Survive - fourth update (last one of day1)

Okay. I'm done for today. Worked for about 10 hours on this thing today and now I'm absolutely destroyed... Still not anywhere near done though.

So, whats working?

The basic controlls are in and most of the behaviour is working just fine.
The overall server structure is fairly polished for a 1-day game and is relatively easy to use.
Object state syncronisation works pretty much flawlessly thanks to unitys amazing networkView class and the ai is optimised to run smoothly even with a large number of enemies on the map.

What's missing?

Attacks aren't in yet, neither are objects or items. Objectives get tracked, but aren't displayed or even calculated propperly.
The map currently only contains a single test building and is waaaay to small for actual gameplay. Some more buildings, houses and other cover objects would be nice.
A detection system that stops rendering enemies that aren't in sight of your team. Still not really sure if I like that feature since it removes controll from the player, but I think it will help the atmosphere and pacing.
Propper ui. Each character has a whole bunch of different stats but unfortunately you barely notice any of it because nothing is displayed in the ui. Very annying.
Doors, weapon pickups, quest items for objectives and an overall object class that is powerfull enough to normalize all these things into a single pipeline.
And of course a win screen that shows up when a level is finished.

Nevertheless I would call this first day a success. Did I make a strategy game in a single day? Nope! But I got pretty close.
Here is the final build of the day. More to come soon-ish.

>>>PLAY<<<

Survive - third update

okidoki. Finished movement and zombie behaviour for now. Currently avoiding them might be a little bit too tricky but I'm not quite sure how to fix that yet.
I also did some UI code and got totally side tracked. Spent almost an hour fixing the health bar color lerp function while I could have used that time to fix some actual gameplay... dough!

Oh well, at least I got some fancy health bars now. After looking at the time (It's 10:00pm already) I realized that I might not be able to get a playable prototype finished today which really really sucks. I got 2 more gamebreaking problems on my todo list before I can really show it off. The biggest one beeing the player assignment. I think I may have to rework my start screen and the network class if I really want it to work. Once that is done the rest should be fairly easy to fix tough.

This is how my current to do list looks like:

ToDo:

group movement

startGame gets only set from server

slot system for players

server can choose seed

Survive - second update

Another 2 hours have passed and I finally added some basic input. You can send your units around and get detected by the zombies now. In fact the movement system is pretty close to beeing done, just 2 more minor features and it should be stable enough for the prototype release.
Next up is some more server code. I really need to finish the character state syncronisation. Then I'll have another go at the zombie behaviour and finish the movement system. Then I'll finally upload a first webPlayer build.
But first I'm gonna make me a Goulash. (You guys really spell that as GOULash... Like... Goul? Thats freakin weired!)

Survive - first update

Put about 3 hours of work into this now and got lots of good, clean code done.
The basic server - client structure is fully functional. So is the reaction from zombie to survivor. You can move the camera and every character in the game has a whole bunch of tracked stats. Next up are some first interactions like selecting units and moving them around.

I'll also have a look at a simple avoidance system so that the characters don't walk into walls constantly. It's not gonna be as nice as actual pathfinding but definitley better then nothing. Performance is gonna be an iffy topic anyway since I want a whole bunch of zombies on the map. So the simpler the movement system the better.

I also got a little sidetracked and added a simple cutscene mechanic. And it turned out pretty darn cool I must say.

Next I'll have a little break and then try to get some actual gameplay going later. Until then.

New Mini-Project: Survive

Can I make a simple strategy game prototype in a single day? Not sure to be honest, but let's find out!

The concept is fairly simple and something I tried to do numerous times before. It's a multiplayer coop strategy game in which you controll a group of individuals trying to escape a zombie outbreak. Think of Left4Dead meets Commandos2. Is it gonna work? No clue. But I'll keep you up to date. Let's do this!

First 3 Steps:
- basic netcode, sync characters and random values over the network
- basic class structure and behaviour functions for survivors and zombies
- basic input & ui

Options Rant

Today I took a break from code optimization and instead toyed around with Unity's QuallitySettings class for a proper options menu.

Now, if you have ever played a commercial Unity game before you may have noticed the striking lack of ingame options in almost all of them. I always thought this was due to some weird rendering limitation of the engine that wouldn't allow changing render settings while the game is running. But as it turns out it's apparently only due to laziness of the developers or their inability to look at the freakin API. Because the ingame QualitySettings class is freakin awesome!

It's super easy to use with a whole bunch of service functions and excellent documentation. And so I made one of the best option menus I've seen in a unity game in just about an hour. Crazy, isn't it?

Quit slacking Unity game devs!

Okay, enough ranting. I still don't have anything new to show as most of the code is still broken. In the most current version all I can do is running around and shooting, every other feature got removed or broke during the optimization, which is kinda frustrating. But I think it will be worth it once it's done.

That's it for today, stay tuned.

May I introduce...

Spend a ridiculous time reworking almost every part of the code today and therefore managed to break pretty much every feature in that damn thing. Whoo me! But still, the code is coming along quite nicely and I expect being done with most of the basic code refinements by the end of the week. New features that are finally gonna be possible thanks to all the cleaner code are things like weapon customization, different types of bullets that have more ways to react with their surroundings, and most notably freakin sounds!

I also did 2 other major things today:

First, I finally made a little gameplay video showing off a new level that is coming up in the next stable build of the game.

And Second, I thought of a title. No, don't worry, it's not going to be called Doomed or anything lame like that. Instead say hallo to

Updates and Upgrades

Got some pretty insane progress done this week, especially today evening. Over the last few days I've been constantly adding new maps and refining old ones, adding a whole bunch of new gameplay features and mechanics. But the more features I got done the more annoying the terrible place holder code from the first couple of days became. It took longer and longer to fiddle in new systems so I finally sat down today and rewrote most of the old broken ugly code and replaced it with new, even more broken, but slightly less ugly code! Yeaaay me! I'll need a couple more days to iron out all of the old and new little kinks in the systems, but then the overall gameplay should be fairly stable. I finally starting putting in some proper trigger and event based map design system which will hopefully make a lot more dynamic maps possible in the near future. I also pretty much rewrote the gun code from scratch. The new code is about half as long, twice as fast, way less buggy and super easy to mod. Now thats what I call improvement. Booya!

One feature I haven't really touched yet, and I probably won't until prototype version 0.1 is enemy AI. Currently the AI, (or the behaviour code to be more percice, as the therm AI is about as meaningful as calling a toaster high end hardware) is as basic as it gets: If they see you, they shoot. AI is not going to be a big part of the project anyway since I much prefer having dozens if not hundreds of enemies in a map instead of only a couple of smart asses. Though a basic movement system at the very least, inspired by the behaviour mechanics from Doom or Quake would be nice. It's not that these systems should be all that difficult to code, but it will probably require a whole lot of testing to see how much the frame rate suffers from constant AI check raycasting.

Still don't have any pictures or videos yet, but once I got a stable version, I'll take some time to document the whole thing and make some neat gameplay videos and screenshots.

Until then...

current project: let's make a single player fps that doesn't suck

Modern singleplayer shooters kinda suck. There are exeptions of course, but qualities like weapon balancing, level design and pacing get more and more left behind and are replaced with shinier graphics and turret sections.
There have been a couple of decent oldschool-throwback-wannabees lately, trying to recreate the good ol' days before singleplayer fps became different variations of running along nice looking set pieces, with loads of cut scenes and occasional sections of shooting brown people.
And while some of them are far from beeing bad games, they still don't manage to be any more fun then a game that is more then 25 years old now, would run on a toaster and rhymes with broom.

Could please get some AAA dev off their arse and make a decent fps campagne for once? No? Well fine, I guess I have to do it my self then. Say hallo to... well...

uhm...

Okay, I don't actually have a name for it yet, I usually just call it "my game thing". But there is already a lot of action in it. With explosions, big guns and demons from hell trying to eat your face off (right after bruning it to a crisp with rocket launchers).

I'll post a little more about ideas, concepts and progress in the future but for now I just want to leave this little link here:

>>>play me<<<

There you can check out the current version of the game after about 2 weeks of development. More to come soon-ish-ish.