bitcrushgames

[bitcrushgames]

It's been a while, huh? Turns out that while making games is hard, having a freelance job is harder. And I'm a people-pleaser who is also working on a game engine, so it took several months of several people telling me to make something for myself for me to come back here.

This game is a "short" platformer called Cloudforest, that has been in my brain for over a decade. It started in a custom python engine, got moved to Unity when I started this blog, and is now ported to Godot. This time, maybe I'll actually finish it lol. I like Godot more than Unity for this project so far.

I don't think I ever even showed the art for these rocks here - I spent a week on that formation in the second screenshot, blithely saying to myself "I'll turn it into tiles later" - then I realised how difficult it was going to be and gave up. So, a few years later, I'm finally trying to do it properly, and the first screenshot shows my progress. Needs a bit more space between repeats, but I'm pretty happy with it so far.

The quick technique I discovered to get these rocks done:

1. Start on a dark background and don't be afraid to let things fade into it 2. Draw a flattened, down-pointing triangle in a light colour - that's a rock's top plane 3. Draw a longer triangle under it on the left side - so two points join the light triangle - in a medium colour. That's a rock's left plane 4. Mess around with intermediate colours and a highlight/shine colour until it looks ok

Then repeat steps 2 to 4 a few thousand times, varying it each time…

#cloudforest #godot engine #pixel art #indie games

[bitcrushgames]

TurnShip DevBlog #1

Hello again! It's been a while, hasn't it.

I feel awkward writing posts like this, but I hope posting about problems and solutions, both designwise and brainwise, might help other people make their own games or projects. So here we go.

I had a break from TurnShip to work on some other projects, because I wasn't finding it fun to develop or think about. But, I never stopped to examine why I was feeling that way about it.

Despite people saying the pandemic is a good time to get creative, I think a lot of creative people are finding it much harder to work - I know I am. So I think that tied into it.

But also, I'd just been working on the most basic ship types, Pawns, to get the combat basics down. Trying to make a vertical slice for testing multiplayer. But it was boring! Also, narrow - because of this, I was missing some glaring design flaws in combat!

(All of these ships are just stretched out Pawns. My favourite is Rotund King, which is also how I wish to be referred to after eating too much.)

In TurnShip, ships have a steam reservoir, which is topped up by a small amount each turn. You use steam to move and fire. Basic resources, right? And Pawn class ships only have short range guns.

Unfortunately, this meant that the best strategy was always:    1) Do nothing    2) Let the enemy spend all their steam moving to you    3) Blast them to smithereens. They can't run or fight back without steam!

I was hoping for ebb and flow to the battles, not just ebb. Design problem 1: How to make players move?

Solution: Lob explosives at them from half a mile away.

Widening my focus from basic ships let me get more creative about weapon types and abilities. Also, I'd never really pinned down what Bishop ships were for.

Rooks as castles were clearly going to be defensive; Knights slow and offensive; Queens fast and offensive; the King, as your command centre, is your highest risk ship and tries to stay out of combat.

For Bishops, I'd been toying with a few ideas about them acting as comms relays, or maybe healers. But those ideas weren't ideal, adding more complexity - comms relays means coding a comms system (difficult), and healers just mean prolonging battles (boring). So snipers it is. Or mortarers, anyway.

And playing against them, it should feel very satisfying when you chase them down. Bishops are weak defensively. (What are you going to do, run half a mile away and shoot me? Ye- no!)

But this isn't the end of this problem. We're trying to encourage a mix of close and long range combat. Now players won't just wait for each other to approach, but the best strategy is for them *both* to sit at long range from each other, taking potshots. Whoever closes first still has less steam, so we need to encourage them to come together. Problem 2: How do we encourage closer range combat for both players?

Solution: Armour.

Armour causes long range shots to glance off, doing less damage.

There's a min and max range for effectiveness, and a falloff in between that I can tune through testing. This should encourage ranged weapons to stay away, but not too far. And if they're not too far away, then other ships can close the distance in a turn or two and attack the snipers.

So the players are encouraged to move their Bishops into optimal range, along with some guards to protect them. The range system can can be expanded later when I add map obstacles to block shots, or block the view of enemy ships.

Armour has also given me a reason to tweak another feature/problem, components and debuffs - more on that in another post.

Good luck with whatever you're working on, and see you soon :)

#turnship #indie games #game design #Unity3D

[bitcrushgames]

I did a decent chunk of work on TurnShip and forgot to update the blog...

So far I’ve been learning a lot about roughness and displacement maps, as you can see. I’m happy with the design, though.

However, my wife pointed out that I struggle to work on it because it’s not fun to play, so rather than vertical-slice this Pawn class ship (the most basic and weak ship in the game), I’ll create more ships with interesting weapons. And give them little chess hats.

#turnship #modelling

[bitcrushgames]

Spent most of Turnship Tuesday trying to understand unity's networking, even though it'll be deprecated soon 😩 but i also sketched some designs for upgrading the ships!

#turnship tuesday #turnship #art #design #unity3d #indie games

[bitcrushgames]

Today I’ve been trying to get the clouds looking better with little success, but I also managed to get multiplayer team colours working.

(Sorry there was no Turnship Tuesday last week - I was crunching on something else)

#turnship tuesday #turnship #unity3d

[bitcrushgames]

And we have a gameplay loop!

#turnship #indie games #game dev

[bitcrushgames]

Got the basic attacking system down on TurnShip. Nearly got a gameplay loop!

#turnship tuesday #indie games #game dev #unity3d #turnship

[bitcrushgames]

I felt like doing some work on Cloudforest this weekend, even though it’s on the backburner for now. Maybe something to do with playing Owlboy again.

Got some tempish animations in place. Plenty of bugs left.

#cloudforest #indie games #game dev #unity3d

[bitcrushgames]

Got move orders working the way I want, though it’s buggy - like the numbers changing. And, generating steam at the end of the turn works. Bit boring to gif right now though!

#turnship #w/e wednesday #unity3d #indie games #game dev

[bitcrushgames]

I’m still struggling wth orders, but at least I added a buggy camera today!

#turnship tuesday #unity3d #indie games #game dev #turnship

[bitcrushgames]

Let’s try to blog more!

I’ve been struggling with this system of orders in TurnShip for weeks now. It’s turn-based strategy, where you control a fleet of airships. I have a tendency to overthink things, which isn’t useful when trying to prototype game mechanics like this. 

I’d ended up with a convoluted system of giving each ship its orders, then you’d end your turn, and the ships would try to execute them while you watch. But that means storing the orders so they can be edited later, in any order, and i was driving myself mad working out how that would work. This is all before the core gameplay loop!

Another problem was, if the enemy can lay mines, what happens if your ship runs into a mine on the second move? Does it try to carry on the orders, or give up, wasting your turn? What if the mine moves your ship, how should it path back? And so on.

So, I’m gonna retreat back to how the old prototype worked: direct control of the ships during your turn. It makes the game more fun to play if you’re not a strategy buff, it increases positive feedback from attacks and stuff, and will probably have no impact on the main gameplay whatsoever.

(On a more meta note, since I have approximately zero followers, I have nothing to lose, so I’m going to try general blogging for most things I do here. Let’s pump out some content.)

#turnship #unity

[bitcrushgames]

I guess I should start updating this blog! I realised my productivity has been bad for a while, so I came up with a new system for myself, where I change what I do each day:

Music Monday

Turnship Tuesday

W/e Wedesday (free space!)

3dPE Thursday

Fakemon Friday

For yesterday’s music monday, I got distracted by a problem importing sf2 soundfonts into Logic, so I started working on a program to convert them to exs24...

#coding #music monday #python

[bitcrushgames]

Currently trying to do cheap volumetric clouds somehow. The one on the bottom looks awesome but not how it should at all :( The top one doesn’t seem to have any meaningful shading.

The design constraints, because this game is set entirely in the sky, are:

Ships can hide inside clouds

Clouds should look shaded, properly

Ships should cast shadows on clouds below them

The game is played on a 2D chessboard, so I have a feeling that, for performance reasons, clouds on the game board that you can hide in (like this one) will be separate to clouds you can cast a shadow on - although it would be nice, especially when the light comes sideways at dawn or dusk.

Because they’re a key feature of the game, it might be worth approaching this with multiple render passes...

#turnship #unity #particles #tech #desgn

[bitcrushgames]

Ironically, I've been having problems rotating airships in a game called TurnShip ☹️

#turnship #solved now though #worked out how to do Quaternion.Lerp with a set axis and angle

[bitcrushgames]

Hashtag 10 year challenge...

Top is the original TurnShip I was making in 2009 with two friends; below is the 3d implementation I’m working on in Unity.

The original ran on python and pygame, stuttered if you scrolled the whole screen, and only supported network play - no singleplayer, and you had to know your friend’s IP address and make sure their router firewall was open!

TurnShip 3D has a planned singleplayer campaign, along with online and offline multiplayer - like chess, people will be able to share scenarios and play turns with some pasted text.

#turnship #not to say we didn't all put a lot of effort in to the original #but there were limitations to pygame #ah well

[bitcrushgames]

Following The Eye

Eye-Trace For Games

When the camera in a game is done well everything feels just right, everything just flows. It’s the reason why Journey, why Inside, why Mario Kart 8, and just about every Nintendo game feels just as if anyone could play them.

Knowing how to deal with the eye not only helps you make your game more accessible but it also makes it easier to follow in the most hectic of moments.

From: PlayDead’s INSIDE

My goal: Is to explain how to design the game around the eye’s limitations and create experiences that are more comfortable for our users. I will start with the simple yet effective concept of Eye-Tracing.

An example:

From: Mad Max Fury Road

Follow the red circle: We can immediately read where the motorcycle is between shots and we see the barrel on the shotgun, each shot takes less than a second, yet we read every beat, and that’s because the eye is directed so well here.

Eye tracing is an editing technique used to direct where the eyes of a viewer will be across several shots, in other words it’s strategically moving the eyes of your player to a specific point in the screen and using it in different fun ways.

Create an environment in which you know which part of the frame your player is most likely to be looking at, this can be performed a number of ways but I wont get in the details of composition, color theory, photography or animation. I will only talk about the eyes.

Now, how does something from cinema world, a world where everything is scripted, and there’s a cut every 5 seconds or so apply to an interactive medium? Well the answer is simple it does so in a completely different way.

I will jump back and forth between games and movies but this is a game focused article.

-

Do Your Eyes Follow?

What does the player see? What do you as a creator want them to see?

Do those 2 align? Can they?

Eyes have a 5 degree central vision, this is where we read books, if our target moves outside of the near-peripheral section of our eyesight the eyes will have to change positions.

TVs tend to hang in the mid peripheral, it feels as if it covers the whole vision but it really doesn’t. Close one eye and make a frame with your hands observe how much your monitor or your TV takes of your vision space.

-

My rules are: 

Screen Is A Plane Not A Window.

Eyes Are Slow.

Eyes Need A Home.

Up And Down Before Left to Right.

One Thing At A Time.

-

The Screen Is A Plane Not A Window

The screen is a flat surface, not a window to another world.

The key word here is Planar space! This is the basis of eye tracing, and designing moving media in a way that is easy to read for people. Even 3D movies need to compose in planar space.

Maintaining the focus in a slowly moving point in planar space makes it easier on the eyes because your eyes have to move way less.

-

Eyes need a home

Even when there’s nothing to be seen, the eyes should be directed to a point on the screen.

From:Mario Kart 8

In hectic game-play, having one direct point to return to is imperative as it makes the gives the eyes a simple point to return to as they jump from object to object during the action.

In games like Mario Kart the player doesn’t have to worry where the character is, but where the obstacles are.

-

Eyes Are Slow

Eyes are freaking slow, if you bring motion to a target and this target moves too fast the eye will unhook from it, this occurs because of something called Saccadic Masking a mechanism in our brain so we don’t see our eyesight motion blur.

This means things on the screen need to move at a slow pace but not in any space but in planar space, remember the first rule The Screen Is A Plane Not A Window, as long as the characters move slowly through planar space the characters will be easy to follow, we are aiding the player to follow the character by moving it as little as possible.

If something moves slowly across the screen the eye has an easier time reading it.

Speed of movement in planar space matters, if you move to quickly the eye gets lost.

For example this is easy to follow by the eye.

This isn’t.

From: Playstation All-Stars

Now on this.

From: Super Smash Brother’s Ultimate

Unlike PlayStation All-Stars, Super Smash Brother’s camera is designed around the philosophy of making the action as easy to follow as possible.

Game camera attempts to make the characters move smoothly through planar space, it will even sometimes hook characters if they don’t move for a bit.

This philosophy means everything, this philosophy created this marvel of technical prowess. Regardless of how it was engineered the camera in Smash Brother’s is superbly created.

-

Up And Down Before Left To Right

It’s easier for the eyes to follow vertical motion than horizontal motion.

This is why magazines design text in small columns, and entire languages are designed to be read vertically. Eyes find moving up and down more comfortable.

(Read on a large screen)

Up to down

Left to right

This also helped Journey’s devs to create a smoother camera that otherwise would have wobbled inelegantly.

Vertical motion will still cause Saccadic masking if motion is too fast, vertical motion just happens to be slightly more comfortable to follow than horizontal motion.

-

One Thing At A Time

One thing at a time, and only one thing at a time.

I’m not going against the laws of composition nor framing, you can do amazing things with multiple characters, and crowds. This rule here talks about how even in highly composed shots we still only see one face at a time, one item at a time, or one enemy at a time.

Eyes can only see one thing at a time. Crazy huh? You have to literally stop looking at one thing to look at another. Hell it’s even scientifically proven we can’t multitask. So don’t force people in your supposed-to-be-entertainment product to attempt things that we aren’t biologically designed to do (unless it’s multiplayer, or if you figure it out, who am I to stop you).

From: Super Mario Odyssey

Make sure that if something is happening on the screen that only one thing is happening that requires the player’s full attention, now this may go against the idea of action game-play for a lot of people, specially in games with a lot of AI going at you, this is easily remedied by having only one AI attack at once, think, and ask yourself the question, What is the main focus at this very moment? and make it immediately readable. Yes, even if it’s outside the screen.

-

Solutions

I will give some solutions to improve your game on the engineering side.

1) Create the camera system backwards.

Engineer the camera system to respect the points in planar space first and then calculate to it.

2) If you know where the eye is, use it.

Dynamically determine where the eye is right before the next shot, or right before elements are to be displayed.

We can create things that only games can do, we can dynamically adjust the camera, the next shot, or item position for our users.

3) Guide the eye.

It’s your job to guide the eye, figure out ways in which you can do it the most effectively.

Things like the opening in Journey are just brilliant. The eye follows the character to the top of a hill just to bring an even bigger from the horizon.

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The Future

I hope this gives people an understanding of how the eye works in games and helps us understand the one issue that I think plagues entertainment software the most, we think of the camera as a dual state either it is a “Game Camera” or a “Movie Camera”, that just has to stop, I think we can embrace cutting and create something that is neither Game nor Movie camera.

With a better understanding on how to handle eye-tracing we can do things film can’t even imagine, so I hope this article helps you learn something I noticed. And helps you realize that one thing that only your game can do that will blow us all away.

Cheers,

-Fern.H.W.

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https://twitter.com/Fern_hw

#not me #camera

[bitcrushgames]

*emerges from shed* today I am mostly making games that should have come out 10 years ago when steampunk and indie games both had peaks at the same time. *returns to shed*

#turnship #modelling