★ Game Creator ★

Hello Marti,

It is still not working, the option show toolbar is also greyed out. I have tried also different builds from Unity 2017.1 and 2018.0b4

 

Hi @tork12 . Sure! Here's a screenshot showing that Japanese words works fine. Bear in mind though that the Dialogue's default skin uses Arial, which contains almost (if not all) characters from all alphabets.



The Futuristic and Pixel Fantasy skins use other fonts which may not include other than western characters. If you have a font that works for you, it is pretty straight forward to change.

 

We currently don't have plans on integrating Invector's product with Game Creator. Animation plays a big part in our product and we're aiming to make an ad-hoc system that both seamlessly integrates together and is enough flexible for us to keep expanding it with future modules. Otherwise we would be relying on on someone else's product (that even if it's a very well made one, like Inventor's, add a dependency to ours).

This means we'll have to work twice as hard to achieve similar results, but we're confident this is the right direction

We're gonna look into it right away. Get to you back soon!

 

About Combat...
I was thinking about make an own combat system in GC. I mean turn-based system what use a Dialog component and actions execute on choice. It gives me a chance to dynamically move a camera, starts the animation, and even modify game variables and stats. You can reduce options for enemy reaction actions, to make them more clever. But I need something like "Choose a random from available options" to trigger enemy attacks.
Sequence Player turn > Enemy turn will repeat, until a victory/lost or escape.
I think it is possible with tools we have now in GC, especially with Dialog. Only an enemy decision is something I do not know yet. But GC gives us an option to add end execute our own scripts.
It is a really interesting task to experiments. And a fun to do.

 

That's thinking outside of the box! It's a quite daunting task to do, but we'd love to hear the results if you decide to do it!

As for the decision making, in the last update we added a new Action called "Variable Random" that allows you to set a random value (within a constrained range of values) to a variable. With this you can do the "AI" of the enemies.

PS: To everyone who's sent us an email for the last two days, we're sorry we haven't answered yet! We're working full steam to publish the Dialogue tutorial and we haven't had the time to properly answer your questions. A someone suggested in Twitter, we'll probably set up a Discord server so everyone can participate in different discussions, though we'll still be accepting email inquiries for those who are more shy

Cheers!

 

Wondering if you could create simple game module templates to work off. Lets say escape type games, stealth and horror to start with. It would be nice to see examples of these types of gameplay mechanics in a working manner to be able to get an idea of how they can be created. I think this would be great to showcase alot more in depth type mechanics that game creator can do. Especially for myself being an artist I need all the help I can get.

 

We're currently publishing Game Creator tutorials in our Youtube channel about how to implement different mechanics. We've started with pretty basic stuff, but we intend to move towards more complex and more genre specific (such as horror jump scares, flashlights, etc...).

We agree that making template scenes would allow us to more easily showcase what can be done. We'll definitely give it a thought! Making template scenes would require moving development resources into the making of these templates, so we need to carefully consider this decision.

Thanks for the idea!

 

Speaking of which, we've just released a new tutorial about how to use the Dialogue module. This one is a little bit longer that the usual 3 to 5 minutes, but there were quite a lot of things to cover.

By the way, we had never made video tutorials before the release of Game Creator, so we're learning how to it as we go. Feedback on the pacing of the video, volume or basically anything is more than welcome!

Cheers!

 

Hello again,

Do you have any kind of development/feature road map available? If not, could you give a rough estimation on when additional features will be available? I'm especially interested in when (or if) combat elements, such as abilities, spells, attacks, etc., might be added.

To tack on one last question: Do the current camera systems provide enough flexibility to setup a top-down camera? (Diablo is one example of this kind of camera system.)

Thanks.

 

Not yet. Our internal roadmap consists of a bunch of different kanbans were each task gets a priority. We do have the idea of making a public roadmap, but we're shifting too much the priorities of the different systems we're working on and if we can't stick to a roadmap, we're better of not making it public.

We're taking a couple of weeks to fix some Inventory/Dialogue/Core bugs and maybe add some small features. Then, we'll either move to the Quest system or towards redesigning the entire animation system. We want to see if using the new Playable API will allow us to split different Animator Controllers for different modules and make them work together when merged.

Once we figure out a way to do this, we'll be able to create a melee combat system, another one for guns, where each one of them will contribute to the main Animator with its own animations.

Regarding the Diablo-like camera, yes. There's the Follow Camera Motor, where you define a distance from a target in world coordinates and an anchor. Then it will follow the target keeping its distance. There are also some dampening options to smooth the movement.

Check out the Game Creator demo. The first scene has this Follow Camera. It follows the player not from a top-down perspective, but all you would need to do is move it a little bit over the player and you'd bee good to go.

Cheers!

 

For now, the most needed function is a setting own gesture and states.
Like sitting on chair state. Or open door gesture.
And starts them with actions.

 

Seems there's quite a consensus. If everyone prefers to have a more customizable animation system (+ gestures & states), we'll prioritize this over the Quest system.

Bear in mind though, that if we decide to go for the Unity's Playable API we'll have to sunset the 5.6 support, as it's a quite new feature.

 

Personally the next feature I would like to have is an easy way to update GC to new versions (without having to manually save and reimport data files).

 

Hello Marti,

I vote for the customizable animation system

 

Noted. Still, we haven't added any "update manager" because currently Game Creator evolves so fast that wouldn't be able to make a system flexible enough. For example, in the last update we changed the underlying base classes of all Camera Motors (which were hidden ScriptableObjects and now are MonoBheaviours). But we promise to have an update manager before we go out of Beta (on 1.0)

Then it seems it's pretty much settled! We'll switch priorities and start working on it as soon as we update the Inventory and the Game Creator with the new features we've been working on.

 

Have read through this forum post 3 times as it evolves. Great work! Question, can your character animation system be used with quadrupeds...I have a bunch of animals and mecanim animations that need to come to life.

 

Thanks! And yes, it does, but there are a couple of things to take into account.

First is that Game Creator detects the model is a humanoid, it will allow to apply off-animation tricks, such as IK and head tracking features. If your model is anything else than a humanoid, then those won't be used.

Game Creator has a set of animations that work with any type of human-like creature, but if you want to use a quadruped model, you'll need to use your own animations. To make them work with Game Creator all you need to do is create an Animator Controller Override and assign it to your model.

Here's an example of how to do so. Basically: Create an Animator Controller Override, set as the template the "Character" controller that comes with Game Creator and fill the animations you'll be using.

​

Cheers!

 

Excellent thank you.

 

@Catsoft-Studios ,
Looking at purchasing this asset. I like building feature rich RPG style games so a little worried about how this asset approaches arrays and lists, loot lists and loot weighting and spawning? Also, modifiable characters (ie changing armour, appearance etc) and saving this and ingame customised inventory items out.
Also stats and buffs/debuffs...
Allowing also for inventory module, how much can this asset support/do on this at present?
Thanks in advance for any guidance you can give on that...

 

Hi Duffer123,

We're afraid Game Creator might not be the best tool for the job right now. Game Creator is like the brain of branching modules that hang from it and extend its functionalities. We have plans on making an RPG module, but it won't be in the near future (probably looking into the beginning of next year of everything goes as planned). Right now we're focusing on making more generic functionalities.

The Inventory module works perfect for adventure-like games, such as Monkey Island, The Last of Us, Dreamfall Chapters, and so. Of course with some scripting and a bit of creativity you could work around making an Inventory that fits your game, but our selling point is that it should be straight-forward thing to do, which in your case it's not.

For the modifiable characters, it's a tricky question. We'll soon be releasing a set of actions to attach objects to a character's anchor points (for example, a gun to a hand). There won't be a problem equipping swords, rifles, shields, boots, ...Problem comes with clothes that move with the Character, such as armors, shirts and trousers. Those are tailored to the model's shape and we haven't figure out a way to do so. Though if you're using Morph3D systems, you can use their system to update those parts.

Despite all this, we've noted your concerns regarding Game Creator's features, which will help us prioritize in which direction should the development head to

Cheers!

 

@Catsoft-Studios ,

I am no genius with the c# coding so, to be fair, I may purchase this wonderful Asset anyway. If nothing else, it's an investment maybe in future modules and great for prototyping.

Can you tell me a little more about how you go about integrating this Asset with other Assets and accessing third party methods etc.

Also, with the Inventory module, is the code well commented and extensible? Does the inventory module come with stackable item functionality and the concept of item types (ie. key, weapon, clothing, armour, potion, consumable, etc)? Also multi-currency (ie. for instance, bronze pieces, silver pieces, gold pieces)?

[edit] p.s. call it a leap of faith, but I bought this Asset...

 

Hi Duffer123!

Sure! If you know a little of coding, you can easily create your own custom Actions. To do so, just right click on your Project Panel, and instead of creating a new C# Script, select Game Creator - C# Action. It will give you a template from which you can make an Action do what you want. There's a section in the documentation that goes step by step on how to do this.

If you're not confident enough, you can still use Game Creator's Set Active Action to enable/disable entire game objects. Or use the Call Methods Action which allows you to drag and drop any scene object and call any function from any component.

There's an upcoming update (matter of days) with a new Action called Enable Component, which allows you to individually enable/disable specific game object's components.

With these tools you should be able to integrate at a basic level any other third-party tool.

The code isn't commented, but is well structured and you shouldn't have problems following it. We don't recommend though writing over it, as if you update Game Creator, your changes will be overridden.

The Inventory module has built-in support for stackable items. By default the maximum stacked items you can have in your inventory is 99, but you can change this for each individual item.

On the other hand, there isn't a classification based on types. We find this an interesting thing we'll probably add in the future, but once it makes sense (when we make the RPG module or any that requires it).

To differentiate consumables from utility items, there's the "consumable" checkbox that allows you to define a set of Actions when clicking/consuming an item from your inventory. Check our demo and notice how Potions can be clicked to be consumed (with the appropriate effect afterwards, but the Key does nothing when trying to "consume" it.

 

@Catsoft-Studios ,

Thanks for the quick response.

I suppose with Items I could put all the other details in relation to items in the Prefab components and then access them that way?

I've also started dipping in to the documentation and it looks fairly straigthforward (even for me with my limited coding abilities!) to draft a custom Action...

[edit] Just to mention, I am really struggling to join the Game Creator community and sign in - it just doesn't seem to want to let me - whichever route I try I get it won't let me...

[re-edit] scrap that - it was a Firefox thing - Chrome works fine!

 

Sure! When you create an item, you also get a unique identifier, which you can see in the items catalogue (see image below). You can use this identifier to add more information about an item.

Happy to hear that! Feel free to drop us a line if you have a question

 

@Catsoft-Studios ,

Variables... Do they all have to be at Build/Game/Global level or can they be:

- at Scene level (* but still saveable)?;
- at GameObject level (*)?; or even
- at even Child GameObject level (*)?

i.e. the concept of Variables at different levels and/or Global or Local, and then whether saveable...

Also, how easy is it to instantiate Prefabs to Scene?

Thanks in advance. P.s. would you prefer if I post any more questions to support email?

 

For the moment their scope is global (per project) so a variable can be accessed from any scene. This is something we're looking to change, so you could define multiple enemies and add them a local variable with the same name. Expect this to be worked on in the near future

Piece of cake. Just use the Instantiate Action found under the Object category in the Actions panel. You can see the different options in the image attached below.

​

You can also choose the position where you want to instantiate the prefab.

 

@Catsoft-Studios ,

Excellent! Yes, levels/depth for Variables is a big one for me, with global level being the default for people who are just after simplicity... but being able to save Scene or GameObject (Inc/or Child) too would be superb...

[edit]. If we come up with any Custom Actions or Conditions which may be useful to the Game Creator community, where best to post / share them and how?

 

Awesome! We thought of making a section in our store so people can download community-made Actions. We haven't done it as there aren't any right now, but if you do one, we'll add it to our store (crediting the author, of course)

You can ask here. The support email is for people who want to discuss a particular thing that don't want to be be publicly shown or are just shy. Either way is fine!

 

@Catsoft-Studios ,

Are you going to do a tutorial on Hooks (in Documentation but...)?

[edit] Also, what happens if I install say Emerald AI on Monster characters or Behaviour Designer. How would or could that work with Game Creator?

 

Hi @Duffer123 ! Hooks don't have a lot mystery. It's basically another name for a singleton object with a couple of extra tricks. Here's how it works.

Imagine that your game is about the player fleeing from a single enemy and at any point of the game you want to access the this enemy's components. You can use a Hook to access it and any of its components without any performance impact. Basically, if you have a class that will only have one single instance during the entire game, it's a potential candidate for a hook.

Have you noticed that when adding the Camera Controller onto your main camera a new component called Hook Camera gets created? That's the hook for the camera.

To define a new hook simply create a new class (let's call it MonsterHook) like so:

Code (CSharp):

1. public class MonsterHook : Hook<MonsterHook>
2. {
3.     // you can add properties, methods or whatever you want.
4. }

From now on, you'll be able to check if the monster exists by calling MonsterHook.Instance != null.
You can also access any component of the Monster using MonsterHook.Instance.Get<MyComponent>().

Notice that Get is a method that caches the query, so you can use it as many times as you want without performance impact (unlike Unity's GetComponent).

We haven't played with those packages. Correct us if we're wrong, but both of them allow you to create custom Actions/Conditionals/Sequencers/Decorators.

You could create a simple (Behavioral Designer) Action with a public property referencing a (Game Creator) Actions component.

Then, all you'd need to do is to call the Execute() method from the (Game Creator) Actions when the (Behavioral Designer) Action is traversed.

We'll see if we can talk to them and create an integration package, once we finish the new Animation system. Which by the way, we're happy to say that we found ways of creating custom States, Gestures and new animation systems.

Cheers!

 

@Catsoft-Studios ,

Ah. Hooks make more sense now. Using a hook component rather like a tag but for a singular GameObject.

In due course, when I've got some custom Actions under my belt, I'll have a go at getting Game Creator and Behaviour Designer to play nicely together through some custom Actions

 

That's about right.

Drop us an email if you get stuck ;-)

 

Good news to those with Unity Plus/Pro! Game Creator is now at a 20% discount! Plus (pun intended) you get free updates!



On the other hand, we're overhauling the Character's animation system (again). We've removed the slope-up/slope-down animations and added IK features, such as correct foot placement and weight compensation when falling and recovering.

Moreover, we're working around the clock to empower you with the tools to add custom animations, gestures and states! We hope to have all these stable for release by the end of March. More information soon and happy game making!

 

Climbing in and out of vehicles I think could have a simple ik system that when activated forces/physics the character's hand, foot and pelvis as a sequence via on new game object IK targets to be placed/attached on area(s) of any vehicle. "IK Game targets" could also have an option that when it hits the IK target collision it triggers a particular animation such as close fist, grab, point, squeeze, A ok etc. This could be a universal solution, it skips the need to animate. I really don't know of any other easy/normal solution.

 

Entering/exiting vehicles requires at least some degree of animation, but we find it quite interesting the ability to let an Action define which target should the player try to reach, defining with which hand should it perform the action, or let it guess with the nearest hand.

We'll also study adding hand-animations as you mention. Those might serve as a complementary animation when using IK hand targeting. Thanks for the input!

 

Maybe if it's easy enough you can make an exporter that remembers all the settings/layout and data entered and add that to your settings area with a sequence 1.export, 2.update(instructions ie; fresh install or overwrite), 3.restore backup.

Also please don't drop support for Unity 5.6, compatibility for it is one of the reasons why I'm buying it today. Also definitely needed is your quest system.. I hope that's coming soon!

Perhaps for IK to follow game objects the transforms could be connected with a spline path that the body parts follow and optionally could contain a curve by adding new handles.

By the way I just purchased it! Your Video and doc examples are clear and to the point. I think you could add a color code and numeric organizing to your online manual for different workflows. For example VR color blue step 1 wont be seen on a particular page but Red 3rd person step 1 might or both workflows might show on the same page . This might sound convoluted but it can help people avoid errors and reduce/save you time explaining the same things on the forum. Although it's not too bad right now as time goes on the forum will get bigger and the same questions will pop up..

 

Definitely! That's why we have the Beta program. We've seen the guys from Bolt Visual Scripting use a similar system and we'll try to make something that is as easy to update as that one.

If we don't drop support for Unity 5.6 we'd be in a deadlock. Unity (formerly) introduced Playables in Unity 2017.1, so in order to use those features we need move forward the version support. I'll contact you in private to discuss this matter

Wow! That would require making an entire Animation system. Game Creator aims to work well with existing Unity features, not override them ^^'

To do this, you could always animate a transform using Unity's built-in animation system (where there aren't splines, but they have curves) and then make the character's hand reach that transform, so that the hand moves in the path you wanted.

How's that sound?

Agree that we need to re-work a little our documentation. It's pretty, but having a color code would help people don't get lost. We'll definitely look into it!

Thanks for the feedback @Ascensi !

 

I was thinking of an easy drop the targets game objects to attract the ik feet, position them etc. I am not that experienced with the Unity animation system to know if you can separate the distance of your pre animated path -via game objects after they've been animated, if so that would be awesome because you can have a small library of straight recorded paths or curves of the game object to follow and then just ik the foot, hand to that prerecorded path etc Is that that what you mean?

 

That's about right. You animate a couple of empty game objects in the scene (and save them as prefabs if you want to reuse them) and then assign each one to the (not-yet-done-but-in-the-making) IK Hand Action or IK Foot Action. Then, the animation will drive the target that the hand/foot will try to reach.

This is video material, so we'll probably create a tutorial.

 

Can we make an Event action? Simply IF. Something like "Execute actions" action but with conditions and place to add different actions sets? Or action what call and execute an specific event?

 

Sure! No problem. We already have this in our Kanban, but due to the nature of how Events work, we might have to redo some parts which may or may not take some time.

 

I've noticed Adventure Camera periodically jumps into character head and back to normal position for a split second. This happens only when character is moving forward. Does this only happen to me?

Update: it seems "Camera motor pivot" transform z position jumps to 0.1 when this happens.

 

We're aware of this issue. We attributed it to the fact that, because it only happens in the Editor it was a bug where the render pipeline took the "motor camera" instead of the main camera as the source.

But now that you've pointed out that the pivot moves to 0.1 during this frame, could mean something else. We'll investigate further. Thanks!

 

@Catsoft-Studios, btw is the motor camera really needed? I remember being confused of why it is there if it is not used anyway Also I've noticed that 'MainCamera' tag is removed from the main camera when I play the scene for some reason, not sure if this is related, but I didn't notice such behaviour before.

 

Humm... The "MainCamera" tag shouldn't disappear. We'll file a bug report and take a look

Regarding the Camera Motor, yes, it's needed. Camera Motors are the "smart" component which does the hard-lifting of positioning and rotating as its type specifies (so a Fixed Camera will stay put and track a target, whereas a Follow Camera will move to the target's position keeping a distance, etc).

The Camera Controller is the "dumb" component that all it does is to copy the Motor's transform properties through a couple of methods.

 

Hello Marti, Is there a reason that you don't use cinemachine ? I use it a lot and i understand there will be significant updates in the future. (Brawler camera, Racing camera). They do the updates and you can focus on other important game creator choices. BTW i use cinemachine with my game creator projects but i am afraid that future choices break my project.

 

By the way, the next release might take a little bit more than expected. We're aware that some updates clear your defined variables and other settings.

We envisioned Game Creator as a tool that would allow developers to quickly create adventure and action (still getting there) games effortlessly.

In order to do so, we're going to take some time and improve some of our core systems, such as the Module Manager and how the different modules are built around it. We also want to improve the way we handle updates. Right now it's quite tiresome and there's a lot of things to do. Now that we have the Game Creator | Store we want to give it a little more protagonism and integrate it with our Module Manager.

Once we're done with this, the update 0.4.1 will most likely have some compatibility issues. But after that (and after fixing any bugs that come with it) we'll be closer to complete the Beta phase and start the....



Yeah. That's right. Road to stable release. We're really excited to show you what else we have in store, with better modules, faster updates and easier to integrate. Stay tuned for more information!

 

Hi Maurice. That's an excellent idea. In order to make Game Creator compatible with Cinemachine we have to build the integration as a separate module. We're guilty of not having played a lot with Cinemachine, despite knowing it's an excellent and very professional tool.

Now that we'll be dropping support for Unity 5.6, we can start integrating Timeline with Game Creator, and we'll try to do at the same time the Cinemachine module.

 

@Catsoft-Studios , by saying "motor camera" i've meant standard camera component which exists alongside camera motor, sorry it wasn't clear

 

Oh! None then You can safely remove it if the gizmo distracts you.

It's there just so you can see what the camera will see when positioning the motor. At the beginning we also wanted to copy the motor's camera properties to the camera controller but that added too many options and the results weren't satisfactory (for example, when switching to a camera motor in the middle of a transition of another two).