Been playing round with this tank model after getting the urge to make a tank-only game playing with the Armed Vehicle Grape tank-(ish) in Earth Defense Force 4.1.
The EDF one is great, all wobbley and skids around and fires sheels really quickly. I have a lot of fun just hooning round in it. Wanted to make something that captured that, with some added movement tricks (thinking jumps and side-flips).
Just woke with the thought that I should add a time trial mode, like how Stunt Race FX has those stunt courses. Would be a good place to experiement with handlign too, so ‘m gunna work on that first. Maybe that’ll become the whole game D:
That Unity tank is working well so far, just had to up the speed by about 2 times. Next step is adding sound effecst in. It doesn’t ‘wobble’ though, but the tracks conform to the level geometry, which is ace.
I’d like to have lots of fun customisation in the game too. Wheels, bodies, turrets, guns, and doodads. May as well do decals too.
Been playing round with a bunch of little ideas, but this’s the one I think I’m going to push on with for now.
del--
Grenade launchers
Fixed jumping
Shuttlecocks
Sniper rifles
Grenades
Fireballs
Lobs
?
--ay
Next
Thinking about what to focus on next…………
I’ve been poking at RPG Maker MV again, but I always realise I can never write more than a paragraph of a story……. they just……….. fizzle……… out……
So I think still and slow fixed cameras, maybe occasional music and sound to emphasize the not-sound. And I’d like to finally do some animation in a 3-D game. I actually studied 3-D animation when I first left high school, but that was a long time ago, and it was with a probably very expensive program called Lightwave. Maybe that gives me a little leg-up at least. I will be looking VERY HARD AND CAREFULLY for Blender alternatives.
This game will be juice fucking free.
Blueberry Soft Pack C
New bunch of games out!
Three are things I’ve released previous for Glorious Trainwrecks KK events, but the rest are new things that I made for Patreon frens.
Trainwrecks often have a troubled relationship with collision detection. Especially with the built in, generic systems that unity or game maker or klik and play provide, and especially with the haphazard way that novice or otherwise glorious developers use them, running into walls can be very hazardous. You’re liable to clip through or get stuck, or maybe the walls just weren’t there to begin with. Making sure your walls are solid and the player can’t get behind the curtain is one of the principle elements of a well polished game. So when you start playing a game like this there’s a sort of tense moment when you go to touch a wall for the first time and you brace yourself for what sort of horrible thing might happen. And in Destroy Your Home that’s a beautiful moment, because what happens is what never happens- the walls give in and become these wonderful springy, spongey, tumbling blocks.
There’s also a tradition of physics demos involving making a big pile of rigidbodies and letting you shoot cannonballs at it and fuck it up. And I like that Destroy Your Home takes a lighter approach to that whole idea. You don’t have any gun to shoot out cannonballs, you have to push things with your body. So you get to really feel the spongeyness and the weight of the blocks and ferns that you’re pushing around, and you get a sense of your own body’s presence.
So EDF Your Home takes the basic premise of Destroy Your Home and replaces the light, tinkling piano tone and feel with the garish, clunky feeling of Earth Defense Force. Here we have the physics-demo cannonball, conspicuously absent from Destroy Your Home. In true Glorious Trainwrecks fashion it shoots hard left of where you’re pointing, because it’s not there to demo the robustness of the physics simulation, but for some kind of more primal purpose. It exists not because this is fantasy about destroying your home with a bazooka gun, but because this is an EDF and DYH mashup, and you need a big bazooka gun. You also need a third person character, and one of the Unity tutorial assets fits the bill perfectly. He has all the checkbox features of a tutorial protagonist: walking, turning, crouching, dynamically ducking when a collider enters his upper half, kinematic footsteps, PBR rendering, etc. But his controls are awful and buggy. He turns in 10 degree increments and whenever you try to back up he glitches out. The [meticulously reconstructed, sans flora] house blocks still squish out of the way when you push them, but something is lost when you view the interaction from 5 feet over the guy’s shoulder.
I love how lovingly vulgar this game is, as an homage to Destroy Your Home. Each individual element from DYH is examined, understood, and perverted to bring it into the Earth Defense Force style. The color scheme gets updated to moon-of-saturn sci fi, the music from tinkling pianos to jarring cartoon rock, the third person perspective and cyan sphere shooting bazooka cannon- but still, the house layout is meticulously recreated.
Earth Defence Force Your Home
Unity has become very not fun for me. Way more fiddly with boring messages about convex rigidbodies and stuff. So I wanted to remind myself why I liked using it in the first place–easy physics!
So I made a little tribute to a game I’ve been playing a lot Earth Defense Force 4.1 (and the second one too, which I played a lot once upon a time), and a game I’ve continued to love and think about Destroy Your Home (also).
I smushed them together and this came out.
I watched the videos I recorded of myself playing it to recreate the design of the house (there are a few differences), and was reminded about the echoey sound in my very first attempts at screen recording. It was easy enough to recreate in Unity.
The textures and music are all taken from EDF. Textures are from my fave building in 4.1.
That’s my cat :)
You can get it on Glorious Trainwrecks. Maybe the Mac version is borked.
There’s already been one whole page made by someone else (excluding SPAM)!!, which really made my day!!
The aim is to make a really useful resource for people starting out making games, and people like me who are just kinda amateurish at is. AND for people just interested in the big variety of game making tools there are about, including old ones.
It might not be super useful for people yet, but I’m enjoying adding bits and pieces to it whenever I have time. I have lots and lots of bookmarks of things to add. And once I am finally done with Careful Felt I will be making lots of little games in whatever programs i can to help me fill this out.
There’s also a landing page if you remove the ‘wiki/’, but it’s just easy access to the stuff I’ve archived, and there’s not much worth mentioning there for now.
Japan Game
Forgot to mention that Japan Game, which has had a Unity web Player version on itch.io for ages, now has downloadable versions. Still pay-what-you-want.
There’ll probably be black borders on your screen when you play it. he main reason I didn’t have a downloadable version earlier because it was important that the game retain the same aspect ratio as the Japanese flag, so those borders are there to do that.
I have to fix a thing with the Linux version (and Mac I assume) where I forgot i had to lock the cursor for those platforms, so things get stuck when the cursor hits the edge of the screen.
Realised itch is a really valuable thing for Mac and Linux people ‘cause it keeps things nice and organised and packaged up! So I will be using it a lot more now I’m a Linux person too :)
I’m retty proud of this game! I hope you like it if you haven’t played with it already!
Last couple of days have been spent reorganising the website (putting things in folders (they were all over the place before) and moving things off Dropbox), so if you find a broken link somewhere you should be able to get to where you want via:
Still poking away at the Game Making Tools Wiki (making it public August 1), and starting work again on the last Patreon Christmas game D: ,so will have those all packaged up on itch.io in August too. Got Unity usually working nice in Linux, so that’s made it easier.
Experiment 26
Oh right, and this is all finally wrapped up. Experiment 26 is a chain game that was organised over at basiacally-dead forum makega.me. I’m not so enthusiastic about my part anymore, but I tihnk I was pretty happy with it when I made it. Maybe mostly because it used music.
Everything’s so slow at the mo’. I’ve been working on this last Christmas game for Nikki for so long now. I probably let it stew in my head for too long and it turned into something cool, but way to big. Even after reeling it back it’s still taking me forever. I sit down with Unity and make barely any visable progress, because everything I try to do bumps into programming problems I don’t understand :/ so it’s become this series of compromised work-arounds.
It’s basically a big spaceship escort mission (…), but the controls are kinda clunky. I wanted you to be able to walk round your ship (and co-op it) and sit down at whichever control panel was needed at the time, but I couldn’t get walking right somehow after all this time make games where you walk round places???
Just realised I haven’t got the part I actually thought would be hard. But that should be what I get to today. I wish the was a 3D KNP. I want that event editor.
I think when this’s done I’m going to take a break from Unity and make lots of little things in lots of different programs. Both as research for the Game Makign Tools Wiki, and to just make some silly little quick games for a while. I need to make that wiki public by June, no matter what, I think.
Method for Testing 3-D Level Design
You will need, or have access to, a: 3-D printer.
This is the best way to test level design in a 3-D videogame. Maybe the best way to test any object, still experimenting there.
Take you level and 3-D print the whole thing, all together as one object. Probably no longer than a metre, unless*
Rub it over your body, squeezing yourself into and through all the holes and cracks and seams. Use you fingers^, your skin rolls, your lips, your ears, your bums, and so on. Your muscle, your flesh, your bone, your hair.
More than any other method this will make it clear how your levels feels to move through.
Soon just moving through a 3-D level should produce a tactile response apart from your input tool and you will save a bunch of money on 3-D printing.
*You may wish to try a large print, large enough for the depth of your body to snake through the tiniest areas, but it should still often be snug enough for you to snake through on your belly.
^Another good size guide is to allow enough room for you to poke your fingers into small, crawly areas, such as ventilation ducts in something like Goldeneye007, or Metal Gear Solid.
Remembered a game Jake Clover posted about once, a 3-D thrus-type I never found a copy of. Rememberd I have a newer game like that on Steam I haven’t played called Crashed Lander.
I guess one of the Christmas games I made for Patreon supporters fits this too (I’ll release it publicly… within a month I hope). You control a floppy, clothey hand, flying and circling a orb. Each player is a clothey, floppy hand. Everything shiney and slippery. I guess Japan Game’s slow too.
Still haven’t played Spintires. Wonder if that slow muddy feeling fits all this.
🎆
I started writing a post about my history with game making, but then got distracted thinking about idle games again.
I’ve got lots of nebulously-formed video ideas in my head, and I think one of them is turning into a video with lots of flashy graphics like the idle games I’ve enoyed most.
New things I can do, that I haven’t dood yet.
Have some things I’ve found help on that I’d like to play with in Unity:
Using the microphone to record the player and play back
Using data from a webcam
Some rudimentary music-reacting stuff using audio sources from in the game, and I think the computer’s line-in.
Fix aspect ratios for full-screen games
I think they’ll be some microphone stuff in one of the Patreon games.
And the aspect ratio stuff means I can do a downloadable release of Japan Game (it’s supposed to be the same aspect ratio as the Japanese flag, see~
