I started with this little picture for this first hour :
Flow of SpaceOreMiner
As you can see, there are some awesome hand-drawn renders of the menu layout, showing what I wanted from each screen. In unity, I created three extra scenes, one for each screen, and started hacking away at it. Surprisingly, the coding time took next to zero – loading a scene is a single command, creating a menu item is also just a one line command. Now with these menu items, and a game over screen, I pretty much have a complete game! This build contains all my features from my must have list to qualify as a game. Its a pretty damn cool feeling. And now I have 2 extra hours to fine tune/tweak/add minor features.
Everything went better than expected
Now looking at my imaginary list of things to do, there are a few things I really want to add in the next two hours :
Music/sound – if I can find any quickly that I can legally use of course 🙂
Heh, well this was a very maniac hour, I spent most of the time in blender and gimp creating ore models. Though I had initially been happy with only three ores, I figured now the inventory system was up and running, it was kinda boring with only three ores. So I speed made another seven, to bring the total up to 10. Now they are all pretty simple shapes, and all the UVs have just been render scripts in gimp, so sometimes they look a little funny, but I am pretty happy with what I have so far. Giving that this hour was almost totally modeling time, I doubt I will be able to finish the other five ores ( as detailed the blog entry with my most favorite and funny title ever ), which is a shame, but I think it is realistic.
All the ores have been added to the event system, so you can collect them. Also cleared out your inventory correctly when the Mole reaches the Limar. Tweaked the font a little for the status, quite happy with how it looks now. Once again, I will upload a youtube, and hopefully it should magically appear in an hour or so after this post 🙂
Well that is it for tonight folks, I hope you join me all for the exciting conclusion tomorrow, when ( in theory ) I will finish my first game 🙂
Don’t you hate it when you have perfect looking code, and yet it DOESN’T WORK FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER! *grrrrr* I built the inventory system in js, and had all the information heading to the debug console ( Debug.Log ( “whatever” ) ). But for some reason, I wasn’t getting the values I was expecting, after much commenting of code, and poking of things, I still had no idea what was happening. All events were triggering once. The idea being that every time the Mole hit an object, it grabbed the name of the object, stuck it into the Mole’s inventory. Sounds simple enough?
But for no reason I could see my code was failing. I could hit each ore type once, and then after that, nothing was put into the debug screen.
Then, I discovered the collapse button on the console. It was turned on. I didn’t know what it did, so clicked it. That fixed the problem. My code *WAS* running fine. But the console was removing duplicate events. ARGH!!!! But oh well, its turned off, and I have an inventory and score system in game.
It is pretty basic at the moment ( as the video will show ), but suddenly – I actually do have a game 🙂 Yay! Well worth the large amount of frustration from that bleeding collapse button!
Hey folks, just a quick blog about my schedule for tonight and tomorrow. I’ve got five hours to finish the game, by midnight on Saturday. I was planning to do an hour tonight, and then four on Saturday, but alas I have run into a small snag. This snag being uploading the videos to YouTube. The original codec I was using to record them resulted in around 40 meg files. However, with this new codec, they are averaging 140 meg. As my upload cap is tiny, this takes quite a while to get to YouTube, during which time I really can’t use my internet at all. Which definitely causes a lot of problems with my dev style 🙂
So a change of plans to solve this problem. I will do two hours tonight, and do the remaining three tomorrow, spacing them out as widely as possible. Then Sunday is definitely retrospection day 🙂
Every hour it starts to feel so much more like a game. I think next hour I will add the inventory and points system in. However, I digress, lets look at hour 14 🙂
As mentioned yesterday, I’ve altered the spawning pattern of the ore, so they now appear in bands. I’ve been playing and tweaking with these settings, I think a large part of deciding on the ‘fun’ aspect of the game will be tweaking the amount of ore in game.
After ore tweaking, I made a mega-uber-health-recharge-sphere thingy. Basically just a sphere with a quick gimp texture on it, turned into a trigger and when the mole collides with it, it instantly recharges the laser and the engine. Definitely an important game mechanic 🙂
Then I had to think how best to put this game object into context. I could have a docking bay on the Limar to provide this, but the problem is as I am dealing with 2.5D, I couldn’t pull off anything quickly which would make sense. I could have the Limar over the hole you go down, but that shattered the illusion of being underground – it just didn’t look right. So in the end I created a quick arm, which is attached to the front of the Limar, which drops down into the hole. I think it looks pretty dang cool 🙂 I added a purple light inside the energy field, which causes some pretty cool shading effects on the giant Limar model.
After accidentally creating a camera into the scene, inspiration struck me! Having a far off camera, and by switching to it with a key press gives an AWESOME view of the mining you are doing. I’m not sure if I will keep this in the final version of the game, depends if I can get it to work exactly how I want. Also undecided if I am going for the real view, or the bathed in green view. So many decisions 🙂 Loyal blog visitors, I ask you for feedback on this issue 🙂
Really really excited about the next hour – once I have an inventory system, and a points system, I have almost all my criteria for a game – really didn’t think I would get this far so quickly! It’s awesome! Also, I have to add, getting twitter followers, and getting subscribers to my YouTube channel, is awesome cool and motivating, thanks very much guys. And for those that haven’t, please think about doing it – every extra one is another step to my world domination! or something hehe.
