in a slow, digestable, understandable way. And I have to ramp it up properly.
I'm having a survival mode, and I think even that is gonna be scripted. Like-- 50 or a hundred waves. Devil May Cry 4 does it and they do it great.

I think in your project the same effect can be achieved by coming up with different enemy and weapon combinations to keep things fresh all the time without having to add stuff which doesn't really belong there.

of course this means programming quite a few enemies, but I see no other way around this.

Ok HERE'S THE THING! I was talking about this yesterday to someone else. To people like us, Tigsource people, it's really easy to talk about games. You can say "You should not have gimmicks" and "You should make it focused" and all these really black and white things, but when you try and DO it: It's all one colour. When you sit down and open the software, it's just one big cloudy cloud. This is something I've really started to think about, and be cautious of.

Like-... When you say I should come up with more enemies and weapons... That IS a gimmick. There's a gap right now, and if I filled that with new enemies and more crazy weapons, that'd be filler. That'd be mush, numbers, cannon fodder that people will churn through and forget.
Here's what you really mean when you say I should focus on the core gameplay: I should work on giving the enemies deeper AI. So that you can play around with the same guy a little more, and the enemies are a bit more unpredictable and alive. So that I can keep using these enemies and they won't get boring too quickly. It should be more like playing with a living, thinking dog than playing a game.

Assuming that a "gimmick" is like a flat, bad, boring part of the game, then the real question is "Which one of these things I'm adding here: The enemies, the weapons, the level features, the dialogue, the different game mode, is just a gimmick?"
"And which one is a deep, fresh, nutritious game idea? Is it something I haven't thought of yet?"
That's a way harder question to think about, and it's a big long conversation to get to the bottom of it, but it's the necessary one to ask if you wanna make something REALLY fun.

Anyway- not that I'm ranting or annoyed or anything like that, it's just that this is the kind of stuff I always forget to dig in to, and my games always come out forgettable. So I'm excited to be sitting here demanding myself to bridge the gap between how I talk about making games and how I actually make them.

Alright, this is a weird day of work and needs documenting.

I've made all my enemies and weapons in Unity (or a good enough handful) and it's time to actually plot out this game's levels from start to finish. A rough guideline, anyway. Something useful enough to actually use, but basic enough that I can push parts around easily...




...That's the basic gist of it, right? I actually was thinking about game design while putting those enemy icons down on that line, so that must be a good start...

Anyway: I'm at a fork in the road here. Is the game gonna be too empty if it's just fighting enemies, broken up with dialogue and background animations?
Do I need some kind of flashy turret sequence or action event every so often to stop things from getting stale? It was pretty hard to make this level actually be longer than 5 minutes, without just throwing a hundred enemies in it.
Ratchet & Clank breaks up it's shooting action with platforming and puzzles... but on the other hand, Streets of Rage is just all enemies all the time. Both are great, exciting games, neither of them are boring.

Maybe I need level gimmicks, like some kind of conveyer belts, or a blast-tunnel or a room with weapons on the walls ... Actually those are good ideas, I should have those either way.
Mainly I'm undecided as to whether or not I wanna commit to some kind of mid-level distraction that I can keep coming back to. Like a Space Harrier segment or a Panzer Dragoon section or something.
I should go play other games like this and see what they're doing.

Aaaaaa I just think it sounds kinda boring and tepid.

I made this new weapon:



And it's my favourite thing in the world, but it can kinda kill everything. That's a shame, when the enemies are coded to actually do things.
Giving it a cooldown makes it a lot less fun, because it slows it down and you're less wreckless with it cos you know you'll have to wait for the next one.
Giving it less damage makes it feel less powerful.

so I'm pretty stuck on how to implement this into the game without making it a god-weapon.

Yeah the cutscene probably makes sense to nobody right now, I just threw it in to show that I'm doing stuff.
Nah I plan for all the space-robot gameplay stuff to be 3D

. Because I'm nowhere near good enough at making 3D cartoons, and making 2D cartoons is something fun that I enjoy doing.
I got the idea to split it up like that from Zone of Enders 2, which was about gigantic skyscraper-sized robots. Anything close-up human-sized would be hand drawn anime, and anything zoomed out (for example the gameplay) would be 3D polygonal. Because they made this distinction, the two styles were never stood next to each other, and they got the absolute best of both worlds being that 3D humans were kinda fudgy at the time, and you could have way more engaging characters if you just drew it.
Long story short I like cartoons and am bad at modelling.

I don't THINK I'll have a HUD... There's no ammo, your money isn't very important mid-level, and the weapon cooldowns are clock-wipes attached to the character.
Maybe I'll HAVE TO have a health bar eventually.
Or maybe it'll be fun to try n avoid it, I dunno. My games don't usually have HUDs. I think when it comes to health is when I'm gonna have to decide- I'm PRETTY SURE I'm having regular old-school health-bar and health pick-ups.

I've made Flash games at 30fps for ages, and I just realised this game's been running about like 800fps since I started. Appatantly PC games do that by default- what's a V sink?? aaaa I'll figure it out. Also I just noticed that the editor has been on the "Back" view all this time... so the game world is actually facing backwards.
...yeah this is my first 3D game incase I didn't mention.
I capped the framerate at something more reasonable.

Anyway, this is starting to grow on me.

The plan for this game was to have a seperate coder person, because I don't know a single thing about C#. Well- some bad news there... In the passed couple months I have learnt C#. This is bad news because it suddenly means I now have no good excuse to not do the whole thing myself. Which means way more work for me, which I am kind of not that excited about actually.

I sketched out a cutscene. This is Chet Jetset Jr. Jr. crash-landing at HQ and finding out he's not the centre of attention any more. It's really short, but I wanted to jot it down before I forgot exactly how it looks.

Anyway-- Any comments on how the game's lookin? I updated like 2 other blogs, and Twitter, and literally nobody responded. I am totally in the dark here.

I have one suggestion. Add a chainsword.

As much as I like chainswords, it wouldn't add anything to how you play the game and there's not really any good place to put one.
I THOUGHT the main guy would have a sword arm, but it turns out that since he's a bear and he also grabs with that arm, I at some point gave him a big claw.
So now his slashes are like a visceral bear slash. I'm pretty happy with how that came out though.

In Devil May Cry 4, your guy has a BIKEsword. Which is to say that it has a rev... trigger on it, which he revs up to spin a motor on the sword that... heats it up? Agitates it's demon energy? I dunno.
It charges up to 3 extra powerful hits. You can rev it up fully inbetween fights, but with good timing you can re-charge it mid-combo. So that's really cool and creative.


This game doesn't have a name yet, so I've bin writing down ideas in my lil pencil book- which I've decided to totally put in the game somewhere when it's done. Here they are:

PUNCHgunner (the original name of the Flash file)
CYBERBEAST RUSH
OUTRAGE!ous
GALACTICAMORA (so far these all sound like 1980's DC superheroes)
SPACE PANICK (from here I thought them up while listening to the soundtrack of Mighty Switch Force)
MANGO FRANTIC
GUNJAM
GUN JAM GIGA
GUNJAM SPLASH

Kinda terrible, but I like the direction this is going in. For some reason "Mango Frantic" makes me laugh, but I wonder if it's too hipster and "whoa so crazy and random!!!!"... I wonder if it'd be too hard to sell aswel, but maybe I shouldn't be worrying about that.

I decided to keep the flash when they attack, but otherwise make it way smaller.

Playing it full screen, the jet fire is kind of more of an attention grabber than the actual 3D models of the enemies.
It kind of feels like I'm fighting blue whips instead of robot dudes, so that's worrying.

Guys I need your help!



I added a blue jet to the enemies, and I can't tell if it makes everything look messy and stupid. Does it? Be honest.
Does it look amatuer like a Photoshop filter? Pretty much all the "blue team" robots will have this, if I go along with it.
Also consider whether or not the orange jet looks dumb.

OH MAN THIS IS EXCITING!!



I'll save you all my complaining about how rough the transition into 3D games was, but finally getting here is pretty rewarding. Oh and uhhh... ignore the terrible messy textures in the background, that's me being bad at stuff, I'll get better at that at some point.

EDIT- LIKE RIGHT NOW!!!!!



I practically do not use Photoshop, this is like my third attempt at this. I'm super happy with it.

Above is the art I did in the Flash prototype, below is the 3D animation test.

Wanna see the model close up? It's pretty awful! It's deliberately chunky and blocky for now. You can make sweet colours and materials in 3DSMax all day, but when you take that over to an actual game, I'm finding out it takes 10 times more effort to get 10% of what you wanted :/

Here's the concept btw, I might as well:

I've moved into Unity recently and so I've picked up 3DSMax again. Materials in 3DS are EASY as F.



It's all sliders and colour swatches, but everywhere else I have no idea.
I've got the Strumpy Shader Editor and I'm slowly figuring things out:



I've just worked out how rim lighting works, and a bunch of other stuff, but I CANNOT figure out how to have an object have a self-illuminating gradient based on how much light's hitting it. Exactly like in that first image where it hops down from red to dark red, then fades to dim blue.


Been bangin my head against luminance and wrap colouring ramps and reading through equations for ages here. If anyone could point me at something that works, I could use it in like a hundred different places.

I actually made a thread in the Unity forums asking "What should I do?" and the only reply was "Download the Strumpy Shader Editor and play around with it to learn about shaders".

I'm doing most of the game in 3D! Robots and characters, enemies and backgrounds are all 3D, to take advantage of lighting like you said. The only 2D stuff is gonna be effects (which I'm pretty confident with) and codec conversations with the humans inside the robots.
I got that idea from Zone of Enders 2, where they had ALL the human stuff be hand-drawn, and ALL the robot stuff be smartly cel-shaded 3D. Because the robots were the size of skyscrapers, you never saw 2D assets standing next to 3D assets, so you never got that weird sense that everything looks dumb, but they still got the benefits from having both.
Oh and shopping for weapons and in-between level stuff is all 2D.

Why didn't I buy Vanquish the first time it came out... I can't remember... But yeah you're right, I would like Vanquish.

More art: A LEGACY PASSED DOWN!!!



From the great and powerful arm of the resistance Chetakmunzikha who liberated the people of Mars from Earth, to the fearless leader Chetak, to Chet.

Chet Jetset Jr. Jr.

I was planning on sleeping hours ago, but then I started this and didn't wanna stop til I was done.

After so much playing around in 3DSMax, I learned that the options for lighting and materials aren't nearly as interesting in Unity.

So I asked on the Unity forums and they said people make their own shaders and it's a coding thing that's completely out of my league.

Well... I'LL SHOW THEM!!!



Properties on the left are linked to values on the right. There's a trillion different ways to set values here,and as soon as I figure out enough to link the Alpha of an Emission map to how lit up it is- I'll be GOOD AS GOLD.

I've never done anything like this before, so I figured it was worth documenting.

I decided I should draw something that's not just "in space". The point of all these images is so I don't get halfway through the game and suddenly go "oh shit! what do I do next!?".

The big decision for the art in this was that I wanted it to be 3D polygonal- which is crazy because I've never done a polygonal game before. I thought it was important so that everything would pick up highlights and shadows from all the flashes and lasers goin off. So I made this to demonstrate that.
The cave background is actually just a flat 1-polygon plane. It's just a bump map that makes it look chunky, and a "self-illumination" map that makes it look glowy. There's no glow filter or anything, it just looks like there is.
The bump map's pretty crummy but MISTAKES IS HOW WE LEARN!!!!!!

These enemies are giant rock-worms that jump out from the background and try n get ya. You gotta beat em... try dropping a mine before they jump out or something.

It was annoying that I had to type it like 3 times cos I got the syntax wrong.

Also this game is super boring. It's like a game where you can place blocks down, but with the most uninteresting and difficult interface a person could come up with to do that.
It's well made though.