dinosaur-nuggets-game - Tumblr blog

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Dinosaur Nuggets Teaser Trailer!

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22/10/19

Crunch time this week! This week we’re gonna do our best to get the final features into game so that we can shift our focus on to bug fixing. This includes the chopping function, customisation, NPC’s, new meals, timers and fire! Halfway through the week and we have made a huge dent in the list!

Fire now spreads! Now we just need to be able to extinguish it before it gets out of control...

Our new meals are ready to go, and our NPC’s are rigged and ready to be animated and added to the game. Plus we have made a lot of changes to the menus, the most notable being the new new hats scene that will let you customise your player before starting.

In addition to this, we have also been working on marketing our game. We have created a twitter (@DinoNuggetsGame) and a facebook page (facebook.com/DinosaurNuggetsGame) so make sure to check those out!  🦖

We’ve also started thinking about the sort of things we could place around our table when we showcase our game. We plan to create a poster and business cards. We have also plan to 3D print a few mini scenes of our characters to make our table stand out.

Casey  🦖

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It’s been a while since I recorded some game play to show everything we’ve been working on - and a lot has changed!  

We’ve made a lot of progress on the menus and UI and just for fun, we’re currently working on a customisation menu that will let you choose a hat to wear. (You can see the shark hat being worn in one of the levels!)

We’ve also made some new recipes (with even more on the way) to add more variation between rounds:

The soundtrack (produced by Hanae Wilding) is almost done, and our second player is ready to be implemented - along with much smoother movement from the controller input.

And lastly were currently working on some of the last few features, this includes the ability to run, chop ingredients, sabotage your opponent, some NPC’s, and some final animations. 

-  Casey 🦖

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The player can wear hats! Here we have our Dino wearing a shark hat while dual-wielding fish.

We’ve also been making some good progress with the textures and the scenes in general - as you can see in the background, the diner’s looking a bit more polished and interesting.

- Immie 🦕

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New Input System

Hello all! Jaron here, about time I made a blog post properly. Anyway, I’m helping out coding the game, and my work for the past two weeks was to set up a local multiplayer system inside of Unity. This was two weeks of agonizing horror, going over unfinished docs, and brute-forcing different methods and finding pitfalls for all of them. In the end though, I’ve created a working input system that uses the UI, pauses the game properly, and can select and assign player attributes at runtime.

https://streamable.com/jknpx ^ Input system in action!

I’ll be writing up a tutorial on using the New Input System provided by Unity, the reason being is that the current scripts the system ships with, doesn’t give me much control over players, what controls are assigned to what player, etc. So in the interest of helping out everyone else, I’ll be writing it up, and will update this blog with a link to that when I finally get time!

Lastly, I did some rubber-ducking last night with a friend, and we were able to convert a transformation matrix from code in the new ShaderGraph that is needed to work with the Lightweight Render Pipeline. This proved rather annoying and difficult, as even though I love node workflows when it comes to complex setups, it’s easier for me personally to do it in code. So we made some stupid mistakes, like pluggin in Sine when Cosine was needed, and so on. But in the end, we got a simple rotation shader to work!

https://streamable.com/di422 ^Rotation shader

On Sunday (tomorrow) I hope to be putting everything into the game and making it work properly!

- Jaron

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Love taking a nice stroll through the flowers!

We’ve also gotten our music in game thanks to Hanae Wilding! :) 

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Play-testing

Last week we had the opportunity to play test our game! We finished getting the cooking function done with about 5 minutes to spare before people started playing our game... And then it almost immediately broke! But after some head - scratching we got our game working again. 

We had players navigate their way through the menus and try out the game so far. We also encouraged them to do their best to ‘break’ the game. We discovered a few bugs and gathered a list of things that we need to improve upon. 

One of these improvements was the UI - Most of our players didn’t notice it when playing our game until we pointed it out to them. So as an attempt to make it more noticeable we added a glow around each icon to make it stand out from the scene - We’re still in the process of making it even better but here is how it looks for right now:

- Casey  🦖

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A collection of the UI icons for the game! Plus an early mockup screenshot displaying how they would be implemented into the scene.

The UI is important for Dinosaur Nuggets so that players know which character they are (blue or orange dino) and what they need to do next to complete their recipe. The ingredients will appear along the side of the screen (along with a frying pan, for example, if something needs frying before it goes into the pot) and players will use the UI to work out what to do with the ingredients. If the recipe asks for chopped tomato, for example, we would use the chopped tomato icon rather than the whole tomato, and players would work out from there what to do. Once a step of the recipe is completed, the check mark will appear over the ingredient!

- Immie 🦕

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There’s only one of each ingredient in each level so one of the things we have been working on is a re-spawn system. This was one of our first attempts.... we somehow ended up with a bread tsunami 😅 

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21-9-2019

Got a few animations to show off! We’ve all been working hard at polishing everything we have so far by cleaning up our code, and adding new art assets. Along with this we have been working towards getting some new mechanics into the game that will allow the player to clumsily control the characters arms, and chop up ingredients, which means some new animations to go along with them :)

- Casey  🦖

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6.09.2019

We have made some really good progress in the last few weeks! We got most of our assets imported into Unity and set up with prefabs so that we could start building our levels. We decided to create a few different levels to change things up each round. So now we have the base of our Prehistoric Jungle and our Retro Diner Levels built!

We have also improved the players movement, making it much smoother, along with added controller support, and also a very basic version of the menu screens working. We didn’t quite achieve our week 5 milestone, but we did get really close, and we’re not far off of finishing everything on the list!

- Casey  🦖

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6-9-2019

We’ve discovered a new species of dinosaur while making this game... not quite sure what to name him 🤔

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5-9-2019

Hey guys, it’s Travis here. we’re hard at work making assets and getting them ready for the game. Here’s an outline of most of the assets we’ve got so far. 

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26-8-2019

Got a few more concept artworks and sketches to show off! We’ve been working on creating another scene, set in an outside jungle, to give the game a little more variety. Here’s the concept art I did for the outside version of the stove, and some background assets like rocks and trees.

- Immie 🦕

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16-8-2019 

 Casey here! I’ve taken on the producer role for Dinosaur Nuggets which is basically just making sure we’re all on track with our progress. As well as this I’ve also been working on modelling assets and animation.  I though I would come on here and show where we’re up to, and what we plan to do going forward. The clip attached is from our game prototype. We have our Dino modelled and animated, waking around and cooking in the kitchen. Currently we are only able to cook one recipe (omelettes!) and there are a few bugs that need to be fixed, but this is just our prototype! This week during our weekly scrum I created a list for two milestones that I would like us to reach in the following weeks. 

Our milestone for week 5 is to add a home screen, game play instructions, a win screen, player arm controls, recipe UI, more recipe functions as well as a second level deign.  Our week 10 milestone is to implement multiple recipes, to get our second player in the game, to add controller support, timers, leader boards, to make things set on fire when burned, as well as to polish everything we already have with textures and particle effects.

- Casey  🦖

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5-08-2019

Hey, it’s Immie, art lead for the Dinosaur Nuggets game project! Here I’ve got the concept art pieces I created for our player character model.

We wanted to go for something iconic, so we chose a T-rex-like bipedal dinosaur. As fitting and hilarious as it would be to keep the famous tiny arms of a T-rex, it would make gameplay more difficult that we intended. I gave him slightly longer arms to enable him to reach things properly, and we’re going to play around with physics instead to simulate the difficulty that would come from being a dinosaur in a kitchen. I also came up with some colour variations for each player character:

- Immie