Tyrus: posts

OUYA CREATE Game Jam, Day 11:

Submitted! I think. I got a screen saying “We’re honored you took the time to enter.” after trying a couple times and watching a progress bar complete. Some sort of further confirmation would make me feel a bit better, but I’m still super pumped to be done!

Today I just worked on the menu screens and did a couple test matches of the game with my wife before filming about 6 minutes of gameplay for the trailer. I cut it down at the points where the music loops so it’s nice and smoove :P.

I did a lot of work on this, but it would’ve been a lot harder to make something this nice without folks like Kevin MacLeod, Arruku, and Jorick Bronius putting out quality audio and icon work with friendly CC Attribution 3.0 licenses. Nymphont’s stylish fonts were also available with a very reasonable commercial license.

Working on an in-progress console was a challenging and exciting thing; being able to talk with the developers behind the OUYA Unity package directly helped a ton. Those guys are doing some good work, and it feels like the community’s helping a lot with the testing during this jam.

The amount that I bugged my wife the last couple days was somewhat terrible. “Aaangie can you play the game for another video?”  ”Angie I need someone else to move the other player to make sure the AI chase code is improved now,” and there she is studying for her math doctorate comprehensive exams. Her feedback and help were excellent. This game would have been notably worse without it. It also would have been a lot less fun to test by myself :P.

OUYA CREATE Game Jam, Day 10:

The game is done! I’ll be prettying up the start menu tomorrow along with some last minute testing, but that’s probably about it. I’ve gotta leave myself lots of time to make the required trailer tomorrow!

The main additions today were two floating UFOs you need to attack and kill to win the game.

My wife and I tested out the game quite a bit. Some really good AI improvements were made as a result, and one pretty nasty bug where the next round would run crazy slow some times.

The desktop I’m working on was out of commission for a bit today while I installed new video drivers on it to fix some pretty nasty crash issues I was running into, so I recorded about 36 different sounds for the game today. Most of the sounds were just me saying goofy lines for the robots. There are hit sounds, but there actually aren’t weapon sounds still because of how much shootin’ is generally going on in the game. You wouldn’t be able to hear anything else! The hit sounds give you most of the feedback you’d need, anyhow.

When I first imported the sounds into my Unity game and sent it to the OUYA, everything tanked and ran terribly slow. Fortunately, setting them all to decompress on load saved my arse. I’m still not sure if the original “compressed in memory” setting is really that much slower on this device. It could just be that decompressing all of that audio finally got the Android OS to give me a bigger chunk of memory to play with :P.

OUYA CREATE Game Jam, Day 9:

Rockets and lasers and respawning enemies, hell yeah! You can buy weapons with the coins dropped by your enemies now, which is pretty fun. The rocket’s probably too good at killing massive amounts of enemies at once… I’ll either make it more expensive or just shrink the radius.

At this point I’ve got something I’d be pretty comfortable submitting. There are unfortunate bugs in the sound when the player goes to the home screen and back in Unity on an OUYA, though, and I haven’t found a way to test four player yet. I may warn people off that but leave it there for giggles any way.

I’m definitely glad I have one more day to go. It’s not even possible to win yet! That could take a while.

Also, I’ve decided to call this game Super Robot Space Fight. I think. I alternate between liking the name and hating it. That probably means it’s good.

OUYA CREATE Game Jam, Day 8:

Welp, it’s late. I’ll let that todo list speak for itself! And this video from earlier today.

Here’s a video of my wife and I playing my OUYA CREATE jam entry together on the dev OUYA! It runs great, although the anti-aliasing isn’t quite as pretty as it is on my PC.

OUYA CREATE Game Jam, Day 7

My UI’s looking somewhat official now! I went through a lot of iterations with it. I had some off kilter robot heads in front of white circles, but in the end I made everything smaller and more straightforward. This screenshot is oddly short, but the UI should be able to resize itself.

I also went through a lot of iterations with my level. It turns out this gravity stuff can make for some damn annoying levels if I’m not careful with it. I’ve been tweaking planet positions and gravity strengths a lot.

I lost most of my work in progress shots for today when I bumped my computer whilst spinning in my chair and it promptly started screeching until I powered it down. It was clearly overreacting. I was not spinning fast.

Every enemy now drops a coin on death, and when picking them up a quick count of the recently picked up coins pops up over the player’s head to help them figure out what they just picked up, and their team’s total cash count updates accordingly.

Hopefully I’ll get to actually spending some of that tomorrow, but getting this thing running on an OUYA comes first! I was intending to do that today but got distracted with these shenanigans. I do like how much more complete things are looking now, though. Finishing is the most important thing.

OUYA CREATE Game Jam, Day 6:

I wanted to code dashing early because it seemed like it’d be a pain. I was right! And it’s done now :D.

Dash sends you speeding in the direction of your aim for a fraction of a second, knocking enemies out of the way and landing you on any planets you ram into. It serves as a good way to escape enemies and make tricky landings. One of the main balancing issues for this game will be limiting the usage of this enough that players save it for defense and can navigate the planets properly without it. Once every two seconds is what I’m trying for now.

Today’s schedule included getting a start on the game’s economy by making critters drop coinage the player can pick up. That’s going to wait until tomorrow.