CGDC Speedgame: Hardmode 2021

Hosted by The Christian Game Developers Conference, Burnerknight Studios, Matt Colón

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CGDC Speedgame: Hardmode 2021 community

DEVLOG// Burnerknight Studios

A topic by Burnerknight Studios created Aug 27, 2021 Views: 142 Replies: 7

Viewing posts 1 to 6

Burnerknight StudiosJam HostSubmitted2 years ago

Hey gang, looking forward to this jam and coming up with an entry, and I'm also looking forward to everyone else's entry! Let's see what game ideas we can come up with.

So, Light vs Darkness or Reflection. I'm digging Light vs Darkness, and I can feel an RPG idea formulating in my mind. It's gonna need to be barebones and simple though, don't want to end up with an unfeasible project! Good news is if I like the idea enough, I plan on pursuing the project past the jam. Time to come up with some ideas and see what pops!

Burnerknight StudiosJam HostSubmitted2 years ago (1 edit)

Okay, so I've thought of a few things, and I noticed that most of my ideas revolve around the idea of light and dark being juxtaposed with the following qualities:
- Light is a deterrent, a weapon, a companion, and a liberator and uniter,
- Dark is oppressive, also a weapon, a negator, a condition, a separator, and an isolator.

Then I thought of a Day/Night cycle where during the day the light has certain qualities, and during the night, the dark has certain qualities, and both play off each other or seek to affect the other. So now I've got some ideas for mechanics and interplay, the question is how is it all going to play out (genre, style, etc). This is now my time to rapidly prototype some ideas and see what sticks.

Burnerknight StudiosJam HostSubmitted2 years ago (1 edit)

So far my progress has been adding a dark orb like a black hole, a light orb, and a simple day/night cycle. And also getting stuck trying to get gamepad or keyboard + mouse to work depending on what you have. For some reason, that was way harder than it should have been! Anyways, you can move the player in first person, Left Analog stick for movement, Right Analog stick to rotate the view, or mouse movement to rotate view and WASD to move. Not much gameplay yet, but I hope to start plugging in the fun in the next few hours.

Here's my first build so you can look around.

CGDC Speedgame 2021: Hardmode (Name TBD) by Burnerknight Studios (itch.io)

Matt ColónJam HostSubmitted2 years ago

It's probably too late to do it at this point, but the Unity Input System package makes controller input so much easier. However, it takes a little bit to figure out how it works as you define controls in a configuration file, then connect them to a PlayerInput component on a game object and link the input to the method to call within that game object's script.

Burnerknight StudiosJam HostSubmitted2 years ago

I'll definitely need to look into it in the future. What caught me was that I was trying to use a conditional to switch how a variable was used depending on if you had a gamepad connected or not. I tried using the Input.GetJoystickNames but lost time trying to get that to work reliably. So my next step was to use a different solution. I started cutting out code until I got to a functional minimum.

This is what I ended up with:

if(Input.GetAxis("Mouse X") != 0 || Input.GetAxis("Mouse Y") != 0)
        {
            tiltAroundY += Input.GetAxis("Mouse Y") + Input.GetAxis("Mouse X");
        }
        else 
        {
            tiltAroundY += Input.GetAxis("Mouse Y2") + Input.GetAxis("Mouse X2");
        }

So if you're using a gamepad, Mouse X and Mouse Y will correspond to the Right Analog stick on the gamepad and allow you to rotate the camera. If you don't have a gamepad, Mouse X and Mouse Y will always be 0, and so therefore the else conditional will run, using the next axis which will work with your mouse.

Burnerknight StudiosJam HostSubmitted2 years ago

Today's update was building the game area into a labyrinth-like level, and trying to spawn the black holes randomly across the game field, which I've tried to split into four quadrants. Still needs work, but we're getting there. Try out the new build!

sbjerkSubmitted2 years ago

It's fascinating to see the progress everyone is making.... Iterate and iterate. Looking forward to seeing where you take this.

Burnerknight StudiosJam HostSubmitted2 years ago

Uploading what will be the last build for the jam. Got the spawning working pretty well, but the next issue I hit totally blocked me. Trying to get the light orbs to be pulled towards and swallowed by the Black Holes. It was working, but then it broke during development. They will still get destroyed if they happen to touch a Black Hole, they just won't move towards the Black Hole as it's supposed to if its close enough. I couldn't implement the rest of the gameplay, so this is as far as it goes for the jam. It's been fun though!