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Hi All… or.. hello whoever is left checking this blog :p

Sorry for my absense… Things havent quite gone the way I intended them to go lately, but It will get sorted soon enough.

I’ve been working through the chapters of Will Goldstone’s book: Unity Game Development Essentials (I am currently at Chapter 3) , meaning… I havent gotten very far… But in dark and gloomy winter times… Progress is Progress.

Here’s a little screenshot of what my progress looks like currently.. its not much, but at least it shows that I am doing something, and getting somewhere. The aim of the exercises in the book is to reach a point where I’ve created a playable little outdoor area with a few puzzles, and the game is controlled with a first person shooter perspective, like quake/counterstrike.

BlogShot Work in Progress

In other news… I’ve also drawn some pictures while i was absent from my blog… Mostly inspired by fantasy games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest… As you can see by the image of the Tauren and the other picture showing the magic using woman with extremely skinny legs (Yes, my apologies to http://www.idrawgirls.com … I didnt quite take all of your teachings to heart… yet heheh )

Pencil Coloured Witch

13-01-2010

And… I have also been trying my hand at music making… I’m still quite a novice at that, but I am enjoying it very much, and I find that the process of hearing your results instantly, and adding sounds as you go along… very rewarding 🙂

If you like any of these, please dont hesitate to rate or comment on them, I would very much appreciate a bit of feedback as I am still very much a beginner. The music was made with various soundpools that i recorded/purchased and then put together in Magix Music Maker. Still have a long way to go in terms of recording my own sound samples, but I’ll get there eventually 🙂

Oh, and I ordered a converter/cable thingy so that I can finally get my old hard-drive content transfered to my new pc… Yes, I am a bit slack.

TastyGraph, over and out… until next time, and surely there wont be another month until next update… I promise 🙂

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Hello all

Super busy week AND weekend this week… Christmas and Chanukah is drawing nearer, which means a little less time to spend on my game project… but on a more positive note… it also means more time spent with my family and in particular my little niece Sara 🙂

10-12-2009

My Brother is coming home from Ireland where he has been working since last year. Another great reason to spend time with the family 😉

Anyways, enough about me and my family, and more about the game, right? 😉

I tried adding in a PAUSE function for the game, but sadly that just lead to me crashing my Unity3d… over and over and over and over again… So I decided to grab a little break from THAT feature and add in something else instead.
Something that I know some of you have requested. The Level-Select feature. Yep, now you’re able to pick which map to play on. The list will automatically update itself as you reach new levels, and add those levels to the list of available levels on your Level-Selection screen in the Main-Menu.
As some of you may or may not have noticed, sometimes the +50, +250, +500 score feedback would fly off in the wrong directions after you grabbed their respective gemstones… The reason for this was that I am still very much a beginner with 3d modelling, and as such, I had the rotation wrong on my gemstones… which also leads to the gems being rotated wrong after they spawn from a trap. This has been KINDA fixed. Meaning I didnt fix the actual rotation on the gemstones, I just made sure that everytime the Score-Feedback spawns, it will have the right rotation. So yeah… It will now always fly straight up, as it should, instead of going all woogy and flying left or right 😉
The Gemstones still end up woogy though 😛 But that will be fixed eventually when I figure out how to do it properly 😉

Also, today, you will see a new thing on the blogposts, something which I will be striving to add onto all my posts from now on. Thanks to TecFail for the suggestion on having an easier overview of what was added to the game in each update.

Fixes and Changes in today’s update:

  • “Select Level” menu option added
  • fixed the score feedback flying in wrong directions
  • drew a crap ton of Concept Art and wrote several pages of story and mechanics the game… none of which you can see! leading you to believe I did nothing in the past week 😉

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Hello all,

Did some changes to the order of the maps… map4 is now the starting map… and also slowly looking into the concept of being able to add secrets and unlockables to the game and to the maps themselves 🙂

As you will also see, now when you grab a finance object (one of the gemstones) you will recieve a visual feedback in the form of a floating +50, +250 or +500, depending on the colour and value of the object you grabbed 🙂

Also threw around some ideas in my head about how to add more interactivity for the player. Alot of you have mentioned that you thought it would be a good idea if the player was able to pick up a crate. And that idea is good, but not exactly what I wanted with the game, as I feel that dragging and carrying boxes around is tedious…

But I thought of something more twinkly and magic…ish 😉 Since the lead character is going to be some kind of creature of nature… be it an elf or a fairy, or some kind of cute little fuzzy animal… I wanted to introduce the 4 elements of nature (Earth, Air, Water, Fire … for those of you who have no idea what im talking about 😛 )

So for example… Imagine seeing part of the floor bluish and icy… next to it is an Ice Crate… So you shoot (will be explained :p ) at the Ice Crate and it turns into a Fire Crate that you can then push onto the Icy Floor and melt the Floor.

But wait… Shooting? I thought you said there was going to be no shooting in your game TastyGraph?!

Yeah… I call it shooting, but its really more like Elemental Magic… your character can have some mild form of control over the four elements but will need to pick up special Elemental Orbs in order to shoot her powers.

So i am thinking these orbs are going to be located on the maps and will be multi-functional… meaning you pick up 1 orb, and it functions as Ammo for your Elemental Power Shot… your shot is Multi-Elemental… and will react differently depending on what it hit.

Shoot a fire crate and you turn it into an Ice Crate… and the other way around of course…

This of course will lead to Air Crates and Earth Crates… and eventually the Crates would/should be replaced with little Elemental Spirits… rather than being Crates 🙂

but yeah… to sum things up… Good things coming to the game in the near future 🙂

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Hello all,

I went and got myself a couple of video tutorials on stylized male anatomy drawing and digital rendering… So while I was watching the tutorials, I did some sketching/drawing and tried my best to keep up… I figured it would be useful for me to practice my drawing skills a little bit (read: alot!) so that I would be better suited to draw concept art and ideas for the game 🙂

Here’s a learning experience of mine from today… Its NOT meant to be used in the game or anything like that 🙂

05-12-2009

You can see some of the steps involved in drawing it on my flickr page, if you click the picture…

04-12-2009

The tutorials came from Xia Taptara’s website: http://www.idrawgirls.com

I highly recommend it for anyone interested in learning a few tricks and tips on drawing digitally 🙂

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Hello all…

Slackiest weekend ever… But at least its over and a more productive week can begin 🙂 (Who would have thought I would ever complain that I didnt work enough during the weekend ? 😛 )

In this latest update I have added a work in progress 4th level (who am i kidding… all the levels are work in progress… the whole GAME is work in progress ;D )

I’ve remodelled the Yellow Gemstone in Blender, making it a more coin-ish appearance… And while I was in blender, I decided to have some fun with a Cube and the Extrusion Tool combined with a bit of scaling and rotating (yes, I am a total newbie at 3d modelling… So if you’re an expert and reading this… and suffering from an abundance of generosity, then dont hesitate to throw your leet skillz in my general direction 😀 ) I havent added an actual Texturemap to the Firetrap model, as I have still yet to learn how to apply those kinds of things and I couldnt be arsed to learn it since I figured the actual coding at present time was more important 😛

Most of the levels also recieved tweaks here and there… I played through the maps alot, and also looked over the shoulders of various playtesters to try and figure out exactly where the maps are not making sense, and where you end up not knowing where to go.

I’ve also played around with the PlayerPrefs system in Unity3d, which is basically a way of storing information on the user’s computer. Thereby allowing the game to remember specific things. In this case, the Highscore (Its not an Internet Highscore, it is simply YOUR personal highscore on YOUR computer… )

Its not perfect, but its a start. 🙂 You’ll find the highscore meter at the start menu in the game, its not finished or polished, but it remembers the best score you did on that computer 🙂

Oh, and finally, before I wrap up this blogpost, as you can probably see, I’ve also played around a little bit with the text formatting on the blogpost, let me know what you think… be it good, bad or in between. Any feedback is appreciated 🙂

Thanks,

Eli (TastyGraph)

 

ps. I am aware of the horrible english in the subject of my blogpost… it seemed like a funny idea at the time 😛

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Hi All, just wanted to let you know that the lack of updates in the past few days has mainly been because what I have been doing, hasnt really warranted a blogpost or a completely new game-update.

 

I’ve basically been working with my code and watching alot of tutorials on making proper code, better reusable programmy…stuff…  And the result has been that I have managed to re-write a lot of my code, making a better menu system (not perfect, but somewhat better than the old one)…

Minor tweaks such as being able to go back to the main menu when dead, rather than bouncing straight back to map 1. The purpose of this, is of course to allow you to access the main menu and change options, if need be.

This will be expanded even further as later on I will make it so that you can access the menu from ingame with the ESC key, allowing you to tweak options or quit/restart your game.

 

Did a bit of extra writing for the TODO-List…

 

and the last thing, that I would say is what qualifies the next update as being: a big update… Is that I am working on the 4th level now.

This level be more in the spirit of how my vision of the game is. It will be a horizontal level, a bit longer than the other levels, and it wont have the same feeling of ‘Oh Snap!’ everytime you miss a ledge, since you wont be falling down past 5 ledges and starting at the bottom…

 

And speaking of starting at the bottom… In the near future, a Waypoint/Flag system will be implemented (Once I have figured out a proper code for it) So what this means is that everytime you reach reach a Waypoint, your Respawn Position will be stored there and instead of starting back at the beginning of the map, you will now start at the waypoint where you had reached.

 

Hope this post shed a bit of light as to where TastyGraph has been the past few days and why there really havent been much in terms of updating 🙂

And as always, please dont hesitate to post comments here and let me know what you think. 🙂

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Yep, today is the 24th of November… so just 1 month left until Christmas… But I say lets celebrate Christmas in November!!! So in the spirit of christmas, the firetraps will now reward you with small and big gems, depending on which sort of Crate you toss at them 😉

No… not really 😛

Actually, it wasnt really in the spirit of christmas, but hey ho 😛 It was my plan all along that the crates would eventually give rewards of some sort 🙂 And today seemed a good day to finally figure out how to do it, and add it in the game 🙂

But you guys had no way of knowing what was coming in the future, or what was being developed.

So to remedy that, as well as to motivate myself. I have now added a Suggestions/To-Do page. You can find the page at the top of the blog, or in the right side of the blog at the Pages section.

 

Dont hesitate to let me know what you think. (And yes, I am aware that the rotation on the gems are a bit … woogy 😛 I am working on that)

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Another day with a decent amount of tweaks and updates..

Extra Lives now display a little text when you pick them up, making it immediately known to you that you picked up an extra life.

Timer mode now resets to 300 seconds everytime you switch a level or you die (effectively giving you 300 seconds for every attempt you do at completing a level…)

Ended up spending most of the morning trying to figure out why the bloody Timer mode refused to reset on level 3 but worked fine on lvl 1 and 2… made absolutely no sense… and ultimately I didnt find out why.. But I did get it fixed… go figure 😉

Here is a video for the lazy folks 🙂

And once again, please dont hesitate to post a comment or let me know what you think of the game or the latest updates… It is really the only way for me to figure out whats good and whats not so good 🙂

Or what you would like to see changed or added to the game 🙂

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Hi All…

 

Just a quickie 🙂 Have been out all day, went on a train trip to visit my dad, and I brought my laptop and my usual drawing gear 🙂

Ended up with my laptop in my dad’s livingroom, working on the game, doing some programming and concept art on my own laptop, while Mette, my dad’s wife, sat next to me on her laptop playing the very game I was working on 😀

21-11-2009

 

Quite a different experience, but a very entertaining one, as my programming would occasionally be interrupted by outbursts from Mette, complaining about the little guy’s ability to follow her commands! or cursing at herself for running into firetraps ;D

 

Oh, and in the train I was fiddling with a different little idea for something I might make another day. no screenshots yet, but its basically a physics/gravity type game with a playfield, a ball, and you in control of the playfield, and your goal is to manipulate the playfield by tilting it horizontally and vertically to make the ball roll in a desired direction towards whatever the goal is for the map.

 

yes, its been seen tons and tons before… 🙂 But its a learning experience for me none the less 🙂

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I’ve recently come in contact with a 3d modeller who is willing to help out with some basic models for the game, thereby allowing me to focus more on the actual coding and designing 🙂

I’ll post a link for his portfolio/showcase later once I get it 😉

His first addition to the project is a little prism-like gem that will replace the yellow gem/coin thingy that we have in the game for bonus/pickups 🙂

I’ve added it to the game and tried out a Diamond-effect on it… didnt quite work as I had intended, but rest assured, it will be sorted once we figure out how to make a purdier looking one 🙂

Anyways, here’s a bit of camera-scanned concept art from TastyGraph’s sketchbook and flickr page 😉

Gemstone and 1up heart concepts
18-11-2009

End of Level Portal, locked and unlocked 🙂
18-11-2009

18-11-2009