‘Hiatus’

I took a break from the squid game, for a couple of reasons, including having the flu pretty bad, but I will be starting up the dev log again soon.

I also found this device called the SD2SNES, and I am blown away. It’s a a board that can be used like a SNES/ SFC cart that allows you to store roms/saves/home-brew etc on an SD card and run them directly on native SNES or SFC hardware. The price is quite high, $195 for the board alone (you would need to salvage an old cart to give it some ‘clothes’ or $260 for the deluxe with custom painted cart/case/ SD card/stickers etc.

The work that went into getting the multiple add-on chips many games had inside them alone is incredible, and I totally understand the cost, but I probably can’t afford one just yet. This makes me dream of creating my own games to run on a real SNES… wow I have no idea where to even begin on that one! If anyone if working an a home-brew SNES /SFC project and needs someone to work on art, contact me for sure! I will be very interested.

Mentioned Links:
Stone Age Gamers – home of the SD2SNES

Until next time,
-Alex

Squid Game Dev Log/ Learning Unity3D Day 11

Day 11 – 12-10-12
So-far so Good, I have now figured out how to have the player ‘eat’ the caffeine pills and boost the awake meter by 25pts and have the pill object disappear
– Fun stuff, most of the game mechanics are done, as this is a simple game.

  • Movement – Done
  • Collection of items  and positive effects – Done
  • Rock rolling ability – Somewhat Done
  • Enemies and negative effects – Not Started
  • Endpoints, and level switching – Not Started
  • Saving and continuing from where you left off – Not Started
  • Menus – Still needs to be done
  • fix rock dynamics – Needs to be done

I Shot a quick video of a somewhat unrefined version of the first level:

After I recorded the video, I spent some time fixing bugs with the terrain, and sealing off some of the weird visual gaps on the outside borders.
Here are some screenshots from before I went to bed:

Squid Game Dev Log – Pill Sprites and Video

Awesome things:

Using Orthello to achieve 2d sprite animation in Unity3D I found a cool setting called “Start on random frame” on the Animating Sprite which allows me to have my pill spites rotate independently – which adds a cool little visual.

Also I am learning how Hinge Joints work for attacking my seaweed sprites to the floor and allowing the player to collide with them and cause them to jostle a bit. I set the z axis (depth) to different amounts for each seaweed, and some are jostles more or not at all depending on the depth relative to the player.

I am obsessing over tiny details, but really fun!
Unity3d is crazy on options.

Squid Game Dev Log – awake meter and seaweed

Okay so, here’s where I’m at with the squid game.

I have added and have been working on a debug level where I will try out different physics stuff, objects, terrain types, and eventually enemies.
One of my friends had a cool suggestion that though the course of the game you upgrade your bed to a full, queen and eventually king size, seems like the perfect nonsense for the game!

Squid Game Dev Log – Animated 2d spites in Unity3D

After  spending about 5 hours total trying to figure 2d sprite animation AND keyboard controls in Unity, I think I finally have a decent workflow setup… – its also my birthday today!

I am using a free add-on called Orthello (WyrmTale Games) which has several great components for handling animated sprites, and a free app called Texture Packer (Code’n’Web – Mac, PC, Linux) to  create sprite sheets. Texture Packer generates an xml file that Orthello can read to map the sprites and give them unique numbers – which makes it easy to choose what frames go to what animation.

There was a bit of a learning curve, but I feel like I am much farther along, even though the end result is not as complete as my javascript browser version.

Here are a couple screens!

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.