Big Boss Battles

The Big Lad

So after the joy/struggle/despair/awkwardness* (*delete as applicable) of learning how the new Blender3D works and then creating an actual character to replace the player's Small Yellow Placeholder Cube, it was time to go after the remaining Big Red Placeholder Cube which had been standing in for the level boss character.

As ever things went horribly wrong for seemingly know apparent reason other than the entire universe having it in for me.

I had split up animations from the actual mesh - that way it keeps loading times down whilst changing things on the fly during development, and means that multiple models with the same armature skeleton can share animation data and thus reduce file sizes - when suddenly everything stopped playing nicely and went back to mutating into a horrendous mess of twisted limbs and multiplied rotations.

The reason this time turned out to be because I was exporting the mesh model in the first frame of the root animation - which is what you would want for blended animations - but I should have exported it out in a copy of the rest pose ... regardless of the fact that this had previously been fine with another model ... which meant that the solution was far down my list of things to test to see if it worked ...

Exporting COLLADA/DAE format from Blender to Torque has become even more specific in Blender 2.8, mostly due to there being a huge number more options available and thus a huge number more things to possibly go wrong ...

I before E except after C ... Also Hierarchy which breaks the rule, and hierarchy is very important ...

I ended writing a little explanation of Blender3D to Torque3D Collada exporting and the importance of hierarchy over on the forums.

Eventually I managed to get "The Big Lad" - as he is currently known unless I can think up a name later - into the game and working. Here's a quick look at him in action. I say "quick" because he squashed me in not too much time. Select quality 720x60fps manually or youtube's autoHD says it's selected it but it's telling fibs.

I fearsome foe! Especially as I end up as pate ...

Apart from that, I modified my laser-beam-wielding veclociraptors by adding helmets and power-packs to them so that they now look different from the other dinosaurs which just bite.

Sharks Dinosaurs, with frikken laser beams on their heads!

I also spent some time modelling industrial scenery, lots of pipes and stuff for a forthcoming level. This will be the fifth level in the game, out of a total of ten - though they will loop for long play. No actual pictures of that yet as it is still all in bits.

So, that was the month that was. It got really warm and now Autumn has truly arrived and I've put socks on. Lot's of other things happened game development-wise but I can't really remember them. Next up is the Overgrown Industrial Level which has been reclaimed by nature, and more boss monsters.

Placeholder Game Level Finally Replaced With The Real Thing

Well, it's been long enough, and in fact seems like forever, that my blank, grid box test level has been on show - but no more! We now have actual game play in actual game play levels!

We also still have Placeholder Player Cube ... but, one thing at a time ...

Starting with level 1 the environment is a dark and rather neglected graveyard, where the dead sleep peacefully ... at least until the player turns up and annoys the hell out of them all (DEEPEST LORE).

And here is a rather long video of the whole thing in action, save for the obviously missing parts of an actual player character and level boss, both of which are currently still placeholder cubes.

But now that we are actually into level design, I am moving quite fast and this month have managed to produce a whole 3 finalised levels.

Behold level 2, The Primordial Forest at dawn, home to ancient plants and even more ancient and decidedly angry velociraptors ... so angry some of them shoot fricken laser beams out of their fricken heads.

And here's a slightly shorter 7 minute video of the level in action. I noticed afterwards that my dinosaurs where not exploding properly and should have been throwing more splatters about. However I had a wrongly named datablock and so the extra gore was not showing up. This has since been fixed.

And finally we have level 3; which I based loosely off pictures of Wulingyuan canyon in China, where the canyon has steep sides of light coloured rock with darker, green vegetation hanging on to every conceivable flat area.

And here is a slightly more reasonable 2 and a half minutes of game play.

In the more cramped confines of the canyon level, I noticed that the enemy spawning often grouped up together at one end of the screen. To create a more even distribution of enemy starting points, I wrote a little algorithm to target the player with the least nearby enemies and then find which cardinal direction (north, east, south, west) had the least enemies and spawn new ones there. This helps to prevent the enemy all starting to one side of the player and spreads the distribution of new enemies out more evenly.

So, their we go. Indie game development is painfully slow, especially for the One Man Army, but once ready to start on creating the actual environments, I have managed to complete 3 levels in one month. That's 30% of the levels done.

Next up, more environments to complete before seeing about replacing the placeholder cubes of the player and boss characters.