robertkylehall-blog - Tumblr blog

robertkylehall-blog · 8 years ago

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Time to dust off this Tumblr and turn it into a development blog. Twitter is cool for short updates, but Tumblr is way better for the deets.

I’ve been working on game development between art commissions. It’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I’ve finally gotten serious about it. I recently took part in Ludum Dare 38, my first game jam, and I’ve been chipping away at a 2D platformer in Unity pretty consistently.

I’ve done tutorials and experimented with small game projects in Unity, but this is the first original game that I’m taking to completion. The scope is staying small; I’m taking inspiration it after mid-80s arcade games like Donkey Kong and Popeye, and mimicking the NES’s aesthetic. As such, I’m using a limited colour palette overall, a small resolution, and 16 x 16 sprites with only 3 colours.

It’s kind of funny how challenging it’s been to get Unity to behave like a game from the 80s. Using its default 2D physics system resulted in weird collision behaviour. I’m using more tailored scripts with a lot of raycasting instead. Considering art, not programming, is my strong point, that’s been a challenge. Still, it’s been getting easier as I go!

GIF 1: Moving Platforms With physics collisions working properly, I created moving platforms. I initially followed a tutorial to get them working, then broke their behaviour into separate physics and waypoint movement scripts. When they reach the end of their waypoint, they can cycle back to the first one, reverse their path, or teleport back to the start. They can also reverse direction in the middle of their movement or while stopped at a waypoint. That was tricky, but I got it working bug-free.

GIF 2: Conveyor Belts I repurposed and tweaked part of the moving platform’s code to create conveyor belts. They work fine, but at this point, they can only exist horizontally, not diagonally.

GIF 3: Extra Characters Unity doesn’t have an intuitive way to change a sprite sheet in an animation. I’m hoping to create a bunch of different characters, but it would be a ridiculous amount of work to create new NPCs and animations for each one. Instead, I found a code that changes the sprite in an existing animation during runtime. That’s going to make it easy to cameo a bunch of characters from friends, and I have my second player in place now.

GIF 4: Independent Controls I remapped my game’s input, and redesigned my character controller to allow control to switch between the first and second player. For testing purposes, I mapped both characters to one controller, using each joystick to move, and the RB and LB buttons to jump. Both characters can be controlled at the same time with the D-pad and A button, in case they need to move together. I have a similar mapping on the keyboard too.

GIF 5: NTSC Filter My good buddy Lollie gave me an NTSC filter. Slapping this onto the game gives a modern TV that CRT vibe. It’s pretty cool! Of course, I know not everyone is going to want to play with extra low-def graphics — especially if you’re actually using a CRT monitor; it’ll look double retro then (AKA: twice as ugly) — so I’m making it optional in-game.

My next task is to get the characters lifting and carrying that eggplant!

#gamedev #game development #Unity3D #gaming #video games #retro #8-bit

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