Off-Road Velociraptor Safari (Preview)

This is awfully rough around the edges, but we set a deadline of putting something out and playable today, so enjoy!

I'd love to hear feedback from anyone on what they enjoyed. Arrow keys and space:

http://www.flashbangstudios.com/tests/raptorpreview/

 

I LOVED it! You've nailed the vehicle physics, best I've seen in a Unity game so far. Loved the tire tracks, dust and kicked up rocks. I especially appreciated how the tracks only happened when the vehicle actually was on the ground and other details. Loved how the camera switched from following to slow mo dolly during a jump, vehicle graphics are very nice, etc. etc.... I could go on and on, this is awesome.

Only crit's I can think of:

1. Any way to tone down the steering response? On my 15" MBP a quick tap on an arrow still makes a pretty sharp turn. On the other hand, I guess it could be argued that this makes the game a bit more challenging.

2. I see obvious popping of the smaller under-plants in the distance, but to be honest, I've yet to see a demo using the new Unity terrain engine that didn't have some popping.

Very nice work Matthew, you always deliver nice stuff!

 

Thats a pretty solid prototype / game. I had a lot of fun 'hooking' the dino's.

Only crits were the as mentioned steering response - it was incredibly sensitive on my machine. As well, maybe a longer chain and less friction when turning (for better drifting and sliding) so its easier to hook the animals and take out the boxes.

If you don't mind me asking, how long did this take to prototype?

Cheers!

 

I'm sure you'll get some 'save the dinosaurs' activists flaming you - oh wait, they're extinct already!

Awesome demo - I like the jump counter - I got 140M

 

Great game! The idea of dinosaur is completely great The slow-mo camera, the dust and tire tracks (btw, how did you do this? ) are awesome!

Did you use the built-in car physics, or role your own?

I'm really looking forward to the final product!

 

I agree with the responsiveness issue. Even on my Mac Pro I was jumping all over the place. Also when I hit a large crowd of raptors the framerate dropped fast.

Great concept tho, look forward to it.

 

haha that's fun - i almost felt bad for the poor raptors... almost.

some notes:

- i found it very hard to snag a raptor without roadkilling it first (is it even possible?) - though i was able to get raptor-raptor kills which was fun.

- when dropping off a raptor, if you drive very slowly or very fast over the platform sometimes the raptor either gets stuck or disconnects - maybe snagging on a collider edge?

- IMO the chain should be much smaller - it really kills the realistic scale of everything else. if you made it that big so it wouldn't have too many joints maybe just do a hoop-rod-hoop or kinda something like this:

http://www.valleymartialarts.com/images/gtsec.jpg

- if you back the jeep up where the terrain is steep (especially in that canyon) the camera shoots way up into the air.

i would add more crazy methods to acquire your prey. i seem to remember a long time ago didn't you guys post a chopper version of this?

i like the concept overall, and it is quite fun already ; )

@ bronx

not sure but it looks like the tire FX from the jeep in the vehicles tut (i'm fooling around with it myself)

 

Ah ah haha-ah - save the raptors!
Ah ah haha-ah - save the raptors!

Ah ah haha-ah - save the raptors!

... just kidding! Was quite fun playing! Cool game, even though I do find it kind of brutal ;-)

And I also agree: The steering is quite challenging, sensitive as it is...

Jashan

 

lol! had me laughing! good stuff and not as rough as you think. the car set up is excellent. i agree that i'd tone the steering down a touch but it's still very good. i also thought it was cool that the player can't get "stuck." you always have a chain and can go pretty much anywhere. it's always frustrating in games when you can't go somewhere you should be able to. graphics could get pushed a bit more but overall nice job!

dr j you can swipe em - even clothesline em! classic.

my 6 year old (is it wrong?) and his 8 yr old buddy played for a while. they were having fun! had 3 on at one point. their comments echoed the steering thing and they asked... will there be a trex? what about the little guys from jurassic park? gigantosaurus? (not sure how to spell that last one but you get the idea...)

 

Very cool game. Instant action, instant fun. Took a while before I got my first raptor captured, and I still get more roadkill then swipes, but hey.

Contrary to other posters, I think the steering needs to be this sharp, otherwise you don't get the "swing-around" effect.

 

That was fantastic! I felt bad for the dinosaurs, though. Just minding their own business and then I come along with my ball-and-chain jeep.

Also, extra points for keeping up with recent discoveries and giving them feathers.

 

Yikes! No analog control?? I can't really do anything with the arrow keys (nor does it really make sense to in a game with this kind of freedom of movement). However, I'm very glad that you gave them colorful feathers as well. I also love the triceratops skull in the back of the jeep!

 

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

We started with Forest's car project for the vehicle physics: http://yogware.bluegillstudios.com/site/stuff.html . We ended doing quite a bit of modification, but it's an excellent starting point for a raycast solution. The car is just one rigidbody; the wheels do raycasts and apply forces to the body as necessary. Unity's WheelColliders seemed very strange, so we went this route. It took a few iterations of tuning to get the jeep to behave properly. Dampening/center of gravity/etc are changed depending if you have a chain or not, which really helped. The goal was to make it very hard to tip over, but still feel unstable enough for skill to play a role.

Other points:

- I have seen steering behave differently depending on frame rate. I'll look into making it feel less twitchy (and probably player customizable).

- You can pick up raptors without roadkilling them first. I put in scoring an hour before we posted it, but there are actually ~15 events at the moment. Try throwing the chain's ball at the raptors from a distance...

- We have quite a bit of optimization to do, but there are some really easy things we should be doing by aren't. Performance should be much nicer in about a week.

- Other people have also pointed out that running down raptors is kind of cruel because they aren't vicious enough. We intended for them to be a threat somehow, but we just didn't have time to do any kind of attack logic for them.

- It's hard to pin down how much time was spent on this. Most everyone in the company was working on other projects interlaced with this. We definitely accelerated recently as more people focused on it. To give you an idea, here's what it looked like 9 days ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-wAokCC_FA

- We use a similar script to the island demo to reduce the tree/foliage distance if performance is bad. On a lot of machines is probably drastically reducing the amount of detail (because there are other performance problems in the project we need to fix and the terrain takes the blame).

 

Since you're trying to make the Jeep stable, I found it extremely easy to tip the Jeep. Just turning made it tip.

 

I tried it on both my MBP (with Intel Core Duo 2) and iMac (with Intel Core Duo). It definitely played a lot better on my faster MBP, graphics were smoother, etc. I noticed on my iMac that it also looked like at times I could see the end of the camera far clip plane.

As for steering, I also gave it a go with my gamepad, and although that helped a lot I still thought steering was a bit too responsive.

But overall I gotta say I really enjoyed it!

 

That is SO AWESOME!

I have a lot of feedback. First, the graphics:

It needs shadows. What we've done is render the trees black from the perspective of the light, project it onto the terrain, and combine it with the lightmap in photoshop.

Have you considered toon shaders?
The tops of the orange beams have an ugly ring caused by texture repetition. Set those textures to clamp.

I'd say more blur on the skidmark texture.

More dirt particles !

For some reason I imagine the spiky balls being dark instead of light. I don't know why.

Gameplay:

Maybe you should interpolate the input more so it takes a while of pressing the arrow before you really crank it around. This is why analog sticks are nice.

Why have you gone with the classic terrain level design that has walls? I know you need to bound your world, but I would do it differently. I think a jungle with some rocky hills sticking up that you can drive on would be cool, instead of the invincible grassy walls. You could bound the world using triggers that turn on AI control of the car, etc.

A nitro that is not accessible when you have a ball out would be cool. A reason why that is like that? The nitro is a rocket engine inside the triceratops skull

Fade in between time scales ?

When you have the ball out and you press space, the camera aligns with the ball and it's velocity. When you take your finger off space, the ball is set free and the camera tries to include the ball, the car, and any raptor it might hit in the frustum while staying behind the car like normal.

Gratuitous jumps, man made or otherwise.

Sounds like the scoring is pretty primitive right now, so I don't really need to advise you on changing it because I bet you will. One thing I think is different scores or star ratings for the same event depending on whatever magnitude of the event you want to base it on make a lot more sense than static scores for different events.

Did I already say rocks? Rocks.

I can't think of a good way for raptors to attack you.. Maybe they should try to group up in the trees, then charge as a group and jump onto the car, maybe while flanking you. You can dump them off, but if you fail then your car is destroyed. In a related point, I think car damage would be better than the current time limit.


I love the hammerfall and nanosaur inspiration. This game is amazingly fun.

 

How did you make it happen? I tried plugging in a pad after the game was already running, which did not work, so I reloaded the game with the pad plugged in (no fun to wait again). That didn't work either.

 

I'd give the raptors nukes, personally.

I found it cool as well, but I'll have to wait until the performance is a bit better on this MacBook Pro and the audio doesn't crackle as much to comment more. The FPS was very low which inhibited steering. :/

I think in general the graphics need more contrast and saturation.

Cheers,
-Jon

p.s. What are the crates for? To satisfy the every game needs crates rule? hehe

 

I spent a few hours on the audio crackling issue. As near as I can tell at this point it's a Unity problem of some kind. We can bring in a loop, like a generated tone, and just play it and it'll still hitch/crackle. Seems to only happen on MBPs too.

 

I didn't do anything special. I always have my Logitech Rumblepad II plugged in to test my other apps, so when I launched it it worked. Only the left analog joystick worked BTW.

 

I found a little glitch on the loading screen, where it wouldn't print any zeros. So it would go 78%, 79%, 8%, 81%, etc. And then when it got to 100% it actually said 1%, which caused me to say, "Wait, don't start loading all over again!" Obviously only an issue for people with slow connections....

Anyway, this seems really cool, except I was frequently getting single-digit fps on my G5 + X800, so unfortunately I couldn't play it much. Most of the time it wasn't even drawing any trees, sadly. I don't think it's the graphics, since the island demo, for example, runs really smoothly here even at the highest quality level, so I'd suspect something with the scripting.

As a personal preference thing, I'm not fond of dynamically changing detail levels in-game...I find it very distracting when vegetation or whatever suddenly appears/disappears because of an arbitrary framerate limit. I'd much rather choose what sort of detail I want, and then lower detail levels myself as necessary if it goes too slow.

--Eric

 

Oh yeah, there are definitely some performance issues in our logic. We'll fix it first thing after the holiday break.

Yoggy: Thanks for the detailed feedback! I really like some of your suggestions, especially better camera targeting on flinging the end.

 

That is simply a blast!

 

Very cool game!

I've suffered from the same issues as everyone else has mentioned ....
Frame Rate related things like steering oversensitive, trees suddenly appearing just in time for me to crash into them ... but you've already got that feedback ... (I'm on a G4 duel processor 1.25GHz with 1gb RAM with a ATI Radeon 9000 Pro ... certainly not the fastest chip on the block)

I'm really looking forward to the next release where hopefully you resolve the frame rate issue

I totally agree with Eric5h5 about being able to choose detail settings ... obviously that's not an issue for a stand alone versions .. just the web ...

totally cool game ...

p.s

I'd be curious to find out just what the frame rate is getting lost to ... if you feel like sharing that info when you get to that end of things ...

 

Very fun! I like the way the jeep turns and rolls but always turns back over. I would like if the raptors where mean, would be awesome if they attacked. Throw in a T Rex or two and I'm sold. By the way, my 11 year old son thought it was very cool.

...only real feedback I have is that the trees popping up out of no way makes it hard to drive. They dont show up until I am about 50 feet from them. MacBook 2.0Ghz

 

fwiw 2.16 imac with a 128 mb 7300 here. no frame rate issues at all. runs smooth. no audio probs either.

my comment on pushing graphics was pretty much what yog detailed. i'll add that the raptors are pretty detailed but the trees are kind of polygonal. they could be normal mapped too. shadows would make a huge difference. the details if you know what i mean. i like yog's suggestion on the world boundries too.

maybe adding other dinos could work for attacks. a trex blasting through the trees or a triceratops ramming you... that or nukes

either way cool game!

 

I had my friends play it and they had some good feedback:

Different ball types, like bomb ball and multi ball.

Multiplayer. (split screen would work)

Moving balls on the radar.

 

this game is just awesome





just awesome





if you wanted more constructive criticism too bad, all you get is praise

 

I'm getting really great Rocket Jockey gameplay flashbacks from this.

I don't think it's super important right now, but I have a huge performance disparity between my PC and my Mac. The iMac's a little faster on the processor side and the PC has the graphics advantage. The framerate on the Mac is smooth as can be, but extremely stuttery and inconsistent in Windows.

 

i got raptor on raptor




it made me happy

 

There's a new version up with initial optimizations and revised tuning (steering and should also be much easier to toss the ball).

Web Version: http://www.flashbangstudios.com/tests/raptorpreview/

Or standalone (but test web if you can):

Windows
Mac OS

@defmech: Rocket Jockey is pretty much the best game ever. I still have a CD of it around here that I bust out every now and then.

 

this game has an addictive quality, i keep coming back to play again and again, but each time i only play for about 2 minutes, and now i think i know why and have some suggestions

1) power ups, there needs to be some reward ever 2 or 3 raptor you bring back, just something like " SPEED INCREASED!!" or " SPIKE BALL SIZE INCREASED" just something small that gives you that sense of accomplishment and keeps the gameplay fresh


2) rival jeep, just another car driving around running the raptors over, and have something like if he kills it, you don't get the points for it so you want to destroy the enemy jeep, right now your the most powerful thing in the level, an enemy jeep would create tension


3) and lastly, i feel bad for the raptors, i read your solution to that by making them attack but i think its a bit simpler than that, you just need a premise, for example

if gamers are okay with " Princes peach has been stolen!!!! run to the right...."

than they'll be okay with, "Raptors have been terrorizing this area, clear it out!!"


anyway very impressive work, i really cant stop playing it

 

Steering is much better. Still a lot of plant "pop" and dino "pop" on my 1.8 ghz 17" iMac. Very addicting!

 

Very fun and addicting game... but the trees do still "pop". I would recommend either taking the colliders off the trees, or adding a simple check to the performance script to not lower the minimum tree distance beyond a certain amount.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. if( nextTerrainChange == 2  terrain.treeDistance >= origTreeDist / 16.0 )
3.         {
4.             terrain.treeDistance *= 0.5;
5.             if (terrain.treeDistance < minTreeDrawDist) {
6.                 terrain.treeDistance = minTreeDrawDist;
7.             }
8.             AddMessage( "Framerate low, reducing tree draw distance" );
9.             return;
10.         }
11.  

 

Much much better. I scored 24710 0 on my last run. I wouldn't suggest a competing car, but having to go repair yours and pick up new spiked balls would be nice.

 

cool ...

just a thought ... if you did include other larger predators .. eg TRex .. or something .. that could chase and devour the Raptors as you collect them increasing the challenge when returning the Raptors to the Transporter beam ... (the chase could be triggered on the pick up, if "TRex" is in the vicinity etc.)

also it's still a bit sluggish on my old beast ... maybe you could disable the shadows in the low end ..

Totally Awesome! Totally Addictive!

 

Playing on a C2D iMac 10.5.1....all in webplayer.

Very much a fun concept/implementation, would like to see this fleshed out...

Steering is indeed much improved from the first version, though still a tad touchy...

Bugs:

I've now managed to get the jeep "stuck" or sunk into the terrain twice - once while climbing a steep "finger" of a hill, the other just, IIRC, after hitting a tree. Interestingly, hitting "w" makes it jump forward a bit. See attached. (It's a bit hard to see on the flat terrain, but you can see it's a bit low...)

Switching to fullscreen (widescreen imac), there's a list of the previous status messages along the right hand side... (See previous attached.)

In the first build, I noticed I'd get the "clothesline" accomplishment (nearly?) every time, even though I was sure I was only hitting them w/ the ball...second build this appeared to be fixed.

I did onetime see the raptors "spawn" - and they did so a few feet above the ground, then floated down... (Judging by the way the red-dots just appear on the radar, I'm assuming they're activated by proximity?)

Feedback/wishlist:

Show transporters on radar.

Sometimes the slo-mo camera (very cool, btw) goes for just a bit too long...either tighten it up a bit, or let spacebar (or something) switch back to normaltime.

Haven't figured out how to unhook/break the ball off reliably, only done it a couple times on accident, once just by backing up over it...

If this is turned into something more full featured, online (built-in) scoreboards, and ability to save instant-replays of the slo-mo takedowns would really help the competitive/community aspect of it...

Obviously the structure of the whole thing would need to be varied to turn it into a full-blown game, (and more art assets and variety, and a defined art direction, and more levels) but what you have now is an excellent proof-of-concept, and the physics-based nature lends itself well to a lot of experimentation and just plain play - which is fun!

Also, I'm agreed that sometimes it feels a tad brutal for the raptors...

 

Got it stuck again, pretty easily repeatable, just try following birds up into the hills. Edit: Oh...I guess that's the "You ran out of time" indicator?!? Needs work. (I didn't even realize I was on a timer until just now...)

Also managed to completely flip the jeep upsidedown - fortunately deploying the, er, thingy flipped it over. (Crushing a raptor should be an achievement!) So too should getting one while up on a steep hill...

Hunting them in a patch of tall grass/bush was fun, too. I wonder if that could factor into scoring somehow? That and the trees. As it stands, it would probably be too difficult, but with some tweaks, maybe make the ball thingy stick to trees?

 

That's our bad--I bolted on killing the car after the time limit just before we posted this. We wanted to close the gameplay loop and it was an easy thing to do

Good feedback! Some of those things are already done in our development build, actually, while others we haven't considered.

 

Ah, Matthew - I take it you're the one that did the physics presentation at Unite? Nifty. (Also, as my name is Matthew as well, nice to see a fellow "full-name", er, person...)

As for th gameplay loop , I think that was severing it, closing it would be to have a "Reset game" or "go back to main screen" button perhaps?

I look forward to the next iteration. Remember: Release early, release often!

 

Send a copy of the game to Randall Monroe. I think he would enjoy it.

 

I almost did that

He might be too scared to play it though

 

Awesome Game! I was having a blast playing it until my jeep got stuck after I crashed into a tree. I couldn't move forward or backward. Great work though! It was a lot of fun to play. Love the dirt kicking up and track marks from the jeep as well as all the sound design ... like how the motor sound changes as you accelerate and the raptors screams when you run one over. I didn't mind the steering.. it made it challenging. I was expecting the raptors to try to attack me or something like in the movies, but understand that is a whole other time consuming thing to create. Overall, awesome and fun game! Great job!

 

Setup: version .91 SL, webplayer, geFo 6 LE, firefox, winXP

Startscreen
===========
- html embedded: the buttons foreground seems somehow out of scale compared to their backgrounds
- going fullscreen on a widescreen display 1680x1050: layout breaks -> buttons not centered, blue border due background image size. maybe tiling or stretching could fix that
- button text seems to be larger than buttons (in y direction)

Game
============
- I don't like that much the tire Dust-particles because of the hard edge created by the intersection with the ground - mainly visible for those closer to the cam. of course this is normal for particles unless when using 'soft-particles' but maybe changing the texture or tilting them a bit (if possible) or changing them somehow with age could improve it. or use a 2nd particles system with oriented sprites along the normals of the terrain to darken a bit the same area on the ground hiding the intersections
- there must be happing something that affects performance over time. initially i see quite a lot of trees in the distance but after a while none and they only pop up right in front of my car not really leaving me time to react accordingly. that's then of course a real show stopper. Maybe you can add another debug screen with some numbers and FPS so we can see correlations
- steering is totally fine for me
- some more opportunities in the terrain to do some funky stuff to "get 'em" would be nice. Somebody mentioned that he jumped right on one. Anyways besides the challenge to get raptors with a swing while having others on the hook already, it maybe needs so more toys to keep my attention for a longer period

Who got that freaky idea anyways? the idea is so bizarre that it is one of the main motivations for me to play it

 

Couple screens with the newer content...

 

The new content looks very nice!

Just out of curiousity, would a higher tesselation on the side mirror fix the big "v" bend in the reflection?

Ricko

 

Reminded me of Nanosaur.
A little choppy on my G5, not bad. Easy to over-steer.
Invisible trees popping up suddenly make a challenge.
Nice choice to go with feathered raptor theory.