Jellyfish Dessert - Snack Frenzy

…i am still running into a silly game idea involving undersea creatures and simple, entertaining game mechanics.

since i’ve been working on game assets a while ago and after putting all into a preposterous animated short as you can watch here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0Y-GOz4gpI baking and cleaning up texture stacks, models and assets is finished, so this project reached early stage of testing bge performance and mechanics regarding upcoming development.

the game character is already idling thus the next steps for animation will be dashing, snapping, swimming up/down/back, turning…
http://haifashion.de/tmp/frenzy.gif
according to the intention of this dev-thread, updated versions of game .blends will be postet here - suggestions and tips welcome! for actual game .blend, just click on the image above to download (size 7 MB zipped with 7Zip).

all content along with the .blend is cc 3.0 licensed and can be used commercial and non-commercial with one exception for a texture as you can read in the release notes of the .blend. final blend(s) of the game will also be available cc licensed.

current performance benchmark on i3 win64 with nvidia gt540m is 60fps, but rasterizer workload is already at 50%.
i’m trying to achive 60fps in final game also, which means i need some tips from BGE Pro’s around here in further development!

cheerio

I know it might not be your cup of tea, but a very simple aquarium simulator would be a nice simple project to complete in the BGE.
Start with a couple fish, feed them and watch them as they go about life.

nice although this tea has already been served by others. i’ve been thinking about different stages/backgrounds for the game, aquarium could be one of them. other than that you are invited to use the assets for fish-tank-sim or what you like.

i’m more like developing a party-arcade-game, so i am excited to read what you think about this:

players: 1 - 4

basic mechanics:

  • fish food falling from surface to bottom randomly (->particle system?!)
  • player get as much food as possible to win game

advanced mechanics:

  • different types of food reveal specials and attacks to prevent other players from munching snacks
  • network mp

input:
keys, gamepad, mouse - maybe motion control

thats it! could be fun? any ideas?

Loving the visuals! And the gameplay idea seems pretty solid.
The “special food” element could be very interesting. Nuclear waste, secretive green ooze, sticks of dynamite…

thanks a lot, glad to read your kind words! there’s a little chance this gameplay could be entertaining, worth giving a try, so lets see how this turns out to be.

feel invited to brainstorm about basic movement and abilities:

basic-control-plan is so far:

  1. swimming, turning
  2. snapping food
  3. basic abilities for multiplayer:
    • fin punch
    • gills burp

and ideas for general gameplay:

single-player

  1. puzzle
    …munch falling snacks matching to random generated patterns
  2. snack attack
    …eat as much as possible in limited time
  3. eat or die
    …snack constantly or instantly starve

multiplayer

  1. royal snack battle
    …munch as much as you can blasting your opponents
  2. deathmatch

i’ve been working on the control-scheme and animations recently and made a first, simple approach. would be cool to know what you think. for the actual .blend click on image at 1st post or here.

the controls still need some improvement to feel less mechanical. would be cool if the character re-turns automatically into leveled orientation after e.g. swimming to the ground, but how to do it?

are there any tips for refining the turning or the animations? general hints?

A little toying with alignAxisToVect turned out to be very fish-like. Figured it would be easier to make than explain, so here’s the script:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19279604/const/movement.py
Feel free to do whatever with it. Everything I upload is public domain unless otherwise noted.

Usage
Attach an always sensor that tics every frame.

Documentation on the function here:
http://www.blender.org/documentation/blender_python_api_2_72_1/bge.types.KX_GameObject.html?highlight=alignaxistovect#bge.types.KX_GameObject.alignAxisToVect

that’s amazing buddy, A LOT more fun this way! thanks!! ironic - i’m kind of afraid of vectors since math class. added the script and your credits for the movement - controls (wrote just pqftgs actually, feel free to add/send emailadress or something otherwise related to you if you want) and deleted unnecessary bricks and animations from file: frenzy.blend

…added shapekeys and drivers for the players’ character basic ability to snap food. the concept for advanced abilities is pretty much like the regurgitation technique of this well known penguin ‘rico’ from the movies; by eating special food the players character has the ability to barf normal and special items on opponents - now there are also shapekeys for that.

you’re invited to check out the abilities animations by looking at the updated .blend here…

…added some logic - bricks for feeding, counting and another shapekey - animation as you see in the latest .blend!
if you’re in the mute for a small quest, feed the fish (C - Key) with more than 5 lemons and take a look at the results.

Looking pretty good!

Suggestion:
Making the fruit scale-out from 0 should help smooth the shadows that otherwise appear suddenly.

Then you can re-use that animation (in reverse) to scale the food as it’s pulled into the mouth.
I think it could be done with logic bricks:

  1. Switch to a new state (on the fruit)
  2. Start playing the scale action in reverse
  3. Track to the player mouth (a small value in “time” might help, but too much will have adverse effects)
  4. Move forward on the local Y axis
  5. Delete the object after a couple seconds

back again…

thank you very much for your reply, composed the bricks as suggested - would you have a look? at least the point of scaling-in fruits is a bit tricky. did a brick-setup for this case as you see in the .blend (state 3 as initial for the fruits) but scaling and then switching to state 1 had some weird effects - fruits are spawning smaller as usual although frame time for scale-in is correct (i think).

added some explosives and the super-special-breadcrumb. eat 5 crumbs and gain some explosives to barf with V - Key.

not solved yet but maybe there is a simple solution:

  • lock C Key if V - Key is pressed and vice versa, otherwise C + V causes a multiplied shapekey
  • explosion forces and collision bounds, with obstacles overlapping texture - alpha - plane

actual .blend can be downloaded here or by clicking on screenshot:
http://www.haifashion.de/tmp/screen.jpg

Hi jester elly!, I tried out Jellyfish Dessert, and I think that the game is a good idea !

I look forward to seeing this game progress…

Moving the scale action to an armature fixed it, but a few other changes were needed to get physics working properly.
May have gone a bit overboard this time… so here’s the blend:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19279604/temp/frenzy_edit.7z

What I did to the food:

  1. Create an invisible cube for each food. It serves as the collision mesh and holder of game logic.
  2. Parent the visual food mesh to a bone (both no collision) - the armature has a scale action that is re-used for all foods
    ^ Actually there are 2 actions, a fast and slow version. The fast version is used when eating.
  3. Parent the armature to the collision cube
  4. Added “suspend dynamics” to the food logic so they don’t get pushed away when simultaneously trying to pull in.
    Really helped with the bananas.
  5. Replaced box collision bounds with the default collision sphere (can’t remember why)

Other stuff:
-Set the background objects as no-collision (physics visualization was ultra-slow)
-Changed the food to rigid body and checked “Lock Translation” for the Y axis (prevents food from going behind the player)

Awesome, thank you A LOT pqftgs. seems there are busy times not only for santa right now, so there is only small progress to show: just added a new character for player 2.

still in progress: the subsurf of the new fish isn’t applied yet and the shapekeys are not transfered, so this is maybe running slow on some computers. anyway i uploaded the actual .blend, you can access it by clicking links in earlier post, a clean .blend will follow in next posts.

there are still many many ideas for gameplay stages but i think focusing on very gameplay basics for a decent 2 player match will be the next steps to a playable 2player demo:

  1. add collision to explosion
  2. add health and score properties to player characters
  3. add overlays and gameplay properties

If there are any thoughts regarding the design of the game, let me know. for example, should the items barfed by players spawn in bubbles to achieve a common look or simply as they are right now? is limiting the weapons by picking up amounts of food a good idea?