Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Gameguru, my thoughts.

I have been taking a break from 3D modeling to actually prototype some game concepts that I have been thinking about. This was brought about by the Humble bundle and all those awesome tools my friend pointed out to me! I may even enter that 2015 contest, I certainly am making some good progress towards that end. That is not to say I am giving up those other projects, in fact one seems to be coming along quite well. The other is still really big an a distant thing but it has a lot of potential.

Anyways without further ado on to Gameguru the easy game maker and some screenshots of what I have managed to create so far:
This is an overview of my level so far. We have a cave, two towns and some ruins. I opted for trying to make a seamless game with less loading times.

Some shots of the cave area. I opted to sculpt it and most of my level out of terrain due to various AI issues. Basically the default AI can have a lot of issues with objects that are not terrain (mainly not liking to walk on or around them very well). Seeing as I have very little experience with programming I have had to design around what gameguru gives me to work with for now. Also, due to the limited time frame I have to work with if I want to enter the contest most of the content I made is going to use sound zones with my voice driving the story.

I decided to take gameguru at its word, and see what I could throw together with what I got in the packs for it. Something to consider is that since it was originally a fps creator, that is what the default settings are at. As such, melee weapons have to be treated like really short range guns, aka damage is done at the center of the cross hairs; you don't really have a cone or frontal area effect you would expect of most melee weapons. The player collisions are actually very well done, so moving around should be a breeze. However this has a downside: the player can get some very interesting places if you are not extremely careful with level design, especially terrain. Your best bet if in doubt is to make it so the player falls to their death or something if they are going somewhere you might not want them to go.

On to the default ai: Gameguru's default ai needs some work. My advice is to try some models/animations and see if they work for your game concept. Some hit boxes can be odd and very counter intuitive making some mobs seem invincible. Some mobs fall through the world very easily or get stuck worse than others. Damage can be kind of wonky too, even by tweaking settings I still have certain mobs one or two shot me. Again, experiment to see what default models/ai seem feasible. Most humanoid or close to human size creatures work fairly well.


Finally lets look at the models. I have to hand it to them, most look pretty dang good. No real complaints with them except the default AI issues. Some animations look a bit stiff or weird, but the texture maps seem fairly good.

Whew that was a book hah. Sorry about writing so much. If you have any other questions about my experiences with gameguru let me know and I will try to help. They also have a great community to fall back on if you are having trouble.

Too long to read version:
pros:
gameguru seems good for throwing together something with a fps type perspective.
terrain and models are quick to create/throw in and use.
you can create some enemies that move around and attack quickly.
trigger zones allow one to make events or play sounds easily
models look fairly good
simple interface

cons:
without programming experience you are very limited in what you can do on your own
can be hard to limit player movement (no invisible walls)
enemies can easily get stuck or glitched.
with a simple interface comes many limitations (positioning objects can be tough sometimes for example).
load times can be pretty long with multiple levels.







Saturday, July 11, 2015

Wow... a lot has been happening the last week or so. Lets see... I finished up a couple models:
Hm, need a more up to date shot of the interior textures... we decided those were terrible and updated them lol.. Ah well I am sure I will get a picture eventually anyways. In addition, also got some animations done pretty quick too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpKH8odIWKg

Overall a very productive period of time... And this isn't even all of what I managed to get done. Also did a quick rocking chair animation and shattered picture. Onward to more modeling and stuff!

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

actually thinking of converting this to a sort of video or play through update... I will let you know how it goes. Did a short demo of some of the things I have been working with and it seems a bit funner than just writing about it.

Thinking about making a sort of gallery of the work and allowing someone to "play" and look around on their own.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

The usual late update hah. Still working with my teams but hitting some snags. One might switch over to blender for various reasons and the other is having issues with collisions in unity. Ultimately the decision about switching to blender is still in the air. It has a lot of advantages, but there is also the whole setback issue that it would cause since this wasn't decided at the outset. Its just a mess really. Working in blender is easy enough, but redoing all that we had will definitely be a hassle. And getting the appropriate license and re-saving is also a pain. Lesson learned? Make sure these things are planned thoroughly from the outset.

Anyways on to the pictures of progress!
This was the tentative textures we had for a sort of run down house. You will notice the exterior was really blurry and distorted. Not too bad far away but up close it had a sort of smudged paper look. This is because of too many UV shells on one map. Ultimately we had to split the house into three parts and their respective maps to get the details we wanted:
The walls there were actually made from pictures of a house up the street. Had that run down paint peeling look we were going for and turned out a lot nicer.


Monday, June 15, 2015

Working on some creatures. Keeping the style simple to give it more of an anime feel. Finished up a golem and goblin.


Can't wait to see them in action in game.

In other news also got some more work done on the arms and gun for the fps we are working on:
Fairly productive couple weeks. Look forward to more project updates soon! I am actually considering doing a quick video of what we got on the fps so far. Just some animations of a player and some zombies they can shoot, but everything starts somewhere!


Monday, June 1, 2015

Over the last couple weeks I was working on a building project that was meant to be a sort of tavern.
originally there were a lot of things that made it unusable for the project. However, I heard the problems and told them to give me a couple more days to fix the issues.

 I mean, we still needed this asset, and it would be the same if not more time wasted just trashing it and redoing. I like to think that overall spending a couple more days fixing it was better than starting something from scratch. This also gave me the opportunity to refine the design a bit more such as adding actual stairs and a guard on the balcony instead of going the cheap optical illusion and alpha channel route.

In other news I managed to get a lot of animation done for my other project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_Tt0jUIW-s

Still improving those and figuring out all the animations we need but it is coming along.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Still working on various things. This week I got some fishing gear done for one game while I worked on gun animations for another:
There we have a low poly harpoon and net model with textures.

I am working on some arm+weapon animations for another game. Textures still very rough pretty much just placeholder or a base to put more details on. Running into a problem importing them into Unity though. The gun and arms come in just fine, but moving different parts of the gun is not working. Probably a problem with the base rig, but not quite sure how to solve it at this time.

Hopefully I will remember to update this more regularly someday hah! See you soon.