Pew pew pew, part 8

Starting to refactor systems. Split out the enemy wave manager into a ship builder class (build and configure enemies based on type), spawn position solver, and a waveManager (that decides WHEN to spawn WHAT ship). Turns out I need to put more effort in the last part, while the two former worked pretty well.

Did a new enemy type as well. A re-make of the shotgun turret from pewpew5 (that never made it into the game).

It is supposed to be a bullet hell after all =D

Pewpewpew, part 7

Finally got some time for this old prototype again!

Added one more enemy (you can glimpse him in the gif), strolling around and planting mines to hinder your movement!

Turns out that having enemy bullets (and mines) be solid color really messed up your sense of depth. And that is super important in this game! So I changed it to simple lit. Sense of depth is improved, but it looks really ugly now! I need an artist to fix this… =(

Pew pew pew, part 6

Started on a strategy for spawning enemies today. I don’t want you to die becaues they appear from behind our out of your vision, so focus is ahead! Trying to find a good min/max distance forward and curving outward. Wanted to keep it wider to the sides and narrow it down a bit in height to allow for an easier feel when looking around you.

First try:

So many Trumps

Second try is to distribute the enemies more evenly. Try to find large patches of empty spots and avoid where it is already cramped.

More even distribution, no overlaps

This turned out quite well. I can tell you that it feels a bit intimidating watching all those Trump heads stare at you in VR X-D

I also made a new enemy type:

LASER EYES

And here is a very short video of todays progress. Let me tell you that without too much time put into this one, it is already FUN AS HECK!

Pew pew pew. Part 5

Really quick dev today. Added a fourth shiptype that bursts out a ton of bullets. I have a good initial setup now! Time to start on spawning them in sequence.

Pew pew pew. Part 4

Some more progress, this little VR prototype is going in the right direction indeed!

I needed a way to distinguish the different enemy types, so I just pasted different Trump faces on the cube. Consider it placeholder graphics (even if it is kind of funny) =D

Pew pew pepw. Part3

The controls did not “feel” right. Has been working on improving them for a couple of evenings now. Great improvement even if there are still some work to be done.

Pew pew pew. Part 2

Replaced the player ship with free model from asset store since the cube looked too horrible, even for me. Replaced player bullets with laser beams.

In this gif it’s hard to distinguish bullets from enemies…

Space shooter prototype in VR, part 1

Got an Oculus Quest a few months back. Love the device, but I’m not overly enthusiastic about the games you can buy. Not to mention that they are very expensive!

So I started writing a small game of my own. A little space shooter/bullet hell with fast, arcade-like gameplay inspired by games like Geometry Wars.

This is the very first progress. Only an hour into the project… good progress for such rapid prototyping. Lots left to do (obviously).

Fight The System

This evening I managed to render tiles from an old Ripple Tilesheet to a runtime generated mesh, using a custom shader to map the tile values.

It does not scroll yet, but supports rescaling the viewport (although only to even pixels in height).

Kingsmountain, Part 2

“Don’t worry about the dog, he’s very nice and only wants to play!”

Kingsmountain, Part 1

A while back I found all the raw material for a game me and Simon were working on a long time ago (actually before both Ripple and Metro Siberia, so somewhere around 2006 – whoa, thats TEN YEARS ago!!) called Kingsmountain, and I’ve been playing with the idea to try and recreate one of the minigames.

My first attempt was with Haxe, and a 2d skeletal animation tool called Spine. However, the Haxe runtime implementation for Spine was buggy as hell, and I spent many hours trying to animate the running little dude, but finally the bugs made me give up.

Instead I restarted the project in Unity, and here you can see the result after just about 2-3 hours.

Shader Week 1, Conclusion

The source code for all 7 days can be found here: https://github.com/Tommislav/unity_shaderweek

It has been a successful and interesting experiment, commiting 7 days to shader programming. As I’m on parental leave I could only spend about an hour a day for this, but I think I managed to get quite far! Apart from what’s visible here, I spent 3-4 days reading or researching, but did not count those as I wanted visible examples for each day.

One problem with only having about an hour a day, and only doing tutorials is that you don’t get much time to modify/experiment/fix bugs. But I early decided that my focus this week would be learning, and that I will do a second shader week where I experiment and create my own shader effects instead.

To conclude

• I have learned a ton!
• Need a second shader week, where I write my own shader effects
• A superb resource for learning shaders is this link: http://www.alanzucconi.com/

Shader Week, Day 7

Last day on my shader week. Not sure what to do when a friend of mine suggested that I do a “wobbly water shader”. Well, I guess you could do it pretty simple by using a displacement map as in day 2, so I used another approach manipulating the vertexes with a sine-wave instead.

I used this tutorial as base http://www.alcove-games.com/opengl-es-2-tutorials/vertex-shader-for-tiled-water/ but re-wrote it in CG

Shader Week, Day 6

Todays shader tutorial was about keeping an offscreen buffer which we can update continually.

http://www.alanzucconi.com/2016/03/02/4539/

In the image to the left we invert the colors every second.

The right image was supposed to be smoke, but the tutorial was very math heavy but thin on how to do the implementation. So I skipped the smoke tutorial and made a script myself that draws a circle at the mouse position (cursor not visible in gif) and fades the image by 0.9 every frame.

Good thing the cursor isn’t visible though. Somehow the mouse X/Y-movement was inverted, and coordinates messed up. But not enough time to fix tonight, as I’m only using an hour a day.

Shader Week, Day 5

Finally started on vertex and fragment shaders again! http://www.alanzucconi.com/2015/07/01/vertex-and-fragment-shaders-in-unity3d/

Using a GrabPass to grab a texture of what’s underneath we can manipulate whats underneath. The red rectangle is just taking the rgb + r*1.5, applied to a quad.

Underneath we’re using a bumpmap to apply something that looks like glass.

Very cool, but a lot of new concepts here. Will have to play around with this more. But now I’m out of time for today…