elacc (Marcus' Entry)

elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Marcus42 19 May 2015 00:53

Hey, everyone! Probably a month ago at this point, I started writing down the details about what it was that I wanted to program for this competition, and I figured that I would just post it now, rather than waiting until Friday. That way, I can just dive right in when the time comes. So …

(Note: No, I'm not talking about the East Los Angeles Community Corporation, haha! And no, I don't live in LA.)

The Game:

elacc will be a 2D, top-down, sci-fi RPG game featuring three playable species and numerous planets in the Solar System to explore. Each species will focus on different combat styles and will have three different classes to start off in, making a total of nine default characters with different stats to begin with. As the player travels, optional quests will be given with rewards for each (the details here are a bit fuzzy, still), and there will also be a series of quests that compose the main storyline about a new intelligence entering the Solar System … and potentially posing the biggest threat ever faced.
The three playable species are: Venusian, Martian, and Terran. The Terrans aren't humans, but they do live on Earth, and the Venusians and Martians, of course, live on Venus and Mars. The Venusians' fighting style will emphasize guns and really just going in and taking everyone out, the Martians' fighting style will emphasize using what is best explained as magic, similar to fantasy RPG games, and the Terrans' fighting style will emphasize … Well, bows. And arrows, yes. However, they'll be much better at stealth and moving quicker than anyone else, and the Martians should be able to deal a ton of damage fast, although be more vulnerable at the same time, so all three should be well balanced.
As you play, you'll gain currency that can either be used for equipment or weapons or leveling up a skill, of which there will be a variety, similar to Dark Souls. Also, every time the player levels up, they receive a token, which can then be spent on the Ability Tree, which will unlock certain abilities, largely passive, that are very powerful. Each species has its own Ability Tree, but they can also unlock abilities from another species, only at a greater cost of tokens.
Hopefully you're starting to think that this sounds like fun, haha!

Achievements:

Thinking Ahead: Spend time before the start of the competition planning your game.
10 Hours: You spend at least 10 hours programming your game during the month.
Moral Support: Leave a comment on somebody else's game thread with (constructive) feedback.
Leveled Up: You learned something that you didn't know that you can reuse in other games or other programs. (I learned how to do several things in Blender during the first couple days of the competition that will likely come in handy again later.)
Lonely: Program on a Friday or Saturday evening.
½KLOC: Your game reaches 500 lines of code. You're off to a great start! (Reached 970 LOC total on 5-27-15.)
Time Machine: Worked for over an hour on code that you rip out later that day. (Pathfindingpathfindingpathfindingpathfinding.)
I'm a Lover, Not an Artist!: You get all, or most of your work, from online sources and do very little of your own artwork. (Yup, I most certainly didn't make the 3D models I'm using for this game, haha!)
Vincent van Gogh: You create your own artwork for your project. (Even considering that I didn't make the 3D models, I need to do considerable work coloring, rigging, animating, and making texture atlases for each one, so I'm claiming both.)
25 Hours: You spend at least 25 hours programming your game during the month.
The Tinker: Fiddle with a complicated piece of code and get it to work only after a lot of failed tweaks. (Pathfindingpathfindingpathfindingpathfinding.)
1KLOC: Your game reaches 1000 lines of source code. Making progress! Excellent! (Reached 1,600 LOC total on 6-3-15.)
2KLOC: Your game reaches 2000 lines of source code. Keep it up! (Reached 2,001 LOC total on 6-8-15.)
Seeing the Matrix: Share your source code with the people in the competition via GitHub, BitBucket, or a simple download.
Monday: The entire weekend went by and you didn't get any programming done. (The last weekend, unfortunately.)
Way to Brag: Claim at least 15 achievements.
Wait, We Were Supposed to Make a Game?: The challenge ends, and you don't get the Mission Accomplished! achievement.
The Great Unveiling: Provide a download for your game.
I'm Sorry, Dave. I'm Afraid I Can't Do That. Add an AI enemy, opponent, or component to your game. It doesn't have to be any good.

Downloads

Source Code

There will likely be more to come throughout the week!

Last edited on 21 Jul 2015 23:13 by Marcus42 Show more

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

rbwhitaker 19 May 2015 02:22

Sweet! This sounds cool, and very ambitious. (It's not a competition if you don't stretch yourself a little too far though, right?) I'm looking forward to this! And I like the format you're starting with, where downloads can be found instantly in the top post. I'll probably steal that idea!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Marcus42 20 May 2015 00:39

Thanks! And yes, this project is extraordinarily ambitious, which is why I'm planning to be working on it all summer long - I can't wait to get started!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Marcus42 23 May 2015 03:26

Well, I've spent all day working on some artwork so that I can actually begin programming my game, and now I'm pretty close. I found a 3D model (after quickly giving up on making one) and rigged and colored it, so all I've got to do now is animate and render it. Then put it in a texture atlas. But then I can start programming!

I did, however, render an image of the completed model that you can see here. This isn't going to be a player-character, by the way, just a basic enemy.

I'll see you all tomorrow!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

rbwhitaker 23 May 2015 03:59

Nice, Marcus! Lookin' pretty good!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Swatacular 23 May 2015 07:01

That guy looks snazzy!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Marcus42 24 May 2015 06:14

Not much to show today either, unfortunately. I did a lot of animation (did anyone notice that the guy I showed you all yesterday was left-handed? I didn't realize that until this morning, haha!), rendered it out, and then made two texture atlases out of it, but then I had to do a lot of foundation work in my XNA project, so the artwork hasn't actually been implemented yet. Close, but not quite.

Also, I'm afraid that there's not even any source code up tonight, because Mercurial kept aborting the push process. I recently switched computers and some things aren't properly set up yet, so I doubt its an issue, I just need to get it working again. I'll figure it out tomorrow.

See you then!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

rbwhitaker 24 May 2015 12:37

Ha ha! No, I didn't notice he was left handed. But I did happen to notice he has six fingers on his left hand. Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die. (Not really.)

I've been pushing to Mercurial all day, so I don't know what's going on specifically in your case, but I can confirm BitBucket in general is working. Like you hinted at, it's probably mostly a function of it not remembering your passwords and such. Let me know if you want any help sorting it out later today.

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Marcus42 25 May 2015 01:48

Greetings, all! Finally, I've got something tangible to show you!

I spent a good chunk of time today actually programming, which was a nice change, and now I've got the basic enemy drawing on the screen, playing several animations (two of which I made yesterday, and three of which I made today), and following some simple user input (which means that he'll face the mouse cursor and follow basic movement commands with WASD). Although I do have some code uploaded to Bitbucket now, and you're free to look at that … I also have a video!

It's a bit small here, but in the video you can see the walk animation, as well as a couple of animations for the left arm, which randomly goes back and forth between swinging beside the soldier or holding onto his gun.

Goals for tomorrow? To get some sort of environment set up and begin work on pathfinding, although I'd also like to get some artwork for him just standing still, so he doesn't look like he's walking all the time. We'll see how all of that goes, though.

See you guys then!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

rbwhitaker 27 May 2015 17:00

It's looking good, Marcus!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Marcus42 28 May 2015 00:35

Hey, guys!

On Monday I got the environment drawing and moving around the player like I wanted to, and since then I've been working on pathfinding. Here's what I've discovered: it hasn't gotten easier to program since Competition #2. Yesterday I didn't do too much, but today I added a lot of lines of code and wrote an almost completely finished method for returning the correct path to a location. It doesn't work, of course, but at least now he walks around a bit in what is generally the correct direction, haha!

So yeah, I don't have much to say right now, and I likely won't have anything to say for a while, until I get the pathfinding working to an acceptable level. Then I can move onto other things.

Anyways, I'll be back then (although I expect to still be in the chat room). See ya!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Marcus42 04 Jun 2015 05:05

I'm back!

Hopefully, the majority of the work on pathfinding necessary for this game is done, but it's probably not. I've put a good chunk of time into it, and it works in quite a few situations pretty well, but a couple of issues popped up today spontaneously even though I didn't touch the code for it. Oh well. Anyways, it's done to the extent where I can work on other things for a bit before returning and fixing any issues and allowing for more situations when trying to move around.

Thankfully, I have done some work on other things. A lot of it is behind-the-scenes stuff, mostly to do with the animations and separating it out into layers (I'm probably pushing the use of texture atlases as far as it'll go), but I also began coding for the player character (not the AI character I already made) and started to add support for switching between guns/weapons! As it is, the player character will draw, face the mouse, and move around. Unfortunately, he turned out a bit smaller than the other guy, so I'll have to redo his texture atlases and probably re-render it all as well, but there is some more visual progress now! Although I don't have a picture of the new character in the game, I do have one of the colored model, just so you guys know what it'll look like. Here it is:

It's not what I originally had in mind, but as far as finding a free model to use goes, it works pretty well. Anyways, that's all that I have for today.

See you all later!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Emblis 04 Jun 2015 08:26

Cool! :D

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Marcus42 09 Jun 2015 01:03

Hello again, everybody! I figured that today I'd make an update in the afternoon so that it doesn't get to be evening and I decide to be lazy and put it off again.

So anyways, I've made a lot of progress since the last time I posted - here's what I've done:

• Added a second gun and finished being able to switch back and forth between the two in-game
• Added an animation (read: several) so that the player can aim both gun types
• Added the ability to shoot from both guns, each with different behaviors (e.g. how fast the bullets move, how accurate the guns are, how fast they fire) that can be easily changed, although I haven't made very good artwork for the bullets yet. I just dropped in what I used for Constant Through the Ages, haha!
• Added a new method of looking around. Originally the screen was always centered on the player, but now pressing tab switches between that and the screen instead following the mouse to a certain extent. It's really hard to describe this in words, but I based the entire thing off of how Running with Rifles does it, because I think that it solves a couple of problems with top-down shooters well. It allows you to give each gun a different range (the longer the range, the more the screen follows the mouse), doesn't hinder the player because of a small screen so you can't see what's happening, and also kind of simulates looking down the sights of a gun in the sense that you pay more attention on where you're aiming and can forget to pay attention to your surroundings. Anyways, I thought this was a great idea and so copied it.
• Added collision detection between the player and the walls in the world that I made a while ago, so you can't just walk all over the map.
• Finally added the ability for the player to stand still, without the walk animation playing. Honestly, I have no idea why I didn't do this sooner.

I wanted to take a screenshot for you guys, because I haven't done too many of those in this competition, but I haven't done enough to be interesting visually in a still picture, so I'm going to wait a bit longer and then just make another video.

See you all later!

Marcus42 20 Jun 2015 17:51

Hey, guys - sorry that it's been about two weeks since my last update! I took a bit of a break last week, so I do have some stuff to tell you, but it's not a lot.

The biggest thing that I did was add the ability to run (which took a lot of code and a lot more texture atlases), and I also did a bunch of work on how the animations transition, so it'll all be smooth, and I think it looks pretty good. The two other things I did was make the world bigger (although that won't mean much to you guys, since you haven't seen it yet), and also code support for adding locations to the AI character for it to walk back and forth between. Basically, you can now set a path for where you want the character to patrol - while you don't have to set waypoints for every time the character needs to make a turn, because the pathfinding code I wrote works reasonably well, you do have to set several locations just to get the character to patrol between two places.

Also, I made another video! And by the way, I do realize that the player character does not have a left arm. Due to several things I would like to add to the game later on, it's necessary that I draw the torso and right arm separate from the left arm, and I haven't yet done the work to animate and make texture atlases for the other arm.

What I'd like to have by the end of the competition is multiple AI characters that can "see" you, the player, and stop patrolling to fire. It may not end up getting done, but hopefully it will, and either way I'll make a download so that anyone who'd like to try it can.

See you guys then!

rbwhitaker 23 Jun 2015 01:38

Lol! That guy was getting shot at and just kept walking. Looks awesome Marcus!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Marcus42 28 Jun 2015 00:20

Unfortunately, I didn't end up doing any more programming last weekend. Oh well. However, as I said I would do, I've made a download and uploaded it to Bitbucket - even though nothing has changed since the video I posted not that long ago, if you'd like you can find the download and try it out here.

As far as the controls go, WASD moves the player around, the player faces the mouse, holding the right mouse button aims the player's gun, holding the left mouse button shoots the player's gun (but only if aiming), and scrolling the mouse wheel changes the gun the player has selected (there's currently two). However, the game will only start drawing a different type of gun when the animation changes, so if you're scrolling up and down and nothing is changing, try running or aiming and you should see a difference. Finally, pressing tab will toggle the way the game is displayed.

See you guys later!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry)

Marcus42 21 Jul 2015 23:11

Hey, everyone!

Well, it's been about a month since the competition ended, and I'm pleased to say that I've continued work on elacc! I haven't done a ton, but I am still making progress, and now I just want to let you all know how it's going.

Most of what I've done since the competition has been centered on the AI - first it was just to get the AI character to stop walking when the player is in its line-of-sight, and then some work to get bullets actually colliding with characters and dealing damage, then getting the AI characters to shoot, and now, when the player leaves its line-of-sight, it will actually walk to the last location it saw the player at. There's some problems, of course, but most of this works very well.

I've also done a couple of other things, like placing multiple AI characters that start in different locations and patrol different paths, drastically reducing the distance the viewpoint will move when the player is running, changing it so that weapons start more accurate and get less accurate the longer you fire them, and also programming an entirely new renderer that doesn't look too different, but is slightly improved.

Well, that should be everything. See you all later!