GameByOne

Playtesting = Game Design

2012-01-15T02:10:00.000+01:00

Today I playtested "the mansion game" three times. It's impressive how much changes from one game to the next. Rules are tweaked and in this case the size of the board was almost halved. The result a faster and probably funnier game.

I haven't written the rules down yet. The game is a puzzle game and the mechanics are about movement, shifting the board pieces aka rooms around and moving the character in order to snatch gems. The goal is to be the first to get all the gems in your color. While playing your objective is therefore to rearrange the board so you can move as freely as possible while hopefully limiting your opponents movement.

Two Board Games

2012-01-12T14:13:00.000+01:00

Testing the four-player-game with two players

Lately I've been working on making a couple of board games. Well it started with one -a four-player-game but being designed for four I can only playtest when there are four people around with an hour or two to spar. Strangely enough even though I share a flat with four other people it rarely happens that they are here at the same time. So I began developing a second idea that could be playtested with only two people.

To begin with the allure of making a board game is really that it is something I can make on my own (with the brilliant input of playtesters). I find when working on digital games as you can see in the very old previous posts that I get stuck in the scripting part of the process. And then the game mechanic ideas are sidetracked by the fight with the code. Though I actually really like coding I don't seem to be good enough to work my way through to a finish prototype on my own. Board game prototyping could be the way forward. I guess you could just call paper prototyping.

A 2D-3D-co-op platformer

2010-10-27T13:20:00.000+02:00

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.

!++

2010-10-25T01:30:00.004+02:00

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

2010-10-23T00:06:00.000+02:00

Playing with size.

Unity Crash Course

2010-10-22T18:09:00.004+02:00

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

2010-10-17T17:56:00.000+02:00

4 frame animation of someone walking.

New Friends?

2010-10-17T02:30:00.000+02:00

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

2010-10-06T04:57:00.000+02:00

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!

2010-10-02T02:14:00.002+02:00

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!

Damn, Smooth Sliding

2010-09-29T22:01:00.000+02:00

Rewriting the code the sprite sheet animation from java script to C# has given me some problems I didn't anticipate. The code simply appears to work differently in C# than in java script. I have two videos that illustrate the difference.

This video shows the right animation but the code is in java script:

Here the similar code is rewritten in C# as you will see the sprite sheet just slides at an angle instead of jumping picture by picture:

Here's the original java script code:

//vars for the whole sheet
var colCount : int = 4;
var rowCount : int = 1;

//vars for animation
var rowNumber : int = 0; //Zero Indexed
var colNumber : int = 0; //Zero Indexed
var totalCells : int = 4;
var fps : int = 10;
var offset : Vector2; //Maybe this should be a private var

//Update
function Update () { SetSpriteAnimation(colCount,rowCount,rowNumber,colNumber,totalCells,fps); }

//SetSpriteAnimation
function SetSpriteAnimation(colCount : int,rowCount : int,rowNumber : int,colNumber : int,totalCells : int,fps : int){

   // Calculate index
   var index : int = Time.time * fps;
   // Repeat when exhausting all cells
   index = index % totalCells;

   // Size of every cell
   var size = Vector2 (1.0 / colCount, 1.0 / rowCount);

   // split into horizontal and vertical index
   var uIndex = index % colCount;
   var vIndex = index / colCount;

   // build offset
   // v coordinate is the bottom of the image in opengl so we need to invert.
   offset = Vector2 ((uIndex+colNumber) * size.x, (1.0 - size.y) - (vIndex+rowNumber) * size.y);

   renderer.material.SetTextureOffset ("_MainTex", offset);
   renderer.material.SetTextureScale ("_MainTex", size);
}

And the code in my C# version:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class Animation_sprite_sheet : MonoBehaviour {
//vars for the whole sheet
public int colCount = 4;
public int rowCount = 1;

//vars for animation
public int rowNumber = 0; //Zero Indexed
public int colNumber = 0; //Zero Indexed
public int totalCells = 4;
public int fps = 10;
Vector2 offset; //Maybe this should be a private var

// Use this for initialization
void Start () {
}

// Update is called once per frame
void Update () {
SetSpriteAnimation(colCount,rowCount,rowNumber,colNumber,totalCells,fps);
}
//SetSpriteAnimation
public void SetSpriteAnimation( int colCount, int rowCount, int rowNumber, int colNumber, int totalCells, int fps){
// Calculate index
   float index = Time.time * fps;

// Repeat when exhausting all cells
   index = index % totalCells;

   // Size of every cell
   Vector2 size = new Vector2 ((1.0f / colCount), (1.0f / rowCount));

   // split into horizontal and vertical index
   float uIndex = index % colCount;
   float vIndex = index / colCount;

   // build offset
   // v coordinate is the bottom of the image in opengl so we need to invert.
   Vector2 offset = new Vector2 ((uIndex+colNumber) * size.x, ((1.0f - size.y) - (vIndex+rowNumber) * size.y));

   renderer.material.SetTextureOffset ("_MainTex", offset);
   renderer.material.SetTextureScale ("_MainTex", size);
}
}

As all the examples I can find in unity's documentation and around the internet on unity are mostly in java script I often find myself being lost when it comes to using C# in unity.

Power of Two

2010-09-29T02:14:00.000+02:00

I'm slowly starting to figure out how I can add graphics to the game. Basically I'm getting tired of the green, red and blue squares. So now I'll go for red, yellow(!) and green blinking circles instead.

I'll be working with sprite sheets for the animation. So far I've managed to get a clumsy animation running on the iPad by using a piece of java script I borrowed from the Unity community wiki. But I want to work in C# so now I have to rewrite it.

Oh and the "power of two"-title refers to the fact that in order to get nice graphics on the iPad I have to remember to use image sizes that are a power of two e.g. 256 x 1024.

Hello!

2010-09-26T19:40:00.007+02:00

Hi, I'm Christoffer,

Benedikte and I are travelling together at the moment- we're going to IndieCade with our friends from the Copenhagen Game Collective - and I've been invited to guest write for the next couple of weeks. So for a short while it'll be GameByOne++. Right now we're in San Francisco.

Well, while Benedikte has been working on the Kids game, I've been trying to make a prototype of a little game that's about chain reactions. It's based on a concept of interconnected nodes with different abilities and you have to send energy between them. The game is aimed for the iPhone right now, so I'm also working in Unity.

More on this later - first to the important stuff: Since Benedikte made such a nice picture of herself, I also drew a self-portrait - that's me up there. You may notice that I am almost as good with graphics as Benedikte is, ahem.

Also, here's a very early prototype screen shot:

OK, see you later.

Out of Order

2010-09-20T20:49:00.000+02:00

I've run into a problem. When I build and run the application it just shuts down right after showing the Unity icon. The console gives me this information:

The internet tells me I should reinstall everything - Unity, XCode and my mobile provisioning files :( 3-4GB download. Yay.

Keeping Their Distance

2010-09-18T12:43:00.001+02:00

I've refined the code that determines the placement of the kids. Now the code ensures that the kids aren't placed to close. Every kid placed after the first one is checked for whether or not they are in the vicinity of any of the kids that have already been placed.

Here's a bit of code:
public bool DistanceCheck()
{
disCheck = false;

for(int i=0; i<antal-1;i++)
{
if ( ((kids[i].transform.position.x-temp.transform.position.x)*(kids[i].transform.position.x-temp.transform.position.x)) + ((kids[i].transform.position.y-temp.transform.position.y)*(kids[i].transform.position.y-temp.transform.position.y)) < 200)
{
disCheck = true;
}
}
return disCheck;
}

And a video with the latest improvement:

To sum up, reds are crying, blues are about to and green kids are okay for now. When the crying kids are tapped they turn happy (no paedophile thoughts intended).

Touchy Success

2010-09-17T11:58:00.001+02:00

Finally the touch input is working. I thought I would be able to "talk" directly to a method on a game object from another class e.g. objectname.method. I have now realised that I needed to use the method getComponent() to access the methods of the objects. This has taken forever to realise. But now the code works! It needs refining but it works.

When I touch the screen a ray is sent along the z-axis into the 3d space (world space I guess). Whatever the ray collides with is "registered" in the raycast method's collider. Assuming the object the the ray collides with is an Kid object I can then access the methods in the kid and change it's state.

When (0,0,0) is not (0,0,0)...

2010-09-11T11:15:00.000+02:00

I'm working on "refining" the touch function so that a kid can sense if is being touched.
All this is probably really easy but as I'm a n00b in unity even the basic stuff is difficult. The idea is that if you touch the screen on the ipad and the coordinates of your touch matches the coordinates matches a kid-object then the kid should do something.

My problem is a can't get the coordinate system of the ipad to match the one in the unity editor. I sure it something really simple I'm missing but I can't figure it out so I've taken it to the extremes - I've posted for the first time in the unity community help forum.

Not so glossy now are you!

2010-09-09T23:59:00.001+02:00

Bonus info on yesterday's post about the iPad icon.

I wanted this:

Instead of this:

Or to put it another way, I wanted to remove the glossy effect from my icon.

To do just that I actually had to do it via Unity Iphone! I just ticked of UIPrerendered Icon under Player Settings and build. The Xcode then updated and voila I got an icon without the gloss.

Det sku' vær så godt, men ...

2010-09-08T23:06:00.001+02:00

I though it would be easy, but no. A week into the project I am learning that the stuff that looks like it's going to be hard making is medium difficult, whereas the stuff that appears super easy turns out to be hard.
After getting input from Martin and Steven (again thank you) I decided that I should rewrite all the code I've written so far. So instead of doing that I'd make a small easy thing, adding my own icon on the iPad for the game instead of the standard Unity icon.
An easy satisfying task. Unity Iphone even has a field for this under edit->project settings->player:

So I just drop and drag a 72x72 image on this field - a nice easy task; then build. Well no, this does not work! To the internet! After hours of reading forum posts, changing and testing I had no progress. Then I lost the Unity symbol and I was left with this:

A blank icon. Desperate and ready to write to David Helgason to apologise for losing their icon, I was ready to give up.
Most of the forum post I've read on the topic of icons and Unity iPhone mention that one would have to add the icon to the Xcode folder. Something I have been trying in different ways without luck. Finally, Christoffer helped me and by magic he got it working without knowing how come it worked. So I backtracked everything.

Here's the solution:
Forget the icon field in Unity Iphone. It does absolutely nothing, apparently. What works is adding the 72x72 .png icon (if you are as I working on something for the ipad) to the Xcode folder. To work the image has to be named Icon-72.png or Icon-iPad.png (the file names are the real magic Ü).

So finally this is what I got after hours of desperate experimenting, yaaaaaay:

We have touch down

2010-09-08T00:29:00.001+02:00

After a lengthy process that most fittingly can be described as black magic I now have Unity Iphone and a iphone developer licence installed on the computer. Thanks for your help Christoffer.

I did some small changes in the code and now the prototype is on the ipad. "Only" problem is code registers touches in general on the screen and the specific location of the touch as you can see in the video.

To interact by touch instead of mouse click I changed this
void OnMouseDown()
{
gameObject.tag="smile";
SetCryTime();
}
to this
foreach (iPhoneTouch touch in iPhoneInput.touches)
{
if(touch.phase == iPhoneTouchPhase.Began)
{
gameObject.tag="smile";
SetCryTime();
}
}
and placed the code snippet inside the update function instead of outside. Next up is fixing the touch code so it only works on the object that are actually touched.

float progress = 0;

2010-09-06T23:37:00.000+02:00

No progress today. I guess I tried to study. I was looking for tutorials on animating with sprite sheets something that would give me a good work method for vector animation. I didn't find anything useful. Mostly forum posts about how to convert a 3d animation to sprite sheets and often with very limited info. If I find a good method by myself then I guess I should write it down.

I did find one post at angryanimator.com on animation in general which is nice. Not what I was looking for but still worth a look. Especially the links to “How to Animate” by Preston Blair volume 1 and volume 2 are great. One of the comments mentions the book Character Animation Crash Course! maybe I should find a copy.

Also, I looked a bit at the code but I guess I wasn't in the zone.

Sigh...sound

2010-09-05T18:17:00.002+02:00

I'm attempting to make a game on my own. I'm not trying for originality (though it would be nice) the main focus is making a game from start to finish. This means I want to sketch, code, design, draw and animate my way through a mini game production trying on all the roles needed to come full circle.

In the game development endeavour I've been part of so far I've worked on the game design and the graphics. So this dogma game entails many first for me. I'm fine with the coding part actually I'm excited about the coding. Up until now I've always left the coding to the coding savvy. But lately I've passed a Java course and I'm taking object-oriented programming. So now I get to play.

No, the part I'm really scared of is the audio for the game. Though I enjoy music I rarely listen to any (I'm a talk-radio-person) and I definitely don't make any music. So where to start?

Music and sounds are really important for a game. The audio sets the tone of a game makes is fun or scary and in some cases boring. E.g. I've been playing a lot of Plants vs. Zombies lately and I really like the background sound its happy and playful and though I play for a long time it doesn't start to annoy me which is a real quality. Recently, I've also played with Kometen I initially got it for the beautiful watercolour graphics but now the real draw is the soundscape that puts you in a soothing meditative state.

So what should I do for the game audio? Of course I want funny event sounds like when a kid gets scared and starts crying. But I don't want constant crying. On its own the game play is stressful so maybe the background sound should be somewhat soothing?

In trying to add sound elements in unity which was very easy. I made two sample prototypes with background sounds borrowing audio from FlashKit and here.

Prototype with not so annoying background music
Prototype with really annoying background music

For the final game I have to make the music by myself.

Organised randomness

2010-09-05T01:52:00.001+02:00

The boxes aka the kids were in the prototype placed by hand on the scene in a grid. I did this so I could easily check if my method for making the kids near a crying child sad work. It did. So today I've worked briefly on placing the boxes/kids randomly through the code thus making the game a bite more exciting.

When placing the boxes/kids I didn't want complete randomness it would stupid if all the boxes ended up on top of each other or only in one side of the screen. I needed to organise the randomness a bit. So I've combined the random placement with a grid structure.

In the code this is accomplished with the help of a couple of for-loops. The illustration above shows the concept. For each loop A, B and C in the example there are inner loops (here illustrated with 1, 2 and 3) that picks random numbers of kids to place (here either 3 or 4) and places them at random coordinates within the intervals defines by the two for-loops. Anyway, this is how I visualised the "organised randomness" in my head before I started coding. Perhaps the code is easier to read :)

Screaming kids

2010-09-03T10:00:00.001+02:00

The working title in my head for the game is Kindergarten Calamity. Looking at the sketches of the game characters you may understand why.

I haven't made any final decisions on the style of game. These drawings are simply my initial ideas.

Subversion and MonoDevelop

2010-09-02T01:20:00.000+02:00

In trying to get more organised I've now with a little help from my friends gotten a revision control system. This gives me a bigger Ctrl+z button.

So far I've used the unitys own editor to write the c# code but as MonoDevelop comes highly recommended I've installed it. I'm looking forward to its advantages :).

I'm a n00b when it comes to installing programs on the mac. I still get surprised over how easy it is. Just drag and drop. It's somehow too easy.

First prototype and first post

2010-09-01T13:34:00.000+02:00

I started three days ago in unity on my first game. The goal is to make a game for the ipad all by myself. I've just made my first prototype.

You can find the prototype here.
You will need to install the unity plugin to play if you don't have it already.

Rules:
- keep the squares "happy"
- green squares are the "happy" ones
- red squares are "crying"
- blue squares are about to cry because a square close to them are crying.
- click on the red squares to turn them green

Right now there is no win condition only stress.