jackgriffithsdev

[jackgriffithsdev]

High Ground Devlog #14 - Final Additions

This is my final devlog! This weeks marks the “completion” of High Ground VR, to the extent I’m willing to work to within this module at least. The final features have been added, and anything from now will be small fixes and tweaks not exactly worth writing a devlog about!  The next update will come either when I release a BETA of this game, or alternatively when I hand the project in and add some more stuff!

Music Crossfade

Music is now different between phases, to indicate to the player that the attack is commencing!  This of course required some music fading between phases, which you can hear on this video! 

Building Upgrades

This is a big update to gameplay! The player now only has 2 units in a default barracks, and they can double click on a barracks to pay to upgrade it! Check it out :

Small Updates

Just a variety of small updates and fixes to make the game a more well-rounded experience! 

Build phase made longer

Added a button that allows the player to skip the building phase

Explosion when a building gets destroyed

When the game is over, all of the units on the board die (It's SUPER dramatic)

Number of enemies in a group increases over rounds, to a maximum of 6

Various building placement rule fixed

Thanks for Reading!

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High Ground Devlog #13 - Wrapping Things Up!

As it slowly draws nearer the submission deadline, I’ve got to stop focusing on adding things and draw my attention more towards the report I have to write alongside this university project! This will be the second-to-last devlog on this project before the 14th May, as I might continue development after!

Orbital Gameplay

Just a cool video of some gameplay I took from an orbiting camera! Take a look :

Lighting Review

The lightning of High Ground VR has always been a little bit off. This is due to my lack of research into how the LWRP handles shadows really! This week, I got round to looking through it, and I think it paid off! The resulting ‘look’ really brings the game together!

Spells Help Screen

The UI I’ve gone for is a point-and-click billboard approach, and the player is surrounded by information boards (That can be turned off!) This week, I added the help board for the Spells in the game!

Small Fixes List

Just a bunch of small fixes and updates added during this sprint!

Enemy Aggression has been reviewed

Left Handedness book misrotation

Casting spells now happens from the end of the player’s finger

Colour of health bar starts blue rather than green

Fixes to the buttons on the book

What’s next?

Tower Upgrades are the only big feature left to add, and then it will be tweaking and updates before a BETA release! Stay tuned on twitter etc. for updates!

Thanks for Reading!

[jackgriffithsdev]

High Ground Devlog #12 - Pathfinding Overhaul

Hey everyone! Back again for another weekly update. I think it will be coming to the end of these over the next couple of weeks, as my focus moves away from development and onto the documentation and university hand-in! 

Handedness Considerations

High Ground VR has always had Left/Right handed options built in, however there wasn’t actually any way of swapping them! I’ve now added that functionality into the Main Menu, as well as improved the graphics of the buttons! 

Detachable Book

The book has always been on a bit of a strange angle for the player to use, so it made sense to make it detachable! The video below shows this off best, but it’s actually so much easier to use now! The option for the player to leave it in a more convenient place makes the whole thing a lot more accessible!

Improved Pathfinding!

No video for this one, so just take my word for it. Pathfinding is better now! The basic pathfinding I was using before was happening very inefficiently, and caused the enemies to sometimes get stuck around corners in strange ways, and that doesn’t happen now!

As I said in the intro, there will probably only be 1 or 2 of these updates left, as I get more into the final submission of this project! High Ground VR has been a big challenge for me, a lot of new ideas and technologies I hadn’t used before. I think the outcome is beginning to look really good, and only a few more refinements are needed before it’s a playable title!

Thanks for Reading!

[jackgriffithsdev]

High Ground Devlog #11 - Overall Stylistic Updates

This week was set aside originally to respond to usability testing, however due to the coronavirus crisis It has been really difficult to get any feedback. If you’re interested in helping (whether you have VR or not!) please register here.

Instead, I’ve been focusing this week on all of the small little changes that improve the overall style of the game. These are little tasks that I have been pushing back due to their low priority, and the fact this week was a bit quiet meant it was a perfect time to do them!

New Assets

Up until this point, the Gem and Enemy Spawns have been just coloured cubes on the game board. It was about time this changed, so that It was clearer which was which. I’ve replaced the gem with, well, a gem. The enemy spawn is a floating sphere, which, as you’ll see in the next section, has some really cool animations. The hex has also had a bit of a revamp, it’s been textured to have dirt on the bottom, and a faint hexagonal texture on the top.

Enemy Spawn Animations

The animations of the enemy spawn make it really obvious that they’re active parts of the game board with a purpose. They float ominously whilst idle, and when they spawn an enemy, they frantically spin. This helps the player notice when an enemy is spawned, as they can see it spinning from above.

Main Menu Updates

Last week I added a point-and-click main menu to the game, so this week I decided to make some additions! The player can now mute music and spot effects, and also added a toggle on the info screens!

Usability Testing

As a result of the current pandemic, I’m really struggling to get feedback on my project due to the lack of VR headsets available to fellow students. If you have an interest in being involved in Usability Testing/BETA testing for High Ground VR, please fill in the following form and I will get in contact with you! (You do not need a headset to help!)

https://forms.gle/xtt7dzYg75s1Tyzx7

Thanks for Reading!

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[jackgriffithsdev]

High Ground Devlog #10 - Usability Preparation

This week has been preparing the project itself for usability testing, including adding new menus and various other UX fixes! I’ve also made a start on my application to the Viveport store, by creating some graphics!

New Main Menu

My previous main menu consisted of pillars that rose out of the floor with buttons on to replay/quit the game. Since then, I realized that the design doesn’t allow for too much in the way of extra data/scores to be clearly visible. Since then, I’ve replaced the menu with a billboard in front of the player, on which they can interact with the buttons by using the laser pointer. 

UX Fixes

These fixes wouldn’t be too obvious to show by video, so here’s a list of every small fix added this week to improve the user experience of the game : 

Rumble on the controllers

Selected Spells Preview

Improvements to the Tank Enemy

Feedback on shooting a spell into the floor

Changes to building placement rules

Viveport Store Listing

Sadly, I can’t provide a link or image of the current progress of the viveport listing until I’ve submitted a build. I can however show some of the finalized graphics that are going to be visible on the page!

Usability Testing

As a result of the current pandemic, I’m really struggling to get feedback on my project due to the lack of VR headsets available to fellow students. If you have an interest in being involved in Usability Testing/BETA testing for High Ground VR, please fill in the following form and I will get in contact with you!

https://forms.gle/xtt7dzYg75s1Tyzx7

Thanks for Reading!

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[jackgriffithsdev]

High Ground Devlog #9 - UI Improvements

So this week has been thrown a bit up in the air since I’ve had to move home from University about 2 months early. Luckily, I’ve managed to setup a decent work-space and continue developing High Ground VR!

Defensive Walls

Up until this point, the defensive walls have very much just been a cube in the ground. This week, I spent some time creating a model in MagicaVoxel that I could use for the walls. This took the form of a small tower, and then a connector that I spawn in between each of the towers to create the wall! 

Improved User Interface

The User Interface has also had a massive upgrade this week. I’ve improved the functionality of the buttons, and made it much clearer which button the player has selected as they can only choose one at a time. Below the video is a comparison of the layout before and after this week, which definitely shows a big improvement.

Improved Sound Effects

The sound effects in the game were relatively unbalanced, and the AudioManager I had written to play the sounds wasn’t functioning as I wanted it to. Therefore, this week I had a complete overhaul of the audio in the project. Many of the effects remained the same, but I’ve added quite a few for things like User Interface buttons and a little “WOO” when the units win a battle.

Next week I’m going to be looking into setting up some sort of BETA list of people interested in testing my project. This will be ran through the testing functionality available through the viveport store.

I’ll make sure to tweet any updates I have regarding this, so make sure to follow me if you’re interested in taking part in the BETA! https://twitter.com/JackDotGriff

Thanks for Reading!

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[jackgriffithsdev]

High Ground Devlog #8 - Game Refinement

This week has mainly been the refinement of gameplay before user testing comes towards the end of this week. Lots of little numbers being changed and the game being tested, but the few updates I did manage to make were really cool! 

Tank Enemies

I’ve added some really cool huge enemies to the game! These are a rare spawn, but when they do, they force the player to teleport down and use their zapping power to destroy them! They’re really aggressive too, so they lead the way through all of the players buildings! 

Enemy variety is really important to tower defense games, so this is a really good step in the right direction!

Finalized Models

The final models for the barracks and mine have been made and implemented. I’ve decided on keeping with the MagicaVoxel models, as they’re very quick to make, colour and modify later on.

Smarter Enemies

Up until now the enemies have been rather simple, following very basic rules on their behavior. Now, they’re much smarter in their behavior. Enemies have an ‘aggressive’ value, which determines the chance they’ll deviate from the path you developed for them and break through your walls to get to the gem. This is increased if they’re forced to wait in a line for a while, meaning the player should try and prevent developing a queue as much as possible. 

Audio Enhancements

Lots of enhancements to audio, including little “WOOHOO” and “YIPEE” sounds when they win a battle. I’ll get a video of all of these out soon, as they’re yet to be properly balanced in the next sprint! 

This week has been strange mix of different little tasks, but as this project slowly comes to a close that was bound to happen!

Thanks for Reading!

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[jackgriffithsdev]

High Ground Devlog #7 - Spell Attacks

I didn’t quite realize how much I had done this week until it came to writing about it all, so this one might end up being long again! Oops. 

Building Health Bars

Since the start of this project I’ve had this really cool idea of showing the health of buildings on the hex they’re placed on, as an outline. I wasn’t quite sure how It would work, but I knew I needed it. It turns out, a simple world space canvas with a hexagonal image on it looks really good! With some fading color to show when it’s at a dangerously low health, I get this really effective result :

Physical Buttons + Main Menu

I never had a set idea for the main menu of this game. Originally, I wanted an actual virtual board game box which the player had to wrestle open in order to play the game. This idea quickly grew out of scope. I wouldn’t have been able to create the box art required, and also the unreliability of the Unity physics system with that sort of mechanic would probably ruin the experience. 

 I knew I didn’t want to have more than one scene in the game, as scene transitions in VR can be disorienting. So, I’ve since chosen the style you can see in the video below. Pillars rise up from beneath the clouds which holds the buttons for quitting and restarting the game.

New Units

Up until now I’ve been using capsules as units and rectangles and swords, and it was about time I updated them. I took inspiration from classic board game pieces, and the addition of the swords and medieval style helmets looks really good! I got some footage of combat to show it off in full action!

Spells

The spells system was a big part of the final project, some way for the user to jump in during the attack phase and prevent an enemy from destroying your gem!  This also marks the final mechanic to be added to the project, so everything from now is refinement, balancing, bug fixes and new models. The spells available to the player are :

Regular Attack (Deal damage to all units on a hex, or teleport down and point at a particular one to deal damage to just that one)

Slow Down Units (Slow down that specific group of units. This WILL slow them down in battle too, but for now only works with movement)

Speed Up Units (Speeds up the unit, this is more helpful to zap your own units with as it will mean they are faster in battle, however you could also use it if an enemy is being too slow)

All of the attacks, as you can see in the video, work in both top down and FPS view, with the angle of the laser changing for more intuitive inputs.

Next week I’m going to be spending a lot of time reviewing the enemies ‘intelligence’. This will mean the enemies become better at navigating around a player’s traps. I’ve also noticed that a lot of players testing end up reaching level 6-ish and by that point they have a completely impenetrable defence. So, to combat this, I’m going to look deeper into creating aggressive enemies that will go and create new paths, and possibly avoid the paths that players create.

Thanks for Reading!

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High Ground Devlog #6 - Aggressive Enemies

This week has seen a really big change in mechanics, that completely changed how gameplay now pans out. Also, I’ve taken part in Jamfuser 2020 this week, which I’ll talk more about towards the bottom!

Gameplay Demo

Being as I have a full gameplay loop ready now, I was able to do some usability testing on how It played out. The results from this are waiting to be analysed, but I’ve recorded a full demo video of the game at this point for future reference, I think it’s looking really good!

Aggressive Enemies

The completely game changing mechanic is that enemies become aggressive now! They can either spawn angry, or they become angry through being delayed on their route! This will mean that they’re more likely to navigate through your defensive walls, and the player is soon going to have some ways to deal with them! This video is a really good demo of this happening!

Game Jam

Completely non-High-Ground related, but me and a few coursemates took part in Jamfuser 2020 over the weekend. We made a really fun game called Apoca-leaps, which is available here if you wanted to check it out! 

That’s it for this week! Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to be finishing all of the core game mechanics so It’s ready for final usability testing!

[jackgriffithsdev]

High Ground Devlog #5 - Prototype Assets

So I’ve only been able to work for 2 days this week, but in those 2 days I actually managed to get quite a lot done! No videos this week though, as there haven’t been any functionality updates

Better Assets

I’ve been working with some pretty rudimentary building assets up until now, so I thought I’d make some really quick prototypes of the final models over in MagicaVoxel. These will be much better for the upcoming usability testing, as the buildings purpose will be much clearer!

Audio Effects

I’ve also spent this week creating a central audio manager for the project, which handles all of the audio calls for combat, building placement and various other effects. I’m spending the coming week doing a bit more refinement of this system, so I’m hoping to get a better video of it all working by the end of this week!

Thank you!

I’ve also spent a while going through all of the previously implemented gameplay, ensuring everything works both while the player is large and small. Having the ability to shrink onto the game board is a core mechanic of my final result, so I need to make sure that system remains fully functional!

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High Ground Devlog #4 - Gameplay Development

A LOT of progress has been made this week, and High Ground VR is really starting to look like a playable product! Most of the core gameplay elements are now prototyped, ready for refinement and balancing. 

Move On Up

The first step on getting enemies built into the project, movement. This uses the previously implemented pathfinding, and uses a little fleshy-looking cylinder to represent an enemy moving from their spawn towards the central gem. There are some really nice moments in this demo where you can see fleshy-cylinder-enemies queuing to get onto a hex, and politely letting other fleshy-cylinder-enemies go infront of them.

Go Your Own Way

Further developing on the previous mechanic, this video shows the pathfinding at work. It shows an enemy heading towards the center, being blocked off by a wall, and then navigating around it. Intelligent enemies is the core focus of this project, so this is a really good start! The plan is eventually to have enemies that are more aggressive than others (based on a variety of gameplay factors), and those aggressive enemies are more likely to destroy your defenses than navigate around them.

I Couldn’t Think Of A Punny Title For This One

COMBAT! I’ve been pondering on how the combat in High Ground would work for quite a while, and I finally decided on the system you can see in the demo below. Enemies approach your units, and a ‘battle’ is initiated. After a few swings of their weapons they pathetically fall over, and then your barracks will respawn more. It’s going to take quite a long time to get some balanced gameplay out of this system, however I’m really pleased with how it’s currently working! The blue lines show the intended paths of the enemies, and then the red lines show enemies in combat : 

Thank you for reading! I’m really happy with how High Ground VR is coming together, and it’s looking more and more hopeful that I will be able to properly release it towards the end of development! I mainly have visual-based tasks planned for next week, so prepare for lots of nice screenshots! Make sure to checkout the links below for updates on the project!

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[jackgriffithsdev]

High Ground Devlog #3 - Core Gameplay Mechanics

This has been a very technical week, as I’ve been building a lot of the systems behind pathfinding and placing buildings. These systems will come into their own next sprint as I further develop the project!

Send Me On My Way

This was possibly the biggest task of this week, as It involved indexing all of the hexagons within the grid, and developing an A* pathfinding algorithm that worked efficiently across a hexagon grid. As you can see in the images below, the pathfinding was originally really bad at finding the optimal route from point A to B, often diverging really far from the path before getting back on track:

This video displays the Pathfinding working as intended, with the red blocks representing blocked nodes, and the blue line representing the chosen path:

Build Me Up Buttercup

Possibly the biggest element of the final gameplay is working! Players can choose buildings from a UI placed in their offhand, and place them on the board! This will later be updated with fancier models and animations, but the base layer of functionality is there ready for me to start developing gameplay! 

Rich Girl

Placed mines generate Gold! Placed barracks spawn units! Now that buildings actually do things, it’s actually starting to become clearer what the game will become. The barracks automatically space the units they spawn, so it would be easy enough to add upgrades later on down the line. Gold will eventually be used to buy buildings, and counted towards a players score at the end of a round! 

Thank you for reading! This project is really starting to come together, and it hopefully won’t be too long before I actually have some gameplay working. Make sure to checkout the links below for updates on the project!

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[jackgriffithsdev]

High Ground Devlog #2 - Game Board & Input Refinement

This week has been great, I’ve really managed to refine the base controls of the game, and i’ve really started to get an idea of the final gameplay. Let’s get into it!

Taking Control

I started this week by revisiting all of the previously implemented controls, and playing around with various button arrangements and gestures. I’ve decided the ability to scale the board up and down didn’t really play well with the controllers, and became more of a nuisance. The new controller layout features a HEAVY rotatable game board (for ease of placing buildings), and the ability to teleport down onto the board and move around it. I’ve also had a refactor of this code to ensure it’s as efficient as possible for VR!

Three’s a Cloud

A great tutorial, available here, taught me to use the Lightweight Render Pipeline and Shader Graph in Unity to make some really nice looking clouds! The video below show the diversity of the shader, where I can adapt the clouds to look like water, sand dunes or even an alien terrain! These clouds surround the player, really adding to the ‘god-like’ feel of playing High Ground.

Pocket Size

The next logical step was to add some models to my project, and attempt to get a scale on everything! This went much better than expected, with the desired effect being recreated very quickly, as visible in the video below. The height of the buildings is exactly what I wanted it to be, and the units are slightly smaller than the player, still giving that feel of power over them. When in ‘large’ mode, the little pieces look great! It is really starting to look like a little game board.

Get on my level!

Alongside with the creation of the map and prototype assets, I really wanted to get an idea of how a level of High Ground would play out. For that reason, I created this template on photoshop, filling it in with an example of how a level will play out. It’s quite obvious from the template below that there is a lot of room for board customization, and if desired, a player could really get into the tactics of creating efficient paths to trap enemies. 

That’s all folks!

Next week, onto actually creating the path finding system and unit navigation, so that I can get some gameplay going! Remember to stay tuned on Twitter for more updates! 

[jackgriffithsdev]

High Ground Devlog #1 - VR Inputs

It’s time to properly start development on my honors project! I’ve got a lot of development ahead of me, so I thought I’d start off easy with learning the basics behind VR development in unity.

The basic interactions with my project consisted of 3 elements:

- Scale the game board up and down, and turn it around

- Teleport onto the game board to become tiny and join the action

- Pointing and clicking different sections of a game board to teleport around them

I’ve managed to prototype all of these interactions, they’re still a bit buggy but it’s good enough for now! Next step is getting the hex terrain generator into the project!

I’ve mainly been working on setting up documentation and creating the specification for this project, so it’s been a bit slow on development, much more to come next week though!

[jackgriffithsdev]

18th December | Sprint 12

Things are definitely starting to wrap up around here, so we’re mainly just working on some last minute bits and bobs to make the game feel a little more polished and complete for our main deadline on the 8th Jan.

Tutorial

At most of our usability session to date, we’ve had little reference sheets with the controls on as well as just hanging around to remind people how to play the game. To help with this we’ve added a simple text tutorial at the start of the game to guide players through the basic movement controls.

Warnings

We’ve added a couple of game wide systems recently, just to more easily convey information to the player. The first of these is a warnings system, to alert the player of something negative or dangerous.

Alerts

The alerts are a similar system to the warnings, being accessible from everywhere in the game, which will provide the player with updates. An example of this could be when you pick up an item.

New Game Page

And finally - we’ve added a game page to the website for HYPERTEC! It will contain some footage, and links out to the presskit and other documentation once that’s all set up. Here’s a link

http://backyardgiant.co.uk/hypertec.html

Extras!

Couple extra bits:

Enemies are now more readily available

Engines now spawn with the correct stats based on faction

New asteroid models added

Until next time!

[jackgriffithsdev]

11th December | Sprint 11

Bit late on the update this week - but we’ve still been working hard! With usability sessions happening and getting ready for the holidays, it’s certainly been busy.

Damage Smoke and Hit Explosions

In order to make the combat feel a little more satisfying, and to be able to keep track of which enemies you’ve hit so far, we added little smoke trails to enemies. As they take more health damage, more smoke is emitted from them! This felt great almost immediately, so we knew we were onto something good. As a part of this, we also added little explosions to the bullet collisions to add a little more weight.

Friendly Ships

Users reported that when you chose a faction, it wasn’t necessarily clear when they came across that faction in the world. To counter this we have added a different colour of hit marker. In addition when you take a shot, you receive a warning that you are firing on friendlies. Finally the normal lock on system is turned off which makes it harder to shoot at them.

Quest Beacon

Rather than just starting the player off with the quest, or having a white cube give the quest, we now have a nice model for the quest beacon and a prompt that details the quest.

Player Tracker

One of the coolest things worked on this week was a display to see where players were travelling and where they were fighting. Each line represents a specific user (we had 4 set up during the usability session) and each red cube signifies a location where the player took damage. This system was live updating, and should provide some really interesting insights into players movement!

Until next time!

[jackgriffithsdev]

4th December | Sprint 10

The 4th was a big deadline for us - with lots of bug fixes and feature additions. It marks the end of our MVP phase so at this point all the major parts of the game are in place and functional, ready for expansion.

First off, we’ve got models for all three faction ships now! I’ll include a video for each and also write up a bit of lore for each one.

ASC (Automated Support and Construction)

An automated fleet of construction vehicles, these weaponized workhorses can deal damage as well as they can take it.

The ASC is a fleet of largely unmanned construction vessels. They are built to be the workhorse in any major operation, ferrying components and tools to and from the build site. Most vessels are built so they do not require a human occupant, although most have space for a pilot if required. A small group of rebels who worked for ASC have set up the remaining fleet of construction vehicles to fortify certain sectors and equipped them with weapons to fend off any newcomers.

Exploratory Coalition

Specialising in exploration and long distance travel, these customised ships are a favourite for quick transport and mapping. Rapid movement and fast fire rates are their most notable qualities.

The ExCo is a coming together of initially volunteers and then hired individuals who owned vessels capable of long distance travel and communication. Their main purpose was mapping and long distance exploration, but due to their individual nature it was a fairly natural progression to them becoming rapid messengers and small item fast delivery. 

There is a great deal of customisation that happens within the bounds of the ExCo, since ships that are heavily modified will generally function better for the specific purpose and therefore get more contracts. People take great pride in their ships. Trucker culture!

Syndicate of Trade and Pay

Money, power, the syndicate collects it all. Their ships are sleek, refined and definitely not cheap. Their weaponry focuses on efficient and accurate long range combat.

The syndicate started as a collection of individuals who were the leaders of the various trade companies who operated under the HYPERTEC banner. As the companies grew in power and wealth, they took a larger and larger interest in controlling the companies wealth and wealth distribution. The leading individuals in the syndicate are in constant turmoil, each replacing the next as they are deemed ineffective or outdated. For the most part their arrangements worked for the company and people were content, however over time the deals became less favourable. The syndicate was part of the main reason for the rift in the company.

Their ships are sleek and clean, representative of their wealth.

Inventory Updates

The inventory has seen a couple of improvements here - the main two being new thumbnails to better show off the weapon you’re equipping and a nice material preview for whatever item you’re currently looking at.

Combat Overview

Here’s a look at combat as it stands right now - notice the new health bars centralised so they’re easier to see. 

Aaand that’s the video limit! There’s a couple more bits like improved environment generation and a whole pile of bug fixes. 

Until next week!