So I’ve been reworking the design of the rink in Shuffle Breaker. Right now I haven’t put it into the game again but here’s a couple quick previews in the renderer…
I’ve redone the UV mapping because it was a bit dodgy beforehand, and I also reworked the design of the goals. In addition, everything is now completely UV mapped so I will be able to use actual materials instead of just solid colors if I so desire.
Hopefully I’ll have this dropped into the game in the next few days.
So it’s been a while, now that I’m no longer working on a side project at the moment I’m back at work on Shuffle Breaker. Not much to show fully yet except for a couple major changes (click for bigger):
Both 1 and 2-player versions of the game are now going to be vertical. In addition I added some shadowing/outlines to some of the in-game text so it shows up better against the table. Granted because of this it’s become clear some changes need to be made, like the green blocks need to be a bit more vibrant I feel. Also, although you can’t see it, I have sped up the pucks to make for a faster game, and made it so more blocks can be created on the field. This last change also came with moving the paddles all the way to just in front of the goals, which also necessitated the perspective change.
I’m still working on a few more things, like the possible introduction of powerups, but I’m getting close to having this game complete. i’m not sure if I’ll be making a mobile version anytime soon but I am planning to at least get a finished version of this game up on Kongregate.
Due to a few extenuating real-life concerns I haven’t really been able to work on my games and other projects as much recently, but I have been working on them. Shuffle Breaker is getting some feedback and adjustments from the people at TIGSource as well as some of my friends. I also finally went back and textured the ship I was working on in Blender, deliberately going for a very flat, retro style:
Granted it’s not perfect, but I think I learned quite a lot from doing it.
I’ve also been working on making textures and materials in Unity as a way of increasing artistic output. I did a set of wood textures which I think came out pretty well:
I’ve made diffuse, normal, and specular maps for everything, learned quite a bit, and feel pretty accomplished. I’m hoping maybe in the future to have something up on the asset store but we’ll see how that goes.
So I went ahead and made both a Windows .exe and a Web Player version of Shuffle Breaker in its current form. The .exe (with readme file) you can download here, and you can play the Web version by following this link here. Let me know what you think!
After a sleepless night (caused for different reasons) I finally implemented a more breakout-styled method of puck deployment for Shuffle Breaker, as you can see here:
Basically just made it so the puck is a child of the paddle until you press the fire button. It also allows the player to move with the puck afterwards as can be seen here.
The initial implementation took only about 10-15 minutes but of course because this is game development, that meant something else broke, usually in the form of the pucks just straight-up disappearing at times. About 1 hour later I had fixed it though and also fixed the problem with the pucks doing their best Poochie impression and returning to their home planet whenever I used the Kinematic options for rigidbodies. So all in all a good win for me. IÂ should have a playable beta up for people to hammer on either later today or tomorrow.
While I’m still working on stuff in addition to Shuffle Breaker, I’d be remiss to point out that after my second dev vlog video I decided to go and add a pause function (complete with menu) to Shuffle Breaker. It looks like this
That’s uh…that’s about it really. Gonna be adding some difficulty options and we’ll see how that goes in due time I hope.
So I’ve been doing more work on Shuffle Breaker, slowly but surely. I recently fixed my nGUI implementation up a bit so that stuff is scaling a lot nicer and the anchors are behaving a lot better. Most of the previous issues were due to my unfamiliarity with newer versions of nGUI but most of that is gone now. I’m also working on a new Main Menu with a slightly more unified theme, a preview of which you can see below:
As you can see I’m attempting to more fully embrace the chalkboard aesthetic. Not sure if I’ll include the sliding panels still, I might just have the menus pop in and out, or maybe apply a fade effect if i can swing that, we’ll see.
The other aspect I was working on was still trying to find a good place to put the pucks when they need to be dropped both to start the game and to restart the game. The end result being the pucks being flung into the rink from the corner, like so.
This works pretty well, though not always, especially in later parts of the game, like this:
I’m thinking I might give it a random angle so that it might go in a few different directions. Anyway that’s all for me for now, I swear I’m going to get more regular at making updates, even if it’s not specifically about game dev. Maybe some reviews or random thoughts, I dunno.
I’m probably not using the term right but I might as well call this an alpha version of Shuffle Breaker. I’ve made a few more adjustments including fixing how the player drops the puck onto the playing field, and allowing for a delayed start of sorts so that you’re not immediately thrust into the action. This is however the 4th revision of the Alpha Phase, hence the Rev 4. You can download the alpha version here. I do recommend reading the README file for control information.
You can download the Alpha here (Windows only)
So a friend gave me an idea to get around my issue of not being sure if or how to make new and interseting block layouts for Shuffle Breaker. The solution, of course, was random generation. Which has given me stuff like this:
Pretty cool, if a bit constrained. I was also working on changing the object of the game to be reaching a point limit instead of having the most points after all blocks are broken. That’s where things got difficult. I was using an older version of nGUI (something like 2.3 I think) and the UIInput(saved) methods weren’t working (though this may have been my fault for not setting it up right). So I updated it to the latest version (3.4 I think?). The end result being that because of messing a few things up I ended up losing my sprite atlas, breaking all the fonts, and utterly destroying my UI. Also because I didn’t set up source control (because one-man project) I couldn’t revert. So…whoops!
Fortunately I’m working on rebuilding the UI and it’s coming out well, possibly even better in some respects. But expect very few screenshots or GIFs until I have all that resolved.
I’ll have some more information about Shuffle Breaker in a bit, for now though here is a YouTube video compiling my work over 2013 into a bit of a portfolio piece.
Also I’ll be attending Global Game Jam 2014 this year cause I got lucky with the way my work schedule sorted out for that week. Should be fun!
(h)EAD Games 