Progress Update

Well basically...there has been no progress haha. I don't have time during the week anymore now that I work. On the weekends, like today, I need to study for my online course and do other things that must come first. So for now, my project is on the back-burner until I am done my online course at school. That should be around August 13th. Once that is complete, I should have my weekends back and will invest greatly into my project. I still think it is going to be awesome and I can't wait to get into again!

Aside from that, work is pretty cool. I still need to learn all the tools that have already been made and also to learn the coding information that I need. Namely programs that interact with excel files as well as networking. Hopefully I can learn that as quickly as possible so that I don't spend my days trying to figure out code but rather make or improve new tools to help out my team.

Inspiration Update #1

Since my last post, I've spent quite a bit of time planning out how I was going to tackle my latest project. 90% the way through, I came up with a better, simpler and potentially cheaper way of doing it. I still finished my initial plan to see if it was in fact feasible, which it was, though more expensive and much more complicated. My new revision of the implementation no longer requires transmission towers, in fact, to prototype, I only need to purchase a few new parts. For the rest, I already have the hardware required! So what I am learning now is networked multiplayer over an ad-hoc wireless connection. Right now, things are looking pretty good, one key element is functioning (tested it last night), I'm going to start learning networking, and the rest of the hardware is coming in next week. If everything works out semi-nicely, I should have my prototype up and running next weekend :-)

Latest project inspiration

For a while now, I've been trying to think of a way to bring games into the real world, mainly to get gamers out and about. I think I've finally found the way to do it. I don't want to speak to much on the idea yet until I have a prototype running, but it will require me to learn a lot of things I have no clue about. I will need to learn augmented reality, set up a server as a hub for players to connect to, and finally, I need to learn how to build small transmission towers to communicate with the players. Yup, this is going to be quite the adventure...

Things are looking good!

It's been a while since I last posted, since then I changed some game mechanics in Slime Jumper, got my XBox 360 and Kinect from Microsoft and got a job at THQ! :-)

Starting with Slime Jumper, instead of having a "slime boost" mode when you can do some crazy stuff, I instead added counters for the items you catch. When the counters reach 0, you can drag an item specific bomb onto the screen that will cause some stuff to happen (more trash falling, player duplication, etc). Last thing I completed was the dragging gestures of the specific items into the middle of the screen. I had problems with that because tapping and dragging can both be gestures, but it only sees a "tap" if the fingers touches down, doesn't move much and lifts off. But that means that you can hold your finger down, wait for the right time to jump, then lift off and jump. This is not what I wanted, I wanted the tap-jump to occur immediately. This was conflicting with my use of the dragging gestures however. In the end, with some boolean flags I was able to distinguish between immediate taps and dragging gestures to achieve the controls I wanted.

As for the XBox, I got it in the mail...some time ago, I actually don't remember exactly when hehe. Anyways I've been playing quite a bit of that lately, I had my spurt of gaming at the beginning and now it's under control. :-P I've mainly been playing Forze Motorsport 3 (because I got it for free last year from the Great Canadian Appathon), and some arcade games. It was fun looking through and playing trials of the arcade games because it gave me ideas for the games that I want to make. Oh and Fruit Ninja Kinect...amazing!

Lastly and definitely most importantly, as of Monday July 9th, I will be a full-time permanent employee at THQ!!! I'm too excited to say much more lol

Slime Jumper Upgrade

Since my last post, I've been doing things here and there, some more important than others, but yesterday I put more time into improving Slime Jumper to make it more the game I intended from the start. 

So what I've changed are the spawn chances for negative items, so now its easier to lose and harder to get high scores. 

I added tar drops that come down the sides of the walls and when the player grabs one, it acts as armor and absorbs one hit with cleaning products.

There is also a 1-up life orb that will come floating from the bottom of the screen that adds a life to the player when they catch it.

When that was done I still felt like the game didn't have anything that the player was really trying to play for, there was no motivation to play even a little intelligently, you can easily survive keeping your finger pressed on the center of the screen. 

So I removed the lives, and instead now there is a vial on the side of the screen that is filled with "slime-life". A little flame under the vial burns away the players health over time and the only ways to change that is to collect garbage. So depending on the garbage, the more life is recovered.
The tar drops will make life burn away more slowly for a time, 1-ups will refill the vial and I plan on adding combos that change certain player characteristics. So for instance, 3 banana peels could give the player a slippery skin that makes cleaning products bounce off. Or 5 trash balls will make the player temporarily unaffected by cleaning products. And so on...

All-in-all I'm very much more satisfied with the way things are going now. Slime Jumper is improving, finishing up the first of two summer courses this summer. An interview at THQ this Monday!!! Things are looking good indeed. :-)

Redirection

Since my last post, I've been turning ideas over in my head about how to approach the lag and collision detection issues for my Tunnel Flyer game. None seem like they would help and I can't do more than speculate about solutions since I can't really profile the game and see where the major bottlenecks are. All these issues combined, I've decided to put that project on the back-burner. I will still keep it in mind and see if I think of some way to solve the problems, but I won't sit blankly in front of the screen trying to push something out.

That being said I will continue with learning Unity of course, and swap-out completing Tunnel Flyer with polishing and updating my two published games, Slime Jumper and Keep Running. Back to work!

It Works! Mostly...

My method for tracking the player along the tunnels in Tunnel Flyer is working! I am also able to make the player bounce off of the walls most of the time, issues arise when flying perpendicularly towards the wall, but I should be able to fix that with collision prediction. Something is causing the game to lag however. Currently I am only ever checking against two of the three tunnel segments that I am tracking, when tracking 3, the game was unplayable. Now when only tracking 2, the game is playable but the lag is noticeable. In all, I am excluding 1/3 of the tunnel segments the player is near, and excluding any triangles in the mesh that are too far away from the player. The next best thing second to only ever checking 1 tunnel segment (which seems like a bad idea) is to perhaps make the tunnels larger while keeping a similar triangle count. This way, the player will only ever be nearer to a smaller number of vertices so less computations should be required.

I will try to find a way to profile the game as it is playing to see exactly where the issues are (though I have a pretty good idea), as well as continue to make optimizations until the game is running smoothly.

On a side note, I have begun learning blender for modeling and animations. I'm not that bad though I can't say I'm all that good either, my humanoid ended up looking like someone wearing baggy overalls with an Easter Island head. So now that I know my way around the basics of blender modeling, I am going to start learning animations when I have time. Oh and I won't be using my model, I found a much nicer royalty-free one online and will continue learning with that one instead. Haha