A 2D-3D-co-op platformer

I haven't giving up on the kid game. It's just resting.

In the meantime I've dug up another project. This game idea was born at the Nordic Game Jam and executed as You say Jump? I say How High!. Is a 2D-3D-two-player-co-op platformer where the main focus in the the verbal interaction between the two players playing. Both players control the same character. None of them however have full control. One player sees the character in top view and can move the character up and down. The other player sees the platform from the side and only controls the sideways movement. As both game view are flat 2D view neither of the players have enough information available on their screen to control the character alone. THEY MUST COMMUNICATE!

 This image is suppose to explain the basic game mechanics.

For the game jam we had a crazy set up with one computer and two screens. None of us had touched Unity at that point so we went with bad old flash for developing. It turned out to no ones surprise that it was a difficult task to code what on all accounts except the visuals is a 3D game in a 2D environment. So all in all not the ideal offset for the huge commercial success we all were hoping for ;)

After playing around with iPad I realised how ideal it is for two-player games. So now I'm prototyping the game in Unity.

!++

I let Christoffer be the ++ on the blog. He wrote one post. And then nothing...
So now I have to do something. And so I have. I've made a draft for the graphics for his game.

The style reminds me of drop7 right now but maybe it will get a life of it's own.

Why Not

Playing with size.

Unity Crash Course

This week I attended a lecture series in Unity hosted by ITU. Two nice guys from Unity, Joe and Emil, gave a guide tour through a lot of Unity's features from animation, textures, GUI and editor scripting. They covered tons of stuff and it turned out to be a nice introduction to Unity.

Adding to the greatness of it all was the time given to questions from the audience. I got to ask what was wrong with the sprite sheet animation code since it was giving my this odd graphics problem over time. At first Joe found it just as strange as me but after a trip back to the Unity-factory he could give me the solution.

It turns out the offset float value on the y-axe kept in increase over time. This would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that the float as it increased would be round up thereby constantly increasing in inaccuracy.

Solution: Adding Mathf.Repeat to the offset's x value with the length of 1.
offset.y = Mathf.Repeat(offset.y,1);
This ensures the value every time it goes above 1 is returned to count from 0 instead.

And now it works! Yaaahhhhhh!

Quickie

4 frame animation of someone walking.

New Friends?

I'm a bit jetlagged still from our trip to IndieCade with Copenhagen Game Collective. So this is all I have to share for now - a few new friends.

Sprite Shiit

As I wrote last I've gotten the sprite animation somewhat working and I've even found a good way of making the sprite sheet. But I still haven't found the trick to getting the quality of the images right :(

So to start with the quality seems fine almost anyway as you can see here:

But after a while of running the application the graphics get blurred as you can see in this second screenshot. I have no idea why.

If anyone out there has an idea as to what I'm doing wrong then please comment.

It Moves!

I've got the code for animating sprite sheets working. I had made the mistake of setting a variable as a float instead of an integer. In human lingo this mean I was working with a decimal number where I was supposed to use a "whole" number. I took me a while to figure this out, but by now at least I understand the code I borrowed a lot better.

I changed this:
float index = Time.time*fps;
to this:
int index = (int)(Time.time*fps);

Current screenshot of application:

Everything looks a mess. I'm trying to figure out why my graphics gets pixelated now that I've change to Unity3 and while doing so I've piled graphics in different resolutions.

Talking of Unity3 the mysterious icon issue has been fixed and it's now super easy to add an icon picture under the player settings and best of all - it works!