Month: November 2012

Squid Game Dev Log – Learning Unity3D

… I have been reading up on the Indie Games industry, and It seems that the only way to get by making browser-besed games is ads.
I hate ads!
So I looked into making games that would work on Mac or Windows, and found Unity.   Unity is a 3d engine, but there are a few good resources I have foudn that will allow me to create a 2d game using Unity.

I am following a video tutorial now and leanring a lot, it seems like Unity has a lot of flexibility and the Unityscript/Javacript language looks fammiliar to me so that’s a big plus.

I am working on rebuilding the engine for squid game, and trying to get it to look as flat as possible to create a 2d look. I really like the cameras and other things you can use in Unity, really cool stuff!

Heres a snapshot:

 

Squid Game Dev Log – re-done sprites!

(above) This is when the character takes damage in the game.

(below) The whole point of the game, avoid letting the squid fall asleep!

I will post some of the animated sprites soon, but they arent refined and smooth yet so I will wait.

Click on the images to view the Deviantart page, and comment, or leave a comment below.

Squid Game Dev Log – Enemies! and Pain!

Alex Bezuska Blog Squid Game

Try it yourself, using the working demo: squid.alexbezuska.com
The idea at this point is if you hit an enemy you start the level over, it’s not about fighting enemies, but instead collecting items and navigating to a goal.
The plan is to have moving pattern based obstacles like this Horseshoe Crab, and also stationary ones like sharp coral or pits not sure quite yet…

The next big goal is to have a goal, a way to beat the level even if its just a flag at the end.

The Beginnings of the first level

Alex Bezuska Indie Game Dev Squid Game

Not much here But I got the first stage started! I am using an app called Tiled (Mac or Windows) which is a general purpose map editor that allows for some pretty awesome stuff such as layers and makes setting up the collision detection with MelonJS pretty easy.

Check out Tiled here: http://www.mapeditor.org/

and MelonJS here: http://www.melonjs.org/

jQuery Tip – Different Keys for the same Thing

So here is something I was struggling with and found a solution that might help other people trying to do the same thing. My goal was to have two keyboard keys do the same thing, in this case move the character in my game. So a player could use W A D S or the arrow keys. My code before was this:

                 case 40:  //down
	         	squid.css('top' , position.top + 50 + 'px')
	         		.removeClass("idle")
	         		.addClass("down");
	         		break;

	         case 83:  // also down
	         	squid.css('top' , position.top + 50 + 'px')
	         		.removeClass("idle")
	         		.addClass("down");
	         		break;

But you can do this instead to help reduce the amount of code, and organize your code better.

               
                 case 40:
	         case 83:  //Use either of these keys
	         	squid.css('top' , position.top + 50 + 'px')
	         		.removeClass("idle")
	         		.addClass("down");
	         		break;

I am still trying to figure out how to have key combos like W + D to move up-right or A + S to move down-left so my character can have 8 different directions to move, making it a bit more fluid. If you know how to do this drop me a comment, if I figure it out on my own or have time to google around for it some more, I will post it here.

Indie Game

So I noticed this movie when I was flipping though Netflix and thought I would check it out, it’s called Indie Game The Movie, ( you can check it out here: bit.ly/Km3WmG )

Indie Game: The MovieThe movie itself was really well made, and followed the surprisingly interesting and emotional stories of some unique game developers. These developers don’t work on 1000-person teams for the big guys like EA or Nintendo, instead they work from home or in small offices with teams of one or two people. They are passionate about their creations, and all of them spoke of some part of themselves going into thier work. The great thing about the Indie realm is that they made a big distinction between where (mainstream)games have gone, and the games they loved as a kid. The all talked about Mario, Megaman, Metroid, Zelda – the classics, and were quite frank when giving their opinions about games like Call of Duty and Halo being crap. The movie stirred up the plan I always had when I was a kid, my first dream career was always a video game developer. I used to draw characters from games I loved, but mostly my own I dreamt up, I even tried to make some of my own games in the past using flash but never got too serious with it. After watching the movie  I was inspired again and I started a new side project – a game.

Game Concept Sketch

Squid HTML5 Canvas jQuery javascript Game PreviewMy plan is to create a game using HTML5 Canvas and jQuery/JavaScript that will be playable in browser, or on the iPhone. Another part of this goal is that the game works well, and fits a comfortable button-mapping to an SNES controller.  The underlying reason for this project, like with TouchTint, is that in addition to it being a possible source of income, it will be a big learning experience. I don’t yet have a goal of how big or involved the game will be, but I will include a link to the in-progress version so you can check it out if you want, and see how far along I am.  Hopefully there will be much more to come as I continue on with this idea!