Christmas or Wintery Games... Are You Making One?

True... perhaps a lot of people are burned out after the LD Jam. But I'm sure arowx won't disappoint.

 

Well I have not started on it yet. Just narrowed game ideas down to the four above. Today I will choose one and get to work. For me I want to have game done in time for a Christmas Eve release. So basically what I can knock out in 3 days.

 

Good luck man, I've finished exams an stuff, so I'll have 3 days to work on it full time, excluding internet and social distractions!! Yay.

 

I'm just going to be taking code from my current project and modifying it to make something that fits the theme. I don't want to lose too much familiarity with my codebase while working on another project, after all.

 

This is a very unique game. A strange concept (at least to me) and looks like you have done a superb job on it!

 

I was thinking about c64/nes level graphics but at this late point am thinking maybe Atari 2600 level.

Checked out about 7 different Christmas games including 3 downloads. Got to the second download and not sure what in hell it was doing but locked computer solid. Had to power it off and on and now running virus scan.

Anyway I will choose something to make soon. Need to get this sorted first. Seems a person can't even check out Christmas games without there being some craziness. ha ha

Actually let me get notebook and do some thinking while virus scanner is running.

 

Well that is good at least. Two different virus scans. Nothing found. Must have just been a very poorly coded game. Perhaps someone trying C++ for first time.

Anyway... I almost have an idea finalized now. More thinking...

 

you gonna let us be part of your thinking process or are just teasing?

 

Well you know there are so many different things that can be done. So many ideas. It's the identifying cost (in terms of time) and benefit to maximize the "bang for the buck" so to speak.

Blowing things up is generally always fun. It is a very easy interaction to implement. But mindlessly... I don't think I want to do that. So I am thinking maybe some kind of protector/defender aspect. Maybe Santa is delivering presents and something is trying to bring him down. Most likely the US government firing missiles I'd guess. lol

Or maybe he is loading up the sleigh and something is trying to steal presents. Again player gets to blow the baddies up but there is a reason why and you can see that reason right on screen.

Something like that. So then it becomes a matter of is it a sort of Operation Wolf style mouse shooter? Or a run n gun platformer? Or perhaps even a new take on Missile Command?

That is where I am so far.

 

Since time is so short. This needs to be pretty basic so I am leaning toward a take on Missile Command for this.

I think it would result in a unique Christmas game. And it should be simple enough to pull off well. I can't just sit here non-stop working on this thing. So basically needs to be something that can be done in a few hours or so.

I made a quick mock-up and was able to use some of my ground tiles.



Basically, the sled will be parked in the center of the screen.
Santa will walk off screen and return carrying a package to the sleigh.
Flying dangers can come from above and land-based dangers can come from the right side of the screen.

So now it is just a question of how does the player deal with them?
How is the player represented?
Is it simply a crosshair? Or is the player controlling an elf bodyguard who is armed with a weapon.
If just a crosshair... is it more Operation Wolf style where a click fires a shot that doesn't even need to be drawn?
I think it would be more interesting if it was truly similar to Missile Command and perhaps there are two elves and each time the player fires one of the elves will fire. With the firing alternating between them each time.
And of course, the elves would need to aim their guns tracking the crosshair.

So that is one way to do it. In that case, I wouldn't have any dangers coming from the right side of the screen.
I think this would certainly be simplistic enough to knock out tonight and tomorrow night.

I think this is the way I will go. Interestingly, this means I won't need to use my tile map engine for any scrolling and in fact I won't even need to use tiles at all. Just a static background image. But that is the way it goes. Time is the biggest factor in most of my game design decisions.

 

Looks like it could be a lot of fun! Looking forward to playing it.

 

Very nice! Great style and nice polish!

 

Thanks. I haven't done anything on it since my post above but at least I have a concept to work with now. Gives me a direction. I am leaving house now but I look forward to starting on it properly when I return in early evening.

And now writing this and thinking about it again I think the elves will have some kind of spherical weapon so there is no need to animate the weapon tracking the crosshair in any way. That will save time. I enjoy this kind of stuff. Planning and working very much the way the game devs from 30 years ago did. The best ones were always trying to figure out how to do the most with the least amount. Need to focus on the essence of the game. Get that done then if have any resources left (time in my case) can focus on flash and sizzle (which I guess they now call "juice").

 

I don't even have the snow yet.

 

Alright time to get to the real work. Although I am in holiday mode so will only work as long as I am having fun. Once it starts become tedious it'll be time to do something else and I will try to come back to it later.

First up is the drudgery... creating graphics for the sprite sheet. Animating the Santa character. Drawing some simply gift boxes, etc. I probably shouldn't say drudgery because I've always found graphics work to be enjoyable but it just takes up so much friggan time a person has to really watch it closely or all of your time has been burned up tweaking and improving graphics. I hate that so I guess that is a big reason why in the past several years I have been so against graphics focus.

That being said I am actually going to put some effort into making an interesting looking game. Still pixel art. Still low res. And relatively low color (might use up to 64 colors this time... we'll see).

I think what I will do is just the Santa animations and the gift box static images. Then use the graphics I've already created to assemble the playfield. Then get that coded up into the skeleton of the game program. Add the control for Santa stocking the sleigh with presents. And add the snowfall in which should really complete the wintery Christmassy look. And that'd be a good little sprint and be time for a break.

Okay, deep breath... and... dive!

..........

Oh! How are the rest of the Christmas projects coming along?
@iamthwee, @Ryeath, @Murgilod and anyone else is doing one?

 

I'm gonna work on it all day tomorrow and have a video to post hopefully. Looking forward to seeing where you are tomorrow as well.

 

Nope. I'm still working on a project I started in the summer, main setback is to get an army animated on mobile. When you call GameObject.SetActive(false) and GameObject.SetActive(true) 25 times a second to cycle through static meshes (can't do many skinned animations on mobile), things get a bit hard on the performance side of things

 

I don't know if I will do any more tonight but I thought I probably should make an update here.



I think this scene is fine for projecting the Christmas atmosphere. Santa scurries off screen to get some gifts then slowly walks back over because of course he is weighed down with gifts over his head.

Snowfall parallax display took a bit more work than expected due to the low resolution but in the end it came out okay I think.

 

i think the snow looks cool although there seem to be some very "close" snowflakes that are melted together XD

 

Thanks! Yeah those are the ones I was referring to about challenges of the resolution. But I updated it this morning because those bugged me too. Now instead of different shapes I focused only on color (actually brightness) and speed to convey distance. Also made it so the closest snowflakes fall all the way down the screen passing in front of the ground.

Then did small update to the graphics of the packages. And coded it up so santa now ransomly grabs one of 3 different stacks of gifts. Finally, I increased the amount of the snow somewhat. Might decrease it a bit later. Not sure. This is what I was saying about a person can spend all of their time on just graphics stuff if they aren't careful. lol



Very odd the gif shows up when I edit this post but as soon as I "Save Changes" it disappears.

If it is not showing you can view it here: http://i.imgur.com/aZjPPJ1.gif

Ah, I see... there appears to be ~4 MB media size limitation on the posts. Had to reduce the fps on the gif. The link goes to the 30 fps version. The above gif is the 15 fps version.

 

Wasted almost 30 minutes getting more gifs made from the video and compressing, uploading & testing to figure out what the limit was for the size. lol

Now time to create the graphics for the elves. And their gun stations. Then will get them coded up. On the bright side, for some reason last night I thought it was Friday. But today is Friday. So, I have more time than I thought to get this done for a Christmas Eve release.

 

Okay for this update... I drew the animated elves, their battle stations and coded it up.

No firing or mouse crosshair to track yet. I will get back to this later this evening. Need to get out of the house and get some things done.

 

Looks good.
The snow is quite good.

 

Crosshair and enemy bombs are in. Kind of. At least the graphics are all done.

I also updated the graphics for the battle stations the elves man (hmm I guess they elf those don't they?).



Now it is starting to look like a game.

Just a matter of having the bombs hit and blow up, level completion tracking probably some kind of meter that fills up as Santa loads the sleigh, some kind of damage meter for when a bomb hits a sleigh, probably let the bombs impact the battle stations, elves and Santa too. And of course, the actual firing of the elve's magical weaponry and collisions between those and the baddies.

Then a title screen and so forth. And after that is all done if I have any time left I might actually add one more enemy or something like that.

Running out of time now. Won't do any more tonight. So it is all up to how much time I get to work on it tomorrow.

 

Thanks! I am glad you like it. This is the most focus I have spent on "looks" of a game in many years. I still didn't spend a lot of time of course (my deadline is tomorrow evening) but definitely more than I have in a while. It was fun. Graphics stuff is always fun I think. I just am wary of it.

Of course, this is actually low res. 256 x 144 with about 50 colors or so total being used. So it will not look as sharp when it is actually released and played at probably 1024 x 576.

 

I got two levels done. First a Christmas themed Roll A Ball, and second a sled runner level. Not sure how to tie them together yet as the only things I've learned so far are single scene tutorials. Starting a third level if I get time.

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Not sure how to make the pictures work. Photobucket was acting weird this morning so I tried this other site.

 

Seems like some excellent work in a short time!

Here are the images you posted so folks can seem them here:



Definitely look wintery and Christmassy.

 

Hey never saw your video yesterday. How is the game coming along?

I haven't done anything yet today but am about to start right after this post. I should have a solid 1.5 and maybe even 2 hours I can focus on the game. That should be enough time to get the rocket bomb thingies exploding when they hit the ground and the player missile firing and collisions between player missiles and enemy bombs. That is the plan anyway.

 

Hey you know what, I was planning to do something but my family got me roped into Christmas preparations!! And I went out the other night and got wasted LOL so nursing a hang over.

It really impresses me how focused you are and how quickly you put together your games garbenjamin, really liking the one you've done so far. I really wanna tinker with some pixel art at some point - it looks so cool. Steam got a massive sale on and I've just gone a spending spree and got me some pixel based adventures - 'Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery.'

Will also be purchasing Eitr as soon as that comes out. If I've got time, and my family leaves me alone I'll no doubt work on something.

 

Well thanks for that. Sorry to hear that your plans got sidelined but certainly understandable. They are far more important than making games. lol

I actually got about 2 hours and 20 minutes in. The first thing I did was to update the images on the bombs / rockets that are coming down the screen. A few iterations on that. Then I created the player's shots.

Next it was time to create the ground explosions and air explosions. This is the stuff that takes the most time for me anyway. Like first I am just sitting here thinking... so how do I want these explosions to be. And I considered particles and thought those are getting so overdone with these modern game engines having built-in support for them.

So I decided I'd just draw the explosions so they are different from the particle FX we so often see. Then it became a question of what exactly do I want to do. I considered making a sort of nuclear blast & cloud effect for the ground explosion at first. Then I decided I'd wasted at least 10 minutes just thinking about it so just draw the damn things. lol SoI just drew a sort of fiery blast for the ground explosion. Then used that same design for the in air explosion.

Then added the explosion manager to handle both explosion types. And a bullet manager for the player's "missiles". Then updated the player manager to handle the firing.

And I still don't have the collisions in between the in air explosions and the incoming rocket bombs. But it should be very easy to do that at this point.



Right now I need to leave to deliver some Christmas gifts and get some food. But I will return to work on this later. At this point I am thinking it will may not be done until tomorrow. I think I kind of fell into that trap I've mentioned many times of continually touching up the graphics. Everytime I start a new dev session I tweak some graphics done in the last dev session so that wastes a chunk of the time I could have spent on the actual game to get it done. lol BUT overall I think it is not a big deal because honestly I did have fun doing it. The main thing is I really didn't give myself much time. Like 48 hours total time for game dev, normal stuff and Christmas activities. Basically a LD game jam.

---------------

I'm back home now and ready to focus on this again. One big push and I'll see where it ends up.

 

Alright, another 45 minutes plus 15 creating video converting to gif etc etc.

Now it is playable. So I could finally get to the play balancing.

First thing I noticed is the positioning of the elves needed to be changed. So I moved them much closer to the sleigh.
Next thing was that the alternating between left and right when firing did not play well. So I changed that. Now when the player fires both elves target the cursor at the same time.

Because of those updates I was able to speed up the game play to make it more exciting.



50% larger gif of a shorter segment from the same video capture


Now for another break from this to enjoy Christmas Eve. Then later I will work on it again. Get a HUD up at that time. I am thinking now it will just be one big level. The enemy rockets will start off slower and less frequent and as time passes the delay between them reduces and their movement speed increases. So it becomes basically how long can you survive. Of course, there will be an ending... if you survive long enough you will win.

BTW - I plan on releasing the source for this project the same as I did for my ultra tiny Attack of the Crows game a week or so ago. I post the sources over on the AGK forum. Just in case anyone is interested.

There might be something useful or at least interesting. For example, before I came to Unity3D I never was familiar with the Vector.Normalize function or "proper" formula. Yet I had been doing that for the past decades just doing it my own way. So in the source for this game you will find the following snippet for normalizing the vectors from the elves gun stations to the crosshair.

(yeah I am programming this in a BASIC language... probably will switch to C++ at some point but I dunno... never realized how tedious all of those semicolons and parentheses around all comparisons were until I started trying out different BASIC programming languages again the past year)

Code (Boo):

1.     if abs(xv) > abs(yv)
2.         yv = yv / abs(xv)
3.         if xv < 0
4.             xv = -1
5.         else
6.             xv = 1
7.         endif
8.     else
9.         xv = xv / abs(yv)
10.         if yv < 0
11.             yv = -1
12.         else
13.             yv = 1
14.         endif
15.     endif

 

Okay, I am done with this project. I never did anything beyond what can be seen in the last gif I posted above except changing the frequency of the rocket bombs appearing and the speed at which they move. Maybe adjusted the player shot speed too.

Obviously, I didn't complete the game but...

...you can play Christmas Command 2016 in your web browser here.

Just keep in mind there is not much gameplay in there yet. Hopefully someone will take the project and carry it forward maybe making a New Year's version.

The project source has been released into the public domain and posted on the AGK forum.

It was a fun project. Next time I will remember to start 3 days before the deadline. Also this proves to me something I have always thought. I wouldn't be able to make a game in a LD 2-day game jam. Unless it had like super simple graphics maybe ideally colored rectangles or something.

I can develop quite fast and I have to say I often wonder how those people create some of the games they do over a 2-day period. I wonder if people are often starting early on content and then forcing it to fit the game or are using existing graphics and even codebase assets that existed before the jam even began. I suppose another factor could be that maybe they just don't do anything except work on their game and sleep (very little) the entire weekend.

 

the fancy LD compo, the rules state that you have to make everything from scratch so if someone would use codebase assets or existing graphics, that would be pretty much against the rules.
But considering I made it within deadline last time (the 2 days) I only slept total 4 hours or so on that weekend, my child was taken care of by someone else, I had bought brainfood for the weekend to not have to go out for groceries and in the end I didn't manage to implement any sounds. (Although I think that's mostly thanks to getting horrendously stuck on the code on the first day)
For a compo, you just have to cut even more than maybe what you would do usually the UI has to be as simplistic as possible, maybe even none, but only some text (like i did), graphics need to be done fast (so nothing fancy either). In general it's good practice to not get stuck in every little detail

Actually I have even calculated, that with 3 hours sleep, you would have 9 hours per task (if split equally and no breaks)
let's say the main components would be :concept, sound, music, graphics and code.
I considered code and graphics needing most of the time so I shifted it a little ', ending up with about 3 hours for sounds, concept and music and 13.5 hours for each graphics and code.
And I had code and graphics split into subtasks like 3d models, textures, uv mapping, rigging, animation and 2d icons(for UI) and code into: embedding sounds and music, scene management, player movement, camera controls, animation controller and UI.
that meant about max 2.25 hours per subtask.....and because I got stuck on player movement on the first day and then another stuck with my "cubs" not following me properly (it was important gameplay part so I couldn't skip it) I had to cut on some other parts....which was sounds, since the codebase for that I knew already from past ludum dares that it takes me alot of time to properly implement for just minimal effect...and since I had wintery scene I could push it on "snow swallowing sounds" but adding a music score to cover it up a little
I also cut UI mostly, just adding a keypress for starting the game, but completely neglecting any "convinience" features like restarting the game from within the game and an end game button. Also I skipped the animations and rigging part (again), because I'm just too unfamiliar with Blender and rigging and in the end the little bouncy effect I had, seemed animation enough.....I added facial animations though, cause they seemed a simple solution to give player feedback about the cubs states.

I did consider my game somewhat finished, although it had many features missing that I would have liked to have, but it was working and not bad at that didn't hear anyone complaining about missing animations or sounds
Just about the game being too short (which is a bug).

 

@Farelle thanks for the detailed info on your game jam work!

That makes good sense. I knew people couldn't be screwing around with graphics and otherwise had to cut corners of course. But some of the games I've seen just have so much quality content and polish those made me wonder.

I can see what the biggest difference is. During my 2 days I slept 8 hours one night and 7.5 the other night. So that could have gave me me some extra time. But I wouldn't have needed it really. Because I didn't spend every awake hour on the game. I had other things to do. Especially with it being near Christmas time. But more than that I just work in streaks. Focus for an hour or two and get stuff done. Then I take a break.

I had forgot that some people literally "lock themselves" in their house (or elsewhere) for the duration of LD doing nothing else.

So that is the big difference. I focused on my game in streaks. Like spent a couple hours on it in the morning. Then spent 3 to 4 hours doing other things. Came back and spent another hour or two on my game. Then spent an hour or two doing other things. And so forth. It still was a huge increase over the normal 1.5 to 2 hours per night I normally spent.

 

yup it's possible to do in 2 days and I think you did a great job with your game in that few time you spend on it would definitely be "compo ready" if you ask me, since it doesn't need any explanations to know what to do as a player

 

@Farelle thanks!

I just went to the LD site and now I know what it was. I was thinking of some of the jam entries. But those are 72 hours, can use existing assets and more than one person.

It's always seemed a bit odd to me like they are doing it backwards.

Compo seems to be intended for one person to make everything from scratch in 48 hours.
Jam seems to be intended for a team of people who can use existing assets (made by members of the team or from anywhere else) and they have 72 hours.

Ha ha! Just seems like those things should be flipped around to me. But as long as folks are having fun that is the important thing. Well that and actually working trying to really make games. A great way to explore game concepts.

Need to get off this thing. It is Christmas! Merry Christmas btw.

I might just do an update to the game later tonight. Not sure. Now I am kind of interested in dabbling in 3D again. At same time I kind of don't feel like doing any game dev for a while again. lol

 

sometimes it indeed feels like a hate-love relationship XD

 

thanks a lot.

 

Well I stuck with it and here it is.

https://ryeath.itch.io/xmas-2016

Had quite a bit of trouble getting it to work in WebGL. Worked fine in the stand alone version first try, but the sphere kept doing weird stuff in WebGL, and after 3 or 4 days and about 20 builds I finally gave up and just stuck some planes under the floor of my levels and turned off the renderer.

 

Haha just for kicks I jumped the ramp you made at high speed and flew my ball out of the map

Nice work! I'd recommend adding a skybox and some particle effects when hitting the gifts. Also enable the Antialiasing as the jagged edges of the objects don't look great.

 

Thanks for looking at it DroidifyDevs.

I hope the sphere reset back when you launched it. Once I realized the sphere could leave the area I put in a reset. I also saw one time where I hit the wall at high speed and the sphere went through but I was never able to reproduce it.

I started messing with particle systems in the maze portion (level 3). Right now the tree blocker just disappears, so I wanted a particle system to pretty it up, but it was way over my head at the time. Need to do some studying on them.

Haven't messed with skyboxes yet and will look into antialiasing.

So much to learn.

Thanks again.

 

Great job on sticking with it and reaching this release point!

It's actually a very nice start for a good little game.

Two quick things that would improve it (for me anyway)...

1. The camera doesn't seem to rotate around the ball when using Z and C. I guess this is why the X to reset was added. If you can make it so the camera basically orbits the snowball that would be a big improvement.
   
   
2. Would like to be able to bowl over things such as the people / person standing around. I moved at I think maximum speed and rammed into them and they served only as a wall. Being able to just bowl them over (just flip them over) would be a way to get a bit more interaction and enjoyment while rolling around. This could be extended to hitting the trees at high speed causes some ornaments to drop on the ground and disappear after a certain amount of time. Doesn't need to actually remove any from the trees just having the interaction in... the appearance of being able to knock off some stuff when hitting them at high speeds... would add to the game.

Overall I think it is a very solid work especially for your first game ever (I think I remember you saying up til that point you had only completed the Roll-a-ball tutorial).

 

Thanks for taking a look at it GarBenjamin. And thanks for the input.

As for the camera rotating, yeah, I spent a bunch of time playing around with that. Looking through the scripting API I found rotate around. Seemed like a pretty simple thing. But the camera would rotate like it is now, but not around the player. I thought I was not using the formula right, but wasn't getting any errors. I was almost ready to make a post here asking what I was dong wrong when I finally figured out it was rotating around the sphere.....but then my camera / player offset (to make the camera follow the player) would put it right back where it started, just rotated a degree.
So I tried a few other things, parenting the player to an empty to get an angle reference etc. etc. but eventually came to the conclusion I would need to tie the camera rotation into the player movement controls and decided it was too much for my little project.

Someone once said (and I paraphrase as I can't recall who or the exact wording) "It's not failure if you do the best you can with your current abilities." So, I'm sticking with that. But it did make me create the goal of learning as much as I can about Quaternions.

Item 2 are all great ideas. I see we may share a similar sense of humor. And might not be all that hard to implement. I will need to think about it. I had a few other ideas myself, igloos that shoot out snowball like turrets (even have the igloo model completed), a sack on the back of the sled that gets a little bigger with each present collected, and a couple others, but wanted to stay away from scope creep.

Thanks again for taking the time to look and reply.

 

Absolutely is not a failure in any way. lol Certainly don't take what I was saying to imply that is how I view it.

I completely get we wrestle with things and put forth great effort and there comes a point where we need to call it "done". I think you did great on it.

Do you know what your next project will be?

 

I want to work through some more tutorials, I'm up to adding enemies in the space shooter at the moment. I've started prototyping a physics based side scrolling space shooter. Got the basic ship movement and camera movement so far. Need to start working on missiles / lasers etc.

Eventually I would like to make a nice RPG.