Tiki Magic Mini Golf

Thought I would share some early tiki goodness. Just having some fun putting together a mini golf game.

Cheers,
Charles

 

SWEET! Need beta testers?

 

That is very cool, I think you have a winner there. From the most popular game downloads for macs, and from reports from people developing casual golf games from the indy mac developer perspective, I think there's a big market for that sort of game.

I particularly like that red/pink fire in the first screen shot. Keep it up!

 

nice job... looking real good!

 

Nice job! Keep us up to date of any progress.


Sora.

 

Looks great! I am looking forward to seeing this finished

 

Nice color choices. Looking professional.

 

Looking very very nice. I too like your color choices and also the lighting. Good work!

-Jeremy

 

Nice. Please do share the code for the shot power bar. Many of us have need for soemthing like that.

 

I've gone ahead and uploaded a web playable for some early feedback.
It's still fairly large(7mb no optimizing yet) and there is no way to win at the moment ;-)

Guess you'll have to wait until I somehow figure out how to change back to the old version of Unity.....

Cheers,
Charles

 

Tried on both intel and PPC machines, unity web player hangs or get stuck in an infinite "updating player" loop. Players work fine on other unity files - saw some other posts that reference problem...

 

Same here!?! This has been the case for over a week now... No Unity web scenes will play on my system... except for builds that I create myself. I have the latest plug-in and all... the only thing I can think of is that I haven't upgraded to Unity 1.2.2 yet, but that shouldn't have anything to do with the plug-in right?

Frustrating to say the least.

 

The cache kept on eating up my memory on download, so much that I got a "The startup disk is nearly full" message! From activity monitor:

 

lol, ok to all users...

UPGRADE TO THE NEW VERSION OF UNITY!

I want to see your creations :wink:

 

Well, it's true. Joe said it, but I forgot it was a beta release.....
So it's down. Close your eyes and imagine cool stuff..... sorry Joe

 

I have posted a larger standalone version of the file:

http://www.digitalrain.org/TikiMagic_MiniGolf.zip

Please check it out and let me know what you think so far.

Cheers,
Charles

 

Very cool. I love the look. The controls are a might bit touchy in my opinion (I tried with a mighty mouse and a Powerbook trackpad), but it looks like the start of a great game.

 

Superb, great look!! but I agree and one-up Dan.

The controls are *way* too sensitive on my 17" 1.9 GHz iMac. Moving the mouse left and right causes the view/aim to swing wildly around, even if I just nudge the mouse. Vertical movement is far too under-sensitive in my opinion to move the power bar up/down. The right/left movement is measured for me in an inch while it's 14-15" for the vertical. It's nearly impossible for me to move the power bar with swinging the view around wildly.

Also, I want to see some form of reaction on the Play/Quit menu items when I roll over them.

But let me reiterate ... this looks and plays fantastic.

Call me old fashioned but what's wrong with the arrow keys to turn the aim and the power (left/right and up/down respectively) as an option?

This is a fantastic game!

One further thought ... the power bar/mouse movement seems inverted. I want to pull down to make the shot less powerful and push up to make it go farther but this is reversed in the game.

 

agree with the above comments regarding the controlls, one other thing: there are some spots on the green (namely near the corners) where your geometry can get in the way of seeing the pointer icon when you are trying to aim your next shot.

looks good, i like the overall atmosphere of it ; )

 

I tried it as well, and though it looks and sounds wonderful, the mouse tracking made it absolutely impossible to play. The slightest tap to my mouse (standard apple Mighty Mouse) would rotate the shot indicator around at least three times with the camera in hot pursuit. Also, like DaveyJJ said, the opposite seems to be true for the vertical tracking. It takes ages to adjust the power, at which point you have already moved a little bit horizontally making the camera flail in all directions. I would assume that this is not how it plays on your computer, cgoran, so I do not know if the problem lies with your implementation or Unity itself.

Additionally, near the end of the course, the lights would sometimes flicker on and off and the shot indicator would all but dissapear. It looks like you are using a light with a cookie on it for the arrow, and I guess my graphics card has some lighting issues because in Unity Editor in my own projects, lights will on their own free will change from pixel to vertex and the intensity will jump around the place. Sidenote to OTEE bug fix squad: I have a Power Mac G5 Dual 2.3 with a GeForce 6600.

Anyway, sorry for my digression, but aside from the control bug, Tiki Magic Mini Golf is looking really great!

 

Thanks everyone for checking it out. And thanks to Aarku for getting bloom happening
Here is a screen with the bloom action in effect.



It's unanimus, everyone who has played so far agrees on arrows and space bar for ball control, so that will be changed.

Cheers,
Charles

 

Nice mascot hanging around on the first hole, btw. :wink: Ron and I will send the address where you can send royalty cheques.

 

The controls were messed up and it was just barely above about 15 fps at 640x480 but thats the fault of my graphics card not really your game.. Bloom looks nice!

 

Testing on a stock 20" Intel iMac.

Visuals - pretty much spot-on. As others have said, very pretty. If you can create enough variety in the levels while maintaining a consistent feel, I think you've got it. (Not that some more visual niftyness, cool things in the background would hurt it, necessarily.) ((And on second thought, it might be fun to experiment with wildly different visual styles between sections...but that's a design issue.))

Performance - Even running via Rosetta, resolution and quality at max, it's pretty good. (Any chance next preview will be universal binary?) Never saw the screen bloom - is that in the currently posted binary?

Controls - I second all the issues, but not necessarily the solution. (One of the tricks of development is listening to the problems, but not always the pre-given solution. But don't dismiss them out-of-hand, either, of course.) Arrow/space/other keyboard control should probably be an option (perhaps with a large/small adjustment modifier key?), but I actually think your existing scheme has promise, it just needs polish. Obviously the main thing is it's waaaaay too sensitive, I'm guessing that's just a numeric value that needs to be adjusted somewhere... I can't tell if it's due to said issue or not, but ATM it feels like there's only a limited # of angles you can actually select. Using up/down on the mouse to adjust power is somewhat novel, IMO. Depending on how you decide to implement the rest of your controls/features (zoom? Change angle of view?) I think it could actually be a differentiator for your game. (Personally I'd want to map it to the scroll-wheel.) All these will need some extra consideration, as the player very well may have a one-button mouse...


Bugs/Other things you probably just haven't implemented yet:
It crashes when you sink the shot. (Console/crash log available if needed.)
Maybe you're calling a method that's not defined? If there simply was no game logic for it, I would expect the ball to just sit in the cup or fall through, depending on how it was setup.

It crashed when I bounced the ball out of the course, as well.

Camera - Aside from the control sensitivity, I mostly like the feel, how it lags a bit. Bumping into the totems was annoying. (Perhaps you could make them of 2 parts, the lower part a "physical" object(rigidbody?), the upper part fly-through...) In areas where the camera swings into the mountainside, you can see the skybox below, looks a bit odd.

 

Nice lighting...

 

Great look, but basically unplayable as is, at least for me.

How I would like to see it handled. Split up the direction/power and the camera.

Control the camera with the arrow keys or wasd and keep the ball controls with the mouse. That would stop the camera from jerking around and would allow you to pan around the level to set up your shot.