The chest is meant to be protected as it is the most vunerable part of the character (disregarding his head) although I can see what you mean and might slightly reduce the size of the mesh around the bottom of the neck. Changing the arm size might be a bit harder though as it would affect the rig as well so I might change that close to finishing the game if I decide to re-create the model.
I’ll also try stop the sliding upon transition back to the normal state
Thanks for the feedback :D!
After another busy and slightly frustrating week I’ve managed to make a small amount of progress in the game. I think usually around now after reaching the bumpy part of the game’s development would be when I previously started to abandon games purely due to the lack of work to get them to a playable standard.
However today is not that day 
!
This week was very behind the scenes in terms of progress, most of it was based around splitting up my huge 200 line script and re-animating the players weapon
Things I did this week:
-Added in the modeled axe for the game
-Animated the axe separately to the armature for all 10 different animations, only to later find out that this wasn’t working well with animation blending.
-Added the axe to the players mesh and re parented armature + some weight painting
-Re-animated all 10 animations using the previous rig as a reference.
-Split up my huge 200 line script into 6 different modules. (this takes a lot longer than it sounds)
-Stopped sliding after ledge climbing
-lots of tweaking and testing.
-Added a equip + unequip animation:
Hopefully by next week I’ll have some attack animations, and possibly the start of designing the enemies if i’m not too bogged down with too much tweaking/optimization.
Comments + Critique is always greatly appreciated 
Thanks for reading
-Thatimst3r
This week has been a lot more productive in terms of visual and actual progress, I managed to get my four different attack animations finished:
which allowed me to have more time on creating enemies!
I am planning on having 3 different types of re-occuring enemies:
So far I have modelled, baked, rigged and animated the repair bot AI.
The robot has 3 states:
-idle
-attack1 (left)
-attack2 (right) - I can probably merge this with attack1 using a property.
-repairing (direction is determined by a property)
If the player walks near the bot (30 units) the bot will chase the player and start attacking him (but only within a certain distance). There is a delay between the bots attacks to make it easier to fight.
However if the player is not near the bot and a nearby ally is damaged (not at full health) the bot will walk over to the ally and repair them to full health.
This is set to only 20 units and the bot must have clear vision of the ally.
Not only can repair bots heal allies (such as turrets etc.) the bots can also repair each other, if the player is not nearby.
After, repair the bot will stay beside the fixed ally.
Currently each repair bot has 3 health, hence the fast repair and exaggerated health bar.
When a bot has no health left it enters the death state, and will disappear after 10 seconds.
So I’m overall pleased with my progress especially getting the bots up and running even though it took at least 8 hours.
Also as a side note if you haven’t noticed I’ve managed to get emission maps working in BGE which is nice
If you have any comments or critique it would be greatly appreciated, I don’t think anyone except me has posted on this thread in a while 
!
Thanks for reading
-Thatimst3r
So this post is a few days late, mainly because I hadn’t finished most of the remaining bots to a presentable standard. This week was a little slow progress-wise, as I was busy with quite a few other things, however I’m currently on ‘study break’ (which is 2 weeks of holiday) so hopefully I’ll be able to spend more time on this.
Also because I have more free time the updates should be a little bit more frequent than once a week, depending on how major the changes or progress is.
This week I focused on finishing the other ‘enemy’ bots which include a turret that tracks to the player, however upon losing vision returns to standby position. Turrets also can’t move mainly for a game balance but also because of the fast fire rate.
I also created a ‘defense’ bot which basically is a ‘tanky’ bot that follows the player. The bot will move to the players location and try and act as a barrier to block the incoming damage from the player.
This took a little longer than it should have to program but eventually I managed to get it going.
So along with this I also made several adjustments to the player which include:
Hopefully by the end of this week I will have most of the main game mechanics nailed down and can start spending way too much time on explosions and other special effects
Comments and Critique appreciated
-Thatimst3r
As mentioned in the previous post I was looking forward to documenting my daily progress but just never got around to it :(.
However development is in full swing at the moment and I’m beginning to re-write scripts and update logic to fit the game’s requirements.
Currently I’m porting all the enemy AI so far into the example scene which I used for my player mechanics.
Again not much of a visual update, quite a few minor bug fixing tweaks here and there on the player as well as the AI.
Something is better than nothing right? Here is a quick screenshot of where I am at:
Due to small bugs here and there I didn’t want to record and upload animated gif’s just yet, so this post might not be as lively as the others. However if all goes to plan I will post a proper update on Saturday or Sunday(NZT), with animations. The plan is by the end of my ‘study break’ to have a downloadable demo level so that I can get some feedback.
Still to do:
-finish AI implementation + optimization
-add player health + death animation
-Super attack (player)
-probably a lot more bug fixes.
Anyway so far so good 
Thanks for reading
-Thatimst3r
This looks pretty cool!
Are you going for something like contra (the bombardment of enemies and bullets all the time)?
Thanks 
Probably not, I wanted to make this game melee based so the player doesn’t sit in the corner of the screen and kill everything (not much skill required). Most of the main game is outlined in the first post of this thread.
I especially like the spider bots there
Thanks! They definitely were the biggest hassle to make :p.
In the game world these repair bots are essential, as they will fix any nearby enemies (including turrets and defense tanks).
Hey great job mate
that spark set up you made is legitimate
Thanks, I’m guessing your referring to the rotating plane :p. In my opinion it looks average, I’ve purposely been trying to keep away from fancy features like smoke, explosions, and sparks, to make sure I spend enough time on the mechanics rather than the graphical aspect of the game (as I usually spend quite a while doing this).
Alright! so after much delay and bug fixing I have managed to put together some animated gifs of gameplay / interaction with enemy units.
(I will do a video play-through upon demo release).
From the last post to this post there has been quite a few changes and a lot of bug fixing:
-Stopped player from being able to run against tank bot
-Stopped repair bot from constantly walking into the tank bot (from behind)
-Added an extra state for the repair bot to allow for left and right repairing, and minimal script error
-more tweaks on the player, some changes to how the repair bot adds health to the target
-And the usual tweaking and optimization as well as some going backwards and forwards (accidently deleting animations)
At the moment I would like to get better (faster) jumping mechanics going as currently the player looks like he’s in space :p.
Changing to character physics didn’t really seem to help, as Blender 2.72 would straight out crash (I’ve already reported the bug).
So with that set aside here are 8 different animated gifs of stuff.
***
Health Bar
I have added a player health bar which is altered by how much health the player has left (I used GIMP for creating alpha masks). The player has a total of 100 health at this point in time. Also as shown in the gif I have animated the health bar + energy bar to match the players position, however after updating to Blender 2.72 the Flipper animation seemed a lot more ‘snappy’ upon deactivation. Additionally underneath I have added an energy bar.
Energy Bar
Underneath the health bar is an energy bar. This determines whether the player can perform a ‘Super Attack’. As shown this is also animated/based off a property (although I’m not sure why it is flashing). In the demo or the actual game, energy will be quite rare and won’t be sitting around in convenient groups of 5.
Turret Track
Turrets haven’t really received much attention through bug fixing or optimization (mainly because it isn’t needed), and therefore I haven’t quite got around to implementing ‘visual’ bullets+trails for it to shoot. Eitherway I thought the ‘jumping over’ gif looked pretty cool :D. Gun-flare will also need to be adjusted as this flips out if the turret is attacked from behind (‘without tracking’).
Turret Destroy
Unfortunately I cut the recording of the gif too early :(. But you can see the health bar is being effected, basically upon reaching 0 health the turret is replaced with a broken version (a cube on a cylinder), which isn’t the greatest transition but is mainly because I have not added particle effects or smoke + explosions.
Bot combat
Here is some combat between the tank + repair bots and the player. As you will notice the Tank does not deal damage and acts as a blockade to guard the other bots. However as shown in the gif the player kills the tank quite fast so I’ll either have to give the tank some sort of damage or ‘stun’ or some more health to make it a bit more of a challenge.
Here you will also notice the player can’t run against the tank bot (push it backwards).
Repair bots also seem to die quite fast but can deal damage as well (and are sort of meant to be delicate).
Also between combat you will notice several different animations being played:
-stab
-swipe
-push
-crit (critical)
Stab, push and swipe deal 1 damage whereas critical deals 3. ‘push’ literally pushes the enemy away or in some cases the player away. Critical and push attacks each have a 1/6 chance of happening whereas both swipe and stab have a 2/6 chance.
Ally Repair
This gif is also slightly cut off along the bottom :(. Eitherway, I recorded it to show what happens if a nearby ally is damaged and the player is not near. Usually this results in the even occuring off the screen anyway. I purposely did this so that the bot couldn’t repair the tank while it was taking damage as this made it close to invincible without continuous attacks…Hmm actually that could be a good idea, maybe I’ll re-add this in to add some difficulty to the tank bots.
Death Animation
As mentioned in the previous post I aimed to get death animations done (which I have). Here is a death animation without holding the Axe, however a variation of him holding the Axe has also been created but is pretty much exactly the same. After the death a grayscale 2d filter is applied and additionally I might have to add a suspend scene actuator to stop the enemies from attacking the player, or just replace the mesh.
Regarding the repair bot, it deals damage from 1 to 3 (the player has 100 health), and this is randomly chosen upon each attack, this can mean that the player will not only lose health relatively fast but also give the bots a chance of a critical hit.
Super Attack Animation
This was probably the coolest animation to replay :D. As you can tell the in-air axe spinning animation definitely needs some tweaking (even though I’ve already spent a while on it). Within the attack animation, upon jumping, the player will move towards the nearest enemy (stopping upon collision), which ensures that the player will always hit an enemy with this attack (let alone blow up half the map ;)).
This attack uses up the players ‘energy’ and generates a huge shockwave (roughly that the size of the screen, which destroys all enemies it collides with. For this reason I will have to make sure that the energy ‘orbs’ are not too freely available as this will lead to the player being too ‘OP’ or overpowered.
If I get more time (probably after exams) I am planning on having 3-4 variations of ‘Super attacks’ however for the upcoming demo this will probably be the only ‘Super’ attack animation.
So there you go :D, lots of awesome gifs…aaaaaaannndd I just spent 1 hour writing this :RocknRoll:.
Personal Goal: Try to get most of the particle effects finished, within the next few days. Then begin work on background and environment.
Comments and Critique is always greatly appreciated and hopefully by the end of this upcoming week I’ll have a downloadable demo and a video play through.
Thanks for reading 
-Thatimst3r
Thats great, i see ive missed out on alot of progress from this game development great work Loved the exe looks futuristic and blends well with the game theme. Yes Health bars or the HUD play a big role on how your game interface will look and attract the player i bet its fun doing or designing it
Thanks! I still have much to add regarding HUD, along with a starting menu, I’ll probably focus on that after the majority of the game is done.
Thanks for the feedback
Keep up the good work sir
Thanks, I will try :p.
So today was very ‘visual’ and I managed to cover a lot of ground (make a lot of updates + changes visually).
Each death of a robot results in an explosion of some sort:
repair bot: electrical explosion
tank bot: smoke explosion
turret bot: fire explosion
(all already finished) However as the (preferred) deadline comes closer and closer I want to spend more time on the bug fixing and optimization instead of the documentation, to release the pre-alpha demo.
Recording and rendering GIF’s takes a while so again at this point I hope a screenshot wil do 
all elements where created in GIMP using previous textures, except for the lens flare which originally was created by Carl Irwin (opengl lens flares), and tweaked by me.
Unfortunately I’m still having trouble naming the game, as I’m fairly terrible at coming up with names.
Any suggestions?
-Thatimst3r
Oh my word the background looks so awesome how did u get that big Lens Flere, is it done on gimp or photoshop? great work The character look good as well as the HUD wow this looks much better that what i had in my mind
Awesome! The lens flare is by carl irwin who recently released a whole package check here
Here is his video on it:
Thanks for the feedback
Hey Thatimster - I only just saw this thread - love your concept and you’re making great progress.
Your BGE tutorials have been a great help to me so I thought I’d add a comment here. For your explosions and other effects I would recommend you use a sprite based procedural effect generator. I use Timeline FX from Rigzsoft. It’s quite old now but still does the trick. It might be handy just to add some graphical polish and is really easy to use.
Thanks Gmanx, Glad you like the tutorials. As mentioned I have already created most of the effects for my game/demo, although the sprite generator does look nice. I haven’t really used sprites or UV based animations very often and don’t exactly have a spare $60 (NZD), however maybe sometime later in the development progress I might be able to save up for this :).
