Saturday 13 December 2014

Balancing Mini Game - v0.1 to v0.7

I want to start getting these things done and out of the way. I feel the time for research is over and it is time we move onto implementation. As such I started work on one of the 5 minigames today. I intend to finish it (code-wise) by tomorrow and have the next one started by then. I am aiming to have two minigames finished by Tuesday. This is because I want to show them to Dr.Claus who is waiting to play some demos. And generally time will be running short, pretty soon.

Balancing Mini Game summary:
First proposed by our mentor as something we might be able to think about doing, I took the idea and ran with it. After telling the team about it (here), I started design and implementation of the minigame.

The minigame will have the player facing a planet (or moon at the moment), as if they were the probe or orbiter. They would have to look at the planet/moon and take photographs to send back to earth.

During this mission, a piece or debris or a mini asteroid hits the probe/orbiter and knocks off one of the buoys responsible for balancing it.

The player now needs to balance the probe/orbiter back to the 'sweet spot' to gather the required images. The player will orbit along a rough axis (halfway between X and Y) and need to use the game pad or keyboard to rectify themselves back towards the planet.

While doing so however, due to the damage suffered the  player may veer off balance once again. This can be rectified using the Thrust feature (A button on a pad or W on keyboard). This will allow the player to regain control of the probe/orbiter and continue attempting to rectify the balance.

Current version - 0.7 looks like this:

Example of current build

The above image is what the mini game starts off with. It will remain in a paused state until any key is pressed (either keyboard or pad). Once done, the game will start and the UI is be hidden away. 

It looks a bit rough at the minute as I threw together the UI in photoshop in a few minutes. The skybox is a placeholder from Luke at the moment and BegoƱa's Tritan moon model looks pretty sweet but is also not completely done yet.

Balancing Mini Game Changelist:

Change List across versions
Full source code is avaiable in my Github repository which can be found here.

Work left to be done:
  • Add raycast to moon (Basically how I intent to make a 'sweet spot')
  • Create UI to inform users they should use Thrust.
  • Create immersing UI
  • Add timer until victory
  • Add defeat once rotation meets X position
  • Replace placeholder assets
  • Integrate and test on Occulus Rift
That's it for tonight!
Cheers,
Rob

Tuesday 9 December 2014

Game Jam over back to work

Well we finished our game jam on Monday and managed to submit a build with 5 minutes to spare! Talk about cutting it close.


During the game jam I learnt how to use the new UI system and also how to attach scripts to the UI's new GUI system. Can't say I liked this new GUI system at first but the more I used it the more I saw how I could save time using it.



Game Jam entry is here - the build has a few bugs, but it's stable at least.








Now to get back to work with the project!