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[DanielSnd]

So today wasn't a super productive day, but it was somewhat productive. I finally implemented the audio mixer, now the sfx are going into different groups, and I have a couple of snapshots already integrated int othe code so Thiago can have some fun mixing the game's audio :D



Another small thing I've been procrastinating for a while is the udpate of the Alert Manager (the text popups that appear on the screen) to the new Unity UI. I'm slowly getting rid of NGUI in the project, only missing the Life counter now then I can delete NGUI completely. The new Alert Manager made with Unity UI is looking better than the old one I had done in NGUI :D

 

Now this is something that's going to be pretty cool, back when I was younger and used to play a lot of bomberman, whenever I died I was able to try and get revenge by shooting bombs from the sides of the level. That gave me something to do between matches so I wasn't bored watching other people play, and gave me the satisfaction of annoy someone who killed me. So I want to experiment with bringing something like that into the game.

I wouldn't do anything that could actually kill the alive people, so I'm thinking of having the dead players able to drop little EMP bombs, that will stun in AOE whenever they fall. They would be able to charge up the throw to reach farther.

Will still have to playtest it to make sure it's a good thing, but for sure if I actually add it to the game it will be something that can be turned on/off on the options.

Well, as you can see on the gif, so far I got the movement working, I just have to position this 2 MapPos GameObjects (one on the bottom left and one on the top right) and it generates this path. Tomorrow I shall work on implementing the shooting.

[Zanetski]

Now this is a game that I could see myself playing for hours at a time. Can't wait to try it out. 

[DanielSnd]

Now this is a game that I could see myself playing for hours at a time. Can't wait to try it out. 

So why haven't you yet? I'd love to hear your feedback! :D

Windows or OSX?

[DanielSnd]

So, today I didn't have much time to work in the game, but I did make a little progress in the revenge mechanic. I did some sketches on what I have in mind for the little guys on rails on the corners.

I also managed to implement a nice ballistics projectile without a rigidbody (I'm avoiding rigidbodies as they can be quite unpredictable and break in weird ways, so far no rigidbody has been used in any gameplay elements and I intend to keep it that way.) I based it on this code: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/27919/making-an-arrow-physics-without-using-rigid-body.html



I made the speed of the shoot based on how long you keep the attack button pressed and attached that to a little charge bar, I'll probably make this bar part of the model's design for the little shooter-guy-on-rails. I also made it so the player rotates to keep facing inwards when turning corners in the rails.

Well, that's it for today Tomorrow is Full Indie and I'll be bringing the game down to playtest again :D

Oh, totally unrelated, today the nice folks at the Button Masher Bros youtube channel released a video of them playing a special version of Rocket Fist I made specially for them :D <3

[DanielSnd]

So today was another Full Indie day! Full Indie is an awesome monthly meetup that happens over here with lots of game developers getting together in a pub to network, get to know each other and playtest games :D


To me it feels like christmas, I spend the whole month looking forward to it and when it happens I feel just like a kid in christmas morning, it feels so good to see people playing my game and the feedback is incredible!


Every time I end up seeing lots of things I need to fix and little bugs, but this time I didn't see any really D: the only thing that still bothered me is whenever people die they're just watching idle, and that was actually a feedback some people gave me. There is going to be a twitch meetup next week that I'm going to try and bring the game to, I'm definetly going to try and finish the revenge mechanics implementation before that D:



It's super cool too that some people came talk to me that said they actually been following the devlogs and being inspired by what I do, saying they actually learned things from me and that is the greatest feeling ever, thank you so much! Sometimes I feel I'm just talking to the wind, but it's great whenever I get to feel someone is actually on the other side listening :D If you'd like to chat more about this stuff totally get in touch on twitter or on the comments on something, I always do my best to reply everything that's thrown my way and I love to talk about this stuff.

[DanielSnd]

Today I finally did new art for the game, even if it wasn't for the environment xD I did the new "on-rails-cart" for the post-death robot :D Using modo!


This little guy is for the revenge mechanics. Whenever a player dies instead of just waiting for next round he is going to be dropped on these rails around the outer edge of the level and will get to roam around trying to shoot EMP bombs into the level to stun people. This way dead players can try and get some sweet revenge!!!

The game is really coming together nicely. The multiplayer idea is definitely a huge plus. Just out of curiosity, are there plans to add power-ups or pick-ups down the road? Something like magnetism to pull fists, speed boost, or even the ability to take more hits without dying right away. That could possibly add an extra layer of fun & challenge to the overall game-play.

For the future I'm definetly planning powerups (as you mentioned), hazards, and a bunch of different levels. Hazards would affect the weapon in a positive way (you would want to bounce your shots off of hazards) while affecting the player in a bad way (avoid hazards). That would add more of that cool "discovery" whenever a player bounces a weapon off hazard by accident, he'll learn that it adds an "effect" to his weapon :D As an exampkle, a spinning saw hazard if you bounce it off of it your fist gets way faster and bounces off way more. A spilling fire hazard if you throw your fist through it it will be spilling fire on the floor where it's passing, and players won't be able to pass that spot for a few seconds without dying. An electric hazard that electrifies the fist and will generate a little AOE stun whenever the fist hits a wall.

For powerups magnetism was one I had in mind already, but of course not pulling harmful fists to you, just harmless ones xD, movement speed boost, Rocket speed boost (the ones you throw get thrown with extra speed), also powerups like:
- rockets that you throw get bigger for a couple of seconds.
- temporarily you get to pick 2 rockets instead of just one.
- Temporarily no cooldown on dashes
- Temporarily dashes go farther away
- Dashes temporarily become blinks (flash,teleport, whatever)
- Bad powerups like on bomberman, screw with your controllers maybe?

So many possibilities *_*

Oh, other than that I also want to get the other game mode (counting kills instead of lifes), finish implementing replay, add a proper win screen with some statistics, update the scores UI, make the game wait a second after appearing before starting (AI is being pretty mean starting even before the fade-in D:), a instant replay of the last kill (this is going to be hard ><) and… I think that's it for now D: I'm probably forgetting something though.

[oldblood]

Like the on-rails cart a lot, should add a lot to the multiplayer experience. Love the ideas of the powerups, especially that some are either good or bad... Awesome you're able to take your game to those monthly meetups. Sadly, not much in my immediate area for events like that so it's cool you're taking advantage of them. Keep the awesome updates coming...

[DanielSnd]

Like the on-rails cart a lot, should add a lot to the multiplayer experience. Love the ideas of the powerups, especially that some are either good or bad... Awesome you're able to take your game to those monthly meetups. Sadly, not much in my immediate area for events like that so it's cool you're taking advantage of them. Keep the awesome updates coming...

Thanks! :D Yeah! I'm hoping it will help with the onboarding of new players as those tend to die quite a bit in the beginning xD.
Awe Maybe you should try starting a meetup! You might have other developers around and not even know it


Alright, so today I made huge advances in the Revenge Mechanics :D Still missing some polish but it's mostly working. I also improved a bit it's path, now instead of being a perfect rectangle it has rounded corners, which also helped with the actual controlling of it.



So whenever your revenge-bot-cart spawns it will start to charge a shot (the shot particle gets bigger and a bar starts to fill behind your cart. When this bar is filled and the shot gets to the right size you can then shoot (also a little particle pops up to make it more visual :D).

To shoot you can press the button and hold, in order to shoot it closer or farther (+ bonus detail, as you charge the projectile gets pulled closer to you like a slingshot XD).

When it finds the ground/wall it spawns a little explosion that will stun any players found within it.

Now I need to do some extra particles and animations for it and to actually include them to be spawned for dead players whenever a player dies in the arena! But I'll leave that for tomorrow ^^

[DanielSnd]

Today I made a simple AI for the revenge-cart. Since we have AI play in the game, whenever they die they will receive a revenge-cart, and they should somewhat know how to use it XD. I'm pretty much finding the closest point in the rails to the player, simulating moving the analog stick towards the appropriate direction and trying to figure out if I have a possible shot, then I simulate pressing and holding down the button with a co-routine. It's far from perfect, but at least it makes it move around and try to get some shots at the player.

Other than that, today I got myself a used Ouya, adding another platform to the list of platforms that Rocket Fist will be released in \o/ The more the merrier ^^

[DanielSnd]

Alright, so I got a bunch of changes in + finished implementing the Revenge Cart (FINALLY!)

• Renamed the previous Hard AI into Insane AI.
• Made a copy of the previous Hard AI to be the new Hard AI, and nerfed it a bit (can only calculate 1 bounce and turns slower). So now I have Easy, Medium, Hard and Insane.
• Implemented the revenge cart mechanic.
• Added a option on the Press Start menu to turn the revenge cart mechanic on/off (I'll need to make a dedicated options screen for the arena later on when I make the power ups ;o).
• Added a Counter Kill message (Like the Double Kill/Triple Kill ones :D)
• Added a little second before players can start to move, so AI doesn't get a head start by being able to move when fade in is still happening.
• Now when there is only AIs fighting and no players a message appears letting you know that you can Hold Select (or TAB) to skip to next round for the people who don't enjoy watching AIs fight.
• I was keeping the Camera a little farther away thinking of people who can't use 16:9 aspect ratio so the level would fit even a really bad aspect ratio… But that makes it bad for 16:9 aspect ratio… So I found a way to force the 16:9 aspect ratio by adding letterboxes :D Now I have made the camera get a little closer thanks to it. Here's how it looks on 3:2 aspect ratio:

Well, today was a productive day I have to implement Powerups and Hazards sometime soon… But I think I should stop procrastinating art if I want to start a greenlight campaign by the end of june D: So I might work on that this week.

[DanielSnd]

Tonight I had 2 friends come over and try the game for the first time, we played for hours and that helped me further fine-tune some things and fix some bugs.

• Added Motion Blur thanks to Amplify Motion :D and it looks pretty cool/more fluid. I'm turning it off if the player boots the game in Fastest quality though. I'll have to make an options screen to turn those things on/off later on.
  
• When players lost all their lifes their revenge cards (ghost) wasn't spawning. Fixed that. Now if the ghost mode is turned on the revenge carts will spawn even if the player has no more lifes left.
• When there are only 2 players it's way better to have 1 extra weapon for them to fight for. However when you start playing the 4 players mode and you're down to only 2 players spawning due to the other 2 reaching 0 lifes there were only 2 rocket fists available. Fixed that so now if there are less than 4 players there will always be one extra rocket laying around
• Since I added “Hold Select or Tab to skip” last version I noticed that was showing up in several times that it shouldn't be showing up. Like On the winning screen of the draw (since there were no real players alive, it assumed you wanted to skip) or the winning screen when the AI wins. Now I fixed it so it doesn't appear in places it shouldn't.
• After finally trying the revenge card with other real players, I saw it was too slow and thus hard to hit players with. My friends weren't even using it. So I buffed it's speed a bit, now it's way faster to get ready to shoot and faster to charge, after the buff my friends started to use it more to annoy each other :D
• To give a better indication if you're charging your revenge cart or not I added extra charging particles that play while you're charging it.

Well, that's it for now it was nice having people over to playtest with today, it's so much easier to spot bugs/things to fix while seeing actual people playing this! Found a couple more things I wanted to change but will leave those for another day.

[DanielSnd]

So, today I didn't have a whole lot of time to work on the game, so I just picked a small-ish task. I started to work on the options menu.

I'm using the same code I made for the other menus, but I had to make some changes to use the new Unity UI as well as the text mesh. Also made some changes so I can use the same space for different menus, It now hides unused menus and shows them whenever they get called by the main menu (The Options menu and the Credits menu are in the same "place" xD).

I haven't actually implemented the options menu functionality though, will leave that for tomorrow

[oldblood]

Love all the new functionality and menus. You're making great progress here... The revenge cart will add a lot to multiplayer matches and help better diversify your game from others out there. I could also see an AI version of it working well in adventure mode as well...

[DanielSnd]

Love all the new functionality and menus. You're making great progress here... The revenge cart will add a lot to multiplayer matches and help better diversify your game from others out there. I could also see an AI version of it working well in adventure mode as well...

Thanks XD Indeed. I haven't been thinking about the adventure lately... I'm kind of thinking of the adventure now as some sort of challenge mode, but still going to take a while before I start fiddling with it again.


Alright, so today I did a really quick playtest of the latest version with some friends at school and found 2 little bugs, today's task was fixing them (it was really quick =x I was really busy today).

Bug 1: Revenge Cart AI was not working, apparently I removed the AI from the prefab for some reason and made the build without it D:

Bug 2: The green cart would not spawn if there was no lifes left for green. I was always checking if there were more than 1 player alive to spawn carts, but since green is the first one to be spawned, it was checking too early so the check would come as not true. Fixed it by only doing that check when players die, not when they are spawned.

Sorry for the lame daily update :x busy day.

[DanielSnd]

Today I was over at the Ladies Playing Indies twitch stream while they played Rocket Fist :D It was lots of fun to watch them play and answer questions from the chat. If you missed it you can see the broadcast recording here.

I was thinking of calling that the task of the day but I felt guilty since I didn't get to work much on it these days so I advanced a bit more on the options menu:

GIF: http://media.giphy.com/media/xTiTnvOXgPxzCQVqYo/giphy.gif

Now you get to change values by either clicking on it or using the horizontal axis. Still missing the actual applying of those values to the game though.

[DanielSnd]

So… This weekend I took a break =x I really needed it. Played a bunch of Splatoon (That game is awesome!) and watched Sense8 (Sush a great show @.@ Netflix, you’ve done it again!).



Sunday I went over to the awesome Vancouver Twitch Meetup! Had a great time showing the game to the streamers :D



The game even appeared on the even’ts stream

at around 1 hour and 50 minutes :D



This is me showing Rocket Fist at the event last night, loved this Picture! Jeremy Lim is an awesome photographer!



This picture defines very well how people feel when playing Rocket Fist with friends, hahahahha, taken by Jeremy Lim while they were streaming Rocket Fist.

All in all, I had a great time and people seemed to enjoy the game ^^



So, today was another small task, instead of the art tasks I really should be doing, but at least I’m back to work

I made it so it fills the latest saved values for most of the settings there (so it’ll remember your preferences) except for the Quality and Fullscreen values, for those 2 I’m actually reading whatever the player used to start the game (picked on the unity settings). I’m using playerprefs for everything, whenever the player presses apply I read the values of the buttons and save them into the playerprefs. If the values for fullscreen, quality or volumes changed I apply them to change those instantly (So you see the result on the music and SFX instantly).

In other news, got the XSplit free Indie license and started setting up my scenes for devstreams :D Hoping to stream one night this week, probably thursday or friday as I’m going to an event on wednesday night and will probably be busy tuesday night.



I really should work on the art for the greenlight trailer this week. I need to make a lot more level art to show variation on the trailer D: So I'll probably be streaming some art.

[ernanir]

Keep it up fellow dev!

When people play your game they make the funniest faces and that's a great sign.   

Did the revenge cart was already playble in this version they play? If yes, did people like it?

Best Dan

[DanielSnd]

Keep it up fellow dev!

When people play your game they make the funniest faces and that's a great sign.   

Did the revenge cart was already playble in this version they play? If yes, did people like it?

Best Dan

Thanks xD

Yeah, the revenge cart was there and people made good use of it! :D Lots of people commented on it, some even recalled bomberman xD I definetly didn't see people disengaging and looking at their phones after dying like I used to before revenge cart was introduced It's proved itself to be a good addition and it's staying. (Can be turned off on the option though).

[ernanir]

 Glad to hear that!
Just as we say back at home...BROCOU!

[DanielSnd]

That weekend break ended up turning into a full week break D:

Well, today I worked a bit on the new environment pieces ^^ This week I'm hoping to get some new different looking levels up for the greenlight trailer, finally.