Friday 14 October 2016

Time Warp: Music!

We've moved on from the story! Who'd have thought it, we only took 3 posts, 2 of which were corrections for changes to the stuff in the first post. safe to say, anything that isn't set in stone I won't be writing overly detailed posts on again. Actually, I will, but not on the story. Nothing spells disaster like false hope to fuel the hype train. Anyway, we have a more important topic to discuss in this post! Can you tell what it is? That's right, because you read the title! Music!

Now, let's get something out there right off the bat. I'm not a composer, and I cannot make music for the life of me. If anyone could recommend any free programs or tutorials or anything (literally ANYTHING) then I'll be happy to take a look. But for now, I'm stuck with the world's supply of music. Immediately when thinking of music, my mind jumped to royalty free music. Why wouldn't it? I used to run a YouTube channel (I still upload to it occasionally), and I've used a number of royalty free songs in my videos.

But I always find that royalty free songs have a certain...generic-ness to them. That's no comment on the creator's abilities, it's far better then I could ever hope to achieve, but it just seems to be sort of normal. There's no real stand out orchestral songs that would serve for a sound track, they all tend to play it safe and stick to genre-based formulae of how to compose music that fits comfortably in the "good but not quite Carling" field of quality. It lacks an oomph that makes it distinguishable as both a track, but also as the soundtrack to this game. Basically put, it sounds royalty free.

However, I've always had one idea sitting at the back of my head, just waiting for the right time for it to come to fruition. I've sat on it for a while, but now I think it's a good time to bring it out for use. A man, named Gustav Holst, once wrote a orchestral suite consisting of 7 movements. Don't know what that means? It means he dropped a sick ass live performed seven track album, but before albums were a thing. Or recording was a thing. Anyway, this suite was called The Planets, and is a very famous classical composition. If you've ever watched 2005-ish era Top Gear then they used it quite a lot.

This is where I unfortunately have to give you both a history lesson and a law lesson. You see, here in the UK we have laws about copyright. Mainly, you can hold the rights to your work, as is rightfully so. But, nothing lasts forever. You see, after a certain amount of time, differing from country to country there is a time period that acts as an expiry date for the copyright, so as to not limit works for all eternity by some stingy dead guy. This is usually the year of the composer's death, with an amount of years added onto it. In the UK, this is 70 years. So, Holst died in 1934 of heart failure at age 59, and yes, I have done my homework on this. When it involves laws, you really do have to do this properly.

Anyway, Holst died in 1934, plus 70 years for the copyright on his works to expire and this gives us a solid number of 2004, meaning his works have been copyright free for 12 years! Crikey, it's a wonder you don't see it popping up more. But either way, since the copyright has expired completely, this essentially makes it open for whatever you want to do with it. In this case, it will be our sound track. Remember how I said it was a suite? And how I described that as like an album? Well each movement (track) had it's own name, which are listed as so:

1) Mars - The Bringer of War (composed in 1914)
2) Venus - The Bringer of Peace (composed in 1914)
3) Mercury - The Winged Messenger (composed in 1916)
4) Jupiter - The Bringer of Jollity (composed in 1914)
5) Saturn - The Bringer of Old Age (composed in 1915)
6) Uranus - The Magician (composed in 1915)
7) Neptune - The Mystic (composed in 1915)

Those are in order, by the way. I know that they were composed out of order, but whatever, that's how it's supposed to be. Each one is themed on a different planet, and is essentially a different emotionally-styled piece, each intended to invoke different emotions in the listener. However, what we're interested in is the movements Mars, Venus, and maybe Jupiter. The others may be used here and there in bits, but these three will be our main basis.

I say basis because they won't be staying how they are. You see, they're free of copyright, meaning I can edit them however I see fit. In this case, I intend to break them up into segments, so that I can play different parts when the player hits different triggers, making the music match what is happening in the scene. Why choose this suite over other ones? because it offers a good variety without losing it's cohesion, and plus I really like it. Why classical music? Because when done right, classical music is awesome, largely for soundtracks such as this.

One last comment about the music as we start to wrap up here, is that this music won't be non-diegetic, like most soundtracks. This means that It'll be physically in the story, as a real thing that the main character is supposed to be able to hear. This basically comes from a audio system built into his helmet, which story-wise will be to keep him calm and focused, but deep down it's because he likes it. He just doesn't want any one to know what Mr Bad-Ass Assassin Man listens to his tunes while on the job, he thinks it makes him seem unprofessional.

Anyway, that's about it for the music for now. This should be pretty final in terms of sound track, but you never know, as the story has proved. I've made some refinements to the AI and game mechanics, so they'll maybe be the next posts, but we'll see because I might end up splitting them up into separate things cause they're both quite hefty, I think. I'll leave you all to listen to the Planet Suite, because you know you want early access to the soundtrack. It's pretty cool to listen to, it's about 50 minutes in total so enjoy.


Time Warp: Story, Part Three of the Story-Line-Failure Trilogy

So, the other story is, as it turns out, ass. If you don't know what I mean by that, I mean I'm rewriting it. But I'm not stupid, so I'm not going to post about the story any more because the more I post about it the more I have to keep making posts about how I'm changing it. The 2.0 story's main fault was that it wasn't so much level based as it was one continuous string of levels, which all directly continue on from one another. This isn't good, mainly because it really, really, REALLY doesn't fit with the main mechanic of the entire game, which proves to be a pretty big problem in the grand scheme of things.
So, It's going to be changed to be more segmented and level based, and I'll rework the parts of the story that are required in order to get it to fit. The story is second after gameplay, after all.

Anyway, we'll finally have sections on music and the mechanic soon, as well as some other stuff, so keep your eyes peeled. I'm going to be typing them up next, though weather there'll be GIFs and demonstrations I've yet to decide. I'd like to, but since I've accidentally forgotten to update my graphics drivers I've been getting a couple of crashes when using Unity every now and again, which has caused me to loose some major work on this project, mainly relating to the AI and how it interacts with the world and the player. Not stuff that can be redone lightly, I might add. Still, it seems to be fixed for now, so check back for updates on the other promised stuff.

Monday 10 October 2016

Time Warp: The Story is a Lie!

So, it turns that I'm wrong about that story. Way wrong. That's not going to be the story used here. Why? Well, it poses a bit of a problem really. I experimented with some models, textures and different shaders for the war train, along with various other elements that would be used, and I encountered a huge problem. Everything looks disgusting. Literally, no matter what, everything looks weird, out of place, and wrong. The backstory is generally fine, there isn't a great deal of it shown so I can keep that, but the actual game story? The War Train? Using it as a battering ram? Nope. Gone. Poof. It sucks, I know, but it's gotta go. I'll keep it for another game, and I'm sure that it'll come in handy in some way, but for now, it'll be locked away in the Great Vault of Forgotten Ideas™.

So, our new story? Well, like I said, a lot of the backstory can stay. I'm still happy to have it given out in some form of easter eggs and things, just to keep things simple more then anything, but the whole train-ram-home-base-explode-y-thing will have to go. In it's place, here's what we've got: The true, actual original idea was for you to play as an assassin (as evidences in my first post, where you are in fact described as an assassin), but some things will change. Mainly, your goal. You will be dropped into an enemy held city, where you'll be escorting a valuable package to an extraction zone, and when you arrive you'll be provided with a first class ticket to Anywherebutheresville. Sounds easy, right? Well, keep thinking that, because making your way through a heavily defended city in occupation by the enemy with no outside support at all is tougher then it first seems.

So, some stuff to clarify about your mission. firstly, avoid the streets. Get anything near the 5th story of a building and you'll be gunned down quicker then you can say "wow, that was quick". This means rooftops and the upper floors are your main level area, using the connecting sky bridges, connecting tunnels that join adjacent buildings, or your ingenuity to cross the gaps. Secondly, your package doesn't turn the entire story into a gigantic escort mission where you're constantly having to protect something. Well, I guess technically it's an escort mission, but you're not really defending anything. I'll keep what you're escorting secret for now. Tertiary, you'll be dropped near a building of the IRIS Intelligence Agency, a shady organisation in charge of the military's intelligence (some shady people indeed) and will therefore need to make a short journey to the building, but once there the package should be of assistance. Once the package has been collected, you'll then set out to get it out of the city.

So, that's what we've got for now. Having it set in a city will be a welcome change in setting from the failed artistic style of the war train, and we'll probably be looking at something more Mirrors Edge's City of Glass and halo Reach's New Alexandria then Blade Runner's Los Angeles. What I mean by that is, more white bright tones then darker ones. Darker ones don't really work, as discovered when I tried to make the war train. By having Something more like this, I can also have more of a pastel colour pallet without it looking strange, as militaristic colours and shades don't blend well with the current settings. I'd also like to show some time progression through having the city slowly reach sunset the closer to the end of the game you are, more as a measure of time for the player then anything, and it'll allow me to make some nice looking sunsets with kick-ass colours. Anyway, next up is those promised posts on the music and the main mechanic. If you want a hint: Mars is sounding good this time of year.

Friday 7 October 2016

Time Warp: Story! Music! Bending Time to your Will?

So it's been a while! Probably the longest between posts, 5 days! The longest I'd gone before was 2 days, but that shouldn't happen again because I have updates! Many updates! As the title suggests, there are three main topics to be covered here, but each one is pretty huge. I mean, it's basically the entire game, right? The story, the musical score and the gameplay? That's the main building blocks for it! So, what I'm going to do is split it up into a number of posts, mainly three. In this post, I'll be covering the Story aspect. In a later post, I'll be covering the musical aspect, and finally the gameplay will be talked about AND DEMONSTRATED (hype) in a final third post. Not final as in last one ever, good god no. We're nowhere near the end. But we're inching ever closer. So anyway, onto the story!

Let's start out with a small history lesson. Not any important history, like WW2 or Hitler's rise to power. Instead, let's talk about my history. Specifically, when I was a wee little laddie. I used to love trains. Like, love them. They were great. It was never the technical aspect that got me, and I couldn't care less about the pulling capacity of the ANU5-B4G steam locomotive during it's prime. I liked them cause they were huge, they went fast, and they looked fancy and cool. But you know what I loved more then trains? Train crashes. Not for all the innocent lives put at risk, but just the sheer destruction of it. Like, have you ever seen a train explode? As in, properly? Take a look:


Look at that. Look at that wonderful mushroom of coolness. If that doesn't get your inner child excited, I don't know what will. I had a train set that went around my room, and all the time I crashed the trains into each other, just cause it was cool (I'm sure it was much cooler in my head). But recently, I replayed Medal of Honour: Frontline. It was the first proper FPS that i'd ever played, and I loved it. I had it on the GameCube, and we had one in my room, so I played it over and over. But one of the levels in particular was my favourite: Riding Out the Storm. This level was set on a WW2 German War Train. Don't know what a war train is? Let me educate you. It's a train with guns, a lot of guns. and armour plating. And then even more guns just in case. And lots of troops to man those guns, plus some spares because everything is always better with spare bits.

So, you're asking is my history lesson is about trains? Yes. And why is it about trains? Because these war trains are THE PERFECT setting for something of this nature. The basic mechanics of the game basically require firefights to be kept to relatively simple encounters, taking on a number of enemies at a time, before moving onto another set of enemies. I could set this in a building, going from floor to floor in a Bruce Willis-style They-Took-The-Thing-We-Want-It-Back, but that lacks a certain...oomph. Sure, you might give a reason, there might be classified information in this building. Cool, the player is saying, what does that do for me? Well, player, it does nothing, just some off screen characters that you probably don't care about. Great, now the player has lost interest because this means nothing to them. Why should they be invested in this building, or what you're doing in it? There's no personal gain.

You know, I've just realised that I'm still not telling you the story. you've been reading 4 paragraphs waiting for it, and I've been rambling about trains. That's probably not as interesting to you as it would be to me. Anyway, the story. So, humanity. We're always fighting things, right? No matter how much Star Trek will tell you otherwise, humanity can never settle itself with anything else, even sometimes its own. This is why we have all the wars history has and such. Well, this time, it's the future, and we're at war. I know, it's a very original idea and you may need to sit down. but here's the kicker: we're actually fighting many different forces on many different fronts. Everyone's fighting everyone, so we're all left in a bit of a tiff with each other.

But is humanity united to stand against the forces who seek to destroy us? Of course not! We're humanity! There's always conflict between us, and this time it comes in the form of the Zealot Military. These people aren't very happy with the bulk of humanity, and how we handle matters of humanity-based vindication. they mostly aren't happy because of how some things have to suffer in order to fund the war efforts, mainly in the working area. Those in certain critical positions have sought to gain power through negotiations to have a stronger input on humanity's war efforts. And having been told by everyone else "can we really not have this discussion later?" they got cranky.

So, they've been taking more and more violent shots at the general human population for quite a while, getting more rowdy each day. However, this time humanity has decided that we've had enough, because theses assholes have hijacked a train. But not just any train. This one was taking vital supplies to the front lines. Mainly, hundreds of tanks and armour, thousands of weapons and an uncountable amount of other things that they'll regret getting their grubby mitts on very soon. This war train taking vital supplies has been stored in a train yard. How do we know it's there? Because it's our bloody train, of course we can track it, and it's huge. Remember how I said lots of tanks and armour? Yeah, this think is building-size huge. I think you'll like the designs I'm going for when I show them.

So, they have a train. Big deal. Use another one, surely we've got a spare somewhere, right? Well, it's not so much what they've got it, more that they're fitting it with explosives. A lot of explosives. enough explosives to crater the earth with a hole a couple of kilometres wide. The moon's radius is 1.737 kilometres, for scale. This party train is being lined up for a straight line to humanity's main base of operations, and given that this line is vital for transport to the front lines, we can't really blow up the tracks or damage them. think of it as a giant battering ram, each carriage weighing the same as a building. Not good, not very stoppable either. This is where the player comes in. Assault the train while it's in the train yard and disable it, and if it manages to get away, make sure you're on it when it does. If you are, then decouple each of the cars, leaving them open to proper disarming and stuff.

TL;DR: There's a big ass train heading for home base with many explosives, board it and disable it before it is used as an explosive battering ram on your home base.

If it seems like a lot to cover, then don't worry, it's really not necessary for the game. Most of it won't play in, and won't be flat out told to the player through some overly elaborate cut scene. Mainly, it'll be saved for those aforementioned terminals as extra world building for those who go looking for it. But how does this in any way fit into gameplay? is it all just a fancy backdrop for no reason? If i'm typing that question as though you've said it even though you probably didn't, you know it's probably wrong.

The whole train layout allows for a basic section/level-based game without it feeling disjointed. Each carriage is a level, filled with it's own unique points that make it different from the rest. Some cars are transporting supplies in crates, these are your basic firefights in an open-ish space. Some of them are used for the storage of tanks and APCs, to which the enemy will use against you, and you can use against them, changing up how the level plays out and how the player can interact with the level. Some carriages contain armouries, some will have completely open floors with walkways running above that must be fought on, with the rails speeding by underneath your feet. Some will force you to be out in the open, limiting the effectiveness of guns like the Ricochet, as they have nothing to bounce off.

Obviously these are just some examples of the possibilities that this presents, and hell, I might end up changing everything up if I find something that works better. But this is what we're going for at the moment, and the levels will be designed as such. As the carriages will have both indoor and outdoor sections, I'll have to get to work on weather certain things play into the current art style and if I can't come up with anything, Then I may have to drop the whole idea in favour of something better suited. If something with a similar section-based idea comes to mind that would be easier to visually work with while offering the same variety benefits, I'd be open to that. I'd probably use the same backstory, just keep the whole train stuff for a future game. We'll see how it goes. But for now, that's what we have! If you've reached the end of this post then you deserve a medal, that's a crazy amount of reading and you should be proud of yourself for supporting indie devs and their whack-job ideas that are way too dumb and risky for AAA studios to ever even think of considering.


A Quick Concept Art

Totally not getting distracted or anything, after I wrote last night's post (I wrote the Quick Notice post and a post that's coming out later on together, but I thought I'd split them up a bit because it's a long one) I did some sketching and drew a quick concept art of what the player models would be like. Obviously parts would change due to customisation, but for now I quite like the look. He doesn't look bad, but I could probably do a better job when it isn't 3 am. That being said, he's got a certain look to all the weird lines in the under suit that I quite like, I'm not 100% sure what nighttime will was thinking with them but they look good in the form of pipes or wires running through the suit. Also, yes, he has no legs, but I'm awful at drawing legs, I'm surprised the hands came out looking so human.


Thursday 6 October 2016

A Quick Notice

Something that I'd like to point out, due to a recent discovery, is that Photon Unity Networking can support 100 concurrent users. I've always used the Photon Cloud servers, which can only support 20, and I feel dumb as hell. I've been after making an FPS multiplayer game for years now. I've even made a few attempts here and there. But I've always held myself back because of that godDAMN 20 CONCURRENT USER LIMIT. GODAMMNIT. GODFREAKINGDAMNIT. I've never been so annoyed and happy in my life. This is more of a forewarning then anything: you may soon start seeing some concept artwork crop up here and there for arena-style maps and human/alien weapons, and maybe some armoured super soldiers. Don't worry, I'm not abandoning any of my current projects, but it's just been bumped up the list to next in line, so when Time warp is all wrapped up, this'll likely be the next one going.

Sunday 2 October 2016

Time Warp's AI, Story and Additional Content

I know I said that I'd write an update on Friday after I uploaded the sketchfab post, but that didn't happen. Not that it matters, as now I have a better update to share: progress on project Time Warp's AI! I've also had some story concepts, but I'm not 100% sure on weather to share them yet, because they are just concepts and might not come to fruition. I'd live them too though, they allow for quite a bit of creative freedom and allow for a story line that's engaging but simple, not overstepping our boundaries. Because, lets face it, writing a heavy backstory into a relatively simplistic game is just a recipe for disaster. I was going to talk about the AI now, but I think I'll detail a bit more on the story for a bit. Because it's my dev blog, after all.

Anyway, so as I said I'm not sharing much on the story yet because that would be dumb, because as a lot of the game is still in development things will change often and most things aren't set in stone. Except that sniper rifle model. That kicks ass. So, as previously stated, the story will be kept relatively simple, and will be largely told through text and other visual means, because I'm an awful voice actor and we've got a budget of £0 to make this game with. That's not the main reason, however, I fell that it's less likely to cause issues with the main mechanic of the game, as voice clips would have some...unexpected issues while playing. The main mechanic is almost done, so you'll see what I mean soon.

But anyway, my story plan is this keep it simple on the surface, but plant of seeds of a larger story (or even just tell one) for those who explore the levels and look for secrets. I love exploring levels, and also love it when my exploration is rewarded; finding those extra ammo crates, or that little Easter egg, or maybe even a hidden power weapon to help complete the level. However, the main case in point of this is in Halo 3, where Forerunner Terminals were present on forerunner stuff, telling an underlying story that adds deeper layers to the relatively simple story that you play through. I loved finding these, it gave more backstory to the locations you were in, introduced lore characters that led to the events that brought you here, and even unveiled present character's hidden motives, including little details that hint towards their ultimate roll either as ally or enemy.

Screenshot from a video by Youtube user HaloSpartanGamer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TFhJki2goA

So, I plan to tell some underlying elements of my story through a similar means. I'll probably plan out a story far in advance of this one, maybe just to give me some hints about where things could go from here, etc. However, one thing that I do like to do it keep a sense of similarity through all my games: each one references another, and they're all intertwined, one way or another. My first ever game, Defender: Last Stand has links to Fighter Prime, a game that'll be put on steam in the near future, which has ties to Galactic Combat, another space-related title of mine. This has links to Gravity, which has ties to The First Strike, which then links into The Dead Planet and so on and so fourth. By the way, most of those will never see the light of day, but here's to hoping that I get round to finishing them as some point. It would be nice. But what I'm saying is that most of them have similar looks in one way or another, in both a story half of linking everything together and the developer half of re-using assets. Anyway, stories in layers. Like onions. Onions have layers.

Also, I said in the last post that I would be unveiling something about weapons in the next major post, but that won't happen so deflate your hype balloons. It's a perfect example of what I was just talking about: adding new weapons offsets the balance and pacing of the game, leading to all sorts of variables player-side that I can't account for. Some of the planned weapons included a pistol, an SMG and a shotgun as a secondary choice of firearm. However, after fiddling with a number of variables and trying out different combinations, a problem arose: what was the point?

If you have a long range point-accurate sniper rifle, then why do you need an SMG? and if you have a reasonably accurate semi-auto pistol, then why have a sniper rifle that does the same, but fires slower? why have a shotgun, when you can just 360 trick-shot ricochet no-scope a dude while he's right in front of you? Point is, those weapons all offset the balance of everything, and therefore were removed. They might be added back if i find a way, but for now, bye bye to the SMG model I made. It didn't look col enough anyway.

Hey, it's finally time to talk about the AI! who'd have thought I could delay it for 6 paragraphs?! That probably holds some kind of record for dodging topics. Anyway, the AI is...erm, yeah. It wasn't looking good until a few hours ago. As a a matter of fact, it still isn't looking great. But it's a start. I'm pretty proud of some things, they work well, some others though, maybe the less said about them the better. Let's start off by looking at how far we've come. Not a great deal of in-progress screenshots and stuff unfortunately as most of it was problem solving, but I have some lovely professional GIFs to show you, such as this one:


See? Are you proud? Isn't it looking great? What? You think it looks weird and unnatural and want to have your dreams unscathed by it's presence because you can't deal with the nightmares anymore? Well great, me too, but we don't all get what we want. In this case, I wanted some way to have a ragdoll correctly react to being shot, so I attempted to simply incorporate AI code into the rag doll. "Simply" maybe isn't the word for it. Maybe unreasonably difficult. I've never done it before, so maybe it's easy to those who have, but to me it was awkward. I didn't want to enable and disable the physics on each bone or anything because surely there's a more efficient way of doing it.

Turns out if you don't, it just flops around like a man-shaped fish. So my solution? Pin his head in place. Of course. Why didn't I think of it sooner? It'll hold him up and i can maybe animate the arms and legs individually and call them as needed. But that's dumb apparently, because this is the result. I suppose I could make a game with no ramps, edges, stairs, ledges, walls or objects, but I think that might compromise gameplay. Dumb solution to a dumb problem.

I basically wanted to avoid what I've come to call "Source Syndrome", which is a condition that seems to affect a lot of Source games (sorry Gabe). Basically, when an enemy is killed, for a frame or two, sometimes you can see their t-positioned ragdoll spawn before it's corrected to the right positions Sometimes, they don't even correct at all and just leave it t-posed! It's especially evident in G-Mod, which I know isn't the best example of a polished game but it's the best place to see it. Anyway, the use of ragdolls already in position came from this, and also I could get accurate hitboxes and reduce what's been come to be called by me as "Payday Syndrome", where leg and arm shots don't count because they don't fit into the (I assume cylindrical?) collider that they seem to use. Especially given the game, these physics need to be on point. Absolutely on point.

So, after some tweaking I decided to give in and disable each bone in their prefabs, and then enable them again when they're killed. turns out that's actually the best way to do it, and it allowed me to get some actually kind of cool physics results. Basically, Using the particle effects and their hit positions, I can apply force to specific parts of the ragdoll as it's enabled,m ending in a seamless transition from living to dead, but also giving a better effect of being shot. For instance, shoot a guy in the head? His head'll whip back as his low-poly brains are catapulted allover a nearby wall. Bop a guy in the shoulder? He'll spin in that direction from the force of the impact before collapsing on the floor. Popping a sniper in the foot? His appropriate leg will give way, and he'll collapse leg-first into the ground, or off a wall if he's standing on one. Take a look at some examples:

Leg shooting

Head shot!

You spin me right round baby right round

Chest bop

His buddy wanted to see what was wrong with him

Possibly my favourite, leg-hitting enemies on walls and watching them tumble

So, as you can see from this increasingly GIF-heavy post, things are going...alright. The AI is still missing the whole second part of that whole "Artificial Intelligence" thing, as currently all they do is seek out locations marked as cover and stand there, randomly selecting a new one at random intervals. I've missed around with them shooting the player and it all works, I just haven't got the whole player death stuff down yet. It's nearly finished, just needs a little tweaking. Also, I added a little blood effect when they're shot which comes out of where they were shot, but I'm not sure about it; I don't think it fits with the whole aesthetic. However, none of that matters because you can Sparta-shot them off of a ledge and they go tumbling, and it's my favourite thing in the game so far.

Bonus GIF: firing Extermination shots into a crowd in a small room, with the impact force ten times as strong as intended. Additionally, shots bounce off of enemies when they hit them

However, once we get this AI business down and tweak the main mechanic to get it perfect, we'll be pretty much set to start creating levels. Oh, and we'll get a story down of course, but I don't really know where to go with that at the moment. My current plan involves sneaking aboard a form of transport to sabotage it, but we'll see. Stealth mechanics aren't really something I'd like to implement in this as it doesn't really fit with the gameplay as a whole, so we'll see. Maybe a rethinking of that concept is in order. Either way, I'm looking forward to making the levels. Some concepts so far involve allow for quite a bit of creative freedom in their design given the aesthetics; Plans for cityscapes, intense sky combat and thrilling train rides are so far on the table. but for now, that's your update. Maybe you'll get the main mechanic next time, who knows.

Friday 30 September 2016

Quick Update on Progress, and Sketchfab is Here!

Just a quick update ahead of tonight's likely more lengthy one. I just today got Sketchfab after remembering that it existed, so for anyone interested you can now view my models in all their low poly glory. Since the only model I've made so far for this project is the sniper rifle, I guess that's all you're getting. More will come soon though!


Tonight I should have an update on the Time Warp project. The collaboration project has ground to a halt since Dan gave up on his script and now I'm going to have to do it instead. Yay. Otherwise, we'll have to wait weeks for  it to be done, since Dan has Uni stuff and all that. How dare he get an education. How inconsiderate.

Wednesday 28 September 2016

More Time Warp Progress!

Since I've been waiting for Dan to finally finish that script, I've been working more on Time Warp then our collaboration project, hence the lack of updates on it since those initial two posts. That said, apparently John has tried to do some animations for the placeholders, which won't be used in the final game because they're rigged for the placeholders so...why do it? Whatever, it's practice I guess, I'll put a GIF of it if it's funny or it looks weird, from listening to him doing it earlier it sounds a lot like he's going to screw up my AI with it so that's fun, tip top collaboration. Of course, I let him get on with it and didn't correct him, he's gotta learn somehow! I can fix it anyway, so it's better to let him learn about what to do and not to do then be told everything. I learnt from making all the wrong mistakes, and it's made me become the developer I am today. You don't want to see my first game. Trust me. You don't.

Anyway, I made some fine tweaks to the sniper's materials and things, but I'll be writing this as though I'm making and changing it while writing this, which nobody would ever do because that would be daft. Either way, there's a work in progress GIF of the sniper rifle, and then probably a couple of the 'finished' (subject to change) product. One of the first things I did upon opening the project in Unity 5.5 was fiddle with the new particle systems, and ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh they're nice. Real nice. You can have lights and trails, making it the perfect candidate for projectile weapons when used right. And as my central mechanic (as of now unannounced, I'm keeping it a surprise, but lets just say that my description of the character you'd be playing as in my first post about this was all true fact to the game) relies on projectiles being moving objects and not any ray-cast line rendering fancy shmancy more optimised stuff, it's the best option I can get. Also makes for short code, too! have a look at a work in progress firing of the sniper, as it stands. no lighting is set up yet, so it just looks silver and stuff, but that'll change very soon.


The animations on it aren't bad, it's lacking a walking animation but I really don't mind that; I can always add it in later should I feel like it. I like the other animations, too; they seem simplistic enough to fit in with the game's art style and generally seem to fit the whole human-alien design I was going for with the weapon itself. The scope floats a little independently of the sniper's body, and has a slight delay when recoiling from being shot, further giving the impression of not actually being attached to the rifle but instead floating with it. The idle animation has a similar latency between rifle movement and the scope catching up, which I quite like as it reinforces this idea that the scope isn't actually attached. Also, that core piece in the middle has become a firing chamber, and spins when a round is fired. It also recoils back into it's original location, as though it's loading another round of whatever supersonic space energy this target-vanquisher exudes. Also, ignore the weird stained glass window to the right. I needed it there. For science.

Overall, the lighting and tone of this has been really fun to do because it's something quiet different to anything I've done before. I've always liked the colouration and styling on games like Heavy Bullets, using pink and cyan hues, but I've never quite liked their over saturation on the colours, so for the styling on Time Warp I'll be using a largely pastel pallet, with pink hues being used for the upper skybox and a dark-ish cyan for the bottom. I'm super glad for the newer procedural generated skyboxes now more then ever, it allows for such freedom to get things right it's unbelievable, props to whatever employees slaved over that for months on end and will receive no recognition whatsoever.


Heavy Bullets screenshot, available on Steam

Notice how It uses more of a neon approach to the colours? Yeah, I'm trying to avoid that. I don't feel like it blends well (obviously it isn't meant to physically blend, but I mean it doesn't fit together right) and that it separates certain objects from the environment, not in a 'I want this to stand out to the player!' sort of way, but more a 'This is a complete disconnect from the world I have created around the player, making a break in the player's immersion!'. I want to point out that I'm not having a go at Heavy Bullets, and it's a fantastic game, just that I feel like for my game, this exact style wouldn't work. And where something doesn't work, we make it work.

Enter my non-Baked Object-Lit Lighting Obscurance Creative Kit System. All of that is meaningless, I just wanted it to abbreviate to a funny word. But it isn't necessarily untrue. It renders the lighting in realtime so that I can change it on the fly, should I need to, which gives me more creative freedom for designing missions and levels. Also, it does use object-based ambient obscurance, or something to a similar effect, so that isn't wrong either. And it's creative. Unfortunately, it isn't a kit or a system in the technical sense, so the B.O.L.L.O.C.K.S. methodology won't fly for your Computing assignments at Uni. Sorry John. Anyway, here's my properly lit scene, with my newly improved sniper rifle in it!


Ok, so things are looking a lot better, and there's some things to note about this right away when compared to the original. Firstly is the cross heir. I'll be honest and say that I lied when I said earlier about not using ray-casting, I did use it a little bit here. I'm ray-casting out the middle of the screen, and rotating the particle effect to make sure it's always looking at whatever the cross heir is pointing at. It's using Unity's LookAt, which should make double sure that shots are always on target, unless the player can't aim, in which case shame on the player. Also chrome won't let me type ray cast as all one word without it throwing a fuss, so for the record I know it's not supposed to be two words, but apparently chrome, made by coders, doesn't.

Second thing to note about this is the firing chamber is now cyan. It fits better with the scene's lighting, and just looks damn nice. It gives the rifle some identifiable without having to fire it and see it's projectile colour. Remember that it has to be identifiable, it'll come up later in the post-blog post test. Also, the projectile has changed colour to the rifle's identifiable colour, in this case cyan. Additionally, the scope now has a slight lightening effect striking between it and the rifle's little scope holding panel thingy on top. I think it makes it look more like there is a force holding the two together, and occasionally science gets a little too rowdy so some gravity-based barrier keeps the energy holding it up in check and it gives a visible flash of energy in response.

I suppose that long exposure would lead to some nasty results from the gravity barrier holding the energy inside that small gap, which would for sure lead to some kind of cataclysmic event happening in the palm of your hands, or more likely right against your face. But, if you're an assassin and you're near your target, it'll probably get them too, so..mission accomplished, I guess! That's probably not even real science or in any formation of the universe possible given the laws of physics, but it does give a nice little effect so that'll do for now. (What? all my scientific knowledge comes from ShoddyCast videos? how dare you!)

I get that most of these changes are aesthetic, and I realise that aesthetics don't make a game fun, but it's important to establish an art style from the very beginning of development, because it WILL shape how everything in the game is designed. all your models, level design, animation, lighting and how your gameplay is implemented into each of those will be dictated by what the art style is. So getting it down now is a good shout for the future of it's development to be as smooth as I can make it. Also the GIFs are a little slower in frame rate then the game is, so for the record sparks come out when shots impact.

And now onto the post log post test! What was it i said was important to remember for later? Was it:
A) Making the rifle's animations differerent so that it looks cooler?
B) Making the rifle identifiable through colour?
C) John smells?

The answer is, of course, B. But you'll get points for writing C too. the rifle needs to be identifiable from it's physical appearance now. Why? because a good game is nothing without progression. And while I plan to have a healthy dose of story woven deep within the crevices of levels, missions and other little hiding places, I'm talking about the player's progression through the equipment available to them. At the start of missions, you will start out with one rifle, and something else, as of now unannounced. But as you progress through the game, different options will become available to use, offering different play styles and completely new ways to approach encounters. Well, as new as you can get when you're still shooting people. These new variants each have their own name, with the original taking on the name of the Vanquish Sniper Rifle. Here's a little breakdown of each of them.

>>WARNING!<< Some people may not want the upgrades and other stuff spoiling for them if you intend to actually play the game, so if you're bothered, then don't look below for obvious reasons. >>WARNING!<<


I believe you're already somewhat acquainted with this one, but in case you've not quite got it from other GIFs and such, here's you're breakdown. The Vanquish. It's simple. Basic. Ordinary. But that's not a bad thing, not with the other guns in our line up. It fires a straight projectile moving at 50 meters a second which harms whatever target it hits, and most likely gives the target's family some serious funeral organisation to be doing. It's main advantage is you can't shoot yourself with it, which is bad because you don't have a family to arrange your funeral. It's distinct colour is cyan, and all of it's colourable stuff is themed that way.


This is a new addition to the family, the Ricochet. It's primarily the same concept as it's Vanquish brethren, but it's projectiles don't just hit the target, they bounce off and continue to hit things until it's lifespan expires. This is roughly 1 second, so use it wisely. It has a number of advantages, from shooting enemies that are hiding behind cover to bouncing off walls to hit multiple targets, but of course we all want to do it for the style points, mainly. Because hitting a long range sniper bouncing collateral double kill just feels good. but it does have a downside. Mainly, the user is it's downside. Firing bouncing projectiles at all the walls in the rooms is all fun and games until you melt your own face off with it because it bounced into you. Use it with caution. It's colouring is a pinky-purple, and all of its stuff is similarly coloured.


Oh boy. This baby. this is the real deal. I named it the Exterminator for a reason, and that reason is that generally death is coming for anyone who fires this in a small room. With projectiles similar to the Ricochet, it fires a three round burst of bouncing beans of death. they fire in a small diagonal line, usually leading them to having reasonably varied projectile paths. Great for clearing out guys or if you just want a better chance to hit, but not ideal if you want to live for long and have an itchy trigger finger. Mainly because you won't have fingers for long. As the great rice manufacturer's Uncle Ben's Rice once said: with great power, comes great plasma death rays to the face. I might be remembering that wrong. It's colouration is green, and again all of it's doodads are also coloured green.

>>WARNING!<< The triggering stuff is over boys, you're good to read again. >>WARNING!<<

I'm actually quite happy with not only how they look and work, but the variety between them. when using them, they all have their own advantages and disadvantages which make each of them viable for a different play style, and allow for different playthroughs of the game to have different end results and levels of difficulty. The projectiles themselves work pretty well and the particle system is holding up nicely, overall I'm pretty damn happy with how it's turned out! Things are starting to take shape and I love how it's currently looking!

For the next post, we'll possibly be looking at a new weapon in the player's arsenal. If I can get some of the issues with it worked out, then we should be good to have that post tomorrow, but that depends on weather I can get some of the ancient rivers imagination flowing again. If not then I might start working on the AI, as that's a biggie that needs doing sooner rather then later so that I can fine tune it for gameplay. I realise that I still haven't mentioned anything about the main mechanic, or how far I've come along with development of it, but just be sure that it's coming.

I don't really want to show this one until it's in a reasonable state, you know, since the whole game hinges on it. Plus the AI plays a very VERY important factor in it, so that'll be more likely to come first. Then it's on to level design! I have some ideas and sketches, along with some pretty sweet ideas in my head, but their application and implementation is undoubtedly harder then their inception. Anyway, the things to take away from this are: Lighting! Guns! Bollocks! Keep your eyes open for more development news as it comes. I'll probably do a small update on John's animation when I can, it'll be funny interesting to see what he comes out with.

Monday 26 September 2016

A Quick Update on Time Warp

Only a really small post this time, because I just imported the sniper model into Unity. You remember how I said it was big? That might have translated to physical size as well, and it appears I got a little lost in blender's scale. We've overdone it this time, people. See that small green thing to the right? That's the player, and the rifle is approximately 64 meters long. If you thought that 12 feet is big, how about 1 AND A HALF THE SIZE OF THE STATUE OF LIBERTY (46m). That's 17 and a half Fiats. I'm going to take a guess that it will have to be scaled down a bit.


Once I get some gameplay up, they'll be better, longer posts. But for now, you'll have to enjoy that sexy reflective sniper.

My Personal Project!

Ok, so, I know that we're doing the collaborative project and everything but let me tell you, I cannot stay focused on one project for long. Often, I loose focus for it, come up with a new idea and think "hey, that's cool, let's do that instead!" But this time, I'm not doing that. Even if it seems like I am. Promise. I'm hoping to avoid that by having a personal project of a completely different style and genre, so that if I get a bit out of focus with our joint project, I can come to this one for some away time, and if i get tired of this one, then back to the collaboration. So, I've had this idea for a while and I've just being sitting on it because I haven't really known where to go with it. I'm not revealing it's central mechanic yet, but I will soon when I can demonstrate it and have something to show for my work.

It all started when I was sorting out the importing of the models for our collaboration project. When importing the knight model and setting up the lighting, I noticed that I had accidentally fallen in love with the low-poly untextured style. Well, that's not true, I've played games with that style before and loved them plenty (Note: Grow Home) but this was the first time that I'd fell in love with my variation on that style. And by that, I mean that I felt that my works looked cool and not ameture for once. Looking at what I'd made, I thought about what I could do with this style, and then it dawned on me. This was the missing piece of my idea, the visual styling that would allow the mechanics to fit perfectly alongside it, keeping the game optimised and looking beautiful at the same time.

Basic premise: you play as a badass in the truest sense; a deadly assassin, enhanced with extraordinary abilities allowing him to kill with ruthless efficiency. Using a otherworldly sniper rifle, she/he is able to eliminate roomfuls of enemies in under a second, moving too quickly for even the most specially trained of bodyguards to be able to comprehend. Dodging bullets at 2,500mph is trivial, for the most part. But, some of these things just don't look as nice in Unity as I'd like them to, so I've got an upgrade.


Unity 5.5.0b4! Numbers! This is the beta version of the latest unity update: Unity 5.5, which comes packed with new features apparently. All I see that's new in the patch notes is the new trail renderers, particle effect changes and splash screens. but, that doesn't matter, because we'll be using pretty much all of those new features! specifically the newer particle effects, but the splash screens are nice too. I'll slap that giant ass 8-bit logo on there and it'll look nicer on Steam. Oh, I forgot to mention, this will hopefully be on Steam Greenlight eventually, but don't get your hopes up! It'll get drowned out by all the mobile ports and RPG-Maker games. I'm passing the time during the install playing a half an hour long Audiosurf ride. Yay for film scores. Today's ride is Batman V Superman, cause the film sucked ass but the soundtrack was bomb.


Additionally, I began some designs on the sniper rifle. I'm aiming (heh) for a more human-alien look for this, so I want it to be quite square and boxy while still having unfamiliar shapes and hovering bits. For the most part, my initial concept sketches are a little clunkier then I'd like, and it looks more like an assault rifle of some kind. But, with the magic of blender modelling, this shouldn't be an issue. Also, I'm aware that most concept artists use graphics tablets to draw their concept art, and have a full colour rendition from multiple angles, but I got a D in my art qualifications so I have an excuse. Mainly, it doesn't need to be so detailed due to the styling of the game, and the fact that concept art is generally to convey an idea to the development team, but I'm the development team AND the concept artist, so I know what I mean when my drawings look like asscheese.


The rifle and scope are designed separately partly because they're meant to be separate, but mostly because I ran out of space at the top of the page. The red arrows indicate where it'll be placed on the rifle. It'll hover over it, to give it a bit more of an alien look, and the centre small core-like piece will rotate, either with each shot or constantly, we'll see how it pans out.there will be about 2-3 materials on this whole thing, mainly metallic greys and silvers of varying reflective. I'm tempted to use reflection probes so that the rifle reflects the scene, but i think that's a little too much pushing the style. I'm already pushing the whole 'low poly' idea with the amount of detail on it, so we'll see how it pans out.


During modelling the rifle, Dan asked how things were going and I thought i'd take a screenshot to show him. I use Lightshot, which has a pen tool built in so I could draw in the rest of the rifle. But this prompted a problem. A big problem. a big big BIG problem. See those mall circle-ish shapes at the back? that's the handle, and the bulging down lump in front of it is the other hand hold. Notice how it's not even half way. The average arm span for people is 5 feet and 9 inches. After a bit of maths so inaccurate and guess-y it would make Pythagoras have a stroke, it's looking to be about 12 feet-ish. That's an entire Fiat 500's worth of sniper rifle. Hell yeah. Nothing inspires fear more then a gun the size of a small city hatchback.

Image photo credit to Fiat

So, here we have the finished sniper rifle. It's huge. And beautiful. And awesome. And huge. Did I mention it was awesome? I didn't scale it down, it'll be on the player's HUD anyway so scale won't really matter, just the third person model will look weird, but it's not multiplayer so that doesn't even matter! It looks alien, mysterious, futuristic and kick-ass. the scope floats, but may have a little bobbing animation while idle, and the centre core-piece is now part of the firing chamber. It'll probably spin up when it fires or something. I don't care, it just looks cool. If anyone wonders how it works, I'll claim space stuff. You may notice that the hand-holds aren't there, and there's no room for the trigger or anything. That's cause it's so god damn huge that to get it on the screen that part wouldn't be visible anyway, so it's only wasted performance. besides, it's alien, you could fire it by tickling it for all you know.


Anyway, that's all there is for now, so keep your eyes open for more things on this project and the collaboration one. I don't know how to separate the two verbally (or..wordily?) so we'll call this project Time Warp. Not like the song, though if I could get the rights I'd have that as the sound track. The name has relevance, but since I didn't unveil much on mechanics it doesn't make sense to readers. Oh well. You'll get it one day. Oh, and this blog is on Bloglovin now, as per my girlfriend Lois's recommendation. She's awesome so I'm sure the website is cool, as far as I know it'll keep you updated and give you notifications and such on my posts, so you'll never miss another flag physics milestone again.

Sunday 25 September 2016

A Quick Catchup

So in my last post (probably posted a couple of hours before this one) I mentioned that more info was to come, so here is said info: I'm super glad I let Dan do the coding. Like, seriously glad. I've looked at his script a few times and I have no idea what's wrong with it, but as long as he doesn't break it that's fine. But being honest you probably couldn't give a rat's ass about Dan's scripting troubles because saying that we've done stuff isn't proof, and a picture is worth a thousand words! Side note: how many words is a GIF worth?


Unit placeholders have arrived! And they look low-poly and dumb! Actually, I'm quite fond of the low poly look, used properly and with the right lighting it can create some really stunning visuals, but that's not what these guys are for. They're to stand in for the proper models, which will come later when I have the slightest idea what the hell a Halburger is. You may have noticed by now that the knight-looking dude in the centre has no legs, and you may be wondering why that is, and I answer with legs are a ballache, and since these are only placeholders I have no need to ache my balls where my balls are not required to ache.

I actually really like him, I gave him a chesspiece-like base so it didn't look too weird and i quite like the effect it gives off, sort of similar to the small wooden pieces a General would have on his warboard or Risk. I've never played Risk but I imagine that's what it's like. Anyway, on the right is our stand-in for siege engines, the subject of the previously mentioned lecture on trebuchets and catapults from John. The abomination on the left is, in fact, not an Anteater, and is supposed to represent a horse, though it looks more like one from a distance, roughly of about 1000 miles. Also, the knight guy has a variety of different weapons and is modular, so we can re-use his placeholder for a bunch of different units cause I'm lazy.


Unity had a slip up here, and rendered the lighting in the 'Butt-Ugly' preset. I would normally just re-render the lighting and take a screenshot of that as appose to showing this, but I wanted to show how important my job of global lighting and scene design is when it isn't done right to inflate my ego a little, what you end up with is something from the early 2000s. And gouged out eyeballs.


Here's the aforementioned knight, with some of his buddies in the background. he's lit properly this time, but doesn't have any camera effects on so he doesn't have the full visual package. That being said, I actually really like this guy now that eh's here and I kind of want to keep him, making other models in this style with a similar low-poly and basic texturing style would be both a nice visual distinction to other entries in the genre but would do wonders for computers running large battles, especially old ones. But alas, it isn't meant to be, as when first showing him to the other two the first point was "where's his legs?" That said, it does free him up to use in my personal projects so one day I might find a use for him, but for this project the prototyping stage is as far as he's going.


Anyway, I'll stop horsing around (get it?) about my cool little knights, because all you unbelievers in my anteater-horse hybrid are about to get a lesson in what proper lighting can do. Well, ok, it still looks bad, but it looks better, and the knight placeholders fit onto them perfectly, so they go together quite well. I want to name them Knight Riders, but I suspect that's going to cause legal issues down the line. The thinking is that these guys will be the fast attack type of guys, though currently they're in some form of squad of three to make testing multiple moving around each other easier, though i quite like having them grouped and would make for nicer, easier to control large battles, I can see why they would need to be split up.


Here's our little test battalion (were they called battalions back then? our resident medieval expert is in bed at the moment, so who knows) they're a tough bunch, mainly cause they don't have health scripts yet. up in front, we have three Knights, which are going to be a separate class of Elite units which will have their own population cap to normal infantry and such. Behind them are my Knight Riders (until I get enough blog views to make it a legal threat, I'm going to keep doing it) which have two groups of spear men either side. On the next row, we have archers sided by two groups of Knight Riders, which totally wouldn't trample the spear men in front of them at all. Behind those are our halburgers, sandwiching two groups of archers. On the final row are one last group of halburgers, flanked by two of our catapult siege teams (these are a catapult and two operating engineers).


Finally, for the models, we have a castle-type structure. It's built out of modular walls which will be able to be individually placed, giving people maximised customisation of their defences and stuff, but mainly people are going to use them to make penis shaped forts and we all know it. I just look forward to the day that I can topple King JustTheTip from the very thin end of his castle if this gets released. If the shape survives, I'll fire some catapults out of the head, in his honour. Units can stand on the walls while ramps are placed nearby, though this might have to go since it would involve generating a navmesh in real time over the network to sync it up correctly and that would extend into an aforementioned ballache.

But let's get real for a second people. I'm doing the graphic work on this test scene, even though it's a test scene and nobody will ever see it, and I want it to look fancy damn it. So, I've done some wonderful stuff with Wind Zones and made the trees and flag blow realistically in the wind. I can tell you're excited to see this more then anything else, so I'll go the extra effort and make a GIF for you. Did we ever establish how many words those were worth?


You know you love it, I know you love it, it looks great. Also, there's units on the walls in that GIF, so there's a bonus for you. Oh, and I understand that some people couldn't care less about my flags (cries) will want to see this thing called 'Gameplay', and while there isn't much to show, I can still show what's there. Basically only camera controls, unit selection and unit movement. But hey, we've been working on it for 2 days, what were you expecting, Starcraft? Currently Dan is working on the script which highlights the selected units, but that's what's giving him such a hard time, so let's not dwell on it, because if we do we'll realise that he's now been looking at the same 50 lines of text for 2 days. I'd like to point out that the game runs at frames that are well into the hundreds even on my 7 year old machine, but the GIFs don't seem to want to render at any consistent quality, so just know that frame rate issues are with the GIF, not the game. Oh, and the camera effects are applied in this GIF, so you'll see the current look of the world it's a little bright on the white, but it looks cool and I like it.


That's all for now, though I'm sure it won't be long before more developments happen. I'll go into the in-depth networking techincal mumbo jombo about how all this will work over multiplayer another time, as I've yet to even find a way to explain it properly to the other two. Basically, it'll do a thing, and it'll work, or not. Either way, I'm coming for you, King JustTheTip, and no amount of low-poly anteater-horses or legless knights you throw in my way can stop me. I'll siege you later.

A New Collaborative Project!

For some time, me and two friends and fellow developers, John Wheatman and Daniel Dennis, have discussed potential game development projects that we could work on together. We have been through MOBAs, FPSs and RTSs, as well as a number of other genres that could conceivably provide a fun development experience with the potential for a full release through the distribution program Steam. Most of these ideas have either been lost to the vast wastes of left behind ideas, but recently, we were provided with an opportunity.

Unity opened up the ability a couple of weeks (or maybe months? I'm unsure) to have multiple developers work on the same project through a 'Collaborations' feature. It allows the syncing of files over Unity's cloud servers so that the project can be edited by all three of us without having to use Dropbox or google drive to store the data, and removes the large upload times that using those methods would entail. This feature, however, is in a closed beta. But, I applied anyway, and we were granted access to the beta feature! It works fantastically, and while having a couple of technical difficulties stemming from being unable to connect to the cloud servers from time to time, it works perfectly and is very well optimised.

So, perfect! The stage was all set for our first collaboration project (well, besides helping each other in college, but we won't mention that cause those games generally sucked ass and were more tech demos then anything). Our basic premise was an RTS-MMO hybrid that would allow players to build armies and defences, and then attack other random players to topple their kingdoms because...I don't know, maybe they're assholes, maybe we didn't think of a reason besides 'killing is fun'. But either way, we had our premise, and after an in-depth discussion we've made decisions on most of the units and buildings that will be present. It's also worth noting that, as per John's suggestion, this will be medieval themed, so units, buildings and gameplay will be themed as such.

Our roles for this project will be me providing networking code (I've used Photon Unity Networking (PUN) a bunch before in a number of different games, so we'll be using that for this too) as well as models, animations and most scene-related stuff, some AI work, plus making things look pretty. Dan will be our main coder, though I'll be helping him every now and again, as will John, though I imagine i can coax him into helping me with some textures and things further in. John is there to look pretty, and maybe tell me how inaccurate to real life my unit models are (I already got told off for accidentally labelling a catapult as a trebuchet).

Anyway, more info is to come, but as I want to split it up into posts, it will probably be in the next one. FYI if anyone from Bungie or Dice read this and decide that you want to hire this coding and graphical genius based on what you see here, hit me up.