Blade Runner Influences

Of all my influences Blade Runner is by far the biggest. I love everything about the universe it inhabits not to mention the characters and themes it includes. 

After seeing the new movie Blade Runner 2049 (great btw, go and see it) I had an idea for a game where you were some similar sort of bounty hunter/assassin in a similar world. This lead me to thinking about interesting ideas in how I could make it into a game that wasn't just the average run and shoot affair that everything is. I wondered about how you could make a game that evoked the feeling of being in that sort of world. How an interactive experience can help you do things you never could otherwise. This is what I came up with after some thinking.

A very basic proof of concept. I knew I could make a 2D world and get an artist to make awesome art work but the actual creation of a mechanic to prove it could be done was what I needed so I decided the registration number on the eye was a great idea. 

Using a sprite mask I simply hid the number and set the sprite mask to follow the mouse when it was clicked. This would then reveal the reg to the player. I added the eye following the cursor to give some sense of interaction with the subject. I then changed the eyes constraint by checking the centre of the screen and then checking if it the centre of the eye was outside a certain radius.

This was about a 2 hour job and so while very basic helped me realise I could build a game around mechanics that engaged the player on an interesting level. 

I hope to continue work into this idea and hope to craft other little experiments.

Unity And Mobile

I was reluctant to write about this project as it was still on going and there appeared to be enthusiasm for it, however I think it's safe to say it's dead now and I'd like to discuss what it was and why I enjoyed it.

Recently I've been attempting to create a simple phone game with my uni friends in our spare time. This game is a vertical-scrolling shooter dubbed 'Star Light'. Another space shooter you might think but it started life as a port of SuperNova. However, I decided, in my infinite wisdom, that I would get some more people on board and see if I could tackle a 2.5D shooter for mobiles. 

I jumped right in at the deep end and didn't do pretty much any planning. I created a basic rectangle that shot balls and a background that scrolled using a plane set to scroll a specific way in unity. This seemed to work for a while but I decided that because I'd been so quick at getting this all working I could go for a more complex arrangement and get a proper 3D background going. So I went to work on that idea and have currently still not been able to get to do exactly what I wanted.

One of the friends I got on-board with me helped create a menu system that works really well with a pause and a opening screen that allows the player to change certain options with a setting menu. While primitive, it looked great due some of the background we managed to create with some orbiting planets and a nice backdrop. 

Another friend created two ships one a player and the other an enemy that looks really great. 
After this we moved forward adding an animation to the ship and using it in Unity (a first for me and them with 3D models). I managed to get a system for spawning in random obstacles in place and we got a 3D model of asteroids from someone else on the project and spent several hours sorting out a particle system for the ships exhaust. 

It was moving quite fast and in a positive direction and then the winter break happened. We all had a huge amount of course work and personal time to sort out so things just stopped. And now going back for semester two we have the final group project for the year.

So it seems this will be a forever half finished idea. It's a shame but it's taught me quite a bit about mobile game development, least the setup required and how to program for inputs on those devices. Also the great way Unity and android link to make use of any android device for testing is a dream for any developer. While I still need to do more research on how to dynamically scale resolutions dependant on phone screen size, I'm glad this was something we did and I felt like I learnt a lot from it. 

My take away here is that if you don't try, you'll never know. And if you do try, you'll probably learn something cool along the way.

Making Sounds & Music of SuperNova

The task of creating sounds for this project was laid at my feet. I'd never really thought a huge amount about the process of creating music for a game as it always seemed auxiliary to the main process. However, since starting I've really enjoyed it. Being a drummer for 12+ years, I've always thought I understood music on a pretty high level but this experience has shown me different ways of making music that I'd not even be aware of up to this point. 

Programs

Let's be straight, you and me are not going to invest in a hugely expensive music composition program like ProTools or CueBase, at least for a project of this size. So I searched for simple, easy to use, easy to understand and lightweight programs that would create the kind of chip-tune or 8 to 16-bit sounds and whole songs. 

It turns out there are actually two VERY powerful yet very easy to use programs that made my life a lot easier than I expected.

Bfxr 

Bfxr is a a lightweight program that will help you create a 8/16-bit sound effects. This is a program that seems very simple to use straight off the bat. There are only two modes available being Synth and Mixer.

Click image to play with Bfxr yourself.

The synth is a simple tool that has plenty of sliders for different values relating to the wave algorithm that you also choose to modulate the certain effects. This even has a random button that will create random sounds, if you have no idea what you want. There are also more specific random sounds such as a 'Pickup' sound or a 'Shoot' sound.  

The other is a simple mix mode that allows you to take any of the samples you've created in the Synth mode and create more interesting sounds by merging them together. 

This helped me create some really cool sounds that I otherwise wouldn't have been able to create on my own.

Sunvox

This program is something I will be using for a lot of projects in the future as it's basically a fully featured synth creation tool.  

While it took me a while to get to grips with the more complex processes involved in creating sound, it was mainly used for creating actual songs and not just sound effects. The tool consists of several modules that you can move into the main area and then play them and combine them to create instruments. 

Click image to go to find out more about Sunvox and download it yourself.

Sunvox allowed me to use my computer keyboard as a musical one and gave me some interesting times while sitting messing with it.

While it looks confusing a little YouTube search will help with pretty much all of the possible questions you could have. I felt really creative once I had the ability to quickly change between instruments and alter the different tracks with speed. 

It would take me too long to explain all the different parts of this particular program, but I can most certainly say i was a beginner and I managed to create some really interesting and fulfilling music with it very quickly.

I would recommend it highly. You can listen to the fruits of my labour by checking the Work page. 

Asteroids

This was the first game I ever made when thinking about getting into games.
A very simple clone of Asteroids using Game Maker. 

There is barely anything here just an endless game of Asteroids where the enemies respawn when there are none left. Can be quite relaxing actually. 

This helped me understand code layout before I really understood how to code at all. Was a good grounding in basic elements of coding.

Please feel free to download it and check it out by clicking the image.