lgwebrandom

[lgwebrandom]

Itch.io Link

https://gizmotheawful.itch.io/gcframing

[lgwebrandom]

Evaluation

Something that I think went well in this project was the overall look of the game. I think that the characters add a bit of humour to the game even if it’s only the concept of them that does so. Another thing that I believe went well is the animations, I think since the previous Garden Chair project that I have improved my animating skills and have put them to good use in the game to help bring the creatures to life instead of being completely static. Additionally I like the look of the text bubbles and I think that I did a better job on them than I did in my FMP because I made them in a different and less tedious way with flipbooks and an existing font instead of hand writing and animating the words and making them as widgets. I really enjoyed making silly and strange characters and I am happy that in this project there never came a time where I was less happy with it like the rest, and I feel more confident putting this one out on the internet despite it not having as much stuff as I had originally wanted in it.

Something that didn’t go well was my time management, specifically having too big or too many ideas and then not having enough time to implement all of them. This is an issue that I consistently struggle with but I think this time around I improved by a little bit in controlling how much time I spend on different things as I am not currently panicking about work that needs to be done and left a decent amount of time for written work instead of focusing too much of the project itself. There are a number of things that are broken within the game despite the entire game still being playable, the flowers in particular were a fairly big issue that had multiple attempts of fixing it thrown at it but it was never fixed and I never really knew what the issue stemmed from to begin with. I could have gotten help with stuff like that more often but I didn’t.

In the next project I will try to have more realistic goals and tone back the ideas to a doable standard, or at the very least just enough so only a few small things may risk not being put into the actual game. I would like to keep with the same art style and improve it further, but it would also be a good idea to branch out and try new things, so possibly a mix of both would be a good idea. In the next project I will try to do better with asking for help with issues with code so that they have a chance to be more polished and hopefully fixed.

I am really looking forward to the next project as I really want to make something either as silly or sillier as a concept and have fun while making it. I am really proud of the work I did in this project which is a much better outcome than any previous project where I would have started looking back at the project with a more negative lens which hasn’t happened yet or at all. Overall I have more confidence in my abilities and am itching to tackle the alternative controllers project.

[lgwebrandom]

Game Ending

During the very last week, I added in a cloud with the word POOF in it to act as a screen to shield Rick’s magic trick when he switched, as well as that I also added in shelves to the shop as well as the nuke itself in the back corner so the player could actually collect it. Furthermore the necessary widgets have been added to indicate when the player is able to speak to rick, to show when the player is able to pick up the nuke, as well as showing that the player does in fact have the nuke once they pick it up.

Something else that I added was a black screen that appears when the player collects all the items that says ‘[Insert Ending Cutscene/Image Here]’ just so that they game had an actual indicator that it was ending instead of the player being doomed to walk aimlessly forever (unless they ended the game of course). The reason for the text is that I originally planned to have both an opening cutscene and an ending cutscene but didn’t have time to add either. It is mildly infuriating because I already spent a bit over 10 hours working on the intro cutscene (it still is only about 80% done) only for it to not be used, but I figure that’s what I get for my overly ambitious ideas and poor time management skills.

[lgwebrandom]

Animations Part 2

[lgwebrandom]

Rick Dialogue and Finishing Rock Paper Scissors

I added an additional character to the game to occupy the shop to finally have something within the once empty building. The idea for the strange half human half fish (his name is Rick because of a reference to Rick and Morty in the game, specifically Pickle Rick) partially is Sam’s fault for correcting me on what a werefish would be. Initially at the start of the project there was an idea of a colony of rocks that had senses, and turned into fish on the full moon and I dubbed them as werefish, but since werefish supposedly implies that they are part human, later on the designs of the character was changed a bit. Rick is a magician who works at the shop, whose ultimate magic trick is being able to turn himself into a rock he however unfortunately cannot turn back.

The code for Rick’s speech bubbled is the same for the other characters, the only difference is that at some point during it his flipbook changed to one of a rock. He starts off by assuming the player is there to see his magic show that he advertised, but then realises that they are a customer with no form of currency. He then makes a deal with the player, saying that if they watch his magic trick, then they can have the nuke (the player went shopping for a nuke) for free. Rick turns himself into a rock, makes a Pickle Rick reference and then promptly explains that he is stuck as a rock for the forseeable future. The player then gets a tag that allows them to pick up the nuke.

In order for the player to acquire gunpowder, they need to win three games of rock paper scissors against Bert before they lose three times. If the player loses three times first, however, then the scores reset and they have to start all over again. After testing the game multiple times it became increasingly clear that Bert apparently likes to tie with the player more than necessary, and that the player has to be very lucky to win the game quickly. 

[lgwebrandom]

Testing Part 2

I sent the link to the itch page of my project to my friend who often playtests my games and finds an abundance of problems that I never knew existed. The list of things that she found included the flowers being broken, with most of them working just fine but on occasion a few would either refuse to be picked up or vanish out of existence when the player got within proximity of them (I had tried multiple times during the project to fix the flowers but with little success, I still don’t know what exactly is broken with them as they all have the same code because they are all the same and yet some aren’t affected but others are, in the end I opted to leave them as is).

Another problem was that when talking to another character, the player was slowed down instead of  coming to a full stop which was deemed ‘annoying’. When the text bubbles were first put in place I couldn’t find the node that stopped the player receiving input and settled for reducing the walking speed to zero, although despite that the player could still move, albeit very slowly. I put in the correct nodes after receiving that feedback and finding the correct nodes.

An additional issue was that the player could move during transitions which could lead to some problems if the player decided to move about when the curtains were down, same as before, I disabled the player’s input after they chose to leave or enter a place and re-enabled the input afterwards. It should be important to note that while the player can’t move while talking to Bert, they can when playing rock paper scissors because when the input is disabled then they simply cannot play the game and are thus stuck there.

There were other issues that were not fixed due to either time limitations or due the either a lack of knowledge or fear of risking breaking something. Such things include the invisible walls on the river being uneven and awkward (the river itself was supposed to be a placeholder but I did not have enough time to replace it), as well as the player being oriented the wrong way if they pressed more than one button at the same time while moving (excluding diagonals which have their own animations). I think with enough time this issue could be fixed, but as of right now I am unsure what the solution to it would have been, not that I had the time to do so either way.

[lgwebrandom]

Feedback & Playtesting

While playing the game, Josie found a bug that allows the player to teleport into Garden Chair’s room from anywhere in the game by repeatedly entering and leaving the collision box that allows the player to enter in the first place. My best guess as to what went wrong is that by repeatedly entering and leaving the collision box, it kept adding and subtracting the tag needed to enter too quickly, which confused the entire thing and made it so that the tag stayed put, same goes for the widget on screen.

Something that was relatively interesting was that this bug didn’t interfere with anything else in the game, although had this been tested later then it might have. A lot of the actions on the game are doable by pressing E when the appropriate prompt to shows up on screen. Tags acquired within the proximity of each interactive thing determines what that same button press does. All of these actions are on an Event Tick, with each tag being looked over in branches that keep going until it runs through every possible action. With that many branches, one might be able to call it a tree, or rather a trE (get it?).

The entrance to Garden Chair’s Lair was the newest thing to be added, and thus was at the end of the long line of branches. This meant that while the player constantly had that tag, if they picked up another one from somewhere else then that newer tag would have priority because it came first in the trE. If the player wasn’t within range of another thing that could be interacted with. then they would be transported back to the room, the same could happen in the middle of interactions, if they managed to inch themselves out of the collision boxes very, very slowly.

After a few attempts of adding Do Once nodes in various places and adding delays to the entrance, I ended up fixing the issue by adding another tag that appears whenever the player isn’t in the collision box. Every tick, the player is checked for a tag that tells them that the ability to enter the room shouldn’t be possible, and removes the tag an additional time to make sure that it is gone for good. The same thing happens to the prompting widget, which gets checked to see if it exists beforehand to avoid errors. The whole ordeal is set to run once, until the player should be able to enter the room, in which it gets reset.

[lgwebrandom]

Garden Chair

After a prolonged absence from a game almost definitely named after him, Garden Chair has finally been added to the game, currently in a permanent state of holding up cue cards. Instead of starting the game in the random area above ground, the game now starts in Garden Chairs lair/house (yet to be furnished or decorated in any way) and cannot leave until they talk to the anteater himself in the far corner of the room. He explains that he is aware of how impolite it is to kidnap someone while they are sleeping, but that he felt it was necessary to get help with obtaining a few items he needed. He explains that other animals tend not to like him (no idea as to why) and that he needed someone else to get the things in order to acquire them at all (besides stealing, but Garden Chair wouldn’t stoop that low). He gives the player a choice as to whether they want to help him or not, although it is not much of a choice because if the player refuses then they are burned alive which they are warned about beforehand.

If the player agrees to help then they are given a list of things to get which they can view if they press Tab, as well as scrawling from Garden Chair in red pen with some helpful tips and mildly threatening words directed at the player. I don’t plan on making the items of the list get crossed out when they are acquired purely due to time and the inevitable headache I’ll receive when trying to implement it, although I may add small widgets on the screen whenever the list pops up, showing what the player has already collected which should be easier than having the list be crossed off.

I might potentially add more flipbooks for Garden Chair, such as him writing the cue cards when there isn’t a dialogue option or maybe dropping the cards when the speech bubble changes. Because of time I am not sure how well I can implement Garden Chair as a whole without him seeming somewhat absent, while I was working on him at multiple points during the entirety of the project, he was added later than I would have liked in favour of the more interactive parts of the game like the flower picking and the game of Rock Paper Scissors. The rest of the Garden Chair ideas will have to wait, however, because despite how long the shop has existed in the game, the interior is still not even started and there is no shopkeeper to talk to and I do not want to scrap the shop entirely because of a very specific thing I wanted to add, that being a nuke being sold in a small corner shop style store among the other items such as tissues and peanuts and what-not.

[lgwebrandom]

Rock Paper Scissors Part 2

Bert has different responses depending on who wins, saying “Well Done” if the player wins, “Good Game” if they tie, and “Ha, you just lost to a bush” if the player loses.

[lgwebrandom]

Dialogue

I made a dialogue system as well as a way to choose an answer and have the future be impacted by that answer albeit the impact currently is small. When the player presses E while having a tag that states that they are in a close enough proximity to a character then the character will run through a series of flipbooks (it's actually a separate actor called [character]bubble) separated by a series of delays which runs through all that character has to say.

With some fiddling, in that same blueprint I was able to have the interaction only run once and have the prompting widget appear when the interaction could still continue (the widget disappears when the player is collecting flowers until they get 7, in which dialogue is an option once again). When it came to choosing an answer I used arrow keys, and had it so that each answer is assigned to a certain value, and depending on what arrow key was pressed depends on how the value is changed, and whatever value it has when the player presses enter is then used to determine what happens next.

[lgwebrandom]

Animations Part 1

In order to choose what animals to have in the project, I used a random animal generator and picked a select few that I thought would be interesting to have and weren't too similar to what I had already picked, any gimicks those characters have were decided on a whim and I am not entirely sure of my own thought process for those besides maybe Bert who became a bush because he was green, with the being a bush being the deciding point on his colours. The alternative was bright pink. Here are gifs and timelapses of all the animations I have done thus far in regards to the current project.

[lgwebrandom]

Rock Paper Scissors

As part of the ‘randomisation’ part of the project, I created the bare bones of a functional Rock Paper Scissors game within the game. Currently it only appears as print strings in the top left corner when an input is given, but it works and is playable so it is a good start. The screenshots in this post are all for the same chunk of code, above is receiving inputs and assigning them to either rock, paper or scissors (1 = rock, 2 = paper, 3 = scissors). When the player makes a choice, it is displayed to show that a game has started, and also to help troubleshoot problems. Also shown above is the ‘computer’ choosing a number between 1 and 3.

The number is compared to what they correlate to, and then what the ‘computer’ chose is displayed on the screen with a delay so it doesn’t move too fast (it used to be far too quick and chaotic all around). Afterwards, the player’s choice and the ‘computer’s choice are compared and depending on the outcome, a winner is stated on the screen.

The idea for this game is for a character to ask the player to win a game of Rock Paper Scissors in order to gain an item needed to progress, which means creating artwork and dealing with widgets in order to make it look presentable (alternatively I could make it look the same as regular dialogue with maybe a best of three indicator appearing on the screen to show the scores).

[lgwebrandom]

Initial Project Work

I’ve explained the bare bones of the player movement in a previous blog post, where because of the perspective the same frames of movement need to be flipped and rotated before being imported into Unreal in order to look right. Above is half of the code that helps keep the movement in check, everything the player does is assigned a boolean, and everything an input is received, each action is set to either a true or false value to help dictate what should be seen. If a specific boolean is set to true, a specific flipbook (animation) is displayed. If multiple booleans are true (AKA diagonal movement) then a flipbook specific to those inputs together is displayed. When no inputs are received, then different booleans are set to true depending on what the last button that was pressed was, ensuring that the correct orientation of idle animation is playing. Furthermore, depending on the last button that was pushed depends on where the character’s rotation is forced. This prevents the wrong animation to be paired with facing the wrong way, albeit there are still a few occasional hiccups with that but it is usually difficult to achieve.

This is how the world currently looks just to give a sense of how the overall game is supposed to look and feel. The trees are all tilted back so that they look front on to the player, and an invisible box has been put at the base to prevent the player from walking through them but still being able to walk behind them. The long string of white boxes is an invisible wall lining a temporary river (the art is going to change, the current one was for testing) with the bridges exposed. This makes it so that the player cannot walk across the water, but they can cross the bridges. 

The red circles seen above are flowers which do not contribute much to the overall game itself, but there are seven in total and a widget in the bottom right corner showing how many the player has collected. A big part of my idea for the game is collecting items so that served as a means to test I remembered how to code such a function after months of not doing so. Furthermore the flower-picking as a whole could be put into the game as a mini-game similar to the Rock Paper Scissors, and perhaps use the randomly generated rooms code we did before to add another element of randomisation into the game.

At the top is a ‘shop’, where currently the player can approach it, be given a prompt on what button to press to enter, and be teleported to an empty room where they are given another prompt to exit on the the wall they spawn near. This is the start of making rooms and buildings for the player to go into, and currently it works as intended.

Here is the run cycle for the player, the frames had to be exported and then flipped and rotated several times in order to appease the really awkward camera angle. There is no separate animation for the player going up or down on the screen because those angles are far too difficult to draw, especially for a four-legged creature and I would rather put my time to good use in making a functional game rather than losing my sanity.

[lgwebrandom]

Don’t Starve Together

Something about Don’t Starve Together that I like is the camera angle in the game. It looks like it should be either front on or top down but it is instead a mix of both. The ground can be seen in a way that makes it seem like it should be top down but anything like the players, trees, rocks or items are front on.

I have already started trying to do something similar, and it is a bit of a pain to do. On a 2D sidescroller only one animation cycle of each movement needed to be made and then it could be flipped 180 degrees in game so that there is animation for both directions of movement. I took a Third Person template and moved the camera so it was looking down at the player and disabled the movement for it. When making the animations for the walking and being idle, I have to rotate the same frames for both actions and assign them to the correct directions the character is facing, furthermore I have to make it so that it can’t be broken by spamming buttons.

[lgwebrandom]

Night In The Woods

Something about Night In The Woods that I would like to draw inspiration from is the dialogue. All the speech is in bubbles next to or close to the character speaking, furthermore the text is colour-coded for different characters so even when the characters are off-screen the player can tell who is speaking. Saying that, Mae and every character other than Bea, Gregg, Germ and Angus has white text. Another thing about the speech bubbles in Night In The Woods is that the words move to emphasise what is being said, mainly being excitement or whatever emotion ‘N I G H T M A R E.  E Y E S’ was said in. Something else to bring up is that the dialogue has sounds, they are subtle but noticeable.

I’m not entirely sure how to add speech bubbles into the game that I am making, one idea is having them be physical sprites in the game that are created individually and maybe cycle through on a flipbook? Another Idea is Using widgets, but I think more is likely to either go wrong or break if I use widgets too much.

[lgwebrandom]

Randomised Rooms

Target Points can be created from clicking the drop-down of the little cube with the plus sign on it and going to all classes and then scrolling down until target points appears. When the game starts, all actors of class (plural) of the target points are retrieved and we get an array in return, target points have to be placed into the ‘stage’. The class of the spawn actor is promoted to a variable and turned into an array, adding all potential rooms to the index (one platform is a parent, one is a child, the rest are duplicated from the child) and a random one is selected to be given to the spawn actor node. A random target point is removed so only eleven spawn, and the rest are cycled through on the for each loop until every target point has a platform spawned at it.

[lgwebrandom]

Lemon Demon

While doing college work, if I am listening to music, it is usually Lemon Demon. The songs are strange to say the least, but that’s to expected when the songs are made by the same guy who made Potter Puppet pals. I used the instrumental to the song Jaws (yes it is about the movie Jaws) as the background song to Garden Chair Eats Space Ants, and I also took inspiration from the song Cabinet Man to make my FMP game which was in all it’s originality was called Cabinet. Furthermore I have thought of an idea for another game because of the song Touch-Tone Telephone, in which a conspiracy theorist sets out to prove his theories correct, and ending up freeing dinosaur aliens from Area 51, finding out that the earth is dinosaur-shaped and that the dinosaurs created it, and then goes on a mission to help the dinosaurs save their planet (which is flat) from tipping over and everything falling off. Once the conspiracy theorist is dropped back on earth, the dinosaurs wipe their memory and the game resets to the beginning.

Lemon Demon songs tell rather.. interesting stories. Such things include a man turning himself into an arcade machine and making people obsessed with the game, wearing a really cool wig in a dream and then being sad about not finding said wig online after waking up, falling out of a plane and refusing help from a sea monster while complaining that the fall is taking a long time, evil babies with guns, and simply mowing the lawn. (song are, in order: Cabinet Man, Really Cool Wig, I’ve Got Some Falling To Do, Angry People, Lawnmower).

Needless to say, Lemon Demon songs are very good at giving me ideas for projects, mainly games, because of the strange lyrics.