Category Archives: Game Development

Day 71 or something, didn’t check

Posted by aabicus on

 

Okay so I think the interview went fucking amazingly. There were definitely things I said that made me look less than perfect, but I think they got a taste of who I was, and if they don’t hire me, I know I couldn’t have done better.

Yesterday had its own weird event when I got hired for my first ever freelancing nude modeling gig. It was at a shadowy place I’d never heard of starting at 7:30pm and with higher pay than normal ($25/hour!) so I was kinda scared it was like a snuff film or something, but they turned out to be great people and I’m totally game to return whenever. So that worked out.

And with its departure, I’m all out of excuses to not keep doing Unity videos, so we’re restarting Block 4 and leaping back into Brick Buster. Today I rewatched in intro video and cycled 30 minutes and so stay tuned for daily updates again! You nonexistent readers are so patient with me :3

Day 39

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Continuing the theme of bizarre bugs, I did what the prof said and uploaded my game to their website. (Link dies in 30 days, that’s lame so I’m gonna upload it here or something but not before I fix the following). However I’m getting this weird bug so I’m holding on releasing it to anyone who isn’t a diehard reader of this blog.

bd65420a2662f572d4a2bfac91a3c258

For some reason if the text reaches the 10th line there’s this black bar that partially cuts off the 10th and 11th lines. That really annoys me and I don’t know how to fix it. I reuploaded after resizing the canvas, didn’t fix it. Guess I’m asking the discussion thread. Too bad my query will almost certainly be consumed by the hundreds of “PLAY MY GAEM PL0X” since this video lesson requires posting your game…

Day 38

Posted by aabicus on

So I got home from work and for some reason i was feeling inspired. So I wrote twice as much content for the game as originally planned. It’s a full game now, not exactly a super long game, but it meets the requirement for being an actual game, not a demo. And I’m pretty proud of myself cause I had to code the whole darn thing in Unity.

So the game’s done. I know I said it was done yesterday, but that before adding 13 new scenes, more than doubling the amount of content. There are even two different endings!

So tomorrow’s when we keep moving forward and finish the game, since it’s midnight 30 right now and I’ve got work tomorrow. But I don’t have work the two days after that! 😀 (It’s been so nice to abuse the ‘one video per day’ rule with the 00:57 second Course 3 closing video. I’ll be sad when I’m done with Course 3.

Day 37

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So I added all the new text for the game, but I hit a completely unrelated snag. My computer restarted itself last night, and while MonoDevelop was completely saved, apparently the game wasn’t and my base game is gone, lol. Easy fix really, just rewatch that earlier video and put the few things back in. But I can’t do it tonight, got work in six hours. Video done for the night, its happening tomorrow. Same time same bat-channel.

Day 36

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For an eleven minute video, very little happened today. He dropped the bombshell that (gasp!) he expects us to make more story so that our game doesn’t consist of literally a single puzzle. To that effect I have mapped out one more problem for our intrepid Traveller to solve before he may find the cure:

Find the Cure flow chart 2

The rest of the video was streamlining the code, which I mostly did before the video even happened. He taught some tricks for testing your code, but I knew them well after Oedipus in my Inventory and Electra City. 

Looks like tomorrow’s assignment is to make said flowchart into content. I can handle that, not even turning over a new leaf. All his video does is the same,. we can watch him put his code together. In that case Im going to bed early, maybe I can wake up and get said video done before work and enjoy the night.

Day 33

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All problems fixed! Ultimately I decided to stick with the Darwin’s Soldiers plot. Even if it turns out the Unity version is more of a demo than anything else, it’s better than having a hamfisted plot I don’t care about.

Speaking of which, today and tomorrow I’ve been putting together the story, and it should be done by tomorrow. I’ve got the roadmap laid out, and to prevent any possible hype from building here it is:

Find the Cure flow chart

So you gotta divide your game into stages, and each stage need to lead to another stage. In the Twine edition of this game, more plot will happen after you escape the first room, aka you can go find the cure and turn on the bridge. But we’re making progress! 😀

Day 30

Posted by aabicus on

Ignore that last post; There’s not enough space to post honking huge paragraphs into Unity so I had to keep the intro short in-game. I’ll go back later once it’s complete and integrate that backstory into the text adventure. But yeah, that’s gonna be the plot to the text adventure. Set in the Darwin’s Soldiers universe, not that you need to know that because you literally just read the entire backstory to the game. (But if you’d like to read more of the lore, Card of Ten -> Ground One -> Chasing Seconds is the story progression you’d need to understand everything.) The game is told from anti-matter Earth’s perspective and takes place after Ground One.

The first half of today’s video was almost entirely taken up by learning how to truncate lines so you can read your code without having to scroll left or right. Seems kinda pointless but I bet I won’t think that in the future so I’m taking his word for it and learning how.

Rest of the video was spent creating more text. Sadly I don’t have the space to view all my text currently but I bet we’re gonna fix that later so I’m leaving it as is.

Starting it up

IT’S HAPPENING!!!11!! ;D  :’D  D:  XD

Update: Crap I realized how to make paragraphs, just use new print functions, one after the other. Derrrr. That is NOT how you do it, he covered it in the video. Just add /n to your content to line break.

Find the Cure!

Posted by aabicus on

When the Travellers emerged from the glowing portal, they seemed a blessing. As they explained it, they were humans from a parallel Earth; scientists, no less. And while they were not capable of replicating the power source that fueled their portal bridge, their intellect brought about a number of scientific marvels and technological wonders. They integrated into society, bore children, and died a few years later.

Decades of peace passed, and then their children all died as young adults. Then anyone who’d met them died. And it soon became clear that the scientists had brought a very dangerous disease with them through the portal. A sickness they’d no doubt been escaping. Named the Time Plague, as it inevitably killed its victims exactly 25 years after contracting it, the otherwise asymptomatic epidemic ravaged the world’s population, and it’s now likely the world will be barren and lifeless within two years.

But there’s one hope. Using the remaining fuel from the original Travellers’ shuttlecraft, your team was able to reactivate their portal bridge for a precious few seconds. Only you jumped through in time, and as you spin through a swirling vortex headed to an unknown dimension, you knew you had two simple tasks: Find a way to fuel the portal bridge for a return trip, and find the cure to the Time Plague.

Electra City is out!

Posted by aabicus on

Update 9/23/16: Game is now updated and playable on itch.io! Check it out there!

Good news! That project I’ve been working on has gone through so many iterations, that I recently checked it out and none of the code from the proof-of-concept ended up in the final product. Which means I can release that proof of concept to all of you!

I held onto this for a while to add a few things that I’d always wanted in there. Specifically, special attacks, stat-altering rages, and a few tweaks to fix blocking being able to indefinitely stall the game

The post below this one does a fine job of teasing the game, so without further ado here it is to download! If you find any bugs, I probably already know about them, but if they’re particularly bothersome (and you ask ardently enough) I’ll feel motivated to patch them. Which fighter is your favorite?

And finally, an apology. I don’t post for you guys nearly as often as I should, I’ve been devoting the lion’s share of my internet time to my other two blogs. If you want more regular posts, you should come read my analyses and video game reviews on the Daily SPUF, which as it’s name implies has a new article every day! I’m also an occasional columnist on Lambda Generation, a news site dedicated to Valve games. But I’m planning on things picking up over here as soon as this big secretive paid project is done. I can’t say much, but since Electra City was a proof of concept, you should be able to piece together at least the genre. 🙂

A Good Shepherd Knows His King

Posted by aabicus on

Whoo, been a while since I posted on this ole thing, hasn’t it? What on Earth could aabicus have been up to?

Well, I recently made the jump from “literally doesn’t even count as a game dev” to “arguably a professional in the loosest sense of the word” because I’ve been hired to program a game in Multimedia Fusion! Or Clickteam Fusion as they’ve rebranded it. It’s gonna have art and music by other people, my job is simply to take their assets and bid them up into something playable. So while I wait for that project to start I’ve been coding* a proof of concept game and it’s pretty far along!

*all real programmers should scoff derisively right here

I’m not sure what aspects of it I’ll be allowed to release but I have been given permission to show some screenshots:


#policebrutality

Even if I’m never allowed to release the game, it’s taught me a lot about what MMF2.5 can do, and I plan on incorporating all of it into my next project. Also, I feel bad because my first update post in almost a year didn’t provide you guys with any new content so here’s a game I made in under two hours as part of a workshop where we all tried to make a full game in under an hour. I kinda lost track of time.

OedipusInMyInventory