What's new

I programmed some interesting new stuff lately, and did a lot of debugging.

- I worked on performance, creating a system of auto activation/desactivation used by every enemy. And I reworked the enemy AI to avoid unnecessary colliders usage (for example, on the situation showed on the GIF I posted last time, now two of the colliders are only activated for a frame, when needed).

- Charged attack is now possible in the game! You keep the attack button pressed, during this time a bar fills itself (while the stamina bar decreases), full after 2 or 3 seconds. When released, you perform a strong attack, with a damage multiplier.

- I did a lot of debugging of animation transitions, and some changes in the game's physics (most of the objects have less mass than before).

Here is the animator for the player object. Pretty nightmarish.

- You can now pause the game.

- I knew it was going to be like this, so I shouldn't complain... But the swimming part is really hard to program, if I want it in a perfect way, covering every possibility (I want the swim ability to be unlocked during the game...), feeling natural & debugged... I'm still working on it.

Oxygen bar is one thing done.

I hope I can release a good demo of Cape Bleue, soon! Thank you for following this blog.

Chrono cards & enemy AI

I spent the last days programming "chrono cards" UI for Cape Bleue. It's a system of unlockable pages about the game's backstory (the 1000 years before the game's beginning, leading to the world you see in the game).

I also worked on enemy AI. Here is a GIF showing an enemy in motion, and the detection colliders attached, used to detect the type of ground he faces & take decisions. Sorry about the quite bad looping.

Real time map

I just finished programming a real time map for Cape Bleue. You can see it in action in this accelerated GIF (the map is on the upper right corner).

Spider tank

Same thing than in previous post, but with legs.

Tank in voxels

I'm working on a tank for a new level's background. To be able to use it in different angles, I did it in voxels. There's still work to do on this, but I already like it.

Early version of Forest level

I'm working on the forest level, with the help of Iverson Chan (he drew almost all the assets used in this level).

It still lacks some things, and all elements are placed for test purpose only, but I'm happy to show you an early version of this new level.

An animated gif showing parallax in motion can be seen here on Gfycat.

 

Spider

Here is the last thing I made, a spider, walking like a boss. Currently working on the whole animset for this character. 

What's new

I'm still working on Cape Bleue. Here are some of the new things I recently changed or added in the game :

- UI numbers that pop up where the event occurs. It gives an immediate feedback ("+30", "-15", etc.) to the player after a hit (see below) or after healing or looting.

- There are interiors now. Here is the hero's house.

You can save by activating the arcade machine.

- I also programmed a map I drew some time ago. My first try at a Gameboy style.

Beginning of the game, when you know nothing.

The map of an experienced traveller

And I did a lot of debugging & polishing on controls, especially during fights.

That's all, thanks for reading!

News

There are a lot of new stuff in Cape Bleue, I worked on UI and engine (saving/loading game, adding loot in inventory, equip it, etc.) and did a lot of debugging.

I can only show you some of the new graphical things (because loading / saving games is a great accomplishment but - sadly - it doesn't make good GIFs): new background houses, new particles and treasure looting. As usual, click for full size.

Making water with simple interactions

I spent the last days drawing water for Cape Bleue, and coding how it interacts with characters. You can see a GIF of the result here. Someone on Reddit asked how I made it, so it could be a good idea to show here the process I followed.

I began with a drawing of water tiles, in Pyxel Edit.

It's not animated, and still not in Unity, but I did a quick mockup to see how it would render with game's background and characters.

It's good. I want this in my game! The only problem I noticed was the upper line, making the character looks like it's behind water and not in it :

So I reworked everything properly this time, keeping in mind how I would concretely code all this.

For technical reasons I couldn't do animated tiles, so I separated the tile in 3 main parts: water line (extensible horizontally to match puddle's size, and will be used as a detector for collisions), animations (bubbles and herbs), and water (a simple color, extensible easily).

I did simple animations, with just enough frames for bubbles to loop : 

 

Placing this in Unity is simple. Water line and water color (set with transparency in Unity) are extended all along the pool size, and I put animations one next to the other:

Putting character behind water, but in front of water line is a quick setting of the Z position of every object.

The next thing was coding interactions, splashes for entering /exiting the water, and other splashes for moving. Back to Pyxel Edit, I draw splash animations, one big, one small:

I can't give the script for all that follow, because there isn't. I made it with Playmaker, that allow me to code in finite state machine. I can explain what were the major steps.

This is what my scripts look like.

I have 4 main scripts :
- The first one, placed on waterline, detects collision with player or enemy objects (in playmaker, it is "Trigger 2D action" with "on trigger enter 2D" as trigger value). It has a dozen splashes objects as children, all desactivated. When collision occurs, it activates one of the splashes and set his position X to the character detected (the Y value stays the same, as it is waterline's position), and desactivate some of the others.

- The second one do the same with "on trigger exit 2D" as trigger value. I can use it to add a different splash animation when the character jumps out of water.

- I have a child object to the player's character that detects if it is in water (in collision with water line object). The bool variable "inWater" just created will allow me to slow the player when in water or other things like this (not done yet). After this, I check character's speed, and if it's more than a certain amount, the script sends an event to the fourth and last script...

-... which shows small splashes. It is very close to the first one, the main difference being it doesn't trigger when collision occurs, but when player object (and every object that has this script) sends the right event.

The result can handle a few characters making splashes at the same time. The major flaw in my process is bubble animations that need to be remade for every different value of depth of water.

I think it works great, so I'm happy with it. All animations could be changed or polished to have a better result, now that I'm not in the hurry of drawing-what-I-need-for-coding anymore.

Thanks for reading!

Combo

I worked mainly on platformer mechanics these last weeks: grip on ledges, zipline, ladders, etc. Everything works fine so far, and the game begins to be enjoyable on this side.

However, all the fight mechanics and scripts haven't changed for a long time (in this post I showed my process to make the main character's attack animation), and they need a lot of work.That's what I'm on these days.

I started to make new attack animations. These first 3 animations below are meant to be a combo. 

Crouch attack

This attack is triggered when the player attacks while blocking. It pushes enemies and can break their guard, or pushes objects violently... In my dreams. For now it's  coded like a normal attack, with more bugs.

The animation I used before this update. I plan to use it if UP is pressed when attack is triggered.

Jumping attack

Animating is hard! These are far from perfect but they are usable while programming. 

I still have a lot of work on this (mostly on the way the character will move on X axis while attacking, and better timings on enemies' stun so it really has the effect of a combo), but I'm happy to be already able to show in-game karate action:

(click for full size)

Voxel! making pixel art in 3D

I continued my work on Voxels. I'm still not sure if it'll be useful in Cape Bleue, but I like this process, and I thought I could show it here.

So I start with a small pixel art truck I draw a few weeks ago.

original size (x1)

size x3

I import it in Qubicle (I don't use MagicaVoxel anymore, it was a nice little soft but it lacks necessary functions like copy/paste or move) and extrude the form to the depth. I won't explain the process again as it's quite simple (it's just doing pixel art in three dimensions) and I already did a quick explanation in a recent post.

Work was 75 % done when this screenshot was taken : extrude is done, headlights are OK, but the wheels are not "cut", and there's no license plate yet

After some time sculpting it, I'm happy with the result.

Now I can view the truck on various views, and start dreaming about all the games that could be done with nice 3D assets like these :)

I can also generate variations around the first image in this post, with slightly new angles (but still in side view so it can be used in projects like Cape Bleue), like shown below :

I think this render, for example, is a far better drawing than the one I did in pixelart.

And finally, a good ol' gif showing the truck on every (side view) angle :

Hope you liked it, thanks for reading!

Zipline

This week end I coded two important things for level design : ladder climbing and ziplines.

Here is a video showing a quick fight and how zipline is used. You can see it below as a gif, or here on http://gfycat.com (5 times lighter)