Blog for Paul /Wedge/ DElia at GarageGames.com

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Paul /*Wedge*/ DElia — 2006-10-13T23:42:07+00:00

School is back in session and the teacher is having all the kids write about what they did over the summer. So here's my assignment. Well no wait, that's a lie. Actually I'm done with school now. I got the final credit for my AA degree in Game Design by interning at Garage Games. You hear that? Two Year Game Design Degree! Any job I want is instantly mine now (yeah, I had no idea what I wanted to do with college).

I haven't posted a blog since the end of May. Back then I had just gotten accepted as an intern. And if anyone was wondering about the stuff I was working on (yeah I know it's not likely), I haven't really touched it in months. But I do plan on porting it up to 1.5 and hopefully fixing some of the things I broke in the process. So back to the point at hand what did I do at GG this summer?

Firstly, and most importantly I believe, I rocked at Guitar Hero. I'd been excited about coming down since Mr. Davey Jackson had informed me the game had become a staple on the office's recreational/testing area. And most duly, did I rock. I never lost a single head to head match in my time here. The pictures of GH Magnus put up from Not-IGC were on my TV and controllers. I was worried the in-office setup would was insufficient and too out of the way for anyone to play. So I dragged my own setup into the hallway, and much rocking was had. Eric Fritz was cool enough to bring in the demo of GH II as well. The two player co-op mode is phenemonal. I am eagerly anticpating it's release in a month or so.

My fanboyish Guitar Hero ramblings aside, what did I contribute to GG beyond face melting faux riffs? Well after a week or so of finding my way around the office, I ended up with the TGB Docs and Demos team. My first major task was the enviable position of reviewing and fixing up the documentation for the TGB 1.1 release. Once that was out of the way, we needed to start developing some new demos for TGB. Luckily we were deficient of free coders at the time, so instead of testing this work, I got to start making it.

Now, I had never used TGB/T2D in any of it's incarnations prior to interning here. I did have a solid background in TGE, especially Torque Script, and had gone over the docs already, so I had a good starting point. But wow. There were times I would feel like I was "cheating" at game development somehow. This was too easy. Sure I occasionally ran into minor hitches, but the existing level of documentation and forum threads meant I could find most things I needed in a manner of minutes. And the documentation is looking to see a nice overhaul in the nearish future. Though admittedly, it was nice to be able go ask the people who make TGB if I wasn't sure about something ;P.

The thing I quickly found, is that TGB is fantastic for prototyping. You don't have the complexity of dealing with the script<->source networked environment in TGE. You don't have to write all your own basic rendering, physics and collision from scratch. And you're also not nearly as limited as some "simpler" development environments that shall not be named. Of course there are some bugs in TGB you might run into, but you can usually get something at least functional, and then work on ironing it out. I also feel Torque Script's flexiblity really shines in TGB. Being able to tweak and test code so easily is great for trying new ideas out and figuring if they will work.

I've worked on a few different kinds of games while here. Some of them might be released soonish, some of them not for a while. I was surprised that I had the most fun working with the dreaded "casual puzzle game". The design for many of these games is fairly standard, so you know the basics of what needs to be done. But finding out how to best implement them in TGB was quite entertaining. For example, what about games that use a hex grid instead of a standard square grid? I found that with a few logical tweaks, you could write a hex based system around the normal square tilemaps in TGB pretty easily. Mind you this is all entirely in script. No you can't display the tiles themselves as hexic pieces. But the tilemap still served as a great map editor and a template for interaction between the world space and your logical "grid space". If anyone is interested, I've tried to write some of the code around this to be reusable, and I believe I could post it up on TDN.

Another thing I'd found in TGB that I would strongly suggest anyone to take advantage of, is the integrated joypad support. I grew up on consoles, and 2D games in particular have always had a much stronger attachment to me when played with a controller. I try to add joypad support to all the demos I work on. A rafting game becomes much more visceral when you have dual analogue sticks controlling the paddles. A puzzle game feels more solid shifting the pieces around with large buttons and joystick movements. It's not a mechansim you can really to base a commercial PC product around, but it's a fun alternate control scheme to play around with.

So I'm leaving the office for the last time in a little while now. I'm going to really miss the laid back work environment, and being able to take a Guitar Hero break whenever I needed. Hopefully I'll be able to stick around in a spectral capacity, and still contribute to TGB a bit. And as usual, I'll still hang around the forums and try to answer the rare question that falls into my realm of knowledge (hey I'm nearing 1000 posts =D). My proffesional future is a bit up in the air, but I'm a little more hopeful now I'll be able to find work better than restocking a grocery store. Keep having fun making games every one. I'll be around.

<edit>Wow. I absolutely fail at trying to use image align</edit>

Melee And More...

Paul /*Wedge*/ DElia — 2006-05-29T00:13:05+00:00

So after losing two weeks to moving and fixing some inane computer issues (who would've thought a USB wireless adapter could cause random system lockups), I've finally been able to get a little bit of work done. Melee combat has proved overall fairly simple using the (mostly) standard ShapeImage class.

I'm just using a single slash, no combo sequences; those are tricky to have relevant while keeping fast paced gameplay. You can however, hold down the slash key to charge up for your next attack to be super powered. And when holding a sword with two hands, the second mouse trigger launches a tech attack that goes through defenses and stuns someone. You can also block with swords. Blocking can repel another melee attack or deflect bullets. Depending on the situation, you can even reflect the bullets back.

The guns are very fleshed out now, with subclasses for SMGs, Rifles, Shotguns, and Pistols (with rocket launchers being easy to add). Shotguns have dynamic reload times based on the number of shells and Pistols play support recoil animations on the hand when they're fired. It's really easy to add stuff like that with just a few tweaks to the subclasses, while almost all the core code stays in the main gun class. The melee weapons are setup to work the same way, I just haven't actually setup subclasses to test them yet.

Players can be "stunned" now, which plays into the melee system a lot, as well as potentially other things. I can prevent players from firing, and optionally prevent them from moving, with the flick of a switch. There is some old code I want to try to mix with this and power melee strikes. It would let you launch someone through the air and have them slam and briefly stick against a wall. And as usual, I've done a bunch more tweaks and bug fixes to the player physics.

Hay look pictures!

You can freely mix melee with guns.

Bullets being reflected back at my wonderful dummy "AI"

Dual SMGs fire a _lot_ of bullets.

Somewhere along the line I did something that made it spawn 2 shell casings for each shot... I can't remember what I did or how to get rid of it now ^.^

Fun With Animation

Paul /*Wedge*/ DElia — 2006-04-28T11:31:40+00:00

Muahahaha, fooling around tonight, I managed to trick the inheritance into working. I'm pretty sure what I did is totally illegal in C++ or anything else, but TS let's me get away with it!

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So after playing around with blends a bit, I've got a nice ground for a simple player animation system. I make animations for each arm for each weapon type, and an animation for each arm supporting the weapontype on the other arm when single weilding. This is nice, all I have to do is define what animation set for a weapon class to use, and everything else takes care of itself. It's not very noticable right now, as I just have some test animation sets for SMGs and rifles, but it will be much more interesting when I have some pistols and swords in there. Especially cool this should let me freely mix melee weapons and guns together.

This also forced me to test my ever so carefully crafted base gun class, to see if it really would be subclassable like I'd intended. After a little silly bug fixing, it's working great! The base gun file has about 400 lines of code, and a gun subclassed to a weapon type, and then a specific weapon ended up at less than 100. Hooray for reduced code clutter! It could be reduced more if method inheritance was working right, but I tried that with images, and it made a lot of stuff not work or act kind of weird. So I'm just faking it by redefining all the methods for subclasses and calling the parent method from there and it's working great.

I'm barely using any of the original inventory system, and have written a lot of code around my custom weapon/ammo/inventory setup. It's the first thing of this magnitude I've ever done on my own. Overall I'm pretty happy with what it lets me do. There are probably a few things I could have setup better, but no huge snags. It even gives me the mostly useless capability to specify a "primary" hand for the player for when dual wielding (this is on a per player, not per weapon basis). Enough words, onto screenshots!

Right handed setting

Left handed setting

I want to throw in a test pistol for fun maybe still, and then it's onto working on... the melee system! Dun dun dun dun...

Oh yeah, and after the reopening of internships at GG, I applied again and got one! Hooray me! See you guys at GG in June!

Yet More Wall Antics

Paul /*Wedge*/ DElia — 2006-04-16T10:09:33+00:00

Wee, I made a much better mockup level tonight, heavily based on a map from one of the games I've been using as inspiration. Kinda fun to go back and relearn QuArK, at least until I try to get some serious art out of it ;P.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm back in school now for the final quarter of a Game Design degree. Not so hyped about getting it now as I was when I started 2-3 years ago, but I didn't have much a choice once I'd started. In any case it should be a fun last quarter. My occasional dawdlings with a third person action game in TGE have now become my final thesis like project for the degree. I met an artist in class who might be trying to do some characters for little project. He's shown some nice concept work, so it could end up with something interesting.

I've been experimenting with various manners of cel shading. Found all the existing resources on the site were pretty useless. I have noticed a few non-tge demos that has some nice effects done with standard OpenGL, and a couple people suddenly working on such things that might end with a code based solution. It's beyond my skill though, so for now I've found normal flipped overlay meshes work pretty well. Even looking into a ridiculously roundabout way to convert .map files to meshes to make overlays for those if need be. For a second I thought just using the debug render mode might work nice ;P

I've finally setup a quick mock level, to provide a better test environment than oddly scaled and rotated village houses. No more terrain or water in the mission either, as I don't have plans for any serious use of them. It helped me find a few bugs in my wall running and other acrobatics, so I went back and cleaned up and tweaked some of that. Tonight I went in and added vertical wall scaling, that lets you pop up to a higher level by running straight up a wall. Even threw in another horribly hacked up Jill run sequence to go with it. Tried doing dynamic player rotations at one point, and found that made a big mess, decided pre-made animations are the way to go for what I need.

Since I sadly didn't get an internship at GG, I'm making up my internship credit by teaching at my school now as well. One of my teacher's was at GDC and met the GG guys there. Apparentley they inspired him to get the school to buy some TGE stuff, and replace the mucky old WildTangent class with a Torque class. Unfortunately there is no one on campus that's ever actually used Torque. So now I'm going to be trying to help a 3D Art instructor and a cadre of lost souls that've seen nary a line of code in their lives, to try and do _something_ with TGE this quarter. Should be fun. Maybe some of them will even read this ;D.

Third Person Action Gamey Goodness

Paul /*Wedge*/ DElia — 2006-03-28T05:01:26+00:00

Ery' one and their mum' hassa blog thingy, so I'll throw a quick one up I guess.

So I been lounging around GG for a while, and occasionally I even do things. I've had a TGE Licencse for... I dunno how long, ever since they gave it to me. I only even tried compiling it half a year or so ago using TBE. Started to mess with it a little, worked on an official project for a bit before that got dull, and I sort of fell out of practice.

Then after 1.4 comes out I eeeeventually learned to get the engine compiled with VSE and after too long ported all my old work from 1.3 to 1.4 . And after another month or two of working on and off with various bits, I've got lots of a nifty core for a third person multiplayer action game setup. I've been working off games like Gunz: The Duel and Unreal Championship 2 as inspirations. Lots yet to go, but I'm happy with the relative ease I've been able to get so much working. Look at the shiny list of things!

* Two key dual wield system (one key for each weapon)
* Core weapon classes for guns and melee (written to make subclassing new weapons easy)
* Single wield bonus options (for example, second hand key gives acc+zoom bonus to first hand gun)
* Dynamic fire spread/reduction system with adjustable ranges/rates/cooltimes
* Support for using raycasts with projectile effects (basically, script created explosions with decals)
* FULLY working clip based ammo with reload mechanisms
* Melee framework for fast, simple, arcadey attacking and blocking
* Blocking and reflecting bullets with swords... kay not really much a code feature, but it's neat =P
* Simplified hit location checking
* Tighter, more responsive player control
* Player acrobatics (air movement, air dashing, wall jumping, wall running)
* Conditional player torso twisting
* Basic third person crosshair

And probably other stuff I'm forgetting. But a couple points from all this. Even though TGE was originally used for the floaty bouncy terrain based combat of Tribes, it's not that hard to get it work like a more like other FPS engines ala' Unreal or HalfLife. Secondly I've done a vast majority of the coding in Torque Script (though some parts like the wall running could stand to be ported to C++ eventually). A lot've people seem to think TGE can't do tighter action intensive shooters, but so far it's been able to handle everything I've tried quite well.

Yes, I'm a screenshot whore too, so here's horrible picture things.

Blog for Paul /*Wedge*/ DElia at GarageGames.com

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Melee And More...

Fun With Animation

Yet More Wall Antics

Third Person Action Gamey Goodness

Blog for Paul /Wedge/ DElia at GarageGames.com