Another Game, Auditions, and Fireworks

Hi! I know I haven’t posted in almost two weeks (yikes), but not much has happened. I do have some stuff to talk about now though, so here’s an unorganized and ramble-y update!

I’ve finally started working on a new game, and I’m excited about this one because I decided not to use any sort of game engine or library. It’s just pure javascript. I’m doing it this way because while working on other projects I felt too dependent on my library and like I wasn’t actually learning anything. Not using a library on this project might make the going slower, but I’ve already learned so much that it’s worth it. Of course, there’s nothing bad about using a library. If it speeds up your work or helps you in any way, go for it. I just wanted to see what I could do without one, especially since I’m a beginner.

I also scheduled my audition for the summer show and it seems like all my worries and nervousness about it just kind of disappeared. The director was super nice and enthusiastic, and I’m really looking forward to auditioning. I can’t wait!

We’re also leaving for our trip in less than two weeks, and I’m looking forward to that as well. It’ll be nice to just get away from everything and spend some time camping and in the mountains. We’re going to see a lot of family too, so that will be good.

And I know it’s late, but happy Fourth of July! We watched the fireworks last night and I even got to watch the beginning of the first Captain America movie, so I would say I had a good day! Did you do anything fun, if you celebrated? I hope you enjoyed these words from a nerd, and I’ll see you next time!

A Ramble-y Update

I haven’t really been feeling up to writing blog posts lately. I’ve just kind of run out of inspiration and things that I can talk about for a whole post. So to get writing again, I’m just going to ramble on about a bunch of different things to get ideas and kind of update on where I am.

I have an idea for a game that I want to make. I came up with it a few months ago and it’s been stuck in the back of my head, refusing to disappear. It’s not fully formed yet, just kind of floating around in bits and pieces, but I have a general idea of what the game will be. It’s way above my level, though, so there are a lot of technical things that I need to learn before I start to develop it. I’ve worked a lot with the Phaser engine, but I don’t think I’m using it to its full extent yet. I still have a lot to learn about it.

One of my next goals is to make a platformer with Phaser and Tiled. I have the basics of working with Tiled down and I can make a simple map, but that’s pretty much it. I don’t know how to export it and use the JSON in a game or how to make an object layer and whatnot. Tiled seems like a useful tool that saves a lot of time, I just need to learn the more complex stuff that it can do.

Another possible thing that I might look into is RPG Maker. I saw the other day that you can buy it through Steam at a lower cost than I thought it was, so I may have to look into that. I already have the Lite version of VX Ace on my computer, so I’ll have to play around with that more. I want to see if I can work with the limitations or if I need to buy the full version. I know many people have made full games with only the lite version, so it’s not impossible. I just need to work with it.

Camp NaNo is also coming up, and I have no idea what I’ll be writing yet. Usually I end up planning a month or more in advance, but there are only a few weeks left and I have nothing. This isn’t a bad thing, though. It just means I’ll have less time to get bored with my idea, which usually happens. Less planning time might me better for me. I’m still on the fence of whether I’ll do it or not, though. For the last 2 weeks of July, I’ll be on a camping trip with a bunch of family and I won’t have much time to write. I might just wait until November to do another NaNo event.

My school is holding auditions for parts in the summer show. This time they’re doing Almost, Maine and I’m going to audition for it. I still have to read more about the play, but I’ve been working on the monologue that I have to give. This morning I went and cut out some lines so that it would fit in the time limit, but I made sure that it still flowed well. The bad thing is that auditions are on the day that we get back from our big camping trip, and I’ll be pretty exhausted. I’ll just have to make sure that when I sign up for my audition time that I pick a later time slot.

I think I’m also going to start working on a short story. I really want to write one, I’m just not sure what to write about yet. I’m sure I’ll come up with something, though. That’ll be one of my project goals this summer, I think. I’m already working on making a habit of writing at least fifteen minutes each day. I just set the timer and write, not worrying about quality that much.

I’ve also kind of abandoned working with Unreal. I don’t have the patience or skill set to make a full-fledged game in that yet, but it is kind of fun to poke around and see what I can do. I may just mess around in it and not actually make anything. I think if I try to do much of anything fancy, my computer might melt. I’ve abandoned my work in Blender as well, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m more focused on doing things with Phaser.

Even though I love Phaser, I think I’m going to research other game engines, just to see what’s out there. It’s nice to be well-versed in all kinds of different things, and who knows! Maybe I’ll find an engine that works for me even better than Phaser does.

I’ve also re-installed Steam and I finally got around to buying Portal. I’ve heard a bunch of good things about it but somehow never played it. I love it so far. I also bought a game called Don’t Starve, and it’s awesome as well. It’s a perma-death survival game that has lots of cool fantasy elements, and it somehow manages to be 2D and 3D at the same time. I think you should check it out.

So there we go! I feel a lot better about writing posts now. I feel more inspired and creative already, which is good. I don’t think I’m going to be as strict on the “one post every day” thing as much anymore. I don’t want to strain to write a post and end up writing something that’s horrible. So I’ll post when I feel like it or have something to talk about, which will still be pretty often. I hope you enjoyed these words from a nerd, and I’ll see you next time!

The Walking Lady is Finished!

My first video game is finally finished! And on time, too! The Walking Lady is live on my website here!

I published it last night and completely revamped my website today, so everything looks prettier. It took a lot of hard work and I’m super proud of it. I learned a lot while making it too, and I’m going to keep these lessons in mind when I make my next games.

Lesson 1: Plan First, Code Second
This seems like a given, but I started this game way back in the middle of May and then didn’t work on it for a few weeks. I spent a lot of time this week reworking old code and adding new features on top of each other. It felt like the improving would never end. For my next project, I’m going to plan out every single thing that’s going to happen in the game and then work from there.

Lesson 2: Deadlines!
My goal was to finish by yesterday, and I did! Without that deadline, I probably would’ve just stopped working on it after a day or two. Fighting the clock makes it easier for me to focus and not get sidetracked (as much).

Lesson 3: Working with Other People
For this project, my friend Simon made a lot of the graphics for the game. I learned a lot about working with people and how to do it even better next time. The biggest problem came from the fact that I had a specific vision in my head of what I wanted the game to look like, but I was really bad at communicating it. We both ended up remaking graphics (even though we did mockups), but we didn’t lose too much time. Working with others has its advantages and disadvantages, and I just need to figure out how to work with that.

Lesson 4: Be Organized
I’m already pretty organized, and for this project I had countless checklists and other things to stay on track. I ended up making a super detailed spreadsheet that Simon and I could both look at to keep track of who needed to do which graphics, and what they looked like. It was a huge help.

Lesson 5: Test Super Often
I always have a live preview open while I’m working, so I usually catch most bugs right after I write screwy code. I had my brother and other people come in and playtest it, and I managed to find and smash a bunch of bugs that way. Another thing that I never really thought about before this project was cross-browser stuff. It’s always sat at the back of my mind. I had to test it in Internet Explorer (ew, I know) to see if a certain problem was a browser issue and my game didn’t even load. At all. Apparently IE has weird sound support that keeps my audio from loading, so the game never leaves the preloader. I tried to fix it and nothing worked, so I just had to put in a message on the website telling people to upgrade their browsers if they were using IE. It’s not a great solution, but in the future I’m going to have to figure that out if I want people to play my games.

Lesson 6: Schedule and Process
Working on this project, I spent a lot of time backtracking and switching between code and graphics and sound and it felt like I was never getting anything done. Next time I think I would benefit from planning out everything that I need to do and then allot certain days to work on different aspects. That way I would completely finish one thing and not have to worry about it anymore.

Overall, I really enjoyed making The Waking Lady. It was a great learning experience, and I’m excited to start working on my next game.  I hope you enjoyed these words from a nerd, and I’ll see you next time!

The Walking Lady Update #2

It’s been a few days since my last update on The Walking Lady, and I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress. The finishing goal is tomorrow, and I’m not sure if we’ll make it, but I should probably update you on what we’ve been doing.

First of all, one of my friends is now helping me make the graphics! We were talking about stuff and the game came up and he was eager to help. He’s been really helpful with more than just art, though. It’s nice having someone else look at the game to give you suggestions on it. Without him, the game would probably still be really boring.

I spent a good portion of yesterday drawing pixel art buttons for the main menus. I think they look pretty cool! And now I actually have a sort of theme: an old-timey-ish bakery! I think that this is going to look really cool when it’s done.

Here’s the super-awesome play button that I drew.

I’ve also been working a lot with the code. There are some new features, as well as some bug fixes and tweaks that I’ve implemented. You now have 3 lives before the game is over, there are powerups and items that make you slow down, and there are more sound effects. The game feels more complete, now. There are still a lot of things that I need to add, though. I still haven’t figured out the pause function, and the visual display for the 3 lives isn’t working right now.

On top of all that, I was trying to check something and ran the game in internet explorer (yikes) and it didn’t work. At all. I opened the console and apparently internet explorer doesn’t take .m4a files or .ogg files. So my game was stuck on the preloader because it doesn’t go to the main menu until the audio loads, and there was no audio that it could load. So now I’m going to have to convert everything to mp3s and provide fallback formats. Not difficult, just tedious.

And aren’t you supposed to stay away from mp3s in games? This forum post has details about the copyright stuff and fines that could possibly find you if you use those in an html game. I’ll probably try to find another format that works and stay away from mp3, but I’ll use it if I have to. (Although someone on that forum says that MPEG-4 should work on internet explorer. Maybe that’s wrong, or maybe I just didn’t specify the fallback correctly. I’ll have to check that out.)

It feels like my to-do list for this game just keeps getting longer. I’m not sure if we’ll finish by tomorrow, but if not, I can easily push back the goal. It’s not like I have anything else to do. It is nice having a goal, though. If this were just another random project that I took up without a goal, I would have abandoned it a long time ago.

But enough here! I’ve got programming to do! I’m off to smash some bugs. I hope you enjoyed these words from a nerd, and I’ll see you next time!

The Walking Lady Update #1

(This is a follow up post on my Project Goal #1. You can read the post here.)

So I’ve been working on The Walking Lady for a few days and I’ve made quite a bit of progress. If you want to play the old and boring version of the game that I’m talking about, you can go here. [Edit: This link now leads to an updated version of the game.]

Firstly, I decided that in order to use game states it would be easier to just rework everything instead of modifying the file that I already had, so I created a few game states: a boot state, a preloader, a main menu, and the game state. I pasted my already existing code into the right places and made a few modifications so that it would work right.

I then went into photoshop and made a bunch of quick placeholder graphics that I could use across projects. Using those, I slapped together a quick main menu.

Of course, I’ll eventually make graphics and have a menu that looks a whole lot better than this. I’m planning to make graphics last, once I have the tech aspects of the game finalized.

After that, I completely reworked the way that objects fall. Instead of changing the gravity when the player’s score reaches a certain number, the gravity now increases by 10 every time the player collects an object. So essentially, the gravity is the player’s score + 100 (100 is the starting amount). It’s the same increase, but now it changes gradually and not suddenly. The code looks a lot cleaner, as well. There were a bunch of if statements that I was able to get rid of.

I also added a few different screens, like a game over screen and a help/about screen. I was worried that restarting the game would be complicated, but all I had to do was start the state and reset some variables. Super simple.

The part that I’m having trouble with is making a pause function. The Phaser pause function freezes the update loop, which is fine and dandy until you want to unpause the game. The event listeners are frozen, so when you click nothing happens. I can pause the game and make some buttons appear, but I’m still in the process of making it so you can actually click on those buttons. I’ve just kind of left it for now, but I’m still working on a solution.

I then started to look for music and sound effects. I spent a good while drowning in copyright terms and all the nitty gritty details of Creative Commons before I found some that I liked with a license that I could use. I ended up making a page on here with a bunch of links to free resources, if you’re interested. Just go here.

I’ve been avoiding making the graphics because they’re inevitably going to suck, but I did download a program that lets you make pixel art. It’s called GrafX2, and it’s kind of weird really weird to get used to. I may just go back and keep using photoshop. Aseprite seems much nicer, but I’m not good enough at pixel art to warrant buying it. I might look into the trial if GrafX2 still bothers me after a while.

Another thing that I want to fix is how eeeehhhh the game seems. It’s not very engaging. You just walk around, so what? To counter this I’m going to add powerups that make you walk faster or increase your score and stuff. There will also be bad items, that subtract from your score and make you walk slower. That will hopefully make the game a lot more fun.

I’ve pushed my changes to GitHub, but I haven’t updated the website yet, so the playable game is still old. If you want to see repository, it’s here. I won’t make any promises on quality/neatness, though. I’m self-taught, remember! 🙂

Next Stuff To Do:

1. Make better graphics
2. Finish the pause function
3. Add powerups and bad items

I hope you enjoyed these words from a nerd, and I’ll see you next time!

Project Goal #1: The Walking Lady

So a while ago I mentioned that I was going to give myself goals over the summer. This way I won’t end up being bored for the next three months and I’ll end up with some finished projects. And what better way to start this off than to finish something that I’ve already started?

The first project that I’m going to take up over the summer is called The Walking Lady. I started this a few weeks ago when I first came across the Phaser game engine. I named it that because the original goal of the project was just to see if I could make a character walk. It eventually turned into a game.

It’s currently unfinished, but you can see what I have so far here. [Edit: This link now leads to an updated version of the game.] It’s just a simple game where objects fall from the sky and you collect them. It’s not new or original in any way, but I just want to see what I can do with it.

There are a few things I have to do in order to consider this to be ‘finished’:

1. Add different game states (a main menu, a pause menu, lose/win states, etc.)
2. Add music (?)
3. Make better graphics (although I may keep the lady the same)
4. Find a better way to restart the game
5. Various refinements

And of course, there are a lot more things I need to do, but those are just a starting point. An overview, kind of. I’ll worry about the specifics in a bit.

I should probably figure out a deadline, too. Otherwise I wouldn’t have much motivation to get this done. Judging by the amount of work that needs to be done and the time that I have, I think I can finish by Friday. So my deadline will be June 12. I’m not really sure if this is too much or too little time, but I’ll get better at setting deadlines as I work on stuff and see how long it takes me to do it.

I’ll be posting updates on this every few days or so. I’m not really sure how I want to post updates yet, but I’ll work it out. I hope you enjoyed these words from a nerd, and I’ll see you next time!

Masses of Models

The other day I was talking about the Unreal Engine and how cool it is, but of course, none of those features matter if I don’t actually do anything with them. And then it hit me: making a game with Unreal is gonna require a lot of 3D models.

Which, isn’t really that big of a problem, I guess. I have some experience, as I took an animation class this year. But this class was based on Animation: Master, which is a lot different than the stuff I would need for making games like these. Besides, I don’t have Animation: Master on my laptop, and there’s no way I’m going to spend 80 bucks when I can just use Blender. It’s free and I already have it on my laptop. I just have to figure out how to use it.

My animation teacher provided us with a few tutorials on Blender at the end of the year so once we finished our final projects we could start learning blender. That way, we would have something to do over the summer. I’ve already moved them onto my home computer and I’m planning to spend my time in class this week following them so when summer starts I already have a basic understanding of the software. I’ve already gotten pretty deep into one of the tutorials.

I actually downloaded Blender a while ago. I completely forgot how to use it, though. I think I made a cube move, once! But now that I’ve taken this animation class I’ve learned a lot of concepts that will translate over to Blender, hopefully.

And of course, talent is important. Even if I know how to use the software, I’ll have to make sure my models don’t suck, which, I’m sure they will. Making semi-realistic stuff is way different than making a cardboard box with legs (which just so happened to be my OC this year. I regret that decision).

I’ll also have to check out what kind of animation stuff the Unreal Engine has in store for me. I think it’ll take a while for me to learn to use everything, and even longer to be able to make stuff that’s worth showing to people, but it’ll be a fun journey! I just have to focus and not fall down a rabbit hole of cool software (which was what led me to download Unreal in the first place). My lack of creative focus is an issue for another post, though. I hope you enjoyed these words from a nerd, and I’ll see you next time!

Running Unreal Engine with Low Specs

So today I’ve decided to see how well my computer can handle big projects with Unreal. If you read my last post, you’ll know that I’m running this massive software on a laptop with 4 GB RAM out of the recommended 8 GB and a worse graphics card, as the recommended card is $200 (yikes!). You can check out the specs here.

I also wanted to see how much power this thing really needs, so I had google chrome open with spotify playing. I figured this wouldn’t end well, but I wanted to give it a shot.

I opened up the launcher and started browsing through the community marketplace in search of something free that I could download to see what my computer could do. A lot of the stuff in the marketplace that I saw is $30 and up, often hovering around $80 or $90, but that’s all aimed towards professionals. I’m just a kid with ambition, so I scrolled and eventually found a project by the name of Xoio Berlin Flat by xoio. I chose this one because it looks super realistic and I wanted to see if my computer could handle it. I went ahead and installed it, which took a while. I then opened the project, which took forever. It pretty much stops at 94%, but it eventually got to 95% and then opened.

Before it opened, though, the audio from spotify glitched out and I spent a few minutes trying to maximize chrome so I could close it. My computer was pretty much paralyzed during this loading process.

This level (scene? game? I don’t know the terminology) has 120 actors, and they’re all pretty detailed. The download for this project was over 300 MB, I’m pretty sure. That explains the massive load time.

As you can see, when it first loaded the graphics were nowhere near realistic. (Also, my layout saved! Hooray!) This probably has to do with when it auto-adjusted my settings yesterday (still don’t know how to change those), but I waited for the assets to load and then played it in a new window to see if the graphics were any better there.

It took about 3 minutes to load the play window, and then it spent a good amount of time (another minute or so) on a completely black screen, but it eventually loaded.

Once again, the graphics were not that great, although I could walk around with only a little bit of lag. My computer was running pretty slowly during this whole process, and a couple checks in task manager (once it finally loaded) revealed that the Unreal Engine was taking up pretty much all of my memory. Here are some more screenshots from the play window:

I managed to close the play window and go back to the main project screen. My computer as a whole had been acting pretty laggy, and closing the play window didn’t really do much to help with that. I tried to move around in the viewport, but nothing happened. I waited a little longer, and then I was able to turn and rotate with minimal lag. The graphics still sucked, though:

I should probably also mention that the Unreal Launcher was running as well as the Editor while this was all taking place. The launcher doesn’t need near as many resources to run, but it still takes up a good chunk of memory. I’ll have to see if it runs any better without the launcher in the background later.

My computer was practically humming at this point, so I went ahead and closed the editor. I didn’t bother to save, as I was pretty much sick of progress bars at this point.

The Final Verdict: It’s possible, but not recommended.

If you’re going to be working with fancy stuff in Unreal, I think you’ll need a powerful computer, or at least not a laptop. If you want hyper-realistic VR-quality games, you’re gonna have to put in the money. However, if you’re like me and downloaded this on a whim with no real intentions, you probably don’t need to spend a ton of money to get this to work. A laptop works fine, just at a low quality. And unless your computer can handle it, you probably don’t want to run too many (or any) other programs with Unreal going.

So there we go! I know I already posted about Unreal today, but I think this is pretty important, especially when it comes to deciding whether or not Unreal is worth the download. I hope you enjoyed these words from a nerd, and I’ll see you next time!

Starting with Unreal Engine

So on Friday night I was poking around online and somehow decided that I wanted to install a game engine of some sort. I ended up looking at Unreal Engine and Unity 3D, two cool looking engines that have way more power than I’ll need (at least, for now).

Unreal impressed me right away. All this stuff? Incredible! And the graphics are so detailed, it’s unreal (pun intended)!

At first I thought it was just a photo, but this was actually rendered in Unreal! (Here’s a video if this screenshot isn’t convincing enough. Watch it in 1080p if you can. It’s just incredible!)

I kept reading about all of the stuff this thing could do and I was sold. But the very best thing about Unreal is that you get all of this incredible power for FREE! I’m not kidding! This is the engine used to make games like Borderlands, Mass Effect, and BioShock, and you can just download it onto your home computer!

Of course, an engine like this requires some pretty hefty specs to operate at full capacity. You can find the requirements here. My laptop isn’t anywhere near this (half the RAM and definitely a worse graphics card), but I dug through the forums to see if it was worth giving it a shot or if it was just too much for my computer to handle. I couldn’t find very much, so I just went ahead and installed it.

After a pretty lengthy install time, I was able to open the program and test it out. It seems to work pretty well, but it takes a lot of power and sometimes it’s a bit laggy. The load times can be a little long on occasion as well. I’m not surprised, as my computer really isn’t meant to run stuff like this anyway. I probably won’t try to run too many other programs at the same time, though.

The thing that I like about Unreal is that there are a lot of tutorials available. I just finished going through the Intro to the UE4 Editor tutorial series, and I understand how the program works a lot better now. This tutorial only goes through simple stuff, like how to move around, but it’s all important if you want to be able to actually use the editor.

Another cool thing is how customizable it is. If one layout doesn’t work for you, then you can rearrange practically everything until it looks the way you want it. I changed mine to work better on a smaller screen, rather than a huge desktop monitor.

That reminds me, I never saved that custom layout! Whoops! At least it’ll be easy to recreate.

In the image above, you can tell that the graphics in the viewport aren’t very pretty looking. They’re usually a lot better than this, but since my computer isn’t super powerful, the program detected that it was running at a low framerate and adjusted the graphics settings for me. That’s pretty cool, but as of right now I don’t know how to change them back. You can still get nice looking graphics when you playtest the game in a new window, though. The images below are screenshots from one of the premade demo levels that just shows all the materials. Click them to enlarge them.

Look at that lighting! The details! Ahh!

Detailed bricks!

Look at the detail of that wood!

Another material close-up.

Yet another close up of a material.

Particles! Water and sparks, to be exact.

An overview of the map where I took these screenshots.

This shot was taken in the viewport, unlike the others.

And remember, I took all of those screenshots on my poorly equipped computer, so imagine how good this stuff looks on a desktop or a gaming computer!

As of right now, I’ve only played around a little bit, and there are a ton of features that I still need to test out. But other than it running a little slow, I have no complaints about this program. The only other thing that might stand in my way is the fact that you have to code with C++ in Unreal, and I don’t actually know C++. Other than the power requirements, that was the only thing that made me hesitant about using this instead of Unity 3D. The reason I went ahead and downloaded this though was because it offers a node scripting thing called Blueprints Visual Scripting, where you can connect stuff instead of writing code. I don’t know much about it right now, but here’s a screenshot from the documentation:

Speaking of the documentation, the Unreal Engine docs seem really easy to understand from what I’ve seen so far. There’s a ton of video tutorials, not to mention the tutorials built into the software. When I first launched Unreal, I followed a quick tutorial that guided me through the interface, and there are a bunch of tutorials for each little part of the software.

So overall, I’m excited to start learning more about this and eventually start making games. However, if this becomes too much for me (or my computer) to handle, I may try out Unity 3D. And if that doesn’t work either, I’ll go back to my original plan, making 2D stuff with JavaScript and Phaser. I’ll probably post more updates as I go along and learn more about Unreal, so look forward to some more posts! I hope you enjoyed these words from a nerd, and I’ll see you next time!