elacc (Marcus' Entry Part II)

Summary:

A continuation of my thread for elacc in Competition #5.

elacc (Marcus' Entry Part II)

Marcus42 21 Aug 2015 00:05

Greetings, all!

First of all, here is a link to the original thread for elacc, a game that I am currently programming. You can go there to get the game description and original progress in case you're interested. However, I will explain here that, due to the large size of the game, I'm carrying the development of it into this competition as well. To be perfectly honest (and rather realistic), I don't actually expect to complete this game, nor did I really ever. That being said, I do want to make something playable that's larger than my other games and includes an AI that's reasonably … Not dumb? And that actually is rather ambitious, haha!

Achievements:

(The achievements marked with a * are the ones that I've carried over from the last competition. The others I'll have to earn again.)

Thinking Ahead:* Spend time before the start of the competition planning your game.
½KLOC:* Your game reaches 500 lines of code. You're off to a great start! (Reached 970 LOC total on 5-27-15.)
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.)
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.)
Seeing the Matrix:* Share your source code with the people in the competition via GitHub, BitBucket, or a simple download.
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.
The Great Unveiling: Provide a download for your game.
"Research": You spend a few hours playing a game when you should have been making one. (Yes, yes I did.)
Game Over: You add the ability for players to lose the game. (It's extremely basic, but it does exist.)

Downloads

Source Code

Last edited on 13 Sep 2015 19:27 by Marcus42 Show more

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry Part II)

rbwhitaker 21 Aug 2015 01:02

Looking forward to it, Marcus! It will be cool to have somebody working on a game that was in development last time around. I look forward to seeing your AI!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry Part II)

Marcus42 22 Aug 2015 00:37

I just got up another download of the current state of elacc, before I do any work on it for Competition #6, in case anyone's interested. (And it's fine if you're not.)

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry Part II)

Marcus42 30 Aug 2015 01:28

Hey, everyone! I was pretty busy last week, hence my absence, but today I was able to sit down for a while and do some work on my game.

First of all, I didn't really do anything last weekend. I spent a good chunk of time doing odd bits of animation, but none of that made it past the Blender phase and into a texture atlas, so I really didn't have anything to show. Today, though, I was able to finish up animating the player's left arm (because I'm drawing every character in multiple pieces and never got to the arm in the last competition) and also made several animations for swapping weapons, as opposed to the gun being held just magically changing to a new one. Then, I put them all into texture atlases, loaded them into C#, and began implementation! I've now got everything in and working, the weapon swapping looks really good (in my opinion), and it's nice to have the player finally with both arms … but I do have one problem. Without going into details, suffice it to say that I'm going to have to remake a lot of texture atlases. Oh well.

Anyways, I didn't see anyone in the chatroom today, but I hope the day went well for you all. Maybe I'll see some of you around tomorrow. Later!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry Part II)

Marcus42 07 Sep 2015 01:42

Hello again - I've got some progress to tell you all about!

There is of course the continual process of making random things work better or transition smoother, but aside from that, I've done a couple big things. The first was to implement the ability for the enemy characters to die, and the second was to add the passive ability for the player to be able to deflect bullets (remember that there's going to be a "magic" type of fighting style in addition to just guns). The first feature is important because it's just such a basic thing to have, but the second was kind of a big deal to add because it required pulling out all the code for the player's left arm and making it relatively independent, as well as beginning to create the ability for it to perform actions on its own, which will play a larger part later in development that I hope to reach. It was also just a lot harder than I expected, haha!

I was also finally able to take a screenshot in which you can actually see a feature, as opposed to it only being able to be conveyed by video. Here it is (you can see a dead AI character and the middle of the player's weapon switch animation):

I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to work on next, but it may be either the beginnings of a HUD, so I can create a basic "Go to A, go to B" sort of mission and get a victory condition, or improving the AI character's intelligence. Right now it's an extremely basic "patrol this route, and hey, if you see the player, shoot at him and follow him around" sort of thing, and I'd like to make it … Uh, less dumb, haha!

Hopefully there will be more to come soon!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry Part II)

Marcus42 13 Sep 2015 19:39

Well, another week has gone by. Just to give a quick update, I haven't done all that much, but I have begun work on improving the battle AI. Back in Competition #2, when I was working on Final Saber, I decided that the best way to coordinate my AI characters during combat was to create a new class that would just watch them all and be able to make decisions about which one does what. Well, I figured that this might still be a good idea, so I'm trying to do it again.

The problem is, this stuff is hard, so I think I'm going to have to do what I did during the last competition when I came to pathfinding, which is to just chip away at it and probably not have much to say for a while. So yeah, that's where I'm at.

See you all later!

Re: elacc (Marcus' Entry Part II)

Marcus42 26 Sep 2015 17:45

I know that the competition ended last weekend, but I'm only now getting around to publishing a demo of where I'm at, so apologies about that! The good news, though, is that I do have a new demo for you all now. The new one is elacc v0.0.3 (and you may want to keep reading before trying it out).

Really, the only thing worth mentioning that I've done since the last update is to continue work on improving the AI, but it still hasn't made it to the point yet where I can put it in control of the characters, so there's no visible difference from what it was like a couple weeks ago (although I did throw a few more characters into the world).

So, here's the big highlights since the last demo at the beginning of this competition, if you want to look for them:
- Much better performance (although for some reason there will be big lag spikes periodically about half of the times the program is run, so if it's lagging a lot, try closing it and running it again. No idea why this is happening).
- The player character now has an animation for switching weapons and also for deflecting some bullets from both an aiming and standing position.
- The AI characters can now die and the program will close if the player runs out of health.
- Guns will get less accurate the longer they're fired for without stopping, up to a certain point.

If anyone forgets the controls, it's WASD to move, the right mouse button to aim, and the left mouse button to shoot if aiming. The mouse wheel switches weapons (the sniper rifle is selected by scrolling up, and the assault rifle by scrolling down).

A little bit of a slow competition for me, but there is still some good progress represented here and I maintain my hopes of continuing to further develop this. If you have any feedback, let me know, but otherwise I'll see you all later!