New NPC for World 2

Level 2-1 is done! I’m starting level 2-2!
The level 2-2 will introduce a new NPC: “The explorer”.

The player will have to protect him the whole level.

Again, it’s mainly about mesh recycling and dirty texturing 🙂

Yet another enemy

I did some “play tests” lately with colleagues who were interested in trying the game. And it appears only the “Ranger Cat” (cat walking and scratching) is a foe they can handle for a first try, after the tutorial. Somehow, it means they can progress at some point and feel challenged, which is a good thing! BUT, it also means I cannot use most of the enemies early in the game without redesigning their behaviour a bit.

So I decided to introduce another enemy. Let’s call him the “Muscle Cat”. He is basically a classic “Ranger Cat” with much more life. The whole point is just to have a bit of variety early in the game.

He is also slightly bigger than a regular cat and a bit slower. But he is still smaller than a “Heavy Cat”.

Here again, the 3D initial mesh is the same as before, I just scaled the arms and created a dirty texture! As I previously said, I’ll only polish if the details are noticeable on mobile.

New style

I’m currently working on the customization of the character.
I decided to give more personality to the rabbit in the process. So I changed a lot his texture.

The red lines around the eyes are seams from Blender… Well I’m not an expert but I finally understood it was a mistake to “cut” the eyes from the face to begin with (at least for such a flat design). I learnt my lesson.

Regarding his new facial expression, I had some feedbacks saying he looked quite angry. I guess it’s fine since he kills cats.

My plan is to do 2 other skins at some point and call those “new characters”, change slightly the gameplay and sell them as an in-app purchases. Why not?

Anyway, if you don’t like the colors you can change that. Check my following post for more on the customization.

Majin Cat

That’s just a “code name”. I wasn’t inspired and I don’t bother anymore thinking deeply about names. So far those names just help me organising my code, prefabs and components, right?

Anyway, I just made a new enemy this morning. It was nothing like a priority, but I just wanted to play a bit with Blender.

Also, I did this sketch few days back when I was trying to imagine some bosses.

As I said previously, I’m not even trying to make anything beautiful for the game in Blender. Instead I’m trying to re-use the meshes I created in the past as much as I can. Creating a mesh from scratch is still a pain for me. So this enemy is a regular cat. I just scaled his head, arms, torso and pants. It’s low cost for low quality! But it will do the trick for a mobile indie game, hopefully 😀

Result in Blender

 

Then, I did a simple idle animation where the cat is kind of levitating. Finally I integrated it in Unity.

Result in Unity

That’s where I am. I’ll let this enemy aside and work on its AI and animations from time to time. There is no rush…

One thing I can mention though is I’ll introduce soon enough the ability for the main character to deflect bullets with a tap with 2 fingers. It will consume 2 slots of energy from the blue bar (used for dashes so far). But purple bullets like those thrown by this enemy won’t be deflectible. This should enable me to add some more subtlety to the gameplay!

Blender: Images auto reload

It’s been a while I didn’t play with Blender. This morning I felt like using it so I worked on a mini boss I designed lately. I’ll explain more about it in the next post. Here I just wanted to share a plugin I found this morning. Even if I’m a total newbie with 3D and texturing, this plugin really helps me there.

When texturing a mesh, I work with 2 screens: one showing the overall result in Blender (with different views: front, back…) and one where I do the actual 2D texture in Photoshop.

Quick and dirty texture…

Result in Blender

 

 

The problem I had till then was I had to always go to Blender to manually refresh the texture to see my updates, which is quite a pain when you are as bad as I am in the matter!

I finally found a plugin for Blender that reloads automatically the images after a configurable timeout. Get it there.

It allows me to mess around in Photoshop and simply save whenever I want to see the actual result in Blender. Cool stuff!

Jet Pack

Right now I’m making a quick Space Invider like gameplay. The idea is just to have some more variety.

I made this basic jet pack with no ref under Blender. It was quite fast.

Then I did a pretty basic idle animation for the rabbit and attached the whole thing together. The FX is the same as the capsule spawner.

The cat will be using the same Jet Pack in a different color. Finally, some big cats will be using big jet packs and act as mini bosses. That’s it. Almost there !

Once this mode is done, I’ll introduce the “perks”. They are things you can find in levels to momentaneously increase your skills. Then, I start the actual game making ! Starting from that moment, I’ll only make features when I need them, I sware !

Combo sequence fixed !

I’m now referring to the moment the player has to draw specific shapes to trigger the super attack as “combo sequence”.

I just fixed most of the recognition issues I had. It’s now working pretty smoothly. I did a bit of styling. I hope it’s still easy to read. But I don’t want to make the sequence too intrusive since I assume once you did it once or twice, you remember it. And I don’t want to make it random.

The camera isn’t centered on the player in this record. It’s a bug I fixed already.

I have a bunch of minor bugs to fix. But most likely some of them will be released with the game (the release date doesn’t exist yet anyway).

Stunning the charger

As I said in my previous post the charger is meant to be stunned when hitting a wall. Check this gif for a demo.

I changed the standing up transition to make it less fast. It’s way smoother right now. I really like this mini boss !!

A friend of mine suggested that I should put him a black shirt. I’ll probably do more styling in the future. But it should be fine for now.

By the way, note the glitch on his back ! The mesh isn’t properly merging the mirrored sides. I have no idea why so far. Darn ! I’ll fix that later.

 

Heavy Charger

The Heavy Charger Cat is done !

It’s a stupid big cat rushing on you and killing his friends by accident in the process. Check the gif in the previous post for a good example.

I feel more and more confortable with Blender. Even if I know I’m doing bad quality animation because I’m not focusing on polish and because I’m not good at it anyway, I can at least now make any kind of animation pretty fast. I guess !

I still need to make so that the charger stops his course and is stuned when he hits a wall (anything unbreakable). This should enable the player to have a proper opening to attack. In a real level it should happen easily, and the player should be able to lead him to do that too.

The Heavy Charger will be a kind of mini boss, appearing alone or with few support. I didn’t unzoom in the records here. But I guess to keep track it might be better. I’m thinking about a “lock” system for the camera. But it might come later when I implement some bosses I designed.

Heavy Cat mesh

I’m introducing a last basic enemy class : The Heavy Cat.

You can probably tell I didn’t invest much in the modelling here. I’m convinced it’s not worth spending time on that for such a little game 🙂

Here I’m not only recycling the default cat mesh but also its rigging so that all animations I made so far are compatible with this one too.

This cat is a kind of mini boss. My plan is to do 4 types :

• Charger Heavy Cat : rushing till he hit something, then turning to face the character and starting over. A kind of dummy but dangerous foe like the charger in Left4Dead. This enemy will have version with an armor too.
• Hammer Heavy Cat : Waving a hammer with long range.  He should be able to hit other cats by accident and destroy breakable things (such as crates..). This enemy will have version with an armor too.
• Swordmaster Heavy Cat : Holding a two handed sword, you’ll have to do specific moves to go through is guard. He will deflect gun bullet. I don’t think I’ll make a version with an armor.
• Gatling Heavy Cat : Shooting bullets with a gatling (maybe 3 or 4 bullets at once). This enemy will have version with an armor too.

I’m starting the Charger right now ! I don’t see a challenge so far.

Once I’m done with those, I’ll do a “training puppet cat” mesh for tutorial purposes, then I’ll do bosses.