Final thought

I like this course

The lectures were super super interesting

The project was good,
I wanted to discover unity and to see how to manage a project.
Finally we coded in java but it was great too and I was happy that another person took the lead so I could see how to do, what was good and what was less good.

It was good to have a look on how to do a business plan, etc. But I focused on the part that interested me the most: the coding one.

I have two regrets: the confirmation that in all "big" group there's always some people working more and some less and, that if the guys who, I think, knew the most about how to code some stuff had worked more on the code and less on other stuffs we could have gone more further, but I totally understand that they wanted to explore other things.

Even if my favourite project is our (it's our baby), I think that the others were really good too. I find the VR one really cool, and I am a bit less enthusiastic for the localisation based one

PS: please if possible avoid 8 o'clock next year

Ultimate work

The last weeks I have done the level 4:
In this level the player has to use a fourth kind of clones: the freezing one. When he touches the saws (a new obstacle), if he uses any other kind of clones his body will be tears in parts, but with the freezing clone the saw will stop and you can jump on it. Later in this level you can discover that the freezing clone also works with the wrecking balls. To finish the level you will have to use all the available kind of clones

I made a special animation for the saw, when you touch it, I don't only free the ragdoll, but I also destroy all the joins (the same trick was use later for the explosive clone) so the clone really seems to be cut in part. There is an interesting "feature" with this: if you respawn quickly enough you can wall jump on the part of the body.

The freezing clone wasn't really difficult to do, I just changed the type from dynamic to static on contact with the freezing clone and then add a special check in the contact listener to see if the saw/wrecking ball should kill or not.

I also modified the wrecking ball, for some reasons I didn't manage to make it bounce correctly so I made it respawn each time it as a contact with something.
When the wrecking ball touch a trampoline, the trampoline is destroyed. I made this choice because I think that if you want to block the wrecking ball you should use the freezing clone.
A bug still happen when a corpse is in the respawn area of the wrecking ball, but we didn't have the time to fix it.

Lately we had complete crash, but we find out that it was because we were sometimes disposing twice the same objects. It's now fixed with a simple check

Finally I made a few changes like increase the size of the breakable wall (because they were exactly the same size as the character and it was tricky to pass it directly without wall jumping) and decresase their width so they look weak and different from the normal walls.

Levels

1. Level 1

The level is basically an introductory level, it has no real difficulties or specialties, it’s goal is to let the player learn about how to move and jump and discover about the unique mechanic of the game by uses his dead bodies to jump over the large pit of spikes and complete the level.

2. Level 2

The second level introduces a second kind of clone: the bouncing clone. So it’s designed such that you have to use this new clone to reach the end of the level. This level also introduces two new kind of obstacles: the big spike and the wrecking ball

3. Level 3

The third level is designed to make the player learn about how the explosive clone works and the different blocks that can be blow up

Week 3

Week 3

This week has been a pretty big one.

I have implemented the 2 first levels of our game (designed by one of my teammate).

For that i have used java, box2d and libgdx because with this solution it's very easy to adapt the game for android.

I have beginned by creating block after block but i quickly realized that it's would be smarter to create functions for doing a whole line/column of block

For now we don't have a large variety of blocks, one sort for the wall/ground and for the obstacles i have implemented different sort of spikes and a first try of a wrecking ball. And we only have 2 kind of clones: the normal one and the bouncing one

I have decided to surround the levels with invisible spikes so the clones cannot exit the windows. I thought that maybe it would be a little frustrating but it's pretty fun

The bouncing clone is a bit of a problem because for now the bouncing part is static when he dies and we wish to make it affected by gravity, but if we do so he bounces everywhere.

Videos

Videos

Here are some videos that my teammates advised me:

- It's about the level design of the first level (warning strong language):

-It's a tutorial about box2D the physical engine that we will use:

Second week

Second week

The USP (unique selling point) of our game is that usually the death is the thing that you want to avoid at all cost. But in our game dying is a good thing, is it even the main tool to finish the levels!

But if the death is not a punishment what is the punishment in our game? I think that we don't really have a punishment, but we are thinking about implementing stars such that you will have different grades based on the time or the number of clones you used

First week

First week

Our final idea isn't the strategic space game anymore. The final project is a puzzle game.

The main idea is that when the hero dies, his body remains on the ground and a clone of the hero respawns at the beginning of the level. The particularity of our game is that you have to use your previous body in order to solve the level. You can choose different type of clone (exploding one, freezing one).

My work is to find the different types of clone that could be interesting and to think a bit about the levels

The clones

• The basic : no special charateristic, can fill holes
• The explosive: click on his body to make it explode. Can destroy some walls/project things
• The freezing: when he dies his body turn in a new platform, for example on top on spike
• The bouncing: when he dies his body turn into a trampoline. When you pass on it you have no choices but to jump
• The magnet: his body attract you
• The streching: when he dies his body extends into a longer platform
• The portal: when two of this kind are dead, when you walk on the first body, teleport you on the second body. The main utility is checkpoints.
• The IEM: click on it to turn off some devices during a limited time
• The rocket: when he dies he dashes forward and explodes after a while. He can destroy things as well as clones
• The warp: when he dies, he creates a slow area, where everything goes slower in it. No real advantages but more a help if you are stuck
• The tank: He's body is taller and he needs two hits to die but he goes slower and his jumps are shorter. 

The difficulties

• Hole (different size): can be fill with corps
• Lava: if a body touches the lava, it is disintegrate
• Spikes (on the floor or on the ceilling): if a freezing clone dies on it it's ok otherwise the body will fell
• Button: if a corps lies on it, it will activate it
• Control panel: can be disabled during a short laps of time by the IEM
• Laser: disintegrate the corps if it touches it, can be disabled by the IEM
• Turret or arrow laucher
• Breakable wall
• Fan
• Moving platform

First reflexions

First reflexions

With the group we have decided to go on a strategic game in space. But there is several things to determine before beginning the coding.

Here are my thoughts about them:

Multiplayer online vs single player

Multiplayer advantages:

• low quality graphics are more acceptable (ex: cs go)
• several business plans (pay to win, pay to fast, skin, gambling, case, monthly subscription
• no need for plot

Multiplayer disadvantages:

• you have to have servers
• coding the player-server part is not necessary easy

Single player advantages:

• no need for server

Single player disadvantages:

• need of a story
• coding the IA of the bot should be difficult

Buisness Plan

As said in the previous part, if we decide to go with the multiplayer game, there are plenty of way to make money with the game. But i think that the most profitable economic model nowadays is the microtransaction one. It could be just aesthetic addition like skins (example: league of legend, cs go) that change nothing to the gameplay, or it can be the possibility to pay to have better weapons/skills faster.

In the other way, if we choose the single player option, i thinck the most common economic model is to sell the game for a fixed price and then sell additional content like new maps/factions/weapons for an additional cost (example: mass effect, skyrim).

Unique Mechanic

For the time being we have tought of two aspects of the game that will make it "unique":

• A very large scalability (i think it's better for a multiplayer game)
• The aspect of gravity when a ship comes close to a planet/star/...

Divers

• Victory conditions
• capture homeworld of the ennemy
• or do we open more possibility (like economic victory)
• Type of units:
• only spaceship (bomber, fighter, massive ship,...)
• or spaceshipe and ground force
• Ressources:
• only money
• or several ressources (like iron, gold,...)
• Turn base (like civilization, endless space) or real time (like age of empire, battle for the middle earth)

Creating a video games in 5 weeks: dev blog

Hello, 

I'm presently doing a project that is to create a video game in 5 weeks with 5 other people and here i wish to expose my ideas, my problems and the solutions i found and the advancement of the project.