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Rocket Fist

Bitten Toast Games · 2015-12-01T01:24:02Z

Super excited about the new forums! :D Gonna use this space to talk a bit about the development of my game Rocket Fist, where it came from and where it's going. It's going to be a long story though! It all started in february, after making ton of small jam-games I've been planning on making something more complete and with a longer dev-cycle. I was pursuing a masters degree in Digital Media and in one of the projects we were working on we were trying to come up with games for the PS Vita that made good use of it's physical interface. I was doing lots of small prototypes in the vita and had the idea of making a 1v1 game in which each player held one side of the device. It didn't really fit the project premise, but I wanted to try it ou anyway since I never saw a game doing that in the vita. And that was the first ever version of Rocket Fist. It was just some spheres in a environment made of cubes throwing little cube missiles at one another, and even at that stage it was already pretty damn fun. Each player only had one button and one analog stick to play with, it was simple and addicting. I started playtesting with my classmates and it was a success, everyone I introduced this to would play for a long time and would have a hard time giving it back. I then decided to try it with more people, I added controller support and made a PC-version with a bigger level and 4 players. I had only spent about 5 hours in the game and me and my friends would play for hours. At that point I was sure that was the one, the project I should pursue to be a long-term commercial project. The game still didn't have art, or a concept around it, I thought of several things like Killer Cupcakes throwing forks around at each other and other crazy ideas... Eventually a friend playing the artless spheres/cubes version said: "Oh, I really like those little robots throwing arms at each other, it's so cool!" And I was like: "Oh yeah! That's totally what they are! Little robots throwing arms at each other! That's what I was thinking about all along!". My favorite art to make is lowpoly cartoon, I think it's pretty and quick/easy to make, so I just went with it. In about a week I had the initial art in place and working. At this point some developer friends of mine were mentioning that it's not a good idea to release something multiplayer only, that most people play alone and they won't want to play a game that only has a multiplayer mode. I listened to them and started working on a procedurally generated dungeon-crawling mode of Rocket Fist, which was a terrible idea. I even got as far as making a boss (The boss was cool though, I liked making the boss <3) After 2 months of trying to make the singleplayer fun, it was getting farther and farther away from the original fun game me and my friends loved. It just wasn't working out, It was a hard decision but I ended up dropping it entirely to focus on the multiplayer, I believe it is the right choice. I figured I should make a Player AI for whenever the player wants to play but doesn't have any friends over, however I didn't really know how to do it. I learned programming by myself without any formal education, so more complex things are really hard for me to make. I tried implementing something with A* pathfinding but the movement was so non-human, it looked totally AI-like, not player behavior. I was showcasing the game at the Power of Play indie expo in seattle and talking about the AI problem with another developer that made a local multiplayer game as well (Auston, developer of Sportsball) and he was giving me some suggestions on the problem. That's when another developer that was playing the game out of nowhere says "Well, why don't you use Rapidly Exploring Random Trees?". I didn't know it at the time, but that was Casey Muratori from Handmade Hero, he explains to me the basics of rapidly exploring random trees and in the same day I already had a basic player AI working and looking pretty human. Here the AIs fighting each other: A month after that, in August, we released our greenlight campaign and got greenlit in 9 days! :D After that I got a new job, and threw all my schedule out of balance, things got pretty chaotic in my life and I couldn't get enough energy to work on Rocket Fist :/ the game didn't get any updates until this november. This november I changed jobs and got time to breathe again, so I started adding the bells and whistles the game needed to improve it's flow, like a little replay screen between matches and a game over screen with stats on each player. After all this time, the game only had 2 levels, one for a 1v1 (still based on the same layout from the starting PS vita level) and one for a 4 player battle based of the original one I made in that first week as well... And the reason for that is simple... It's a pain in the ass to make the levels. I spent a lot of time to make them trying to make sure things were in the right places for rotational symmetry and then when I wanted to change something it was super annoying. So... I decided to make a level editor that does all of that hard work for me. I found a really good tile system for unity (Rotorz Tile System) that came with a really simple runtime level editor example, so I built upon that adding all of the things I wanted to have for making Rocket Fist levels, like symmetry options, lighting preferences and etc. I save the levels to XML so players can actually share levels (I plan on integrating it into steam workshop later on). It's pretty fun to use :) I hope to see people playing around with it in the future. And that's about it, you guys are all caught up on about a years worth of development (not mentioning the 2 months or so I took a break from the project D:) The only thing I really skipped was all the Online Mode stuff... which is still being a pain in my ass and I'm not touching right now, got most of the main mechanics syncing though (Using Forge Networking), I need to implement the proper game flow into it, but getting the game into a more complete state is a higher priority at the moment. Will keep you guys updated :D I'd love to hear any questions/comments/suggestions ^^

A topic by Bitten Toast Games created Dec 01, 2015 Views: 4,464 Replies: 27

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Bitten Toast Games8 years ago

Alright, so for 2016 I set as a personal goal to stream at least twice a week on a regular schedule! I picked mondays and wednesdays from 3pm to 5pm PST!http://twitch.tv/danielsnd

I just had my first stream yesterday afternoon and It was a lot of fun :D

One of the people who reads my devlog (Or maybe the only one that reads the blog, since no one else comments on anything ;_;) actually turns out to be a really cool developer from another local multiplayer game called Skyhook, we talked a bunch and I ended up watching his daily stream. He gave me some tips on how to setup my stream better with Streampro, which helped me a lot :D Now my stream looks really cool with a custom RocketFist themed overlay.

I'm not sure if it's because I streamed earlier in the day, or if it's because the overlay makes it look more professional, but there were a lot more people on the stream than usual and they were actually chatting with me and asking questions, which made the whole experience way better :) I'm now looking forward to the next stream.

What I made on the stream yesterday was a little fire hazard for Rocket Fist, so the player can catch on fire when it touches fire. It adds random input so it's harder to control your character while it's on fire :D

I also integrated it into Uncle Knuckle's firepuking attacks.

Well that's it :D If you'd like to always know when I start my stream make sure you give me a follow on http://www.twitch.tv/danielsnd

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Bitten Toast Games8 years ago

Today I made some advances with the Fire Hazard during the stream. I implemented it into the Uncle Knuckle projectile attacks so the projectile leaves a trail of fire hazards behind it :)

I like the trail idea so much I decided to make a powerup out of it. So I changed the way the firehazard works to not affect health actors of the same color of it, made a method to tint it to the player's color and made it so if you have this powerup you'll constantly spawn a trail of fire hazard behind yourself that will affect players of other colors.

I've been meaning to do powerups that affect the weapons for a while, so I finally added a system into my powerup system to do just that :) The weapons on their shoot method look for powerups currently in use by the player with the shooter ID and hook into that powerup, whenever it goes harmless again or changes color the powerup gets unhooked and the weapon goes back to normal. I have used that to also add a trail of fire to the fists thrown by the player with that powerup.

This opens a lot of cool powerup possibilities that enhance fist functionalities :D I also hooked up some events like Hit wall and Hit other fist into the powerup so I can make use of those in powerups as well… Possibly a fist that explodes in AoE damage when hitting walls?

Another thing I did a while ago but haven't showed you guys is the new singleplayer game over screen xD I also added a little glitch effect in it, I think it looks so cool :D

Actually, I said I was going to write a longer post about a new Rocket Fist thing and then I never did… Well, that thing is the Singleplayer D: I know what I said before, but… this time it's different, I swear! I believe my mistake before was that the singleplayer was going so far away from the multiplayer, a lot of the time you didn't even have a Rocket Fist with you, the enemies were so different and honestly, boring. A lot of it was running around empty rooms backtracking, the whole thing was a disaster.

So I made a little prototype of this new singleplayer idea, it's way simpler and plays pretty much exactly like the multiplayer does, I'm even reusing the multiplayer AI for it :) Pretty much you go from arena to arena fighting a team of enemies that are against you, they also use Rocket Fists (I might make some special ones that use other things as well) so there are always weapons around. When you clear the room a trapdoor opens to the next arena, and you fight your way down different sectors of this building. Each sector has a boss you need to defeat to unlock the next sector. I think it can be actually pretty fun :D

Now I need to make new enemy art, looking back at the old ones… I don't like any of them :/ Well, that's it for today, this was a long post D:

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Bitten Toast Games8 years ago

It all started this thursday when Phaze Pyre, one of the friends I've sent a test build to, told me the game was freezing his whole computer when he booted it up. That is a big problem and I couldn't reproduce in my machines, however my machines are pretty powerful so it's hard for me to find those kind of issues.

I started profiling it, and as I was in fact doing a lot of the scene's setup right on Start there was a huge spike on the first frame. I was also reading and parsing all of the XMLs for the levels in that first frame as well, which in retrospect was a bad idea.

So I went on to change the way the level serializer works to make it read the XMLs over several frames, spacing it out. I also changed the way the first scene works so it adds one element at a time over several frames, which should also mitigate that initial spike. After that the game started loading way faster than it was loading for me. I wasn't seeing it hanging before, but there was some delay between starting and "actually starting".

Another point that could be problematic is actually loading the gameplay level, as a lot starts at the same frame. I remember seeing a loading screen in Skyhook so I asked WaseQazi about it and he pointed me towards this gamasutra article about it

After several hours, I got the game working with a loading screen and starting potentially heavy stuff over several frames, and even though I wasn't having hanging problems before, the whole thing felt more responsive and lighter! I then ping my friend again and send him a new build. He then tries it and… It's still hanging. At this point I'm starting to get desperate, it doesn't make sense that it's hanging, after slamming my head against the wall a few times I decided to do what I always do when debugging something, turn things off one at a time until I find the culprit. My first suspect was the XML level serializer, and when my friend confirmed that it was still hanging without it, I was a bit relieved. However when I turned off the inputmanager (which interacts with the gamepads) he wasn't seeing hanging anymore. D: That could be a big problem since A LOT of my code relies on that. He told me that he was using DInputMapper to use a PS4 controller on his pc, so I asked him to turn that off and try it without it. No more hanging. He then turned it on again and… NO MORE HANGING!

So… In the end… All of this was made to solve something that wasn't actually a problem on my part, but on some third-party stuff that just needed a restart or something. Well, at least the new loading system and the spaced out start calls did make the game lighter and more responsive, which will be specially good for the consoles :)

This actually caused a lot of other problems in other parts of the code, since a lot of it was relying that certain things would happen on the start and when a certain thing started the other would already be there… I believe I have fixed all the bugs that caused, but it did take quite a while, according to toggl I've spent about 12 hours on this.

Other than that, which took a lot of time to deal with, I added a little "invisible powerup" which is really cool ^^ it will make you and your fist invisible, so you can potentially surprise an unsuspecting player.

Well that's it for now :) Next up I should be working more on the singleplayer. I need to make new enemy art, so the enemies can look different, then make some more enemy behavioral variations for it.

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Bitten Toast Games8 years ago

I was interviewed for Made With Unity! :D I talked a lot about the origins of Rocket Fist, it's inspirations and where it's going! It's featured on the front page of their website ^^

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Bitten Toast Games8 years ago

Alright, so this past week I've been hard at work on the Level Editor, I wanted to be able to create game logic with it so making the Singleplayer levels would be way easier :)

Because showing is easier than writing, here's how the process of making a singleplayer level is looking like:

I made a longer video better showing and explaining those new features ^^

And here is how the first 2 tutorial levels I made are looking like :D

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