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Justin Johnson: CodeMonkey
Whirlygig UI Unveiled
0I haven’t posted for a little while because I haven’t gotten a lot of work done in awhile. I have a couple things going on but I’m still very committed to getting this game into DBP 2k11 and also onto the market. Here are a few interesting events that have happened.
First of all, I’m famous for having very poor moderation. I frequently go to bed at 1-2am and get up at 7. I work out (weight lifting) at a local gym during lunch. I hate water and sometimes forget to eat when I’m deep in code. I generally work More >
Magicka Reaction
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I’m taking another little break from my usual project updates to talk a little about Magicka. Several years ago, a friend of mine had an idea for a game where you combine magical elements to make spells on the fly. The game would figure out what the spell should do based on the properties of the elements in the spell. We worked on the concepts for awhile but it was too complex for us to turn into a game. Magicka nailed this concept so perfectly that it manages to shine through the variety of technical More >
Whirlygig: Secret graphics preview!
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I don’t want to give away too much right now, but suffice it to say there have been some pretty significant graphic and style changes to Whirlygig over the last week. I still have a lot of graphic work to do so it may be awhile before I post a video showing off the new changes. So, for now I’ll just share the current, mostly-finished, city level. The red box is 1280×720. The copter is in there for reference. You will notice that it has a more grainy, dirty feel to it.
This is not just a mock. I More >
Whirlygig: Explosions and Debris
1Tonight I improved a lot of things but it’s late and I don’t have time for a long update. Here’s the short of it:
- fixed poor programming governing shot movement
- fixed level end bug (no frags, no time = immediate end)
- shockwave effect
- base Shot class now supports bouncing shots
- heli debris now scatters after explosion
- revised overall heli explosion
- fixed problem with heli being stuck at last velocity after respawn
- rebalanced shot speeds after programming fix
- increased camera shake power
Also, today I got the official email for the launch of Dream Build More >
Whirlygig: Long Time No Post :(
0Whoa. It has been a very long time since I posted. I am very ashamed. However, fear not. No posts does not mean no work. Quite the opposite. I’ve been busting my rear until so late at night that I have just gone straight to bed after SVN check-in. What have I accomplished? Hmmm….
- Implementation of Game Setup screen with buttons that control level, game time limit, game kill limit and allows players to elect to join the game.
- Total change of how levels are designed. Better use of larger textures + small, tiling textures for more interesting level
Whirlygig GUI Work
0I feel like a slacker because I haven’t posted in awhile. First of all, work has been a lot more stressful lately. Several nights last week I got home and, instead of spending free time writing code I just vegged out and played Minecraft because I was too fried from work.
Added to that, I’ve had computer problems with both my desktop and laptop. My laptop is a brand new, super-powerful ASUS G73JH. Unfortunately, it shipped with a wonky video bios that caused me no end of headaches with freezing and GSODs. I finally sorted all of that out, flashing More >
Whirlygig Player Health
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Tonight I got player health done. That short sentence sums up a lot of work in code, FRBDK, Illustrator and Photoshop!
First of all, if you have been following the progress you’ll immediately notice the helicopter changes. These colors are far from final. I revised some graphics to give the helis more contrast and made it so they could be easily colored in code. The helis also pass their color to their death explosion so it rains debris in the right color.
You also will notice a very faint healthbar in the image above. The healthbar has a default More >
Whirlygig Building Collision
0The post title here is a little misleading. I actually got a lot more done than just building collision. The full list of stuff I worked on tonight:
- 1280×720
- Moved horizon into separate scene
- Added sun
- Added multiple background layers
- Added test polygon for buildings
- Added shot collision vs buildings
- Added heli collision vs buildings
- Random tweaks
I don’t have a ton of time to post tonight so I’ll just post this video demonstrating some new level aesthetics and collision vs a test polygon. This video shows collision with debug view on and
Indie Game: Aurora
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I wanted to take a little break to post about an indie game I played that I really, really enjoyed. I saw this game mentioned on twitter by some others in the development community and gave it a shot, mostly because the video looked interesting. The game is called Aurora and is a realtime strategy game.
Gameplay
Aurora distills the RTS genre down to it’s most basic elements: produce units, attack, defeat the enemy. The player starts with More >
Whirlygig: Smooth Camera Movement
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The maps in Whirlygig are larger than what fits on a single screen. So, the camera needs to move (see Camera Averaging post) with the battling helicopters and zoom in or out depending on how far apart the combatants are. Moving the camera and even basic zooming was fairly easy. But the zoom was jarring. When a heli got within a certain distance from the screen it would zoom very quickly and interfere with the gameplay. So, I wanted to make the camera accelerate smoothly in More >