Monthly Archives: January 2011

Suzuchibi Development Continues

Posted on by

Well, I haven’t stopped working on it of course, its just that with my hand sore from work, I don’t always feel like doing more computer stuff when I get home.

The only weapons shown in the menu are the ones you’ve unlocked
Hurray for diablo style click-to-attack combat!
She also doesn’t auto-attack objects that don’t have health.

Since the last update, I’ve implemented the following:

  • Save/load data on death, respawn, and enter level
  • enhanced triggers that can fire a number of events and effects
  • game pause stops combat
  • save triggers/checkpoints
  • a save data system that stores your variables
  • level transition trigger
  • mouseover text in game world
  • boss state system (partially complete)
  • click-to-attack system, like diablo
  • enemy wandering
On the todo list for code:
  • reincarnate player to hub at 0 lives
  • save and load ALL game variables (ughh)
  • level system
  • inventory system
  • dialogue system
  • cinematic system

todo list for design and art:

  • design everything
  • do all the art
  • nothing major

Review: Crappy Ebay Mouse

Posted on by
The Culprit

Let me first begin by saying this. You can get one of these here.

Alright, alright. It’s not quite as bad as I make it sound in the headline. I bought this mouse with some Christmas money off ebay. It’s red. It has three buttons. Well… it HAD three buttons. Until today.

I spend a lot of time at work and at home on my middle mouse button. I use it for navigation in just about every 3d app in existence. I also use the mouse in general about this much, which is how we got here in the first place. After a long day of working in 3d apps and spinning models and pushing verts, I come home to do what? I work on the same stuff. My wrists and hands are starting to suffer for it already, but I know enough to know that I can stave off the worst of RSI by being careful. Hence, the red ebay crapmouse. I’d heard a long while back that upright mice are supposed to hold your wrist in a better position for long term use or something. The truth is, until it broke, it was actually really nice. After an entire week of use (only) I noticed almost no pain or soreness in my hands.

Which was quite a relief. For a time.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to pass.

I noticed that I couldn’t zoom in on my model. I tried again and noticed that there as no clicking in the wheel, only when I actually pressed the button. I ended up taking it apart at work and checking to see if I could fix it. Nope. The little plastic pin that acts as an axle for the scroll wheel just snapped clean off. When I put it back together, the button didn’t even work anymore.

Sigh.

Oh well. The thing was only $12 with shipping, and it made my hand feel a bit better for a while. Now I know that the key is probably just changing input devices frequently enough. TL;DR: upright mouse good, but not this one. Keep that hand in shape, and use JFT.

Anime Review

Posted on by

Arc and I just finished watching a few new anime series straight from Japan via CrunchyRoll and would like recommend a few series to you.

Fortune Arterial: A charming boarding school anime that involves fitting in, coming of age, and vampires. This anime features some of the most charming and tame vampires I have ever seen.

The World God Only Knows: The main character in WGOK is an anti-social dating game obsessed young man who is only interested in 2-D girls. One day, he receives a challenge that states he can conquer every girl he meets. Keima accepts and finds himself saddled with a demon partner named Elsie and a challenge to woo girls who are possessed with escaped souls. The show itself is enjoyable and worth watching, but the last episode has to be one of the coolest/scariest things I have ever seen.

Panty & Stocking: An acid trip. It’s a damn enjoyable acid trip, but this show is really off-the-wall. Must be consumed in small amounts over long periods of time.

Squid Girl: Ika Musume is the cutest world conquerer that you will ever meet. De geso!

Otome Yokai Zakuro: Zakuro is set during the Westernization of Japan, when European ways are clashing with the traditional Japanese spiritual world. A group of young soldiers is sent to work with the Ministry Spiritual Affairs and an understanding begins to grow between the two groups. An interesting note, Arc and I think that Agemaki must be the grandfather of Tamaki from Ouran High School Host Club.

One Hundred Baddies and some menus

Posted on by

Well, last night I got enemies animating (mostly) and tried a test case to see how my scripting is doing. I wanted to check to see how many baddies I can throw at a time, and the answer appears to be 100. Kinda.

They can’t even all gang up on me right now.
It gets kinda hectic in the editor

 The “kinda”is due to the fact that 50 runs kinda framey in the editor, and 100 definitely does, but both run great in the build. Fortunately, only 20 or so seem to fit on the screen at a time, so it shouldn’t be a big deal. I was trying to see if I needed an enemy manager to keep track of which enemies to activate based on the player position, but at 100 guys, it almost doesn’t look like I’d need to. What I may do is build that into the enemy ai script early on so that it just doesn’t execute most of it if the player is too far away.

BEHOLD! GUILayout!

I’ve learned a lot over the past few days about GUILayout. It’s really, really awesome. Very much like CSS. I’m also very fond of the Border feature, which allows you to cut an image up and stretch the middle portions and not the edges or corners. REALLY HANDY. Thanks unity! Right now the menu has 3 tabs: inventory, settings, and game. The inventory actually controls what the player has equipped, and the settings menu adjusts the size and display of health bars. I’ll be adding in a save/load feature once I research writing to XML a little later. I may end up only having one save game I guess, if that turns out to be too complicated.

Seraphiel Renders

Posted on by

I almost forgot (due to Suzuchibi and work) that I had finished the textures on Seraphiel. Here’s some awesome renders.

Realtime render, DX9 3ds Max 2011

Next I get to move on to rigging and skinning her. Fortunately I’ve been learning a ton of stuff from Suzuchibi, so the rig should be pretty easy. And since a lot of things on her (namely the scales and horns) are all rigid to the bones, it should be a pretty easy task to skin her. I’m still just hoping I can get her into an engine to play around with. Eventually I’d like to do a little diorama with her in it, acting cool.

Red Oni test enemy and Attachments

Posted on by
Hurray for Paint Tool Sai!

He is SO going to get ragdoll’d

So this is our first enemy. He’s just an oni. He’ll have a tetsubo when I make one. Maybe the lower rank ones will just have clubs.

So the enemy guy was intended to help me get the enemy ai and weapon attachment stuff working, but doing so had the added benefit of teaching me all about classes and enumerations. HURRAY!!!! Now I feel smart. I now have an attachment class that allows me to set up an object to attach to any bone of the model after the model is spawned in. This is so that I can make a small number of bad guys and attach unskinned objects to them to change their equipment.
From there I applied the attachment class (which contains the bone name in a string, the game object to be attached, and a position and rotation offset) to the player, and linked the player’s list of weapons (as attachments and as weapon effects) to the Menu so you can actually swap weapons from your inventory! I feel so cool.
Also, special thanks to the Walker Boys Studio for their really nice videos on Enums and Classes. Dirt simple is what I needed.

Suzu Mechanics

Posted on by
Here’s another vid of some things in Suzu working. Demonstration of mechanics, such as targeting, movement, holding movement, firing weapons, and crossfading animations based on velocity and input.
Behold, the most massive rig for the least massive heroine

Suzu’s rig is pretty intricate, and will continue to evolve as animation needs arise, but right now its around 60 objects, with only half of them actually skinned bones. The rest are controller objects for animating and so on. There are controllers for the hands, feet, tail, head, and the major joints. She’s also got bones for her ears, and several bones for her sword and other weapons. The weapons themselves will get attached in game. Should be pretty easy to animate. Next up is skinning.

I don’t anticipate that the enemies should be as much trouble to rig and skin, since they need so much less customization. Unfortunately, they’re all going to be different, so I can’t really share animations.

Hopefully we’ll also benefit from Syl’s talents on this deal too, though we’re unsure as to what yet.

Off to skin!