AINT 152 – Week 10 in review (Final Week)

Week 10, the final week of the project, has finally come and the game is almost done. All of the main game play parts of the game are done I just needed to add the start, death and winning screens, some music for the menu and death screens and a how to play section to teach people have to play the game in the first place. Let’s start off with the other scenes.

The menu main screen is a flat image that I created myself in Photoshop of a wall high above a busy city at night. The buttons on the screen are very self-explanatory. The play button works by waiting for the player to click the button and when they do the button runs a script to start the first level of the game. Same as the exit button does the same but the code that that button uses terminates the program.

The Game over screen is quite similar. Again I made it I Photoshop my self and just shows the main game characters hat on the floor with red eyes all around. The play again button re-runs the code to start the from the start menu and just restarts the game from the beginning and the exit button again just terminates the program.

Last is the winning screen which depicts dead rats all around the player’s character model. The only button here is the menu main button which again is very self-explanatory. It simple runs a line of code that starts the main menu scene and the game can either be played again from there or simple closed.

Next I added the how to play canvas to the game. This is a canvas on the main level scene that appears when the level 1 scene is loaded and it can be seen below. It simply outlines the rules for the game and how to play it.

Last but not least I added music to the main menu and the death scene. For the main menu screen I wanted to use some sort of slow guitar song so I did it myself with my guitar. I did this by simply recording me playing the song on my Dictaphone, editing it in audacity and then adding it to the scene so that it plays continuously.

I wanted some slightly haunting music for the death screen so I went for some spooky synthesizer music that give the scene a slight haunting quality which is what I was going for so I’m happy with it.

No GIF but instead a YouTube video of a play through of the game. I am very happy with the end result of my game, it is a bit rough around the corners and could still use a lot of work but I find it enjoyable.

AINT 152 – Week 9 in review

Week 9

Week 9 was all about adding a few new things to the game to the game such as a new rat enemy, a pause menu for the game and some music to the main game scene. The new rat enemy is called King rat and has a much larger pool of health, does more damage at the price of moving slower than the regular rat, the pause menu will allow the player to quit the game when they please and the music in the scene is sewer sound effects to give an scary feeling to the game.

First off let’s talk about king rat. King rat as I said is a rat enemy with more heath and damage than a regular rat but with the down side of being slower and larger than the other rat meaning that it is harder for it to get around the level. The King rat also does give more score to the player when one is killed. Below is the sprite for the King rat:

Sprite
Health	100
Damage	5
Speed	2

As you can see compared to the other rats the king rat is quite a hardy enemy and will cause the player quite a problem if they manage to get stuck in a corner with one of these.

The pause menu is very simple and was added purely because without it you can’t exit the game if you’re playing it from an executable. All I had to do was add a panel to a black canvas and add a few buttons. The buttons either resume the game for the point the paused it at or just straight quit the game. Below is a picture of the pause menu and the code that goes with it:

Last I added some music to the background of the game to give the game some ambient background noise so that the feels a little more deep and immersive. Since the game is set in a sewer full of rat the music that is playing in the background is mostly noises of dripping or rats scurrying around.

I feel the game is really coming along now and next week is the next week so will be adding all the last finishing touches so that the game is more polished and ready for the final hand in. As you can see in the GIF the pause menu and the big rat are both in the game fine.

AINT 152 – Week 8 in review

Week 8 has mainly been used trying to get the power ups working which has been a little stressful but all but one are now working and they work well and are now well balanced.

I’ll start by talking about the power up that doesn’t work.  Sadly the triple shot power is not currently working. The power up is meant to work by activating 2 extra bullets spawners once the power up is collected to make it so that the user fires 3 bullets instead of 1. At the moment when your player’s collider comes in contacted with the power ups collider the 2 extra spawners activate but continually fire at a very high fire rate for the full length of the power up and when it runs out the spawners disable. After many hours of testing and changing code I can still not get the triple shot to work so I have made the decision to take it out the game for the time being as there are lots of other core features that need to be added or polished before the hand in.

Anyway on to the power ups that do work. First there is the rapid fire power up. This power increase the spawn rate for the bullets so that the fire rate of the player’s weapon increases dramatically when the power up is picked up. You can see the power up in action below.

As you can see the fire rate is increased a lot and gives the player a better chance of cutting through those hordes of rats.

The other power up is the double damage and double point’s power up, this power up obviously makes the player do double damage the enemies and doubles the amount of points that the player gets for killing an enemy.

As you can see in the GIF above, the first few kills take two bullets to kill and give 10 points a kill but after the power up is picked up the enemies die after one bullet and give 20 points on death. Below you can see the main code for how the power ups work.

AINT 152 – Week 7 in review

Week 7 was a very productive week for the game as I managed to fix the problem I was having with the A* pathing algorithm and the enemies will navigate around obstacles with ease now which makes the game a lot more enjoyable and actually now adds a large amount of challenge to the game as you now can’t hide as the rats will come and find you.

As I said in the last post the problem I was having with the A* pathing was that I had to transfer my 2D game into a 3D game space. This transfer was quite smooth until you tried to play the game and all the sprites were invisible. What was actually happening was that even though I had changed the rotation of the sprites so that they appeared on the level correctly, the animations on the sprites were still making the sprite display as if they were on the 2D game space so they were appearing side on to the camera.

The way that I fixed this was by adding a child object to the animation prefab and putting the animator itself and its sprite renderer on it so that it was on a gameobject that was meant for 3D game space. After this was done the sprites moved around the game fine and everything worked.

I have also created so power up place holders for the game. These place holders currently
don’t do anything but soon they will be working power ups in the game.

This one increase the fire rate of the player weapon for a short amount of
time to make it easier to gun down the rat hoards.

This one with be a triple shot power up which does what it says on the box. It will enable two other bullet spawners for a short amount of time after it is picked up so that the player’s weapon will fire 3 shots at a time instead on just one.

This one will be give the player double damage and double the points for
all kills they get for a short amount of time.

You can see in the GIF for this week that the rat goes around the wall to get to the player.

AINT 152 – Week 6 in review

Week six has been a difficult week as I went about trying to give my 2D rat shooter an A* pathing algorithm so that the enemies in the game wouldn’t get stuck on walls and be able to find their way around obstacles on the map to get to the player. However this didn’t prove as easy as I thought and have run into a bug which I’m currently stuck and working on.

Due to this there isn’t a huge amount to talk about the game in this blog post so I will be also be talking about an indie game that I have been playing recently and features that I like that I think would be good to have in my own game at some point but back to the pathing problem.

My game ultimately needs a type of pathing algorithm due to how tight and angular my map is, as you can see.

The problem is that Unity3D’s pathing is only set up for 3D games and not for 2D. This is mainly because 2D games are a reasonably new thing to Unity so there is not a huge amount of customisation yet. This of course means that for me to add the pathing I would need to convert my current game from 2D to 3D. At first I thought this would be as easy as just turning the sprites and level so that they would be on the correct 3D axis but it turns out that a lot more work is needed. The animations on the enemy’s and the player’s character flip the sprite when it moves in game, so even though the sprite in the design view looks like its orientated in the correct way as soon as the game starts the sprites flip so that they are side on to the camera and since the sprites are 2D when they are on their side you can see them. So other than this no other progress has been made so far this week but I think I should be able to get the pathing working.

As I said earlier in the post, I’ll be talking about an indie game that I have been playing recently. This indie game is Risk of Rain and you can follow this link to check out its steam page (http://store.steampowered.com/app/248820/)

To quote the store page itself: ‘Risk of Rain is an action platformer with roguelike elements. With permanent death as a primary feature, players will have to play their best to get as far as possible. Fight on a mysterious planet with randomly spawning enemies and bosses, either alone or with 3 friends in online co-op.’ the game has such a great mix between fast paced run and gun platformer and smart, tactical roguelike that is truly does deliver a very satisfying gaming experience.

One feature of the game is that as you kill enemies you collect cash which you can spend a few different ways. You can buy differently priced chests, donate money to totems and hope you get an item or buy items from one of the venders in the game. The items you pick up all have different ability’s that branch from firing rockets when you fir, causing bleeding damage when an enemy gets close to you or just passive healing. I think implementing something like this in my game would be really cool as the idea of a randomised item system sounds very interesting and it also varies the game play a lot so there is lots of replay ability. I would recommend this game to anyone who wants a really fun game to kill some hours on.

AINT 152 – Easter & Week 5 in review

This blog post will consist of the work that I have done over the Easter holidays that we have just had and the work that I have done in the first week back to University.

I started the work I did on the game over Easter with redesigning and making a new arena for my game to take place in. To this I decided to use the program tiled to make my arena as I have used tiled for other projects such as the sprite platformed I made in AINT 151.
Tiled lets users import their own tile sets and then use them to make your own custom 2D maps for games. It uses different layers so that you can create depth and a 3 dimensional effect.

I have made my own tile set before and it was very time consuming as I’m not known for my artistic skill. So I decided to use a free one from a website called OpenGameArt (http://opengameart.org/). I decided over the Easter holiday that I was going to change the zombie enemy to a rat due to the theme of plague that I was going for, this is why I went for a sewer tile set made by user MrBeast. (His page is linked at the bottom) The tile set has all the basic tiles I would need to make my map and I really like the 16 bit art design as that is what I was trying to go for with the rest of the art assets that I was creating. Below you can see what I made with the sewer tile set.

As can be seen above, the map I decided to build ended up only really using a third of the overall tile set but I feel I used that third effectively and also by only using a small amount of the tile map and can use the other sections so create other levels to add some diversity to the level design.

As I said early I decided to go with a rat design for the enemy in the game due to the theme of plague I was going with so I made my own rat sprite to go as an enemy. Below is the end product that I came up with.

The sprite is longer than the player sprite and a little bit wider so that they have the effect of looking like giant rats. However making the rats like this may have caused so problems with the enemy’s pathing. Due to the fact there are a lot of walls in the game the rats tend to just get stuck as their pathing automatically makes them walk towards the player as the crow flies. I will have to think about adding some sort of advanced path such as A* pathing so that the rats can get around the walls in the game so they can get to the player without getting stuck.

There is no gif for this week as there was no huge game play differences due to the fact that I have not yet implemented a lot of this stuff yet and that will be done next