Assault Android Cactus - twin stick shoot-em-up (PC)

Hi everyone! I'm part of a three person indie team working on a twin stick shooter, the other week we finally announced the game and I figured I should start a thread about it here!



So this is the main character, Cactus, she's responds to a ship's distress call only to find everything has gone horribly wrong, yadda yadda yadda killer robots!




The game has different playable characters that all have unique weapons, so it's a bit like a scrolling shoot-em-up where the character you pick gives you a different play style.




The levels are arena based, so you're in one area dealing with waves of incoming enemies, but we're trying to mix that up as much as we can, this level reconfigures itself as you play.




We're supporting keyboard and mouse as well as xbox pads at the moment, one to four players, local co-op only.


Anyway, here's our announcement trailer if you want to see it in motion :

The gameplay is in a pretty good place, but we still have plenty of content to build. I'll try to keep this thread updated with our progress and I'd love to hear what everyone thinks!

 

Very nice work so far. This looks good. I like the name of it and the characters name. Cactus. haha.
Keep up the good work.

 

Game of the year!

 

snowconesolid - thankyou! I'm quite fond of the characters!

pixellegolas - haha that would be nice

It's been a few days now, figured I should talk about what I've been up to! Assault Android Cactus is set aboard a very large spaceship, although most of what has been shown is from zone 1, that rusty brown loading bay style environment.



I'm more of an animator than an environment modeller, but my approach has been to build a tileset as I go while modelling custom parts as I need them. Above is zone 1's tileset, and below is where I'm at with zone 2's.



This is the whitebox version of the first level of zone 2, Hive, built by the designer out of Unity primitives.



Here it is with the components fitted! Still needs some polish, but a good chunk of the way there!



Now it's in game, wheeeeee!



A few plants around the workplace livens things up!

 

It's just amazing this game!!! I can't wait to play it!!! Fluid, cool, nice avatars, and the style of the weapons!! I loved the boss's part tooo!! AHHH SO GOOD

 

How is this not in Showcase Forum? Amazing work, guys!

 

HelziX - thank you! That was uplifting to hear! I tried hard to get the game to flow and to balance all the weapon sets so they feel different but remain on par, power wise.

Thanks! Hmm, should this be in the showcase forum?? I figured it belonged here because we're still in the middle of making it...

 

Looks good.

 

How did you do the changing level floor in the trailer?

 

[table]
[tr][td] [/td]
[td]With lots and lots of prefabs! We started with a 1x1x1 cube that could move up and down to become a wall, floor or a hole to test the gameplay out.

Once we were happy with that, I realised there's only so many permutations (floor to hole, wall to floor etc) so I made an animated object that could switch between each state.[/td][/tr]
[/table]



The block became a prefab with it's own script, then we laid them out in a 15x11 grid to make the level. Each block has a single skinned mesh with 1 bone weighting.



The designer wrote a script to control the position of each block based on a texture lookup. (those little icons are the level layouts, they're only 15x11 pixels ) and as the player reaches set points in the spawn waves, we trigger a level change. The final touch is to start the level change from the players feet and let it ripple outwards. (also there's a bunch of code to prevent blocks under the players feet from collapsing - it's not the sort of game where you are thrown to your doom)



Here's one of the texture loopups enlarged, and the level it creates! In case anyone is curious, the colour scheme is green is floor, red is wall, black is a hole and yellow for a pathfinding node.

Hope that all makes sense!

 

@FlaxSycle, awesome. I'm amaze with the tech. when will this game come out. Will it be on console as well?

 

Thanks! Right now we're hoping to have the game wrapped up by the later part of this year.

Right now the focus is on making it a PC game (we've got a Steam Greenlight page if anyone wants to show some love! We could definitely use it!) but it's been really cool to hear how Nintendo and Sony are working so closely with Unity. If the opportunity arises, I'd love to work on a downloadable console version too.

 

No, of course, by all means lol. It just looks soo awesome, really seems like a completed project minutes away from getting published!

Will there be a level editor of some kind so people could make some twisted stuff?

 

This is absolutely awesome!
The overall style is polished and has a lovely japanese look (even if you are australian! )
I'm impressed by the overall quality of the project, and the changing-level is amazing.
I don't know if you ever played it, but this game reminds me in some way of Chaos Engine (a veeeery old game for Amiga).

 

Looks great!

 

I am disappointed. I expected a cyborg cactus shooting needles...

Anyway, looks awesome!

 

Thanks everyone!

SuperSlonik - at the moment each level is a custom endeavour, it's not the kind of thing I could wrap up in an in game level editor. I'll have to give it some thought!

sea5ide - haha yeah I used to love that game, although I mostly played the Megadrive version!

Asvarduil - as long as you're not disappointed that it doesn't run on android devices! That one's been confusing people a lot! Hmmm... Cyborg cactus shooting needles... there's potential there...


I wanted to make another update, so I thought I'd talk about everyone's favourite part of making games, the tutorial. AKA The annoying bit nobody wants to do but will absolutely define the experience for everyone who plays it.

We've redesigned the tutorial three times now, it's tricky to get the right balance between informative, fun and, uh... brief The game's storyline is Cactus investigates a runaway super freighter and ends up crash-landing in their hanger bay, encountering the other characters from the trailer. The tutorial picks up there, which gives us the setting!



I'd started blocking it in a while ago, but yesterday I did a material pass on it. Cactus's mini-spaceship is still untextured and I really want to dirty the place up a bit, dent the wall where the ship has hit and strew some wreckage around, but the gameplay space itself is feeling about right.




As you go through the tutorial, objectives are tracked on the right hand side.




I did a talking portrait system for moments like this. It uses an extra camera looking at the ingame character set to depth only. The dialogue system is clunky and needs a re-factor but it's getting the job done.




Then I pause the game to display an info screen. These really help, an earlier version tried to present this stuff during gameplay, but everyone was too distracted by the attacking robots. We were playing Castlevania Lords of Shadows when it finally clicked that if we froze the game it gave us a lot more control.

Those tutorial boxes are placeholder, but since they are gameObjects being enabled/disabled, they should be easy to improve when I get the time. I've got a script that switches text to display the controller specific term (eg. "left mouse button" on mouse/keyboard, or "right trigger" for xbox pad) although I'll probably use graphics in the final version.

And the tutorial now plays from start to finish! Woo!

 

First of all say that your game looks amazing! I've just voted the project in GreenLight

Really? I was thinking in buy StageBuild or ProBuilder for some of my projects, but after read that... wow, can you tell me how did you do that?

Cheers!

 

Thankyou!

Haha, well when I say primitives, really I mean cubes, and the key is a lot of overlap...


Here's the level with wireframe turned on, it's a big mass of scaled cubes. The ones that characters can touch have box colliders, but the bigger ones on the outside don't as they're only there to block off vision. The final touch is to give them a material with a world space shader so the grid is clean.


The circular pillars are a bunch of cubes, the designer made them a prefab so he could drop them in and scale them as needed.

This approach is good for us because the goal is to work fast and replace the level with clean geometry later. (I used that ObjExporter on the wiki to pull the scene into MAX) There would be z-fighting issues in forward rendering, and obviously texturing it with anything other than world space materials would look terrible.

 

Thanks for highlighting ObjExporter - I've been whiteboxing levels in a similar way, and that will save me a lot of time in moving things over to the editor

 

oysterCAKE - it's a very handy script!

Been making steady progress on the tutorial...


new screens/artwork are in


I added a 'highlight system' that puts those yellow markers on a type of item, so I can make it obvious what the current objective is


the 'after' version of the Pickups screen

 

Wow, this thread is almost as BAD ASS as the game! Congrats!

 

The game is looking great! Keep it up!

 

Thanks guys!

With the tutorial pretty much working, the untextured spaceship was starting to stick out like a sore thumb, so today I got around to unwrapping and doing a first pass texture.


Nothing too fancy, but I was happy with how it came out! Cactus is there for scale

 

Just posted some fresh screenshots on our blog, didn't want to spam them in thread but check them out if you're interested!

http://www.assaultandroidcactus.com/2013/05/new-screenshots.html

 

Absolutely amazing!

Thanks for the dev write ups as well FlaxSycle.

 

You're welcome! I'm enjoying being able to talk about what I'm working on for a change!

 

Out of curiosity, when you did your white boxing, was there a reason you only use cubes, eg for the pillars why not a cylinder etc? (btw I went to show our designer your previous post about the white boxing wireframe but the image is missing )

Also if you dont mind me asking, how long have you been working on this? Looks highly polished!

 

can't wait to play it.Is it going to Steam?

 

It's more out of habit than anything else. Cylinders use capsule colliders, which makes them unsuitable as platforms, although in the case of Cactus, the gameplay is largely 2D and there wouldn't be a problem outside maybe the occasional missile hitting an invisible wall when it's not meant to. Sorry about the missing image, I didn't touch anything but the attachment system on this board seems to be a bit flaky!

As for how long... technically, it's been a while, it started as a side project to teach myself Unity several years ago. When I left my job in February to work on my own projects, this is the one we resurrected. it's gone from whitebox test levels to what you see now, plus character skins, weapons a lot of the effects and almost all of the menus and gameflow.

So on one hand, a lot of work has been done since February, but on the other hand we weren't starting from a clean slate. (not always a good thing, considering some of my early code that's still hanging about!)

I would very much like it to! But according to our Greenlight page, things aren't looking good.

 

I hit the would buy button in steam green lit page, and left a comment.

Good luck, hope you guys get on steam!

 

Thanks! Every vote counts at this point!

We started sharing early preview builds with people in media, HalfBeard over at HalfBeard's HUD did a really comprehensive preview of the game - I got nervous when I realised he was recording his first ever impressions, but I think Cactus held up great and it gives an accurate feel for where the game is at.

So to reiterate, this isn't my video, this is a stranger's first impression of playing our game.

 

Still making progress on the game, lately I've been working on cleaning up the HUD, doing a bunch of internal changes to how score and rank get calculated that'll be useful in the future and chasing down controller discrepancies between the desktop platforms.

That last one has been a pain, actually, but now thanks to an input manager wrapper and a whole bunch of Application.platform checks, a gamepad should handle the same way on Windows, Mac and Linux. Bought a Logitech F310 to test today, was freaking out until I realised there was a little switch on the bottom to set it to X mode.

All good stuff, but nothing really visual, well except the HUD really. Here's how the clear screen's looking now!



Not final, but certainly getting more functional!

 

The game look awesome.

 

thanks hizral! It's taken a lot of effort to get this far!

By the way I'm happy to answer questions, feel free to ask for more info on anything or if you're curious about how we're doing certain things. I like being open about this kind of stuff.

Anyway, to mix things up I thought I'd dip into the character art pipeline. I use the term loosely as I make this stuff up as I go along. To start with, our heroine Cactus!



Cactus has a bit of a history, I started drawing her back in 2003, that picture on the upper left is from 2007, so she pre-dates the game by a bit

When I started working on the game, the first character I built was modelled off the model sheet on the bottom left - just to get the proportions down and test how readable the ears would be in game. The larger model sheet is what I modelled the character off of (it's pretty close for the most part, although the face had some alterations) and on the right is Cactus today, screen capped out of Unity.

 

Wow you are making such amazing progress on this game. This is something that should get featured on unity's home page in the "Made with unity" section.

Really good work. Keep it up.

 

Thanks! I actually only just realised there was a "suggest a game" button on the game list page! Cactus suggested! There's so many amazing Unity games on there though, might be hard to get noticed!


Choosing your character in Assault Android Cactus is like choosing your ship in a shoot-em-up, they have different weapons and play styles that will suit different people. That said, I wanted them to have a bit of personality.



Holly was the first character designed specifically for the game. Story-wise she's an inventory manager aboard the spaceship where it all goes down, she's got a combat capable body because she works in dangerous conditions, not because she expects to see combat.

Visually, she's an alteration on Cactus, but while Cactus has a wing motif on her calves and a gun for an arm, Holly is a little more plain. For gameplay the most important thing was that her hair colour is clear (necessary for telling the characters apart in multiplayer) and has a readable hair style. I mulled over a few ideas before I settled on the high pigtails, and you can see in the paint over that originally I tried to have them set behind the 'ears', but when I started modelling I realised it was too awkward so instead they hang forwards over them.

 

Maybe we can get jesse to do a video on it.

 

the next playable character is Lemon, she's armed with a spreadshot for a primary weapon and a four shot rocket launcher as her secondary. (based loosely on the M202 Flash, so probably looks familiar to fans of Resident Evil)



Her concept is a medic in training with a cheery attitude. Since I'd already modelled the generic legs her body's mostly a recolour, but she has medical satchels on her sides and her left hand is similar to Cactus's but is a medical display. I also tried to model her visor closer to sunglasses.

The tips of the characters 'ears' are lit with an emissive texture and a colour, during game I change the colour to reflect characters health. A handy side effect was for Lemon I could paint in the ECG readout, so it glows in the dark and turns off when she gets knocked down.

 

Really nice game, following

 

Awesome!

 

Ok. I am looking at this game and looking at my Android tablet.
At the game.
At the tablet.
Back at the game.
Back at the tablet.

WHY IS THIS NOT THERE YET?


Looks really good. Would hope that now that Unity mobile is free that there is the possibility but I guess I can settle for the PC version.

 

Killswitch - sadly we're unlikely to put the androids on an Android device! It has less to do with Unity plugins and more to do with it not being a good fit for the platform. If it helps, you can check out, Antibody, a game we did a while back. it's action packed, free, and on Android right now

So that brings us to Coral, the forth starting character and one of the most interesting in terms of how she plays.



Art wise, the biggest challenge was getting her hair right. I went through various concepts, arriving at the version I sketched up on the bottom left. I started building quads and extruding edges until I had a shell that I could adjust until it felt right.

In terms of a character, she uses a shotgun and the plasma field, the latter being a ball of energy that damages any enemy inside it. It makes her a close range specialist when compared to the others. Where it gets interesting is that it drops in place and will push away enemies and bullets. So she can drop the plasma ball then stand in it for protection, drop it on a group of enemies and shotgun them for extra damage, or use it to block up choke points... a very versatile weapon!

 

The game looks really great, looking forwards to this one.

 

O.O this game looks awesome... congratulations guys...

 

@OP

Fabulous game.
How many people in your dev team?

 

Thanks!

There's three of us!

I've done the art and most of the coding and there's a designer and a composer.

 

Thx for the replay.

 

Slowly been making progress on the dialogue system - I had the bones of it working for the tutorial, but I extended it to handle non-player characters, multiple characters, and cleaned up the formatting a little!



Each character has their own short exchange with the boss before and after the fight and in multiplayer the other characters turn to face the speaker so it works pretty well!

I'm using a depth only camera with a culling mask to do the portraits. When a character starts talking they switch their layer so only they get picked up by it.

 

The other week we had James and Paul from the Eight and a Half Bit podcast drop round to do a video!

There's some cool four player footage of the game and you can find out what Sanatana and I look like!

I'm the nervous one, lol.