Nice demo!
You should make some kind of invisible lanes or a grid for the crates to move on. Those kind if puzzles needs predictable movements. Players will expect to move the object in a predictable way, its like a chess game(this may not be the best example, but still):
Leave the crates dynamic objects, when pushing them, but switch to rigid objects, when they are falling. This will keep the good impression from the physics and still the game play will be more predictable.
Make the “push” speed faster, players will test many variants before they solve the puzzles. So the game needs to be fast, otherwise people will be bored.
Footsteps sound do not match (at least on my pc) the walking animation. This is a little bit irritating . Try to fix it.
Great job I suggest you to find a good puzzle game on youtube and try to reproduce some of the puzzles there in your game. This will reveal at you many new features and/or gameplay, that you may be forgetting or should change in your game.(at least that is what I’ve done in my game).
Keep up the good work, looks great!
Thanks, that was a great idea, but when I tried it, the enable rigid body part didn’t work. it was easy to switch to dynamic object but seems impossible to switch back.
Well, I’m planning on having some pushable object be dynamic and some be rigid bodies. Actually a lot of the puzzles are going to be more kind of situational and naturalistic rather than formal arrangements of blocks. You won’t have to move the pushable objects in to endless arrangements, once you see the solution it will be easy to solve.
I’ve got a lot of ideas already, but I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag so to speak. Once I get the dialog system sorted out I’m going to make an introduction level. After that I hope to make a level a week, with new game play features added when I can.
A lot of people have complained about slow gameplay, but I intend for the character to evolve during later installments. But she needs somewhere to evolve from. She needs to start off weak to become strong, be slow so that she can become faster. I want to develop the gameplay and character and story as I do more with the project. (if you’ve played quake 4 you’ll know what I mean)
But I also want it to be a testbed for new gameplay mechanics and design methods which I can carry over in to my other main project.
Watched the last video, and everything looks really good. The potential for puzzles is there, like you said.
I’d ditch the rigid body physics in favor of dynamic physics for the crates. It seems like it’d be frustrating to only be able to move in 4 directions, but have the boxes “wave around” at will, essentially.
The sounds don’t match the objects or actions being performed. The barrel rolling, for example, sounds like a scraping spatula or something, not a big rolling oil drum. Maybe you could pitch it down by 50% or something - it needs to be slower and deeper. The crate should make a low scraping sound when you’re pushing it; it sounds like you’ve just got the “creak” right now. The player’s footsteps don’t (appear) to sync up with her steps. Use Python and Audaspace to time the playback of footstep sounds.
In any case, keep it up, Smoking. This is looking pretty cool.
Thanks.
Yeah, the footsteps were working before but something went wrong when I changed some code. I think I’ve got it fixed now though. For the object sounds, I’m using placeholders until I find a suitable sound. I thought about trying to get away with a single sound for creaking/scraping and one for impact but i think it needs one for each.
Movement is now in 8 directions so it’s not that ddifficult to push the blocks but I think I will use dydynamic objects in most situations.
Today I’m out with my son in the lego cafe. He’s playing with lego and I’m drawing up some ideas for puzzles with good old pen and paper.
Some more stuff today, just working away at it.
As I get more done, the story is slowly writing itself. It’s kind of like working on an old B-movie, or the original star trek.
There’s lots of things I’d LIKE to do, but what I CAN do is kind of dictated by restrictions of time and ability.
This is coming along great. Can’t wait to see more and I’m interested in the story :D. You could maybe improve the animation of the player at the beginning, the falling down doesn’t look that convincing right now. I like how the metal looks. How did you make the reflections look so nice? Just a reflection texture? If that’s the case what kind of textures work best for reflections, cause I never achieve something which looks that good. Also loved the end of the video with the barrels :D.
Today I’ve been working on the particle system. Nearly done.
I wanted to make the particle system available on the resources forum, but to get nice effects you have to have a lot of settings, and it’s not very user friendly. I make cut it down a bit, or just set up some basic templates, smoke, sparks, fire etc…
To help you out, you might want to make something that allows you to tweak the particle system from an editor so you can see the effects in real time.
You would probably do well to just implement something to end particles when they are faded out, rather than (or in addition to) having separate color fading and lifetime settings.
I think smoke from a fire wouldn’t be white, but would be a lot darker, as I’m guessing it’s partially composed of carbon / charcoal particles (no idea on this, just a wild guess).
Yeah, tweaking effects in real time would be better…
I think I need to rework the whole system again. Right now particle settings are split between particles and emitters for some reason, but I think emitters need to have full control of all settings.
Had some good ideas while I was sleeping so I’ll try implementing them tonight…
Thanks, I’ve just finished the particle system. That means nearly all the systems work is done. Just need to make the damn game .
The particles are mostly there to liven up otherwise dull areas and to stop the level from becoming too repetitive. Like random drops of water seeping down in to a basement area, or exotic radiation to spice up the engine room.
Definitely another great demonstration of what can be done in the BGE when you have the knowledge and persistence.
Loved the lighting ‘generated’ by the particles, offers a unique aspect to the eerie atmosphere of the game.
And here I picking to make a simple particle system. :no:
For the next episode I’ve got some ideas about building machinery from parts, or repairing broken things by taking them apart and doing maintenance, there’s going to be special game mechanics for that. But for now it’s just a simple inventory game.
I think side on view or top down view is ideal for the BGE. It cuts out a lot of dead space, focusing the action of the main character and makes technical things like dealing with particle systems much simpler. It also means you can make asumptions about the angle things will be viewed from, just like in Diablo III. I’ve been thinking of having the camera kind of “on rails” so that it always moves left to right or up and down, but that can be rotated along with the level… but I think that will have to wait for later. I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got now.
In actual fact, this is the game I dreamed about when I first decided to try and make games in 2008. At that time I didn’t have the skills I needed, but maybe now I can do it.
Just plugging away at making levels now, building props and background items.
I’ve got three main materials:
Tiles; A kind of high tech space station style tileset with some monitors and keypads thrown in.
Junk; Some alpha clipped textures such as piles of trash, clumps of dirt, and some wire/pipe textures
Decals; Industrial signage, monitor screen glows, wire mesh etc…
And of course there’s the shiny glass material which makes an appearance now and again, but that’s only 64x64 pixels.
. Try to fix it.
