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09/10/2023 – CYBERSURFER UPDATE

Posted on 09/10/2023 by Adam Lutton

Happy 11th birthday to the blog. It’s not that important of a milestone compared
to last year, but worth noting nonetheless.

But let’s get to the real news:



I did mention this partial rewrite in the last blog post as the last post took
so long to write (I was busy with stuff, not that the post was long) that some
of the work was done. But now I can get into more detail.

The hoverboard is now a model on top of a collider, an upright capsule collider
to be exact. Propulsion works in more or less the same way, but is currently
fully controlled by the player. Furthermore, in my last iteration of the
hoverboard, when turning, I had a part of the script that would animate the
board’s model to tilt it when moving, giving it a more believable look. I’m just
adding a smooth damp value to the model’s rotation based on the input. Here’s a
code snippet:

Vector3 newRot = hoverboardModel.transform.localRotation.eulerAngles;
if (grounded)
{
    newRot.z = Mathf.SmoothDampAngle(newRot.z, input.x * rollTurnRotAngle, ref rollRotVelocity, turnRotSeekSpeed);
    //newRot.x = Mathf.SmoothDampAngle(newRot.x, slopeAngle, ref pitchRotVelocity, 0.05f);
    newRot.y = Mathf.SmoothDampAngle(newRot.y, 180f + (input.x * yawTurnRotAngle), ref yawRotVelocity, turnRotSeekSpeed);

hoverboardModel.transform.SetLocalPositionAndRotation(hoverboardModel.transform.localPosition, Quaternion.Euler(Vector3.Lerp(hoverboardModel.transform.eulerAngles, newRot, playerTurnTorque * Time.deltaTime)));
}

(I’ve highlighted the code because it’s hard to see with the dark theme)
I’ve continued with that feature and made further additions to it, which gives
it a lot more of a snowboard turning look. That said, I’m not finished with it.

I played more games for research during the process of rewriting the code, and
one of the games I played was Extreme G Racing. An interesting thing to note
about the behaviour of that game is that the player has a very large turning
circle. So large in fact, that it is very difficult to get the player to face
the wrong direction as you’re more likely to collide into the sides than get the
vehicle to turn around on the track. I might change the behaviour to match that
at some point.

In regards to the physics, I do mention this in the video at the top: the
player’s gravity is relative to them and not the global value. This is set to
the normal of the surface they’re on. In theory, it helps keep the player
connected to the surface they’re on a lot better and gives me more flexibility
in terms of track design. Previously, I couldn’t create loops as the physics
driven system I had previously would break and push the player away from the
ground. And now I can make corkscrew and loop sections of track without issue.

Loop section. Corkscrew section.

I’m really looking forward to making some new tracks with these mechanics; it’s
certainly more interesting to look at than a flat track.

The big new thing is rails, and I didn’t really cover this in detail in the
video, so I’ll be going into more depth about building it now.

My first attempt at this new version of rails involved making rails in Blender
and then importing them into Unity, including even more CSV files with vertex
points, and lining them up. As you can imagine this got very tedious extremely
quickly and I began looking for alternatives.

Nothing to do with the text, I just thought this bug was funny.

I then updated Unity and began using its built-in spline tools to create the
rails. As I said in the video, this worked great. But then I tried to use it
with spline animate to have the player move on the things, and that’s where it
fell apart. The camera was a jittery mess and the whole thing wasn’t smooth at
all. So I deliberately made the splines linear instead of curves, then made a
script that got all the waypoints on the line and used Vector3.MoveTowards to
get the player to move along the rail path.

And it worked… Until I tried getting back on the rail to go in the opposite
direction. This is when the trouble began. I had to figure out what direction
the player was coming in from and their position on the rail. Plus some edge
cases on top of that. This led to a lot of if statements, which I am not too
happy with.

But as you can see, it did work. What came next was figuring out loop-de-loop
rail sections. Which required further code changes and even more pain.

As you can see, the biggest issue was keeping the player upright properly while
going through the loop. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a good solution for
that problem with the system I’ve built. Someone did suggest to me pointing them
up towards a point in the centre of the loop, but considering I’m going to
arbitrarily build and place these rails, it seems like a lot of work, plus even
more additional work if I edit anything thereafter.

I’ve been looking at the way other people and other games have built their rail
grinding stuff, and more recent things seem to be using something similar to the
spline animate system that the spline tools have built-in. So I may need to give
it another chance and perhaps that’ll solve the issue.

One thing I am mostly happy with is the rail switching mechanic.

This took a lot longer to figure out, but the solution is quite simple in
theory. When I’m on the rail and lean left or right, I shoot out a sphere cast
(Spherical raycast) within a certain range to the left or right of the player.
If it hits a rail, I then draw an arc from the player’s position to the hit
position (Note that I said hit position, not spline track position). If the
player then presses the jump button, I do a slerp using a sin wave to give it a
curved arc. Here’s the code for that slerp:

private IEnumerator MoveToNextRail(RailSplineScript nextRailScript, Vector3 hitPoint)
{
    float timer = 0;
    float step = jumpTime / linePoints; //Line points refers to the number of points on the arc being drawn. More points = smoother arc.
    int i = 0;
    float progress = 0;
    Vector3 startPos = transform.position;
    while (progress < 1) //Should be using time progress, not number increments
    {
         progress = timer / jumpTime;
         transform.position = Vector3.Slerp(startPos, hitPoint, progress) + (transform.up * (jumpHeight * Mathf.Sin(progress * Mathf.PI)));
         timer += Time.deltaTime;
         yield return null;
    }
    transform.position = hitPoint;
    currentRailScript = nextRailScript;
    CalculateAndSetRailPos(); //Sets up some stuff for the spline points system mentioned earlier
    onRail = true;
}

It works pretty well; it’s not the smoothest looking thing in the world, but it
does work. Although I suspect some of the issues with the smoothness have to do
with the camera, which I will probably fix soon anyway. Another issue is just
the positioning of the player themselves when they switch rails. They’re
off-centre. It is a problem that eventually corrects itself as they keep going
on the thing, but it is annoying.

But yeah, that’s the new stuff out of the way. As for improvements and what’s
next, well here’s a list:

 * Fix the camera on rails
 * Change the rail system again and see if I can get spline animate working
 * Create tracks using the spline tool, minimising Blender usage for level
   creation
 * Create some levels using all the existing tools and mechanics (Demo!)
 * New character animations
 * Better foot placement on the board
 * Overhaul the trick system

I’m probably giving myself a lot more work to do than I’d like, but hopefully it
works out. I really want this idea to work out. I’ve put so much time into it,
and it’s really fun to just move around.


WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

Well I did the WWII COD Marathon and it went alright. I gained some new
followers out of it and some of them have hopped back into chat and such since.
Wasn’t a massive gain, but whatever. The COD games I’ve never played before will
be mentioned in the year end “ADMAN’s Den” post along with my usual top 10s, but
I will say that I enjoyed WWII more than I thought I would, but it’s definitely
got some issues.

I do want to do a highlight video for it, but honestly, after looking through
the highlights for the first COD game, it’s very difficult to find clips that
are worth putting in a video. I could make a death counter video, but I don’t
think it would be that entertaining. So maybe what I’ll do is grab clips from
all the games and shove them into one video instead of doing a video per game.
More time spent in prep, but less time editing.

As I mentioned in the video at the top, Unity did something stupid, and now I’m
finally in a position where I’m thinking of changing engines. But I want to do a
video about the experience of learning new tools. However, since making the
video, I’ve come to realise just how busy I am with all the videos I need to
make and all the work that Cybersurfer still requires, and I think I might need
to delay the original timeframe I wanted to work on it.

On that note, Rotaction needs to be updated soon, or it’s going to be pulled
from the Google Play Store. Or at the very least, unavailable to download on
modern phones. It will continue to be available on Itch.io, so don’t worry
there. The deadline is November 1st, so I need to deal with that soon.

Another thing is back-porting the new hoverboard code into SandSurfer, and
changing it to be an actual sand surfing board without all the hoverboard stuff.
It’ll take some work, but hopefully it’ll be better than it currently is. But I
have no idea when I’ll get a chance to work on it.

But that’s your update. Sorry for the radio silence, but that’s just how it is
sometimes. I’ll probably post again once the demo is available for Demo Day. If
I can get it working by then. Till next time.

-Adam

Posted in Blog, Game Development, My Projects, Video Games


01/08/2023 – CYBERSURFER?

Posted on 01/08/2023 by Adam Lutton

It’s very early, but I need the feedback. This is Cybersurfer, a follow-up to my
GGJ game SICKHACKS.root.

I’m not gonna retread the same things that are in the video, you can watch it
yourself, but I do want to talk about what I want the game to be going forward
as well as some of the games I’m gonna be looking at or re-looking at.

But as I said, I’m not terribly happy with where the project is at the minute.
It plays OK, but it definitely feels like it’s lacking something. Plus the
physics driven hoverboard is now more of a hinderance as I look towards
different level design aspects. Specifically verticality. The game Distance as
well as Wipeout are my two points of reference in terms of what kind of level
design I want.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And here’s where I have to admit that I took too long writing this blog post
that everything in that video and previously written is now outdated.

Following the that video, I did another stream where I played a handful of games
and made notes about various aspects of them, and how they handled the same
problems I was having. It was a very informative stream and helped me realise
that I was trying to over design everything.

And now, as I’m writing this, the whole physics driven hoverboard system has
been scrapped. And the spline based system that I attempted to follow it with
has also been scrapped.

The new system is fairly simple, a player model on top of a collider acting as a
cushion of air. I’ve ditched the waypoint system, and instead I’m just letting
the player control their forward speed and turning themselves, and it’s working
out pretty well now. On top of that, I have a bit of rotation to the player
model when they turn and a sine wave to make the model bob up and down like
they’re on a hoverboard.

It’s a night and day difference and a definite improvement.

Next up is getting the player to stick to the track regardless of the
verticality of said track. I’m using Distance’s magnetism as a reference here.
My plan is just use a downward force while grounded, and magnetise the player to
surface once they get close enough. I suspect it’s going to be more difficult
than I’m envisioning though.


LEARNING TO RIG

I recently had a Twitch stream where I taught myself how to rig a robotic arm
model.

It’s a very basic model with some problems due to some of the ways I was trying
to rig it, but once I figured out the issues it was too late to re-do the model.
However, the animation side of things turned out alright.

The next stage of this is getting more familiar with IK stuff as well as other
bone constraint systems.


YOUTUBE CONTENT & FUTURE PLANS?

Demo Day 51 happened, and although I did not submit a demo, I did stream other
people’s demos and provided as much feedback as I could. Here’s the playlist. I
do want to get more content on to my channel as it would likely help my Twitch
performance, but it’s difficult to find the time to make stuff that would be
palettable.

YouTube’s algorithms prefer shorter videos, so uploading whole VODs would
probably be a bad idea, but I could cut down my playthroughs into highlights.
But requires time I just don’t really have, either to watch 30 to 60+ hour
playthroughs to find stuff worth putting it, or to find time to edit it down.
But I think I’m gonna be forced into doing it because I am at the absolute mercy
of the algorithm gods.

As for future plans, well it’s coming up to the 78th anniversary of the end of
WWII, and I want to commemorate it by playing through all of the WWII Call Of
Duty games. Those being COD 1-3, World At War, Finest Hour, Big Red One, and
WWII. I’ll probably using that stream as the experiment for creating highlights
for YouTube, alongside uploading the VODs of it, possibly. Either way, the
playthroughs will be available in my Twitch collections page as per usual.

That’s it for the time being. There’s probably more I’m forgetting to mention,
but I took so long in writing this blog post it’s better just to move on. I’ll
see you next time.

-Adam

Posted in Blog, Game Development, My Projects, Video Games


ADMAN’S DEN: JANUARY – JUNE 2023

Posted on 16/06/2023 by Adam Lutton

It’s that time a again, a full dive into most of the things I’ve been playing
and watching in the past six months. And as a reminder, I write this over a
period of months (Although in this one’s case about a week or so) and as such
the language may be a little disjointed in places.


METAL GEAR SOLID: PORTABLE OPS

Portable Ops is one of the few Metal Gear games I’ve never played. It takes
place post-MGS3 and has the player explore bases in South America.

Let’s get this out the way, I don’t like this game. The controls are terrible,
and don’t hold up at all. CQC is broken at times and grabbing enemies just
outright breaks at times. By default the game runs at 20FPS, but you can mod it
to be 60FPS.

The stamina system really limits your ability to explore levels, and is only
restored with rations. It’s designed this way because it wants you to switch
characters and place them throughout the level, which you need to do to
effectively recruit people. Unlike PeaceWalker and MGSV, if you want to recruit
people you need to knock them out and then drag them to a truck near the start
of the level. And if that sounds tedious, it is. But there is a way around it,
place your teammates at various points on the map and then drag the enemies to
them and then there’s a Codec number you can call that will auto-collect them.
It still sucks though.

But the thing that really gets my goat, is how uninspired the boss fights are.
They’re all bullet spongy shooting fests with no puzzle to it at all. And
they’re ruthless at doing damage to you. To make matters worse, you get thrown
into levels thinking they’re gonna be a sneaking mission, but then you get
thrown into a boss fight completely unprepared and with the wrong equipment.

Story-wise, it’s semi-interesting, but it’s also lacking the depth that
something like PeaceWalker would go on to improve on. The amount of voiced
dialogue is fairly minimal, but that’s not surprising considering it’s a PSP
game.

I’m still getting through it, more or less forcing myself through it, but I’ll
and finish it soon. I’m also streaming it, so keep an eye on the my Twitch
channel.


LIKE A DRAGON: ISHIN (KIWAMI)

Ishin has finally released in English. People are finally going to understand
why it’s so good. Or they would if it weren’t for the problems.

You play as Sakamoto Ryouma, who is a fairly famous historical figure in Japan
who was assassinated. In real history, he helped end the Edo period and bring in
the Meiji Restoration turning Japan into a modern empire. Well following the
events in this game, after the events in the beginning, he assumes the identity
of Saito Hajime (Who was a real Shinsengumi member) and joins the Shinsengumi in
order to find the culprit to the murder of his mentor.

The new visuals are nice for the most part, generally sharper. A lot of the
characters have been replaced with characters from Zero and 7, which actually
ends up spoiling a lot of stuff in the long run, but fun to see them
nonetheless.

Getting to do a lot of the side quests for the first time is great, there’s a
lot of ones I missed my first time through because of the language barrier, plus
a bunch of side activities like the second home things that I never touched in
my original playthrough. Plus I get some additional context for the stuff I did
previously see.

The card system from the underground dungeon segment from the original has been
greatly expanded upon and is now available in all battles. Although I like the
powers, the whole game has been rebalanced around them, and now battles feature
significantly more powerful enemies and are tougher overall as a result. Combat
in general is not as great as the original Ishin. It’s much slower and input lag
is prevalent, the latter byproduct of using Unreal Engine no doubt.

Other things they’ve changed is how much money you get from various activities
and the value of items that you pawn. They’ve definitely taken off a couple of
digits from a lot of items, especially the platinum plates that you win from the
gambling mini-games. It means there’s a lot more grinding for cash now. One
exploit, which is now patched, was that chicken races could be started without
actually spending your money. I used that to earn a considerable amount of cash,
but a day or two later the patch came in. But I got the sword upgrades I needed,
so no big deal I suppose. Leveling is also slower, but it’s not that big of a
problem as you can get items to boost that.

One last point on the visuals, some cutscenes have changed due to a difference
in particle effects. If I say “Bathhouse scene” you’ll know what I’m talking
about, and that specific scene is drastically worse than the original.

As negative as I might seem, I still like this game. I’m glad it finally came
out in English and I’m glad I got to see all the content I missed. But it is a
lesser version than the original PS4 version, and if you speak Japanese I would
recommend getting that version instead. You can watch my full playthrough here.


I EXPECT YOU TO DIE

Been a while since I had a VR game on one of these posts. “I Expect You To Die”
is an Escape Room style game where you play as a spy trying to thwart an
international conspiracy. It’s very slapstick though, which is appropriate for
VR. The opening song is fantastic too.



The puzzles are very entertaining, with multiple ways of solving them, and even
some different escape routes for some of them. A favourite level of mine was the
one where you’re in an underwater escape pod as various things start to break
and you have to react quickly to seal broken windows or stop fires. Plus there’s
a draw filled with grenades.

The puzzles definitely get harder as the game goes on, although I would chalk up
a lot of the difficulty to the hints being more subtle.

I had a great time with this, I might play the next two when I can afford them.
Also, I did stream this and you can watch the playthrough here.


VALKYRIE DRIVE -BHIKKHUNI-

I wouldn’t normally talk about games like this on the blog because I don’t want
people to think I’m some kind of degenerate, but there’s also not that many
games to talk about.

It’s about girls with a virus that causes them to turn into weapons, and the
best way of suppressing it is for them to beat the shit out of each other. It’s
from the same people as Senran Kagura.

PLOT and BACKSTORY are represented well, all the girls are well equipped in that
regard. But the actual plot is boring, and that’s mostly due to the characters.
They’re just boring. You’ve got two sisters who are closer than anyone should be
comfortable with, a stupidly powerful girl that the game hypes up a lot, a moody
girl that doesn’t like anyone, a tryhard, a rival to the powerful girl, and
finally a girl who just eats a lot and is 6 feet tall.

There’s nothing really special about any of them and their personalities don’t
really develop at all. I’m trying to follow the story, but I feel like skipping
the cutscenes more often than not because they’re long and visually
uninteresting.

Combat is decent, but I’d say about half of the characters are not fun to play.
Rinka and Viola play fairly well, but Mana is fucking awful. She uses a bow and
her melee attacks are pathetic, but her ranged attacks are slow and do little
damage. She is dreadful to play and I loathe the levels that require her.

But the general combat revolves around air juggling for the most part. You
charge your jump to dash forward and then use a launch move to get them in the
air and then charge jump again to chase after them in a way that stuns them, or
press launch again to close the gap with a different combo.

Customisation is a pretty big thing in these types of games of course, lots of
outfits you can have the girls wear. But it seems fairly limited here, with a
lot of items likely being behind bonus modes. And if you want to use a
character’s outfit on someone else, you have to do a mini-game to boost your
bond with them, and then you can use it. The process is a bit tedious.

I’m gonna try and finish it, but it’s something I play when I have free time in
the morning.


LOST PLANET

I’ve always had a weird interest in the original Lost Planet. There’s just
something about fighting giant monsters to gather a key resource that you need
to live is just kinda interesting to me. I don’t really care about the plot,
it’s something about the main character wanting to kill the monsters because
they killed his dad or something, plus a bunch of other
colonisation/terraforming related shenanigans.

But who cares about that shit, shooting giant monsters with mechs is pretty fun.
I like how the game just lets you jump in and out of them at will and you can
swap out the weapons they’re using. The only downside is that they don’t really
last all that long, and for a couple of boss fights they’re required, but it
needs up being more difficult than other fights.

You get a grappling hook too, but it’s not like Just Cause. You can’t just
grapple everything and go anywhere. The levels are quite linear, so the amount
of places they’ll let you grapple to is pretty minimal, but you can use it on
enemies and dropkick them on arrival. So that’s neat.

The biggest gripe with the game are the checkpoints, and no, the little stations
you mash a button for are not checkpoints. Not always anyway. The actual
checkpoints are fairly far apart from each other, often more than 5 minutes
apart. It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the game’s habit of randomly
killing you.

But I’ll end on a nice note, the performance is fantastic. I hit the max FPS of
120 pretty much constantly. The benchmark mode with the unlocked FPS would hit
near enough 300 FPS. Good stuff, but it’s also a game from 2006, so probably not
unexpected.


GHOSTWIRE: TOKYO

Well this was a disappointment. Well, it’s not completely terrible, but there’s
a lot I don’t like. But let’s get the biggest complaint out the way; the game is
boring. Just fucking dull. The majority of the game is so by-the-book Ubisoft
open world design that it’s painful. The map is full of icons and there’s a crap
load of pointless collectables. And none of that stuff is even remotely scary or
unnerving.

The best way for me to describe the game is that it’s a lesser Far Cry 3 with
Yokai and Ghosts. But the combat is worse, much worse, and very repetitive. The
level of combat variety you can expect is 3 different elemental powers and a few
different ways of shooting them out your hand. But all the enemies are damage
sponges, so expect to be fighting them a Hell of a lot.

The boss fights are a joke, extremely easy fights that usually rely on the
single mechanic to defeat them. While I was playing I had a “Is that it?”
reaction to a couple of them.

As for the story, everyone but the player gets spirited away in some fog and the
bad guy kidnaps the main character’s sister. And I kinda stopped caring beyond
that. I’m not sure what about made me stop giving a shit, but I honestly
couldn’t give less of a damn if I tried.

Last thing I’ll complain about, the performance isn’t great. My PC is getting on
in years admittedly, but even on the lowest of settings with FSR enabled,
keeping the game above 60FPS is near impossible. Indoor environments
notwithstanding, being out the city leads to a lot stuttering in and out of
combat and general playability is pretty bad. The FoV also requires a mod to be
changed.

But let’s talk about some of the good stuff to end on. There are some
interesting segments, but they are short and not super in-depth. Most of them
take place inside building and such, with a lot of non-Euclidean geometry and
creepy imagery oozing from the walls.

There’s a reoccurring environment of a labyrinth city, where streets and stuff
go off in all directions and you have to navigate it using the limited and
pretty poor platforming mechanics. But visually it’s quite interesting.

Photo mode can be fun at least.

The second memorable section, which if I remember correctly is completely
optional, is a section inside of a high school. You’re basically helping out the
ghosts of an occult club solve a mystery of why crazy things are happening
around a school. The dark corridors, echoing sounds, and the lack of escape
routes really makes the section way scarier than anything else in the game.

To top it off, there’s a anatomical model that follows you around during a part
of the section and you have to keep looking at it to stop it from chasing you.
Probably the most interesting mechanic the game offers.

The bad news is that the whole section lasts for about an hour and there’s
nothing else like it for the rest of the game.

Overall, disappointing and under-delivers on the idea that it could have been. I
kinda wish I had played it on Game Pass instead of buying it. You can watch my
full playthrough here.


HI-FI RUSH

From one Tango Gameworks game to another, except this one is actually good and
not disappointing in the slightest.

It’s a rhythm-based action game where you fight robots and bosses in-time to the
music. And the key thing here is, everything is synced up to the music. Attacks,
jumps, everything. That sounds like a pain in the arse, but they’ve taken a
different approach with it. Your attacks are timed with the music, regardless of
whether you are. But you are graded on whether or not you can keep the timing
yourself. The timing windows are pretty damn big however, and on top of that
there are a bunch of accessibility options if you need them. Although I didn’t.

The combat works very well, there’s a good amount of combos plus you can call in
a teammate for some additional attacks. Plus you get a grappling hook, which is
always nice as it lets you close the distance. The battle rankings are bit off
at times, if you don’t rely on teammates to help perform special attacks or get
really good at parrying, your rank will never really get above a B. It’s not a
big deal however.

The boss fights are definitely a highlight, barring the first and last fights,
they all focus on different mechanics or present themselves in a non-standard
way. For one fight, you’re combating a giant animal mech, and then after
damaging it enough, the pilot gets out and you can damage them normally, plus
some additional bits like some laser dodging. Then another boss is just the two
of you walking in a circle talking and a beat memorisation sequence pops up and
you have to beat that correctly to continue the conversation.

I understood this reference.

If I was going to complain about the combat, I might give grief about some of
the enemies. Especially the samurai type of enemies. Their attacks are instant
and it’s hard to pay attention to when they’re going to attack while you’re
surrounded by other enemies. Plus, their Sequence Attack is longest and most
difficult of any enemy type in the game. That said, the bird type enemy is also
a pain the backside because it relies heavily on getting your parries right.

For my last few points, the visuals and music. They’re both fantastic.
Unfortunately due to the fact I was streaming the game, I had to play with
Streamer Mode on, which removed all the licensed music. A shame, but the
non-licensed music is still really damn good. The visuals are pretty much
on-point. The characters are very expressive, and the cartoon look really pops
on the screen with text-effects and various other VFX that does a substantial
job selling the style.

Easily one of my favourite games of the year. You can watch my full playthrough
here.


WO LONG: FALLEN DYNASTY

Imagine Nioh but in China. That’s the basic premise behind Wo Long, albeit with
some streamlining.

Team Ninja of course doing some great work when it comes to the combat here.
It’s snappy and mostly responsive. They’ve doubled-down on parrying, goes for a
Sekiro-style reflect system. More or less every attack can be reflected away,
staggering the enemy and buffing you, and once it reaches a certain point you
can stagger them and deliver a critical hit.

It’s a good system for the most part, but the reflection timing is a bit whack,
I often getting mistimed or it doesn’t work at all. On top of all that, each
weapon has martial arts assigned to it, which is a special attack. The spirit
animal system returns, but works very differently now. Some provide attacks and
others produce an area of effect healing pool. An interesting change. The
archery and magic mechanics are also present and work very similarly to Nioh.

The photo mode seems neat.

The loot, leveling, and other systems are much more streamlined compared to
Nioh. I don’t mind it so much because there was a lot of shit to do Nioh, so
trimming it back a bit so I can focus on the gameplay more than the menus is
preferable to me. On that note, you no longer go back to a hub menu between
missions now and just start the next mission immediately, but you can travel to
and from side missions from the “bonfire” equivalents and it will remember your
progress on the main mission when you come back. It’s a nice improvement, but it
also means I need to remember to occasionally check for side missions.

Whereas the enemies in Nioh were based on Japanese mythology, Wo Long is of
course based on Chinese mythology. Unfortunately, I’m nowhere as familiar with
the monster types, but some of them are really grotesque. Stuff like multiple
headed birds, mutated tigers, and so on.

My last point is on the morale system. Defeating enemies, finding flag points,
and even doing parries on bosses special attacks all raise a morale meter. This
meter determines how easy or difficult an enemy will be. What this means in real
terms is, the more exploring you do of a level, the more damage you’ll do to the
boss at the end of it. This can be a bit of a double-edged sword though, as it
can make some bosses an absolute joke. You also have AI NPCs you can recruit to
help in the levels which also greatly lessen the difficulty. However, I don’t
mind this so much. It helps the pacing a lot.

My character.

I’m still quite early with the game, I’m struggling to find the time to sit down
and play it. But considering I’m playing it through Game Pass, I really should
get my time with it before it gets rotated out.


PLANET OF LANA

Bit of a tailend entry here, I literally played it the week of me trying to
finish and publish this post. It’s puzzle platformer much in the style of LIMBO
and Inside. The player character’s village gets abducted by what seems to be
alien robots, and the player’s goal is to get his village back. Along the way
you meet a four-legged black blob with weird powers.

I didn’t take too many screenshots, but I can assure you it’s a very pretty
game. It’s a mix of drawn art and 3D models, blended together really well. A lot
of colour too, with a good consideration towards of the colour pallette. The
animations of the enemy robots are also very well done. The sound design is
quite strong too, with some excellent atmospheric sounds.

It’s a fairly short game, so keep that in mind if you’re thinking of buying it.
I got it off Game Pass alongside other stuff, so I’m less bothered. You can see
my full playthrough here.


OTHER STUFF I PLAYED:


ROLLERDROME

Jet Set Radio with guns and also an arena shooter. The gameplay is pretty solid,
pulling off tricks is fun and it flows well once you get the hang of it. But it
might be a little fiddly at first. And the art style is great too.


GRIMGRIMOIRE: ONCEMORE

A remake of an early Vanillaware game. If you’re familiar with them, you should
already know that you’re going to greeted by a very rich art style. That said,
the gameplay was not what I was expecting. At its core, it’s a tower defence
game with resource and unit management, but you play against AI that is also
managing its own towers and resources. So it’s basically a MOBA without the hero
characters. I’ll keep chipping at it, but I would have preferred this game on PC
rather than PS4.


HENRY STICKMIN COLLECTION

I saw gameplay of this game a while back when a bunch of VTubers were playing it
and got curious. It harkens back to an era of Flash games that I haven’t thought
about in years. It’s got some pretty good comedy, and a lot of memes from the
2000s up to more recent years. A lot of the fail states are hilarious, and some
of the options that you think would be illogical end up being the right choice
for the puzzle. It does have some severe technical problems though, it crashed
an alarming amount of times for me, which is a shame. Otherwise, I really
enjoyed it.


MIDNIGHT FIGHT EXPRESS

Moderately enjoyable brawler. Takes a lot from the Batman games in terms of
combat, and a tiny bit of Yakuza. Lots of parrying, picking up and using
weapons, etc. Standard stuff. I did change the control scheme because what it’s
set to by default isn’t great. I did find the combat to be repetitive after a
while. There’s a good amount of character customisation, but requires the player
to complete challenges to get the best stuff, but you have to replay the levels
to get information on what those challenges are.



The game generates .gifs for some of your more “Interesting moments” while
playing, but it my experience, it mostly just records fuck ups or nothing
particularly special.




PRODEUS

I’m having a hard time calling this a “Boomer Shooter”. It doesn’t feel retro.
Some weapons have Aim Down Sight mechanics, there’s mid-level checkpoints, plus
a generally modern feel. It’s pixelated look is the only old looking thing about
it. The gore is pretty good, you basically paint the walls red, which helps with
navigation a lot. I say that because the levels are very similar looking and
there’s a lack of colour contrast or even colour variation in general. My last
point is on the weapons, they sound good, but I think their very plain. Not much
creativity so far. You get a pistol, a couple of shotguns, a rocket launcher,
and some kind of rail gun. They’re not bad, but it’s pretty standard. DOOM
Eternal managed to provide some alternative versions of its arsenal, especially
its Super-Shotgun having a grappling hook. There’s nothing like that here so
far.


SLAYERS X: TERMINAL AFTERMATH: VENGEANCE OF THE SLAYER

This is related to another game called Hypnospace Outlaw, which I haven’t
played. This is another old-school styled shooter, similar to Duke3D. I’ll be
honest, it’s trying to look like shit and it succeeds. But it is also just kind
of shit. It’s a boring game. The weapons are creative at least. You get a
shotgun that fires glass shards and a crossbow that throws cans of explosive
sludge. I’m not gonna keep playing this.


TOUHOU LUNA NIGHTS

Another late entry on to this blog post. I should start by saying that I know
nothing about the Touhou games and characters. My friend knows a bit about the
series, so I generally chat to him about characters in this. Anyway, you play as
a maid named Sakuya who has time stopping powers and it’s a Metroidvania type of
game. The platforming isn’t easy, there’s a lot of stuff that can damage you and
there are even flying enemies that refuse to die that can interfere with your
platforming. Enemy variety is pretty good though. You don’t get any new main
weapons, but you get a few abilities that use up MP. And finally the boss fights
are very damn difficult, but my understanding is that’s pretty standard for a
Touhou game.


DISTANCE

I played this for research for one of my projects, but it has been on my backlog
for quite a period of time. It’s similar to Trackmania where you’re a car on a
track with checkpoints, but then it adds weird horror elements and a story into
the mix. Well that, and a bunch of track hazards and a focus on doing acrobatics
in a car. I had fun with it though, and got a good amount of ideas for the game
I’m working on.


ANIME CORNER:


TOMO-CHAN WA ONNANOKO!

Quite a while ago now, the manga for this was reasonably popular. Then several
hiatuses and the ending happened, and everyone more or less forgot about it;
barring a handful of nutters demanding an anime for it. Well someone must have
listened to them, because here we are. And you know what? It’s actually a pretty
good adaptation. The animation has some dodgy bits here and there, but the
characters are still fun and the voice acting is well done. Rie Takahashi does a
good job as Tomo.

This is also a rare adaptation where it tells the whole story, and even improves
the ending. In the manga it’s a very sudden single page affair, but here it pads
it out a bit and improves both the context and the timing. Honestly, if you
never read the manga for it originally, give it a shot. Hell, watch it even if
you did, it’s a pretty good time. Misuzu is still great.


NIER:AUTOMATA VER1.1A

Now this is a weird one. Automata was already a strange game with odd side
stories and anecdotes. The anime doubles-down on that and adds even more,
including adapting the manga chapters that are a prequel for A2 and explain her
backstory. 2B looks excellent in 2D and it’s telling the story in a very
interesting way. Unfortunately, only 7 episodes have aired and is currently on
hiatus.


KAMINAKI SEKAI NO KAMISAMA KATSUDOU

I don’t like Isekai… But, this show, really fucking interesting. Main character
is the son of a cult leader and is sacrificed to the cult’s god. While he’s in a
process of drowning, he asks to be reincarnated into a world where gods don’t
exist. And so he does. The show has an interesting world, and some of the worst
3DCGI I’ve seen. But you know what? I don’t care. The show is absolutely
hilarious, and it seems like the animators know it. They’ve got no budget and
they don’t care. They’ll tell entire scenes in pixel art and still frames and
it’ll get the point across just fine. I’d recommend giving it a look if you’re a
fan of “So bad, it’s good” anime.


OTHER THINGS?


THREADS

Jesus Christ, this movie is unnerving. It’s an extremely pessimistic view on
Britain’s precautions and reaction to nuclear war, and shows the consequences
thereof. Even for a movie from the 80s, the practical effects hold up quite
well. My understanding is that Sheffield council gave them free-range to go to
town on a street they were looking to demolish anyway. And they did. There’s
images of destroyed houses, the whole street on fire, and so on. The make-up for
people suffering from burns and radiation is also very well made. And that’s
just from the nuke going off.

The rest of the film covers having to live life in a country basically sent back
to the Victorian times, with little to no electricity, limited food, no fuel for
cars or other machines, etc. That aspect, watching the world go to pot, makes me
really uncomfortable. I ended up looking up an episode of a show called QED
called “A Guide To Armageddon”, which is predecessor to this film and goes over
the government’s nuclear war strategy and describes in detail why it’s in
adequate. And now I want to see an even older film called “The War Game”, which
is very similar to Threads, but was never aired on television back when it was
originally made.

I cannot stop thinking about the things I saw in this film. Very few films have
ever unsettled me like this.

Right, that’s it from me until December/January. GOTY is gonna be interesting
this year, that’s for sure. And normal blog posts will resume soon.

ADMAN



Posted in Anime, Blog, The Den, Video Games


04/05/2023 – DEMO DAY 50

Posted on 04/05/2023 by Adam Lutton
Sand Surfer Prototype by ADMAN

I haven’t made a post in a while, but I’m back, and with a new demo for Sand
Surfer. There’s been a few changes to it, mostly focusing on the player
character and smoothing out all of the movement and playability of it.

The bow now has proper animations, and a better aiming system. The movement
feels a lot better. Jumping has been fixed. The player can now slide by
crouching while running, and so on.

Considering that I don’t get anywhere near enough time I would like to actually
work on this thing, I’d say the progress is somewhat decent. But now it’s going
back on the back burner so I can work on “CyberSurfer”, a derivative of
SICKHACKS.root, my game from Global Game Jam earlier this year.

CyberSurfer will be my next main game project, and I’m gonna try and really get
this one out into the mainstream more. Not sure how, but I’ll probably have to
start shilling much harder.

In other news, my shotgun asset pack was rejected from the Unity asset store and
I’ve yet to receive any reply to my request for more information. However, I
have decided to sell it anyway on other storefronts.

Low Poly 4K Textured Shotguns by ADMAN

It’s on Itch.io (Link above) as well as my Ko-Fi Store. I will try to expand on
the Unity asset when I can and re-submit it when I’ve done that, but there’s
only so much I can do.

But while I’m here, I’ll explain why it was rejected; it was “Too Simple”. No
elaboration on that point whatsoever. Didn’t tell me what I needed to add or
what was unsatisfactory. Companies do this shit a lot these days and it’s been
driving me mad. Vagueness. Deliberately refusing to provide detail or specifics
and then using that as justification to reject, ban, or otherwise punish
customers and developers.

I don’t like it, and you’re seeing it a lot. Throw in power-tripping jackasses
without even a modicum of personal responsibility to not abuse it or use
rational thought to understand what people are actually saying, and the whole
thing gets worse. Ever had to deal with shitty forum moderators? While they got
a significant promotion and are now ruining the Internet at large.

Anyway, my ranting aside, you can now use those shotguns in your game if you
want to.

Next up, I put out a new Blender/Unity tutorial.



I’m cooking up another one on Skyboxes and after that, I’ll be making a tutorial
on materials from Blender into Unity in both URP and HDRP.

Outside of game dev and other projects, I went to Belfast for the first time in
3 years. It’s changed a bit, a lot of the shops are different. I had Yakitori
for the first time, there was Japanese fast food place that did it, although I’d
struggle to call it fast food as it took quite a while to come out, I almost
finished my meal by the time my friend got his. But if I went back, I’d probably
get some of the larger items like the Katsu curry bowl.

While I was in Belfast, I had a list of things I wanted to get. The first item
was a new backpack, my old one has had a hole in it for some time (Which I did
patch up pretty well) but I decided that I should replace it. Got a nice one
from a surplus store. Next on my list was a Swiss Army Knife. I was intending to
get one when I turned 18, but I never got around to it, but I have one now. It’s
quite stiff getting some of the tools out. The knife is sharp, very sharp, as
the cuts on my hands currently might suggest.

The last thing on my list was straight razor, which I forgot about. So instead I
went to CeX and got some more Xbox games for my collection. Dead Or Alive 3 and
Call Of Duty: Finest Hour are the two big ones, plus the game for the 4th Harry
Potter book. I’m trying to get a full collection of those games, but it’s gonna
take a while, and likely get expensive. I also bought some anime, Haibane Renmei
and 5cm Per Second.

And for the actual reason I went to Belfast: I saw the Mario film. It’s OK. It’s
a kids movie and it’s fairly inoffensive. My only issue with it is Peach being
overly “Kick-ass”, to the point where I wonder what her character arc is even
supposed to be. Bowser’s maddening love of her gets a bit weird too, but that
might just be Jack Black’s portrayal. Not that I have anything against the man.

That’s it for now. Reminder that I stream on Twitch most days of the week during
daytime hours, so check that out. Till next time.

-Adam

Posted in Blog, Game Development, My Projects, Video Games


28/03/2023 – TWEAKING THINGS

Posted on 28/03/2023 by Adam Lutton

Let’s start with a minor update on Sand Surfer.

I’ve spent the last couple of week tweaking and changing how the hoverboard
works inside the debugging level I made for SICKHACKS.root for testing stuff.
The biggest change comes from the camera, I’ve replaced the fixed camera with a
free look camera so you can rotate around the player, with additional
adjustments to fix the camera bounicess.

The board handling isn’t that much different. The board now rotates a bit as you
turn, and the physics have been adjusted slightly. I did do some other
experimenting with different ways of producing the hoverboard effect. One
involved putting the board on top of a couple of sphere colliders and another
involved using wheel colliders. The latter was terrible, and the former worked
in a sense, but still felt bad, especially when turning. So I’m sticking with
the physics driven system.

Next thing to work on is gonna be the archery and general player movement. This
project is gonna be a long one.

Next up, an update on those guns.

Lever action reload animation.

The guns are done. The animations are made, the materials are made, and they’ve
been exported as Unity assets and general .FBX models. Unfortunately I have to
wait for Unity to approve the asset pack before I can promote it as available.
But the pages for Itch and Ko-Fi are itching to be made public. So as soon as
they’re ready, I’ll post here about it.

I’m pretty bloody happy with how these turned out and I hope folks make some
interesting stuff with them.

And lastly, an update on SICKHACKS.root.

SICKHACKS.root by ADMAN

There is a new update, v007. It is not a James Bond reference, it really is the
7th build of this game I’ve made. This is the last update, and it’s pretty
substantial.

The board handling has been redone and now feels a lot more hoverboard like.
Level 1’s colliders have been changed so you can’t get out of the level easily
now. The camera system has been tweaked. And finally the player collider has
been slightly reduced in size so that there’s less random fails.

I AM NEVER TOUCHING THIS PROJECT AGAIN

But that is not the end of the story. I am working on a new project under the
name “Cyber Surfer Prototype” that takes all the ideas I’ve been working on with
that game, and making it into something more worthwhile. It’s gonna be awhile
before I get to work on it as Sand Surfer is my current priority until Demo Day
50 is over.

That’s everything for the time being. Again, I’ll make a post once those gun
assets are available. I’m also planning a trip to Belfast soon, which will be
the first time I’ve been there since 2020. 3 Goddamn years.

Till next time.

-Adam

Posted in Blog, Game Development, My Projects, Video Games


07/03/2023 – CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT

Posted on 07/03/2023 by Adam Lutton

Here I am again. I guess I’ll fill you all in on the things I’m working on.

Remember 7DFPS? The game jam I made a game for back in December? I’d forgive you
for forgetting, the game I made was utterly terrible. However, there was one
aspect of it I thought I could do something more with and that was the guns.

The models themselves were made and rigged by a friend of mine, but I did the
materials and animated them. But I figured it would be a waste to have these
guns made and not use them for other things, but I’m not really in a rush to
make another FPS, so I figured I should release the assets… For a price.

 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 

I’ve redone all the materials, a lot more detail and wearing added. The model
UVs are now way less of a mess, meaning much better texture maps to use for
Unity’s materials. The next stage of these at the minute is re-doing the
animations. A lot of the data was lost, so I need to either try and re-import
them from the old files or remake them from scratch.

UPDATE: Three of the guns have finished animations now.

Not fully sure where I’m gonna be selling these, Blender Market, Itch, Unity
Asset Store, and my Ko-Fi page are all viable options. Possibly all of them at
once. They should be available near the end of this month, keep an eye out.

“How’s the side project?” is something you’re probably thinking of asking.

A small taste

Well, I’ve been making a bit of progress. I’m juggling my time between it and
tweaking SICKHACKS.root so it’s not quite as far along as I would have liked.
But you can run around, shoot a bow, and ride a hoverboard. Which is like half
of what I want from the gameplay side of things.

Actually, GGJ helped me figure out a lot of the problems with the game, like how
to properly separate the collision and animation stuff from the aiming target,
which was a source of a lot of my woes with this project for the past couple
months. The bow stuff needs so much more work, it’s a surprisingly complex
animation when you consider that the arrow has to go from the hand to its place
on the bow, and then disabling that when the arrow is shot, which is actually
just an instanced object being shot out.

The hoverboard isn’t great. It’s quite floaty in the air and the collisions
aren’t very precise. I’ve dropped through the level more than once. I have a few
ideas of how to fix it, but I’m concerned that Unity’s physics system will break
it some more.

There’s a demo if you want to play it, but it’s very, very basic. You can check
it out below.

Sand Surfer Prototype by ADMAN

Now I’ve mentioned it a couple of times now, but I have made some small tweaks
and changes to SICKHACKS.root.

The most serious of issues were FPS dependant movement where you would move
slower at lower FPS or if there was an FPS drop and the camera jitter as the
player would move down the track on the first level. Some fairly simple fixes.
The original movement code didn’t use delta time so it heavily affected by the
FPS. As for the latter, well I replaced the transform.LookAt code with some
Slerp code instead and that seemed to help a lot. However, it is still affects
the downward trajectory of the player, but I’m working on stuff that should
address this issue.

On that note, I’m experimenting with different methods of turning the player
towards the track waypoints. I’ve managed to create a system of turning the
player via torque and allowing the physics to do its job. It does somewhat work
in my prototyping level, but I haven’t fully sent it full the ringer yet with
different terrain types, but that’s probably the next phase. But once I get the
game to that point, I’m gonna make a decision about whether or not I’m gonna
continue with this game.

Check out the updated version here:

SICKHACKS.root by ADMAN

As a last point on this, I finally finished the technical(-ish) video on the
game, so give that a watch if you want.



It’s not the best video in the world, but it covers some of the stuff I wanted
to talk about. It’s harder to make a video in that format than I thought. I
eventually settled for reading a script with what I wanted to say and then
mushing together the clips that are related to it. I think next time I’ll write
the script first along with notes on footage I need and then edit it that way.

I’m not done making videos by the way. I have at least two or three more videos
I could make from things I learnt from making SICKHACKS.root, especially on the
Blender side. I’ve got about a dozen or so ideas for Blender related videos as
well as Unity stuff.

Blender tutorials are going to be rough for me because I’m not super experienced
with it, but I’ve gotten alarmingly decent with the shader material tools and
there’s a few things I couldn’t find info on that I ended up having to learn how
to make, like the sunset skybox in SICKHACKS.root, which is a cube map. Not only
did I have to learn how to make the visual effect, I had to figure out how to
get it on a cube map. So that’s probably the next video, among many others.

Now Sand Surfer is a side project, and it will stay a side project, and I need a
new main project. I have been thinking of taking SICKHACKS.root (I’m getting
really sick of writing this title out fully everytime) and turning it into a
full game (With a new name, obviously). But that is likely going to be a very
heavy project for me, from design, to building, and developing. It’s gonna be a
lot of work, especially as a one-man-band. I really want to make more of it
though, it’s just fun to play.

Another project I’ve been thinking of doing (Or even going back to) is
Rotaction. Specifically making a sequel to it or updating it. I really want to
re-do the enemy spawning code because the game is a bit bland after a while,
there were also enemy types I never got to implement properly and I want to have
another shot at them. Plus, I figured out a way to do multiplayer, but that
almost certainly requires a sequel, not an update. But I do need to fix the
phone version because the controls are pretty buggered and controller support
doesn’t function correctly.

I’ve got a lot to think about, but for the time being, I’m just gonna get done
what I can.

Right, I’m not sure how long it will be before the next post, and I’m not gonna
attempt to guess, but I’ll see you next time.

-Adam



Posted in Blog, Game Development, Game Jam, My Projects, Video Games


GLOBAL GAME JAM 2023: SICKHACKS.ROOT

Posted on 10/02/2023 by Adam Lutton
SICKHACKS.root by ADMAN

Global Game Jam happened again, and this year’s theme was “Roots”. I started
pretty early on this one, basically the day after the theme announcement, which
happened on the 28th of January. To be honest, the theme kinda stumped me a bit
at first, partly because I was doing some prep work prior to the jam that was
focused on a hoverboard mechanic.


A small test of the hoverboard stuff.

Eventually, myself and my friend struggled so much for ideas that we just looked
up the definition of “Roots” to if there was anything that would give us any
inspiration. And I happened to stumble across the following:

> ROOT
> COMPUTING: A user account with full and unrestricted access to a system.

Putting 2 and 2 together, I suggested making a hoverboard game in cyberspace.

First downhill test.

Early on the idea was to have a player constantly go forward down a track,
avoiding obstacles. That was a pretty general core plan. Problem one: downhill
movement. As you can see in the video above, it kinda works but it’s slow and
stutters a lot. Furthermore, the original turning code from the previous
prototype would go against the constant downward trajectory I was looking for.
But more importantly, the track I made wasn’t straight, so the constant forward
force I was applying would send the player off the track soon after.

There was one solution I knew would work well enough to keep the player on
track, and that was to place waypoints along the surface of the track and aim
the player along those, while maintaining a forward force in relation to their
rotation.

My first implementation was pretty horrible. A lot of stuttering movement and
the player curving into the waypoints excessively hard, killing the speed and
handling. My first implementation relied on rotating the player’s forward using
Vector3.RotateTowards(). After some changes, I switched it to
Transform.LookAt(), and that worked significantly better. But there was still a
problem. In the original test, from the video above, the board would match the
downward slope of the map and match the slopes on the side. With the new
implementation, the downward slope is matched, but now the player stays upright
when on the sides. There’s also still the issue of the player turning into the
waypoints themselves, but it’s pretty rare.

The curved/uneven map used in the first level ended up being a real pain for me,
partly due to the restrictions I placed on myself. The waypoint system was just
the first problem, the second issue was scaling. Simply put, importing the level
directly from blender was too damn small so I had to scale it up, and then
rotate it a bit. But when it came to placing objects on it, that was just a
crapshoot. Every obstacle on the first level is placed and rotated by hand, and
each one has different values for rotation due to the unevenness of the model.
It’s way the placement is so messy.

Gravity was the big issue. The short of the issue is that the player cannot get
down the slope on their own gravity fast enough. So I did two things, added the
forward force (Previously mentioned) and a downward force. This kept the player
moving at a good speed and stop them from going flying off when they hit a ramp.
It isn’t perfect though, it’s still very much possible to go absolutely flying.

There was something I discovered while rewriting the code, and well here’s a
video of it.

Rewrote the code and made some changes so I could perform tricks.

While I was adjusting some code, I was looking at my turning code from my
original hoverboard code from the first video on this post. It works by applying
torque on a specific axis, the Y axis (Or Vector3.up). As a bit of a fool
around, I changed that axis, and noticed that it that it would make the board
flip around as if I was doing tricks. But with the first implementation of my
code, I knew it wouldn’t be possible to do. So when I rewrote it, I made sure to
accommodate this feature. As you can see, it really elevates the gameplay. It’s
my favourite feature.

I previously mentioned that I was working with my friend on this, well that
isn’t strictly true. Most of the game is a one-man-army effort on my part.
Although we started early, my friend decided that his contributions to the game
would be minimal until the absolute last minute, so in the extra week or so that
we had, he spent 4 or 5 days doing nothing. This was a problem, because my
friend and I have an arrangement where we switch roles for each game jam we take
part in. This time it was me on the programming and him on the art.
Unfortunately, when you require specific assets, like a track or obstacles, and
the person in charge of that isn’t making them, it slows down development.

So I made most of the assets myself. Which was interesting. I’m not a great
modeller, and you can tell that the assets below are pretty simple. What I have
been getting good at is the material work. So despite the low detail look, the
materials look pretty good.

I know it seems like I’m moaning about my friend here, but I was very frustrated
at the time and I’m still upset about it because I think I could have done more
if I wasn’t forced to spend my time generating art stuff.

 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 

After learning some lessons from making the first level, I decided that the
second level should be a flat plane. There’s only one waypoint, right at the end
of the map, so the camera no longer breaks and stutters trying to follow each
waypoint. It also fixes a small issue with the lateral movement occasionally
being slower than it should.

The big benefit though is significantly easier placement of obstacles. I no
longer need to adjust each object individually to fit it correctly to the
level’s surface, and additionally, I can bulk edit large amounts of obstacles
easily. Level generation become much easier once I switched to this model.

But, it is less interesting to look at. With further experimentation, I might be
able to find a good middle ground to have interesting downhill tracks but with
the ability to add obstacles to it much easier. That said, I really can’t say
enough how much better the second level feels to play compared to the first.

 * 
 * 

The last level is just a cutscene due to a lack of time. It’s also the only real
contribution my friend made to the game. And it was a massive pain in the arse
to implement. In fact, I actually finished the last level before making the
second level.

But let’s get into what it is and the implementation, it’s quite a story.

The level is a rail going up a tree root. Not interactable at all, more-or-less
a cutscene. The rail is a normal mesh and on top of it is a bezier curve. Here’s
the problem, Unity doesn’t recognise a bezier curve as a mesh. So I had to find
a script to export the curve as a series of coordinates into a CSV file, load it
into the game as a text file via the resources folder, convert those coordinates
into Vector3 data, making sure to swap the Y and Z axis for each one. After
that, I then can to scale the vectors based on the scaling of the objects it
needed to be planted on, and then convert it into world space.

Now, all of that is easier said than done, but it took me a considerable amount
of time to get working. It was worth it in the end, but I really should have
figured it out days prior. I had to make it with less than 24 hours before the
deadline.

I like to say that a lot of what I do is a “Learning experience”, and that gives
me some motivation to challenge myself during these events. And this was a
pretty big learning experience. I learned a lot of manipulating the physics
system, generating assets and models for a game (Moreso than the 7DFPS jam), and
generally how to build this type of game.

Since GGJ ended, I’ve had this game on my mind and I want to keep working on it
weirdly enough. At the very least, I want that first level to play smoother and
fix the issues with the waypoint system, or find a better solution to the
problem. Perhaps I’ll experiment a bit.



Anyway, that was the game and some of my experiences with GGJ this year. All in
all, probably the most productive GGJ so far. If anyone reading this thinks I
should continue developing this game, let me know. I would love to get more
feedback.

That’s it for this post, bit a long one. Till the next one.

-Adam

Posted in Blog, Game Development, Game Jam, My Projects, Video Games


THE DEN: JULY – DECEMBER 2022

Posted on 27/01/2023 by Adam Lutton

Another year goes by, and another post looks back at the latter half of it.

As per usual, I write this post over a period of months, it can affect the
writing style or flow. Please forgive any inconsistencies.


KILLER7

Where does one start with Killer7? I restarted this for my Twitch streams and
it’s a really interesting game in places. Let’s get the bad news out the way
first, the gameplay is pretty crap and the controls are even worse. The hit
boxes for shooting are pretty bad too, I often ended up missing shots I thought
were dead-on and sometimes getting headshots despite aiming for the chest.

The game takes place is a few different places, sometimes an apartment building,
sometimes a school, and even a small town. Nothing crazy, but the layouts and
how you get around them are a bit bizarre. In one of the boss fights I was
running circles around the boss in a series of interconnected ambulances.

Speaking of boss fights, they’re probably the highlight of the game. The first
one is pretty normal, shoot bad guy in the weak point type of thing. Then later
I’m fighting a woman in a schoolgirl outfit and anime girl head mask in an empty
car park.

I don’t really know how to explain the story. You’re just gonna have to play it.
I will say that I didn’t like either ending. Nothing is particularly well
explained. Maybe that’s for the best.

I wouldn’t say I like Killer7, but I think people should play it. Much like
Drakengard.


PHANTASY STAR ONLINE 2 – NEW GENESIS

I liked the original PSO2 but there was a lot of bullshit in it. Minerals,
random crap in my inventory, difficulty scaling not actually making any damn
sense and just killing you instantly despite being a higher level than what
you’re fighting, no real exploration, and so on. But there was a charm to it.

New Genesis fixes somethings and keeps a lot of the bullshit. There’s more
exploration now because I can actually explore the world and get all those
minerals and fight the same enemies over and over. To be fair, I’m spending a
lot less time in loading screens and more time playing. In base PSO2 I spent
most time wondering around the hub doing random crap or playing in the casino.
And the missions I did were mostly the EXP boosting ones you got from the
dailies. I’m still doing dailies in this, but there’s more interesting things to
do and I can get side quests done in the process.

I do not know what the story is about. I don’t give two shits about it. So
that’s all I’m gonna say on that.

My character transferred just fine, although I made a lot of changes.

Gameplay wise, I’m playing a Ranger and the archer classes, I did have Gunner as
a subclass but switched for variety sake; and it’s pretty boring. There’s a lot
of the same enemies and the amount of attacks I have is very limited. I’m not
sure if I’m understanding the systems poorly but I don’t unlock any new attacks
or abilities from the class menu. Maybe I need to fuck around with the other
classes and see if that changes anything.

The streamlining isn’t all bad though. I no longer need to go to a bunch of
different parts of a hub to do different things and can instead do them from a
menu or just a single NPC. There isn’t a casino yet though. I suspect it’s gone.
But the item enhancement is much better. No more secret items you need to reveal
or multiple version of the same item to upgrade stuff. But there’s still a
limit.

Welcome to the paywall. Want to upgrade your gun more? You need this specific
item that you can only get via recycling a crap load of other items, the login
bonus, or by buying it. Want to change the colour of your outfit? You need a
Colour Pass which you get from Scratch Tickets, login bonuses, or buying them.
And so on. The most annoying one is storage though. New Genesis shares storage
with the original, so if you have a bunch of crap in there from base PSO2 so
you’re very limited with what you can throw in there. Unless you pay, of course.

Last point, which isn’t as true now as when I was making notes for this post,
there’s a lot of grinding to be done. Story content is gated off unless you
obtain a certain combat level, which is a number that represents your level,
upgrades, weapon potential, etc. in a general way. Think Light Levels from
Destiny. I ended spending a couple of weeks doing dailies and side missions to
boost my level up to where it needed to be so I could get to the next story
part. Upgrading your weapons and unlocking class skills boosts that number
considerably, as I found out at the end of those couple of weeks. Since then
though, I’ve become over-levelled doing repeats of daily quests that give you a
crap load of EXP.

New Genesis is alright. I’ll probably stop playing it soon though, unless
something happens that grabs me. As of 7th of January 2023, I have uninstalled
the game.


FINAL FANTASY X

I’m still pretty early into this. I stream this game with my friend while we
chat about it. The HD Remaster is a bit of a mess and requires a mod to work the
way I want. So I have PlayStation button prompts and Japanese voice acting
enabled, making the experience a bit more bearable. However, the visuals a bit
of a mixed bag.

The backgrounds look pretty good, especially the pre-rendered ones, but the
characters look weird. Like their eyes are popping out and their face is rigid.
Another issue is that various FMV cutscenes break and get replaced with a green
screen, which is a problem with the PC port that is unfixable.

The combat is OK, it’s normal turn based stuff, no bullshit ATB system. I’m not
super into the story yet, like I said I’m pretty early. I do like Lulu and Rikku
though, but maybe for the wrong reasons. Blizball is fucking terrible, just
layers of complicated statistical bullshit for something that really didn’t need
it. Just make a handball game, don’t add all this crap.

God speed, kid.

I think Yuna sucks. And that’s all I have to say on the matter.


SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS

I started playing this again when I was doing research for that action game idea
I’ve mentioned on this blog previously. I wanted to get a good idea for how the
character moves and interacts believably with the world and the giant enemies.
There’s a lot of animation systems at play here and to properly explain
everything I learnt would take a blog post of its own. I’ll probably do that
once the side project reaches a good point.

Anyway, I kinda got addicted to playing again and wanted to Platinum it on PS3,
which was the version I was playing. It was going fine up until I had to do all
the hard mode time attacks. Basically, the physics are bugged on the PS3 version
due to the slightly higher framerate and some other changes. So movement on the
Colossi causes the main character even more than in the PS2 version. This makes
a handful of Colossi significantly more difficult that they should be, and it’s
very frustrating. I’m struggling with the 3rd, 4th, 6th, and 15th colossi’s time
attacks because I unable to get a good foothold to attack them with.

For the time being I’m playing other things, but I do intend on finishing those
time attacks.


SPLATOON 2 – SINGLE PLAYER

I liked Splatoon 1, but felt the single player portion was a bit lacking, but it
wasn’t terrible. Splatoon 2 fares better in its offering content wise, but the
quality of that content may vary depending on your tolerance for bullshit.

The single player works by having a bunch of different hubs with multiple levels
and a boss. However, first time through each level you’re forced to use a
different weapon. And this is where the problems begin. If there’s a particular
weapon you hate using, you’re probably gonna have it force upon you for some
really crap level.

The gunplay is fine, but the movement is slow and when using some weapons it’s
slowed down even further. And then to top it off, there’s an alarming amount of
platforming to do, especially if you’re weirdo like me that wants to find every
collectable first time through. And if you suck at the platforming, even more
bad news, you’re on a lives system. Die 3 times, and you have to start the level
again.

The music is still good and there’s a lot of charm in the game. I did play the
multiplayer a bit and even won a few matches. I did not play the expansion pack,
not sure if I ever will.


BAYONETTA 3

I would not call Bayonetta 3 disappointing. But I would say some of it’s ideas
are really bad.

To start off with there’s multiple characters now, alongside Bayonetta there’s
Jeanne and Viola. They both have their different playstyles, and in the case of
Jeanne, a completely different genre for her levels. Bayonetta still plays
pretty well, I can muscle memory the dodges most of the time but as I got
further in it became more of a problem as I was rushing to just finish the damn
thing and having timing issues due to the differences with Viola. But I’ll get
to her in a minute.

There’s a good amount of exploration in this one, lots of branching paths
leading to challenges, items, and so on. In one level there was a whole
mini-dungeon hidden away. And all the collectables are stuff like music, models,
things like that. Decent stuff.

A new thing they added, most likely nicked from Astral Chain, are monster
companions during fights. They’re fully controllable and do quite a bit of
damage, they add quite a bit to your combo. But much like Astral Chain, you’re
completely vulnerable while controlling them and it’s awkward as Hell to use.
The bigger problem is that they balanced the game around it, if you want high
combos and high tier awards for each encounter, you have to use them. There’s
also a fuck load of them, like 6 monsters or so. Each have different attacks and
powers, so there’s a lot of experimentation to be had. Or you’ll just stick to a
couple like I did.

Speaking too much stuff, there’s just as many different weapons to use and most
of them are kinda awful. You get to preview them early in the game too, various
challenges in the levels will often provide weapons that aren’t available at
those points in the story on your first time through. Again, there’s too much
and I ended up just sticking to the default weapons most of the time, although I
did like whip.

Right, Viola. Absolute trash. The biggest problem in terms of gameplay with her
are the major differences in controls and timings for dodges and Witchtime. The
biggest control issue being that pressing block in time to parry causes
Witchtime, and dodge doesn’t. For further annoyance, it’s on a different button.
So my muscle memory for Bayonetta is useless. The dodging itself isn’t
particularly effective either, mostly being more of a side step than an actual
dodge. I’ll get back to the Witch Time problem in a moment. Her ultimate attack
form thing plays a lot better than her base from at any rate.

Her personality is also a sticking point. She’s a bit of a whiny git, even in
Japanese. She also does stupid things often to the point where I wonder if she’s
taken one-too-many hits to the head.

Back to Witchtime, I’m not sure what they’ve done, but it seems very
inconsistent. Often I would go into Witchtime and try and land an attack and
half way through the animation it would just wear off. This is especially
irritating during challenges that explicitly set that you can only cause damage
during Witch Time. It’s not as bad with Bayonetta but with Viola it feels
outright broken. There were challenges that were outright impossible because I
simply couldn’t get Witch Time to work.

Last negative point, I wasn’t a fan of the ending. Looking at other people
talking about the game, it seems like I wasn’t the only one.

I like the game overall, and I think it’s better than 2, but Platinum need to
stop adding gimmicks for gimmicks sake.


CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE TRILOGY (ORIGINAL)

It has been a while since I last played a COD game, and two of these I already
played. Now I only played the single player obviously, because the multiplayer
is either dead or a Hell hole. The campaigns are still very fun although there’s
a clear shift in scope between COD4 and MW2 & MW3.

Before I get into that though, one small note. A had a weird application
duplication bug that would occur when I changed my settings in-game. It would
cause the game to open multiple instances of itself on my desktop and I
literally could not end the process because I would get stuck in each instance.
The only way I could close them was my logging out and logging back on again
which would close most applications. This happened in all three games. But my
settings did save so I didn’t need to re-do it again and risk the same bug.

Call Of Duty 4 is my clear favourite of this trilogy, it’s still incredible and
very chilling in places. “All Ghillied Up” is still a fantastic mission, the
levels are surprisingly challenging even on the normal difficulty. One thing
this game does that the other two didn’t was unlock cheat codes for collecting
the intel laptops. The other two don’t give you anything for getting them other
than an achievement.

Modern Warfare 2 is still entertaining, but I always felt it was a little too
short. A lot of the levels go by at a breakneck pace. But looking at my
highlights from when I streamed it, it apparently was about the same length as
COD4. But the levels are way more bombastic and absurd than anything in the
previous one, and that makes it a little less memorable in my view. Not to say
that levels like the oil rig and prison aren’t cool as Hell. But it’s also an
easier game overall.

Modern Warfare 3 is the one game in this trilogy that I hadn’t played until this
point. Just from the opening alone, it sets a very different precedent. There’s
no training mission, no tutorial about how to shoot your gun and throw grenades,
just straight into the meat grinder. In terms of pacing it works well and
certainly makes a statement in terms of story that “Shit is fucked” and World
War 3 waits for no man.

In terms of levels, I’d say it’s about on-par with MW2, although there are a lot
more gadgets and in-game cutscenes. On that first note, there’s a level where
you pilot a small robot tank thing that’s got a whole array of weapons attached
to it and just riddle any poor sod daft enough to be in-front of it. That’s a
semi-new gameplay idea.

The story is alright, can be a bit hard to follow what the Hell the overall
world situation is. You’re getting thrown about all over the place and playing
multiple characters, some of which only for a single level. The ending is
satisfying, although it is a QTE sequence, but everything up to that point is a
full guns blazing experience.

Something did irk me while playing through it, and that’s just the current state
of the world. Tensions are very high right now, and the strong WW3 themes in
this stated to make me feel a little uncomfortable. But that feeling has eased a
little bit as of late. I’d glad I finally finished trilogy off though.


ANNO: MUTATIONEM

When I first saw this game, it was on Indie LIVE Expo. A little while later, a
demo for it appeared during one of Steam’s Next Fests. Something about the demo
intrigued me so I wish listed it and waited for a sale because I couldn’t afford
anything. Once it was cheap enough, I picked it up. And my general opinion on it
is that it good.

The art style is on point and it nails the cyberpunk look. The sprite animations
look pretty good, although a lot of it seems to be using 2D bone animation
rather than sprite sheet, but I think it works well. The outfit selection stuff
is nice, it has a couple of gameplay related events too. But dressing up the
main character as a maid or office lady is pretty great.

CORN MAN

Combat is alright. You get handful of different weapons, I mostly used
dual-blades because I prefer fast attacking weapons and the katana wasn’t doing
it for me. There’s a ranged weapon and a greatsword too. It got a bit repetitive
about mid-way through the game as you get stuck in this underground section for
quite a while and I eventually just teleported out of there and did side quests
for awhile just to stop myself getting burnt out. Crafting is a element of this
game, but it doesn’t really factor in until much later as you can’t really get
the money or materials easily till you get to a harbour town nearing the latter
part of the game.

I can’t say I cared much for the story though. The main premise is that the main
character has a illness that causes her to become violent and uncontrollable,
and her brother is looking for something to cure her. He ends up going missing,
so you spend the rest of the game trying to track him down. A lot of the details
of the background lore and explanations about what the main character is
suffering from is mostly told through text documents and things you find around
the environment. I’m not really the type of person to read that stuff, so I
mostly skimmed through it.

This looks familiar.

The game is full of stuff reminiscent of Evangelion is you’re into that. Lots of
crosses and large underground labs and such. It made me roll my eyes a lot.

It’s a good game, I’d check it out if you got the time.


OTHER STUFF I PLAYED:


SKYGUNNER

Short little flight game. Like a light Ace Combat. Cute art style. The controls
are fine, although the emulated performance isn’t great. The auto-targeting has
no bias, so trying to target your actual objective can be a pain. And the actual
mission objectives aren’t all that fun. A bit of a disappointment unfortunately.


GTA III & VICE CITY

I hadn’t finished either III or Vice City until this point, I kept losing my
saves. The first issue I have is the game logic being tied to FPS, so I had to
hard-limit to 60FPS via the drivers. I installed Silent Patch and the Widescreen
Patch to make the game more playable.

The story was more disjointed in III than I remember. You meet a lot of
characters and then they often die soon after and you meet some new ones. The
driving isn’t good, I flipped my car so many damn times. A lot of the missions
are escort quests, which suck. The AI are very aggressive, and by the end of the
game I couldn’t drive through many of the streets without getting shot at.
Despite my complaints, the game was OK. I’m glad I finished it.

As for Vice City, I installed the same mods again. I played the whole game
without its soundtrack, which is a depressing experience, but necessary for
streaming on Twitch. The cars feel better, plus there’s bikes. There’s a few
more weapons to use. The story is better told and follows the characters in a
more sensible way, I had a much better understanding of what I was doing and
why. The story does feel a bit short though, or at least it would do if not for
the last part of the game being a massive slog because of all the business
missions. It’s a real kick to the pacing. Better than III, but San Andreas still
reigns supreme.


CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS II

Another game I never finished. The game has a bunch of story choices and
branches, but I honestly didn’t enjoy it at all. Once you get to the end those
story choices sort of play out in a disjointed manner. There’s a lot of gadgets
and different guns, but I just stuck to the “Old reliables” of AR-15 style
rifles and regular grenades. There’s no real reason to use them, which I guess
is a downside of selectable loadouts is that the levels can’t be balanced
towards certain tools.

The RTS/Tactical missions you have to do on the side are really half-arsed. It’s
just a horde mode with a bit of objective defense ones. But the story around it
doesn’t make sense and there’s no real reward for doing it. I’m not sure why
it’s there.

Other than that, pretty standard COD campaign otherwise. Still a good amount of
fun set pieces and missions.


HYPER DEMON

HYPER DEMON. That’s a title. It’s from the same guy that did Devil Daggers, so
you should know what to expect. It’s a very similar game, including the replay
system. It’s a pretty fun game, but I’m really bad at it. Also my eyeballs start
burning while looking at it. It’s fucking cool though.

A replay I made as a test.


ANIME CORNER:


CYBERPUNK: EDGERUNNERS

I haven’t played the game, but I enjoyed this. The soundtrack is good,
especially the opening song. The aesthetics are on point with the game. The
characters are fun bunch, the story around them is interesting enough to watch
it play out. And a lot of characters die in some really fucked up and gruesome
ways, which is always nice to see.


LYCORIS RECOIL

Do you like girls with guns doing anti-terrorist things? You’ll probably like
this. I know I did. There hasn’t been much in the “Girls with Guns” genre in
anime for a while, so this and Maid Wars was nice to see. The main two girls
have a dun dynamic, Chisato is basically an S-tier murder robot who refuses to
use lethal weapons and Takina is a shoot first, ask questions later type.

The episodes are fun, a good amount of action and slice of life. The actual plot
though probably could have done a bit more or gotten a bit more focus at times.
It is elevated by a pretty good villain though who plays off Chisato very well.
It’s good watch, I hope they make more of it.


AKIBA MAID WARS

Speaking of girls with guns, I was not expecting this show to be anywhere near
as violent as this was. The first episode is an incredible ballet of gratuitous
murder, featuring a cross-cut between a song performance at the maid cafe and a
maid shooting dozens of maids in a shootout on the streets of Akiba. It is quite
the sight. I know the maid cafe scene in Akiba during the 90s was competitive,
but bloody Hell.

The plot overall is fairly typical of something who’d find in a Yakuza film.
Extortion, protection money, rival gangs, etc. But it’s all maids, and animal
themed maids at that. The characters dedication to the cafe themes make me
question whether they have any humanity left. Great show.


YOJOUHAN TIME MACHINE BLUES / TATAMI TIME MACHINE BLUES

As a fan of Tatami Galaxy is was nice seeing these characters again. As you can
guess the plot this time involves a time machine. They find it in a closet and
use it to go back in time an steal a remote for the air conditioning unit in the
main character’s room. There’s a crapload of foreshadowing for the time
travelling shenanigans they’ll undertake, including something involving a Kappa
statue. It actually does a pretty good job and tying up the loose ends caused by
the time travelling nonsense and looping back on itself. Great show, I hope it
gets a Blu-Ray release so I can keep the physical collection going.


CHAINSAW MAN

Let’s get this out of the way, Chainsaw Man is not the second coming of Christ.
That said, I did like it. Some of the animation sequences are very well done,
especially some of the character animation. The gore and violence are as
visceral as you would want it. Power is hilarious and easily the most fun
character in the show. Makima is good as a character, but I’m not sure they got
the right voice actor for her.

All the episodes have wildly different ending sequences and although I like the
first few endings more than the later ones, they’re all pretty well done and
visually interesting to look at. The ED about Power is especially well done.

I really hope they continue the show though, because I think it ends just as it
was starting to get interesting.


BOCCHI THE ROCK

Well this show became a hit out of nowhere. I went into it with the mindset of
it being a discount K-On. It’s not. It’s a premium product that is vastly
superior. Cloverworks really outdid themselves with this. The animation styles
are completely insane, with a good amount of stop motion, non-standard art
styles, and real world images superimposed in. Completely insane. The music is
top notch, the album that released after the show has become a best seller and
I’m still listening to the songs even weeks after.

Bocchi’s reactions and faces are a real highlight. My favourite reactions being
her just fucking exploding and lying down in her bed staring at a room covered
in the same photograph and just cackling. The other characters are great too, I
really like Hiroi. An absolute drunken train wreck full of best girl energy.

It’s an absolute must watch.


MY TOP 10 GAMES OF THE YEAR


RELEASED GAMES THAT I WANTED TO PLAY OR PLAY MORE OF


AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES – NIRVANA INITIATIVE
KOUMAJOU REMILIA SCARLET SYMPHONY
STRANGER OF PARADISE: FINAL FANTASY ORIGIN

I wanted to play these, but couldn’t afford it. I did play the demo for Stranger
of Paradise on PS4 though and had a pretty good time, but I wanted to play it on
PC for better performance, unfortunately (As of time of writing) it’s still an
Epic Games Store exclusive.


WORST GAME OF THE YEAR


TREK TO YOMI

The art style could not save this one. The combat felt bad, it was really
repetitive, and the story was nowhere near as good as it could have been.
Thankfully I played it on Game Pass rather than buy it outright. Saved myself a
bit of money.

And without further ado, the Top 8. Yes, 8. I didn’t play that many new games
this year.


8. FORGIVE ME FATHER


7. NEPTUNA X SENRAN KAGURA: NINJA WARS


6. DRAINUS


5. HYPER DEMON


4. ANNO: MUTATIONEM


3. LEGO STAR WARS: THE SKYWALKER SAGA


2. BAYONETTA 3


1. WINDJAMMERS 2

If I had more money to spend, I would have played more games. But to be honest,
this year was kinda week. Windjammers 2 is a fantastic game, but should it
really be my number one? Well for the time being, it is.

Let’s actually give it some credits. It’s classic Windjammers gameplay, snappy,
responsive, super fun. It’s got rollback net code, bonus modes, some single
player content, and it’s reasonably priced. It’s a damn fine game and I struggle
to find fault with it.

Just to answer a question; Yes, I played Elden Ring. No, I did not enjoy it.

And now for the other Top 10 list.


MY TOP 10 ANIME OF THE YEAR


SPECIAL MENTIONS:


SPY X FAMILY & KOI WA SEKAI SEIFUKU NO ATO DE


WORST ANIME I WATCHED:


HOSHI NO SAMIDARE

And now the top 10.

 1.  Koukyuu no Karasu
 2.  Kawaii dake ja Nai Shikimori-san
 3.  Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story
 4.  Chainsaw Man
 5.  Kakegurui Twin
 6.  Sono Bisque Doll wa Koi wo Suru
 7.  Lycoris Recoil
 8.  Akiba Maid Sensou
 9.  Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai: Ultra Romantic
 10. Bocchi the Rock!

I bet you didn’t see this one coming. Shit year for games, but a pretty good
year for anime. And Bocchi The Rock is one Hell of a show. It’s the kinda show
that you watch and then every other anime after just looks like a pile of crap.
It’s 10/10. Easily. The characters are great, the animation is great, the music
is great. And it was blast to watch and talk to other people about it and see it
just absolutely set the anime community on fire.

Watch this show. It’s fantastic.

And that’s your lot. 2022 is over and 2023 is now in full swing. Sorry this post
took until late-January to get done. It was longer than I thought and I started
working on it much later than I should have. I will try harder next time.

Hopefully things will get better this year.

ADMAN

Posted in Anime, Blog, The Den, Video Games


18/12/2022: 7 DAY FPS JAM

Posted on 18/12/2022 by Adam Lutton
All I Need Is A Shotgun by ADMAN

I made another game for another game jam, check it out.

It’s not a great game, but it’s my third attempt at a first person game, and my
first attempt at an FPS. Unfortunately the date snuck up on me quicker than I
expected, and I spent late November and early December being unwell to the point
that affected my productivity. So a lot of the ideas and mechanics in this are a
little rushed and half-arsed. But as a proof-of-concept, it has some charm. If
nothing else, I made a Liminal Space Meme Game with guns.

As I said, I was sick at end of last month and the beginning of this month.
Literally the day of the last blog post was when I started to feel poorly. By
the evening, I had a really bad fever and even vomited. Very unpleasant. It
ended up lasting for about a week, although the coldsores lasted a little
longer.

Well from one depressing thing to another, England got beaten by France in the
World Cup. I really am not going to live to see the day they’ll win again. I
could complain more, but it’s not really worth it.

Now for something completely unrelated; I’ve been getting a considerable amount
of Blender tutorial videos from YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. Mostly ones
about materials. I’ve been thinking about getting into making textures and
stuff, maybe try and sell them as asset packs for Blender/Unity. That said, I
probably need to find some unique ideas of things to make to compete with all
the existing stuff out there. Maybe I’ll make some assets to use in Godot as
well.

I might harvest the stuff I made for the recent jam game and sell off some of
that. I imagine there would be a market for the guns in there. But I will need
to split the profits with the friend who made the models. Although first we need
to improve and fix the models a bit, give them correct sights and improve the
animations and such.

Right, last thing: Rotaction is 25% off until the 2nd of January. Feel free to
grab it at the reduced price if you want to support me.

I am working on the year end blog post with all the games I played and the top
10s, so look forward to that. Later.

-Adam

Posted in Blog, Game Development, Game Jam, My Projects, Video Games


28/11/2022 – ANALOGUE POCKET GET

Posted on 28/11/2022 by Adam Lutton
 * The Pocket in the dock.
 * The screen is nice.
 * OpenFPGA support means I can play Neo Geo games.

Hello again. A thing I bought a year ago finally arrived, and it’s pretty sweet.

The Analogue Pocket is an FPGA emulation device that specifically plays GameBoy
and GameBoy Advance games. FPGA is hardware emulation, not software, so it leads
to greater accuracy in terms of emulation. This generally means less visual
glitches but also has the downside of emulating the slowdown in games that would
suffer it on real hardware.

Although you can play real cartridges on this thing, the OpenFPGA side is the
most interesting part. You can just load FPGA cores made for it and then boot
games off the Micro SD card. I have Neo Geo, NES, SNES, and Mega Drive cores on
mine. Pretty much all the games I’ve tried have worked perfectly, and GameBoy
games especially look gorgeous on the screen.

My major issue with the thing is that I don’t find it particularly comfortable
to hold for long periods of time. Much like actual Nintendo handhelds. It’s not
as bad as the 3DS or Switch JoyCons, which cause literal circulation problems
for me, but there’s still things I would have changed.

I mean there is one more issue; the price. I think I’ve spent £400 on the thing
all-and-all. It was £300 for the thing and dock, plus shipping, then the FedEx
tax was £70 (Customs charges are a fucking scam), and then another £40 for a
Micro SD card and UK USB-C plug. Yeah, it comes with a US plug. Be fair warned.

But I like the thing, and I’m gonna enjoy playing it. I actually did a stream
soon after I got it where I played a bunch of games, check it out:



In other news, Indie LIVE Expo is happening soon. Why am I bring up here? Well
Rotaction is going to appear during the first day when they discuss currently
released games, so keep an eye out for it. But this is the first time one of my
games has appeared at a major event, although it’s the second time it’s been
promoted. The event will be streamed on the 3rd and 4th of December. Check it
out, there’s loads of cool games.

Now, I’m going to talk about what I’m currently working on.

7DFPS (7 Day FPS) Jam is coming up in December, and I’ve decided that I want to
take part. So I’m putting together a few things to practice and learn how to
make stuff for it. I’m looking at stuff like Probuilder and Pro Grids for fast
generation of levels, and learning how to do raycasted bullets with appropriate
effects, as you see in the video above.

Now I know what you’re thinking, the Jam hasn’t started yet and I’m over here
making stuff. Well, there’s no rule that says I can’t work on stuff a little
early and most of this work isn’t going to be used in the Jam game. But it’s
better I figure out these problems now, rather than during the Jam.

As for the side project I’ve been working on:

Well, progress is slow. I can shoot a bow now, but it’s a giant mess. Unity’s
Rig Builder tool is such a giant mess to use that making it this far is
generally surprising for me. But to explain the issue, layers upon layers upon
layers. At some point I had to undo a lot of work and replace it with a canned
animation, which is how I got the bow aiming and firing to work. Although I can
explain some of that as well. When I started with the rigging, I was basing it
on the idea of driving the player animation in relation to the bow. That was
dumb, now I’m driving the bow animation in relation to the player, which is
simpler to implement and has lead to better results.

Well that’s it from me for this time. Now I have to publish this before my power
goes out. Which is a thing that’s happening today. Fun times. At least I have
some books to read.

Till next time.

-Adam

Posted in Blog, Game Development, Game Jam, My Projects, Technology, Video Games


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RECENT POSTS

 * 09/10/2023 – Cybersurfer Update
 * 01/08/2023 – Cybersurfer?
 * ADMAN’s Den: January – June 2023
 * 04/05/2023 – Demo Day 50
 * 28/03/2023 – Tweaking Things


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