An Evening of Code: Cyberpunk

Building from this.

Not sure if I'll take this further. Basic concept is that you fix people's machines and upgrade them so they can run missions (think The Finn upgrading Case's Ono-Sendai). I have a vague idea for an overarching storyline but I'm not sure if the underlying mechanics are fun enough to carry it. There seems to be scope to balance quality of work with the cost the customer is willing to pay versus your reputation. It could be at the point where I need to close out a few more mechanics to know for sure. It could be that a lack of immediate feedback means it's not matching the expectations I have in my head. If I find the inspiration to go back and hook in a few more systems I'll post a playable version up for feedback. 

In terms of implementation, you can drag and drop the different pieces around and they snap into place correctly. You can click on the blobs of solder to remove, or add, them back. If a piece is soldered it can't be removed. The biggest issue I have with this is trying to reconcile the high-tech with the simple components. I can conceive of more complicated innards but then I can't imagine anyway of making it fun. For now I want to keep things simple and recognisable. Alternatively, I could re-purpose the basic mechanics into a more abstract puzzle system and have you as the hacker breaking into systems. That sounds more interesting but I'm willing to spend a little more time with what I have, just to flesh it out a little more, since I can take a lot of it into this other idea.

An Evening of Pixel Art: Cyberpunk

Just messing around with another prototype for a game. Nothing playable yet but I have a few ideas jotted down. I'll try and get something playable this week to determine if the base mechanics will be fun. I'm no artist but pixel art is often forgiving if symmetry is maintained. It also serves the game where realistically I'd have to implement an incredibly complex device that wouldn't be fun. With simplified graphics it requires less work to define . I kind of like the base colour scheme but I'll probably do another pass on it to better serve the mood of the setting if I decide to get more serious with it.

I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos about electronics recently and that's definitely feeding into my ideas for this. I've also always been a fan of Cyberpunk which definitely feeds into the look (those purple hues seem ubiquitous). In terms of laying out the screen, there're two perspectives similar to Papers Please. Having a front on view for the background and top down for the playable area simplifies the control scheme and the burden on the user significantly. I only spent a few minutes with the UI in the same perspective before dismissing it as unworkable. Aside from the complexity there's a lot of wasted space setting up that view in a meaningful way and it doesn't serve the game.

This is a drag and drop into Unity but no logic attached. Whilst it's usually better to get something working, sometimes having some (admittedly crappy) art assets is nice to start. At least it means if I do decide to start adding functionality I've got some distinct parts to work with without having to drop to an editor each time.

An Evening of Code: Platforming

An infinite platformer. No special rules for the platforms except to ensure that the random numbers are always the same. Wrote it in Unity over a few hours with a few rounds of Evolve in the middle. The player sprite is from a sprite sheet Google Images popped up and I couldn't find attribution information for it.

Unity & Playmaker - Building a Keypad

Update: There's an updated version of this post, complete with source code and the full project here: http://www.stephen-gurnett.org/unlikely-objects/2014/11/20/unity-playmaker-building-a-keypad

I've been experimenting with Unity for making games and prototypes more quickly. One of the things I picked up in the recent Unity sale was Playmaker. When I first started out programming I wanted to do everything myself. I'm in two minds about the benefits of this. On the one hand, I learnt a lot of things (mostly what not to do but that is kind of useful as well). On the other, now I know those things I also know I don't have the time to spend on them. 

I want to put together a quick project to provide as a little birthday gift to someone. It's little more than an animated card but I wanted to put some interactivity in there just to provide a little entertainment. It's also a good excuse to learn putting how to work with Unity (and Blender as well).

The view in game (debugging shows the state of the FSM on the Game Object).

The GUI is built from standard Unity components. The keypad is represented by the small box on the wall. When the player gets close enough it triggers automatically. This could be refined but works well enough for testing.

The Finite State Machine in Playmaker's editor window.

And here's the Finite State Machine (FSM) as depicted in Playmaker's editor. It starts in the 'Off' state. On entering the triggering state we progress to 'On'. This state handles drawing the GUI and also fires an event to the player controller to enter an 'interacting' state which freezes the player in place and enables the mouse cursor.

On pressing a number button a modified version of Playmaker's GUIButton class is called. This sets a string on a specified variable equal to that of the number of the button. We go to Error Check to see if the current value should be cleared, and, finally, append the number string to the code. On pressing OK we validate the entered code by comparing it to the correct version, and, if it's correct, we open the doors. We go to the Exit state from there so we can send an event to restore motion to the player and they can exit the area of the trigger. Once done, the FSM is reset and will trigger again if the player hits the trigger. If the code does not match, we update the display to show an error message and set a flag so we know to clear the display when the user presses another button.

There's some small improvements that could be made but, otherwise, this is working nicely. It's easy to modify and could be used in a number of places if required. Overall, it was a useful learning exercise and picking something slightly more complicated than a light switch forced me to learn a few different ways of using Playmaker.