Flock of Dogs is Made in MA

I've been sick! Apparently, a doctor said, this has been a bad week [for the flu, maybe?]. Anyway, fever's all done, some runny nose/cough issue stuff. Enough about my body! Excited to get back to work! I'm taking Flock of Dogs to an event!

Made In MA at PAX East 2017 Party

Supposed to have 800-1000 attendees. I'm not exactly clear on how close to PAX it is. You have to buy tickets to this event, $15, but I don't think you need to have a PAX badge to get in, which is nice, since those are much pricier and sold out. Come on by!!!!!!!

I had to provide a 50 word description:

Flock of Dogs is a 2D co-op game for 2-8 players. With your brother and sister dogriders, and a flying whale, navigate treacherous, procedurally generated skies. Fight on dogback, man stations aboard the whale, locate oases to rehydrate, absorb solar energy, teach your dogs new tricks, and defeat airborne monstrosities.

And a title:

Flock of Dogs

And a website:

http://flockofdogs.weebly.com/ 

And a table fee:

$75 (Supposed to include 5 free passes tho! Great deal for me.)

And a high-res logo:

Not sure about my logo. It's functional for now. Couldn't decide between male or female rider for a long time. Maybe it would just be better to use the name? Or start promoting the acronym FOD? But I don't have a custom font and I didn't have a lot of time, especially since I was sick.

In terms of work on the game, I was able to do a small amount of work getting the building spawn system to work with the new map and river generating system. That's exciting.

Mesh Mosh

I followed a tutorial on the Unity tutorial page to generate caves using cellular automata, the marching squares algorithm, and the flood fill algorithm. This is to make a map structure to encapsulate each level. I can toggle how dense the map fills with walls vs open area, effectively changing it from small chambers and passages to a wide open cavern. Then I  fed in the points along my river, made with Bézier curves, into the passage carving functions to carve out the river, effectively making the cavern/cave structure like a canyon the river is passing through. Within each level, the canyon may split and have separate areas for interesting encounters. Here's some screen shots of the process where I turned off all the other special environmental objects, like watering holes, shops, the castle, the bath house, the dam, etc.

If you can't tell, in the bottom left photo, I forgot to turn off a trigger to spawn a bunch of dudes, so a lot of them just appeared inside the walls or wherever. The bottom right is from the same instance of the game, so you can kinda get a sense of scale.

The other big reason I did this was that creating a mesh is way more optimal than having the million game objects for environment that I had before. I've actually turned the river into a mesh as well, because the river was a bunch of smaller objects laid along the curve. One mesh will be much better. The trouble that has caused is needing to calculate the direction of the current based on the location of the flying units and also the visuals need reworking. I didn't absolutely love the overlapping ellipses, but I thought it was minimalistically pretty.

I also changed the blog to Blog of Flock of Dogs and blogofflockofdogs.blogspot.com, because it's funny. And now, when I type into the address bar "flo..." it autocompletes to my website and if I type in "blo..." it will, I imagine soon, autocomplete to this blog.

Hurray, I Made a Website

flockofdogs.weebly.com

You probably came from the website to the blog, so that's not surprise for you.

Anyway, a big motivation for creating the website was the possibility of getting to show my game at PAX East. That's a very big deal. There will be tens of thousands of attendees and all the major gaming press. And it wouldn't be acceptable to still be using art stolen from the internet from other games, lol. I really enjoyed drawing all my creatures and creating their digital versions. I definitely improved in using GIMP, which is the biggest, open source competitor with Photoshop. Probably a good skill to have, if I'm to continue in this business.

An big ancillary benefit was the snappy summary written on the home page of the website. It took a fair amount of effort and several friends to help me pack in all the things I wanted to communicate in those two paragraphs. However, now I have a sweet elevator pitch. I had been able to explain my game to you in 5 minutes, but I needed the 5 second version and the 30 second version too. If I do manage to get into PAX, I'll definitely be giving lots of explanations of what my game is and what sets it apart. I'll probably want a lot of other things too, so I'll need to reread some articles on how to prepare for exhibiting your game at a convention.

Meanwhile, as a reward for coming to my blog, here are some secret sprites that I haven't revealed anywhere else yet (well, the tri-legged creature is in the big poster screenshot on the website).

New Sprites

Ok! So I'm ready to start showing my game to the world. You know, literally. Because I'm no longer using any Pokemon, Angry Birds, Space Invader, or Adventure Time sprites, so like...I could actually try to create promotional material now. I'm super excited to make gifs.

(I had stopped posting, because it seemed better to spend the time on the game, rather than typing out stuff here. The posts here felt pretty redundant to the notes I regularly write/draw and, since I never told anyone about this blog, I wasn't getting any feedback.)

Here's some new players that I drew (and removed some detail, because at the typical game zoom level, the details muddied the image...might need more simplification, pending game testing):

Cool, huh? Unfortunately, my work flow for producing these guys is pretty terrible. Drawing is drawing, then I take photos on my iPhone, then I use GIMP's edge detection, tweak brightness/contrast, increase threshold level, add transparency,  I've watched livestreams and seen tutorials where people have fancier softare or hardware (those Wacam tablets look wonderful), and it looks like magic. Anyway, if I get to the point where I'm committing to making animations, I'll either want to collaborate with an artist or get a tablet/stylus thing. 

I've drawn some creatures, mostly at home, but sometimes during Boston FIG talks. So here's some of them after editing in GIMP along with a big duck drawn by my friend, Sarah May (oh and the big tongue dude in the top right was drawn by Ted Larson):

Weekly Update #8

Well, first major slip up in my weekly updates. Oh well. Let's not beat us up over it.

Here some copy pasta from my commit notes:
- Made basic sector map with responsive nodes. Made finish line with curtains.

- Fixed explosion collision detection. Moved gm reference initializations to Start functions. Used SceneManager.activeSceneChanged to get singleton pattern working for gm. Created GameLord to resolve singleton issue. Placed watering holes with Guassian distributed water drops. Placed road blocks. Linked sector map with river level. Removed bird carrying item ability. Created dynamite item for destroying roadblocks. Made bullets die after 5s. Created DamAndWall prefab, scripts. Currently, nothing actually destroys gate. Moved finishLine to child of this. Created shop signs and spread them around.

- Made distance check (haven't tested it). Fixed Leech (test drag removal?). Changed claw controls. Created rock with gem spawns. Created Nuker, Freezer, Lake, Boss, Sunset, SpecialBullet, BrickWall, Nuke, Shade, Target Dot.

- Fixed up shop, added displays. Increasead spawn above rate. Rotated barrier angle. Fixed camera man, issue with bubbles not clamping to screen. Changed up powerbird. Issue with spawner not spawning dots for slice. Made harpoon Die calls used. Started working on Lance.

- Actiavting tetros and river dots piece by piece (and deactivating prev section). Started red shells item. Created sunset mechanic. Hatchling no longer inherits from item. Started lance pick up. Fixed rock gem spawning. Making hatchling survival easier.

So I have been working, just not updating. From testing with friends, there's plenty of bugs. I think the contant rate of spawning enemies isn't good enouggh alone. Want to create waves or surges of enemies or maybe triggers that then release a number of enemies. These sort of monster traps could be placed near watering holes or deposits (rock groupings that spawn the gems). Or near shops. Considering making finer gradation between shops, like repair shop, item shop,...maybe that's it. I will probably lower the rate of constantly spawning enemies, so that alone isn't difficult to deal with. Considering making physical traps for big bird, like big bird gets walled in and can't leave area until all enemies within are killed. Not sure.

I'm getting tempted to go down the new rogeulike designer pitfall path of wanting to include everything. Lately, wanting to make neutral enemies and AI v AI combat, as well as a sort of prayer system. The motivation for the prayer system is a solution to the game state of 0 greyhounds, but a funcional big bird. Maybe just deus ex machina and a stork flies by with baby greyhounds. idk.

I think I'm happy with my 3 current bosses, but need to test them. I want to have more on foot sections, but don't have great ideas and also there's issues with camera and some on foot and some flying players.

Weekly Update #7

Created an enemy spawn mechanic which picks a random entry in a list of enemies and spawns just above or to the side of the camera every 2 seconds. This was my basic way of pacing the game. Don't know why there's still fps dips into the 50s every once in a while. Sometimes, it's consistently in the 80s or 90s. Usually, high 60s. Don't have experience using tools to go about optimizing.

Made the tail station work properly with the cockpit station, including boosting and tweaking speed variables. Needs to be tested with two people playing now. Saturday night I'm having people over to play games, so it's sort of a deadline for me to get some more stuff done by then.

WeeklyUpdate #6

I think these posts should be something different that a summary of my repo commits, but summarizing them seems necessary for commentary. I'm going to try copy/pasting.

- Made Spiraler.cs and Bomber.cs. Changed up how Flyer.cs and AI targeting works. Made solar panels and water hose work with Black Bird.

- Made medicine item. Made harpoon reeling in from dock work. Now it detaches when dismounting bird. Started tump baby boss and created accompanying homing missile with capped velocity. Created blood slider and straightforward big bird hp.

So I've done all this work to get around BigBird.cs and BigBirdManager.cs and instead have Carrier.cs and CarrierManager.cs. Hopefully, when multiplayer is implemented, this work will have been worth it. Other than the broadsides, and removal of the coop, I think I've gotten back to full functionality plus more from the Kestrel version of Big Bird.

I believe I'm getting bogged down with wanting to create new mechanics or tweak existing ones. The current storage system and number displays seems bad and awkward with their flipping. The tail rider station doesn't function like it should. Creating the lance item and balloon shield and getting the electric tether and power bird and net and healing and overheating/freezing player mechanic are all things that I would want to do next, but I believe I need to work on game structure. Tweak the rhythm of enemy spawning, created some reasons to explore off the river, get the store system working, get a few basic bosses, and get the level progression working. Then play test and add in new mechanics.

Anyway, one solid day of work was basically all I got done this week. Some of my new sounds are annoying. 

Peace out.