"Corporate Combat" A fighting game in the works.

Recently my lecturer had told our class that the arcade machines made by Tafe will be on display at this year's Supanova (Pop culture convention) And that he wanted some games to be put onto them. Last year our group got one game onto the machines and the response from people playing it was great. So this year I decided I would create a game for the machines for the opportunity for a lot of people to play my game.

The idea I had was simple. A 'Mortal Kombat' style fighting game set in a office with a manager vs employee style scenario. I would have basic move sets which were: Punch, Kick and Block. And the player would be able to move left to right along the scene.

Reference Image:

My initial plan was to use the kinect sensor from the xbox 360 to record motion capture data of people performing these moves, but I decided against it after messing around with the software for a bit. There was too large of a chance the data would have weird movements added in. Although it wasn't the first option I wanted to do, I ended up purchasing some really nice fighting animations off the Unity Asset Store. So basically Now my animations were there, I just had to set it up inside a scene to work with controls.

At the start I began using code to control the players. I then decided to go for using PlayMaker as it was easier to set up the collisions that way between the two players so it could detect who hit who and whether to react or not. I had some great help from Fred during this process. Sometimes handling collisions can be confusing!

Next step was to start creating some assets for the office environment:

After those were modeled I then created a scene inside unity, adding some lights (WIP) and started to organise the layout of the level

Now all I need to do is add:

Sounds and music
Player models
Textures
Loading Screen
Start Screen
Ending Screen/scene

Unity Playmaker Game states

A few weeks ago our lecturer showed us a pretty neat plugin for Unity called Playmaker, it's essentially a visual node based version of scripting. Need to create a object when you click on something, step on something or activate a trigger then all you need is a "Create object" action. Very similar to Unreal engine's blueprint system.

Our task was to create a game using only Playmaker game states and no scripting was allowed. Challenge accepted.

My game idea was based around another game called Besiege, where the idea is to create a object to do certain tasks in a sandbox style environment (unlimited objects)
So my game works in a way where it will raycast the mouse position and place a building object, which in this case is a cube. The idea being a simple building game. Currently I havn't thought up a "end game" or goal to achieve but personally I'm pretty pleased with myself with how it turned out so far. I got the basic gameplay to work! Awesome.

Here are screens of the gamestates I used. there might be some actions included that aren't currently being called upon but I left them in there for now during the creation process to see how I'v progressed and just in case the latest thing I do doesn't work.

Perth Games Festival

Been a little while since my last post, but recently alongside some others from the same course, we attended the Perth Games Festival. An event in the city town hall for developers to showcase the latest games they were working on. We had a table set up with three computers running different games we have made so far in the year. It was a great experience! So many people came through the event (1700 was the number I was told, how crazy!) so we almost always had people stopping by to play our games. Got to know a couple of other developers a little bit which was neat.

It was great to see so many people playing the games, offering feedback and just having fun.

Big thanks to my friend for turning up to help out as well even though he wasn't apart of our course. His spare mouse and help saved the day!

Today's update: Had a photo taken with some other game devs from Perth ready for the Perth Games Festival on the 11th of October. Apparently the picture will be published in a local Perth newspaper. Pretty cool stuff to see some of the other devs out there. Hopefully I can make it to the games festival and get to know a few of them a little bit more.

Bit of an update from the weekend.
Helped out our Tafe at the WA Skills West expo. We had some of our games put onto arcade machines which were displayed at the expo. My friend Nick and I both wen't to help out on the day and it was very enjoyable. It's really satisfying to see people playing and enjoying the games we've made.
We were also interviewed by Boom Radio at the event. But that's another story.

Terrain

Bit of an older post. Found a nice screenshot today of the terrain I created for the Multi-stage boss battle for Tafe. The terrain was created inside a program called "World Machine" which lets you randomly generate terrain, playing around with different settings until you get the look and feel just right.

Snake Game for arcade machine

Today we reached a finalised build in the game our group (of 4 people) created for a Game Jam in class.
The game is a local based multi-player game of Snake. Each snake emitting a poison trail behind them in order to kill the other player. A series of different pick-ups, both good and bad, also spawn into the game for players to collect.

This build was optimised for the arcade machines, so that included making sure movement and fire controls would work with the arcade controls.

Other fixes included improved collision boxes over the rocks and increased the spawn rate of pick-ups.