Well, well, well….we meet again! It has been entirely too long since our last blog post, but worry not as we have plenty (entirely too much) to show off. Why has it been so long you ask? Our games have been passion projects ever since we started our journey years ago, and recently there have been opportunities for us to work on other (PAID!) projects. We have had less time to focus on Humongous Bone games, but have fit in development time where we can while letting other items like blog posts fall by the wayside. We will continue to update the blog when there is enough to report on, but unfortunately these posts will no longer be monthly as they were previously. Now that the the air has been cleared, lets get into the update.

Mechanics

Our previous blog post explained how our last sprint focused mostly on completing the first iteration on the final look and feel of the game, as well as allowing for a full gameplay loop. Now that all of the core gameplay exists in the engine, and the game’s visuals are pretty close to what we envisioned, we decided to focus on tightening up the existing gameplay as much as possible. We want to continue driving towards the focal point of the game being movement, which means that character movement needs to feel very tight and fluid. There are many movements that a player can perform with their character including wall runs, wall jumps, air jumps, ground slides, etc. Chaining these different movements together should feel effortless but allow for a high ceiling of mastery. That being said, we felt that the system had a long way to go to accomplish these goals and adding coyote time was one of our starting points in building towards that:

If you examine the image above closely, you may notice that the character is able to jump for a short period of time after becoming airborne from falling off a platform. This is generally referred to as “coyote time” thanks to Wile-E-Coyote and his animated shenanigans:

There is a time and a place to think about game design strictly from a logical perspective when building mechanics, but when it comes time to polish and add some game-feel, some of that logic must go out the window. Getting back to how that relates to coyote time, it makes sense when building movement mechanics to implement character states such as “grounded” and “airborne” and to turn off sets of functionality based on whether the character is on a platform (IE “grounded”) or not. If taken literally, the moment the character becomes airborne they will no longer be able to perform “grounded” functions such as being able to jump. This makes sense in the real world, but when it comes to making platforming games FEEL good and characters fun to control, adding a split second between these states for a player to perform those movements adds a LOT to getting the most out of the movement controls.

Adding coyote time is a step in the right direction for improving movement mechanics, but we still felt more could be done to increase the skill ceiling of mastering movement in “Switch, Pit, Win!”. Previous iterations of movement saw us adding speed to the ground slide, and continuing that momentum in-air by chaining the ground slide into a jump. This felt fun to perform but was highly situational, so we decided to expand upon the idea of increasing momentum through movement mechanics. There are now a number of ways to build momentum including but not limited to: ground sliding, air jumping, and wall jumping. To supplement this, we also implemented a “base” movement speed that players start out at, and a maximum movement speed that each of the aforementioned movements will build towards. Idling or crouching will reset movement speed gains, which incentivizes players to move skillfully around the map to build speed while avoiding resetting their momentum. Skillful use of this allows players to close distance and sneak up on opponents, or to avoid and get away from players when in compromised positions.

The previously mentioned mechanical changes are larger updates to systems as a whole, but we have also iterated quite a bit on general movement variables to continue improving the feel of controlling a character. This is a bit harder to detail as we are tweaking a lot of numbers that drive the movement code, but just know that we are constantly tweaking and testing to make movement as fun as possible!

Finally, and unrelated to movement, we have updated the logic which controls the laser sight to make sure the laser originates more precisely from the weapon. This probably seems a bit obvious and something that should have been done correctly from the start, but sometimes we implement things quick and dirty to get them in and iterate later, which is the case here! We added a bone in spine which we can reference in the code so custom calculations are not necessary, and the origin of the laser can follow the gun accurately no matter which animation is being played.

Art

We have been pretty busy in the art department as we have built entire menu systems since our last update! Up to this point, our game has only existed as a single gameplay scene which we have iterated on as a means to finalize mechanics and visuals in the game. Now that we have a complete “game” and can play full matches with multiple players on one level, it is time to expand to more levels and a menu system to facilitate navigating through the game. The first step to this was creating a first pass to a main menu which is temporary for now:

Loading times can be different based on what platform the game is on, and the performance of the computer if it is played on PC, so loading screens are important to tie scenes together. Below is our first iteration of a loading screen which displays a random piece of concept art to build the lore of the game world for the player:

The main menu and loading screen are very basic mockups using existing assets that are meant to be iterated on later, but hey at least we have something to get us going! The more important and less temporary implementations in our menu system can be seen when a match is complete via our end-of-match report screen. An accolade system was discussed briefly in our last blog post which has now been fully realized thanks mostly to the capabilities of Unity UI! We wanted players to feel rewarded at the end of a match regardless of winning or losing, and what better way to achieve that than adding accolade medals to the end of match report. We currently have 10 accolades which are unique meaning that only 1 player can earn that accolade at the end of a match. The end-of-match report screen allows for each player to have a maximum of 10 accolades displayed at the end of a match meaning that there is plenty of room to grow and add accolades!

The accolade system is almost endlessly scalable, and we are certain to continue adding interesting accolades in the future as we think of more.

Animation

Last but not least, we have continued to expand upon the animations that exist in the game and iterate on old ones which needed a little bit of love. As a general rule, we try to ensure that virtually every action in the game has multiple layers of visual feedback to make that action feel impactful. Most of the time, that means layering visual effects on top of character animations, or layering visual effects on top of some other object movement animation. One example of where we execute this is on the ground slide animation, where the character slide animation is accompanied by dust VFX, but we realized that the VFX look a bit out of place with the look and feel of the game currently. Because of this, we changed the VFX from a brown dust cloud to a grinding spark VFX colored the same as the character’s suit (which depends on what color each player has chose at the start of a match).

[old ground slide VFX]


[new ground slide VFX]

Another example of existing VFX that were tweaked is the player death VFX. This effect is shown when a character falls into the death pit on the map, causing them to lose the round. We felt that this effect among others was not exaggerated enough to depict such an impactful moment as a player being eliminated from the round, so we changed the effect to have more layered VFX on top of each other, and made it quite a bit bigger to sell the impact.

[old death VFX]


[new death VFX]

One obvious effect which did not previously exist in the game was a jetpack VFX for when it is in use. We love using the jetpack powerup (because who doesn’t want to fly) but it felt a little bit less like flying and a bit too much like floating since there was no visual feedback telling the player that they are in flight. Adding a simple looping flame effect to the boosters of the jetpack does quite a bit to sell the visual of being in flight.

We have implemented a lot of gameplay, so there are times when we have a lightbulb moment and notice that an effect doesn’t exist where one should like the jetpack flame VFX. We recently had this same epiphany with powerup pickups as we felt it wasn’t noticeable enough that something happened. When a player runs over a powerup, the orb disappears and a powerup icon appears on their character’s UI, but we felt that layering VFX on top of this would be the icing on the cake in selling the action to the player.

While VFX accomplish a lot when it comes to selling interactive elements of a game, more subtle animations can also add quite a bit to overall atmosphere of the game world. The first world that we are building levels for is a lava-themed weapon and armor-smithy, which until now was not obvious apart from the lava-filled platforms. To build on the feel of this world, we added very subtle smoke VFX scrolling in the background, and some conveyor belt animations which we will soon add weapon and armor molds on top of to finalize the world’s atmosphere.

That was a lot to cover in one post! We are still quite busy with other paid projects which means that we are unable to post regularly, but we will continue to make progress and post when enough new shiny assets have been implemented. Thanks for sticking around and reading our latest update, we hope you are as excited as us that the game is starting to take shape into a final product. We look forward to showing more when the time is right.

Talk to you soon.

-Humongous Bone

The gravy train is on the move! Another month down and the game looks more different than ever. Lately, we have been focusing a lot on nailing down the aesthetic of the game which is really starting to take shape. As our consistent progress continues, we look forward to having a beautiful and playable game by GDEX which will give you a great idea of what the game will be. Lets get into the recap!

Mechanics

Like last sprint, a few known bugs in core gameplay have been fixed:

• Fixed bug related to the aiming laser remaining visible when initiating a jump kick
• Fixed bugs related to selecting characters before starting a game
• Fixed bugs which allow players to switch with characters which had not yet been selected by a player
• Fixed bug which allowed player to slide left indefinitely
• Fixed a bug which prevented the character’s gun from aiming in the direction of the laser

We try to keep a good mix of fixing bugs that are known, as well as iterating on design and implementing new features each sprint. Our goal is to maintain a build that is playable to a level where we can continue play testing full gameplay loops at all times.

The left movement bug was an interesting fix because most forums that I find online tend to suggest making a character’s scale in Unity a negative value on the X axis to flip the character around. This is fine for game objects that are only images, but not for game objects that move and are modified by code. Note: negative x-axis scales cause unpredictable movement and should not be used. Thankfully we use Spine as our animation software, and through their API using JSONs we were able to flip the character in a much more programming-friendly manor.

Fixes were not the only thing we worked on this sprint! As mentioned above, we spent a lot of time working on the look and feel and a big part of that was adding weight to the character. We added quite a bit of weight by giving the player HUDs some movement lag and are quite pleased with the results:

Continuing along the look and feel of the game – we started implementing screenshake into the codebase so we may add more gamefeel soon. Keep a lookout next blog for examples on how we will implement this.

As we continue to iterate on gameplay, we decided that our sticky-aim system needed a bit of an update, along with parts of the switching system. As far as sticky aiming goes: players could previously break their own lock on another character by moveing the control stick 30 degrees above or below the enemy character. This did not account for the enemy character moving out of that threshold on their own. The new code makes that threshold a bit smaller (25 degrees) and accounts for enemy player movement as well as control stick movement. When it comes to the switching system: we decided it makes the most sense for ammo to transfer over from character to character when you switch. This incentivizes players to be a bit less trigger happy before landing a switch on a player, because having ammo to slow your opponent down once you are in control over their character can give you a big advantage.

Speaking of player switches, they just got a lot more exciting! We decided that there was not quite enough suspense or skill in gaining an advantage once a switch has been completed, so to remedy this we added button combos directly following player switches. Instead of gaining control of opposing characters immediately after the switch animation, each player must complete a button combo before they can control their opponent. While the full button combo is revealed in the same amount of time, the player who initiated the switch only has to complete a 3-button combo while the player who  is being switched with has to complete a 5-button combo. We hope that this will incentivize players to initiate switches to gain that advantage, rather than waiting to be switched with.

Finally, over in the statistics department, we started implementing stat-tracking code into the character controller script. We came up with 19 variables (for now) which track player actions such as movement, weapon use, powerup use, and more. These will end up being translated into accolades which players earn at the end of a match. The full accolade system will be fleshed out a bit more during our next sprint so keep your eyes peeled.

 

Art

When we said that the game looks very different – we weren’t joking! A big part of this game for us is creating the correct aesthetic to make the neon colors really pop. To accomplish this, we always knew we would eventually need to add lighting to the scene rather than using the standard unlit Unity sprites. This sprint, we focused on creating hand-painted normal maps for as much of the art as we could, and created a first pass of lighting in the scene. Check out the fruits of our labor below, the first image is the unlit scene and the second image is our normal mapped, lit scene:

Our original idea with the vents and grates was to use them as overlays on the lava portions of the platforms to reduce the brightness of the scene. Our goal with this was to continue to drive the characters and interactive objects in the scene as the focal point, and felt that the brightness of the platforms detracted from that. While the vents and grates helped grately with this (pun and spelling intended because dad jokes are awesome), we still felt that the scene was a bit too bright. To continue to tone down the brightness, we created another overlay which essentially turns the platform into solid metal with no lava in it. We will need to iterate on how to use these in conjunction with the vents and grates to balance the look of the level, but we are off and running.

To cap off our iteration of the environment art in our current level, some updates were needed for our pit art. Firstly, we wanted the lava to be able to flow from the platforms directly into the pit for future special effects purposes, and secondly we wanted to make the pit doors collapsible so we can easily animate the pit opening and closing. We are getting very close to the final look of the world 1 pit, take a look below at how it is shaping up:

Animation

A few character animations were added and iterated on this sprint as we start to give the character a bit of personality through its movement. Firstly, we added animations for two newer abilities that did not yet have animations attributed to them – jump dive and sprint. You can see both of these animations below:

As we attempt to bring more liveliness to the scene, we have been brainstorming things that we can animate in the foreground and background of the environment. One thing that we thought would look really cool was a bobbing animation on the recharge station bolt, as it will accentuate the lighting on the station. Take a look at the animation and light below:

When it comes to adding more personality to movement, we decided to start on the switch animation since we saw some timing improvements that could be made. This isn’t the end of the road for iterating on this animation, but it is a step in the right direction of iterating on all of our character animations.

Character and object animation isn’t all that we have been doing in the animation department during the last month! A big part of improving the visuals of the game involves adding a lot of beautiful special effects to add to overall gamefeel. We worked on iterating on the primary fire VFX as well as the primary fire shot hit VFX from a visual standpoint, as well as making them greyscale so we can color them based on each player’s color in the engine. Take a look at improvements below:

New

Old

 

We are looking towards the future as we begin planning for GDEX. This includes generating ideas for shirts for our new game, logistics around what to have at the booth, and making sure that the game is in top shape for gathering feedback. We are so excited to show everyone what we have, and to hear what everyone thinks about how we can keep pushing this game forward and making it awesome.

Talk to you soon.

-Humongous Bone

 

With another two months behind us, we are still making quite a bit of progress. The last time we blogged, we had the most productive span of time in the development of the game. This time around, we are on the same pace and it feels good to see the game progressing relatively quickly! We are all systems go getting this game ready for GDEX 2019 so get hyped, buy your GDEX tickets, and read on to see how greatly this game is progressing 🙂

Mechanics

To start, we fixed a few bugs which were prevalent in core gameplay systems:

• Fixed wall run bug which allowed players to wall run up other plays
• Fixed wall run bug that allowed players to wall run up nothing
• Fixed visual bugs which made players vibrate when running up walls
• Fixed issues with the size of player colliders when performing specific actions
• Fixed bugs which prevented players from performing certain actions with a jetpack equipped (such as wall running, wall jumping, jumping, diving)

As we continue to iterate on core gameplay and introduce new functionality, we slightly break other pieces of functionality so staying on top of bugs is a relatively high priority. Although it is still super early in the game’s development, we want anyone who plays our game throughout the process to have as bug free of an experience as possible.

Along with fixing broken functionality, we added new character functionality which diversifies movement even further! Introducing the dive jump: while in mid-air, players can now jump a second time to traverse even more of the level faster. This jump acts as a more horizontal leap than another vertical jump. The dive jump works in conjunction with other abilities like the slide to increase your character’s velocity, so try using this to get around the map even quicker than before.

Note that we do not yet have an animation for the dive jump just yet, but it should make a lot more sense visually when we do 🙂

Jetpack movement has been greatly improved as it now feels more like a flying system than before. The previous iteration of the functionality was a simple system that took raw joystick input and applied it to player speed, much like running in the game does. This allowed players to change direction in-air in an instant, which really does not feel like flying at all. In addition to this, the only force applied by the jetpack was vertical, limiting the player to the maximum run speed in terms of horizontal movement. Both of these pieces of functionality were changed to provide a much deeper jetpack movement system. Velocity is now tracked and manipulated so when players change direction, it takes a bit of time to slow down and move in the other direction depending on their current velocity. To accomplish this, we added horizontal movement velocity to the jetpack so it feels more like a movement advantage as you can fly around the level at speeds much faster than running. Try tapping the “jump” button to maintain a level flight and stay in-air longer.

Along with the jetpack, we have continued to improve the “jump kick” switch mechanic in the game. Since the jump kick is a teleport ability now instead of a physics-based movement ability, some important features were overlooked during the first iteration of the mechanic. Movement distance was not normalized, and players could sometimes teleport into objects if they were close enough. We have since improved this mechanic to ensure that no matter what angle a player was aiming at, they always had a max linear distance that they could teleport to. You can picture this max distance as a circle around the player, where before it was more of a square because we were not calculating the vectors properly.

[ex. showing old max distance and new max distance]

Along with this improvement, we are now also properly accounting for the player’s collider size and calculating movement distance based on that to prevent players from warping into objects.

Art

Many improvements and additions were made in the art department, making the game look very different and much more atmospheric. As detail passes continue, the looks of the background and midground art have greatly improved. The level as a whole is now completely detailed and the game’s look and feel is coming together.

Continuing on the theme of environment art, we decided to create vent and grate overlays for the platforms to break up the brightness of the lava platforms. We want the lava to glow (so it looks like lava), but the predominant lighting in the game should come from the neon colors of the characters. Our solution was to significantly reduce the amount of lava on the platforms by overlaying more metal pieces on the platforms.

We have also recently decided to iterate on all of our UI art by turning it into vector art. Currently, all of the art in the game is raster art, which makes certain artwork difficult to scale if we need to. Since the UI could scale different based on different screen sizes, and as we iterate on the look of the UI, it made sense to convert this artwork.

Since atmospherics are a big focus for us, we have been spending a lot of time iterating on normal maps and seeing how they react to lighting in game. Our most recent iteration of the recharge station normal map is very close to how the lighting should react, and makes us confident that we can move forward with hand painting normal maps for the rest of our objects! Check out the normal map and its lighting effects below:

Animation

We have made quite a bit of new animations and VFX recently as our focus has been on giving the visuals in the game more character and more “punch”.

We improved the crouch pose to give it more character so it looks more in line with the themes of the game. We wanted the character to be closer to the ground in a sort of speedy / stealthy position reminiscent of the matrix.

Like the crouch, a lot of our animations are poses rather than animations with actual movement. This is because some actions need to feel really snappy, and can be accomplished by a pose without any movement. The wall hang was previously a pose, but we wanted to give it a bit of movement to give the player a dangling feeling when they are hanging on a ledge. Check the new animation below:

Since sprinting is a new feature in the game as of our previous sprint, we needed to develop a new sprinting animation to go along with it! The idea behind the animation was the angle the character forward more to make the running feel more laborious, as well as exaggerating the movements more. We will iterate again on this so that the gun is parallel to the character’s body since you cannot shoot while sprinting, but this works well as a first pass.

We spent quite a lot of time these past months working on the look and feel of characters switching bodies since it is a cornerstone mechanic of the game. This new animation shows the switch from the time one character teleports to another, and goes through the visuals of ripping off each character’s hoses, the characters’ color essences switching, and the idle pose of the characters being stunned before players regain control. We intend to iterate a lot on this and add more visuals, but check out the first pass below:

 

We are making great progress with our eye on GDEX in October as a time to showcase a vertical slice of our game. We are very excited to continue polishing and can’t wait to hear your feedback!

Until next time.

-Humongous Bone

 

Its been a bit longer than usual, but we haven’t forgot about you! Statistically speaking, we have accomplished more in the last two months than any other two months so we’ll use that as our excuse for skipping a month’s blog. Yeah.

Although we have done quite a bit, I’ll try to keep this a bit shorter and sweeter and get to the juicy stuff. Without further ado, check out the progress we have made:

Mechanics

A few major mechanical changes have been made to make the game feel even more fast paced, and allow for more diverse movement options.

Since our first time showing off the game, we have had a few design meetings and decided it made sense to change the aiming quite a bit. We gathered valuable feedback about the difficulty of hitting shots, and realized that joysticks just aren’t precise enough for our current aiming system when paired with the fast paced gameplay we are trying to achieve. With this in mind, we went through a couple iterations of auto-aim systems (1337 h4x0rz) which ultimately landed us on what we call “sticky aiming”. Sticky aiming requires the player to aim directly at another player in order to shoot them, but once you place your laser sight on a player, it will remain on that player until they leave your sticky aiming point of view or you move the joystick too far away from them. Right now this angle is about 30 degrees away from the character on any side to break the sticky aiming.

As you can see in the example above, sticky aiming is not the only improvement to the aiming system: you can now aim without moving! Since aiming and moving share a single control stick, this requires you to apply half of the full pressure on the horizontal axis of the control stick…apply more than that and you will move while continuing to aim. Ignore the legs running in place in the above example…we’re working on a more permanent pose for stationary aiming 🙂

To continue the theme of promoting a fast paced game, we have modified an existing ability and added a new movement ability!

The jump kick ability for initiating character switches has changed to be “hitscan” rather than physics based. What this means is that a hit will be detected immediately when the player pushes the button to execute the move, rather than having to land the move by moving a certain distance across the screen. This should accomplish two things for the player: 1. Make the game faster paced and more responsive, and 2. Guide the gameplay to be more in line with utilizing your movement abilities to avoid another player’s sights. We will continue working on this functionality, but are happy with our first pass results!

And the new movement ability is…drum roll……………………………WALL RUNNING! This ability is perfect for roleplaying neo from the matrix, as it allows you to run up walls for a short duration, and chain that into a wall jump, jump kick, overhead shooting jump, whatever matrix-esque moves your hearts desire. Again, this is very much a work in progress and will continue to be improved and polished.

One last addition has been made recently in terms of movement abilities….the most standard movement ability that probably should have already been in the game (oops)….sprinting! Like moving fast? Of course you do. Now you can move faster (you just can’t shoot while doing it).

Art

If you glanced at the screenshots above, you probably realized pretty quickly that a lot has changed in the art department. We have new and far more detailed character art, new badass lava platforms for our first world, shiny new bloom effects, updated powerup and recharge stations, and a lot more…

Our development strategy from the beginning has been to lay the groundwork first, and keep iterating until we are happy with the results. For this reason, every piece of art seen so far has been placeholder and non-detailed art used to get a feel for the game and lay the foundation for more detailed pieces of art. That being said, we have finally gotten around to making artwork a bit closer to the final thing, although we will keep making small changes and improvements. Check out some of the new artwork below!

Along with simply detailing existing artwork, we have been hard at work on the overall mood of the game and have been running tests to see how to approach that. Our goal is to light the entire game using mostly real-time lighting which means that all of our 2D art needs to be normal mapped. We have experimented with normal map generators and landed on the idea that hand painted normals will simply look and function the best, so we have been running tests to find the best method of creating those. Below is our fist normal map and test in the game engine.

As you can see above, some of the angles of the normal map do not reflect the light as we would expect, and some of the portions of the art are a bit too detailed for the map. In the coming weeks, we will create the next test using the same art asset and continue iterating until it works as expected. Then its on to mapping all of the other assets and lighting our game up!

Along with real time lighting, something we are already utilizing in the engine is bloom. This really makes the lava look like bright flowing lava, and the colored lines on the character suits look a bit more like bright neon lights. Although we like the effects on the platforms at the moment, we think it is a bit too bright and orange so we will be creating grates and vents to overlay on top of the current platforms. This should also create an awesome glow effect through the small holes of the grates / vents once we animate the lava in the platforms flowing 🙂

BLOOM!!! (And yes, some of the platforms are a bit unaligned, we’re on it!)

 

Animation

After adding aiming animations into the engine, a lot of our existing animations broke since we needed to add IK to the arms. This means that we spent a lot of time reworking existing poses and animations to make sure they work again! That’s not all that we have been up to…we created a slick new recharge animation when you are recharging your weapon, a dope recharge station animation for when you pass by the recharge station, and a new idle animation. Check them out below!

Along with making vast improvements on the artwork and continuing to iterate on our look and feel of the game, we have started polishing passes in the animation department as well. As you’ll notice above, we cleaned up the idle animation and put a little extra love into it with a chest breathing effect. We also have two different idles to choose from with a gun inspection animation to go in between idle loops to break up the monotony of long looped animations like this. We will continue looking for ways to do things like this with other animations and loops, and have been talking a lot about how to add “character” to our animations. We really want you to feel connected to the character and feel like an athletic futuristic badass.

 

We hope to have some information soon on when and where you can play our game. We have big plans for releases a bit into the future, but in the meantime we will be taking our game to any and all shows that we can as soon as it is ready. Keep following here and on our social medias linked in the right sidebar to stay up to date!

Until next time.

-Humongous Bone

 

We are back and refreshed from showing our game for the first time ever at the 2019 BOGS (Business of Games Summit) at OU! For those that saw us – thank you so much for checking out this VERY early version of our game and offering valuable feedback. We have already had a few meetings and plan to implement much of the suggestions we were given, and have some great new ideas on how to improve the game. For those of you that didn’t see us – we will be showing our game at other expos in the NEAR future and will continue updating the blog here so stay tuned. This recap will take a bit of a different approach since we were more involved in playtesting and gathering feedback last month, but should give you some interesting insight as to where we plan on going from here.

Mechanics

We talked about our game to a wide variety of people – from developers to professors and consumers, and it was great to hear different perspectives. One thing we heard repeated was how much people liked the pace of the game and how fast it felt. This feels great to hear as we have been deliberately building the game around quick movement and fast paced gameplay, so it is good to know we are already executing on that. Taking the good with the bad, we also realized that the game is pretty difficult to understand – even when the player is given an explanation of the mechanics.

In the coming weeks, we plan to add many more visuals and more exaggerated animations to sell the core mechanics of the game and make it more readable. The overall concept of the game is confusing, and from here it is our job to keep iterating on the visuals to make sure the gameplay is communicated effectively. In particular, players seemed to get confused when they switched bodies because there wasn’t an animation to show this happening. This coming sprint we will implement that animation, and play around with effects to make that the focal point and ensure players understand which character they will be controlling when the swap is over.

Art

We had a discussion which almost caused us to start from ground 0 and rebuild the game – but ultimately we decided against it. We are focusing on detailing the artwork this sprint, and had a tough decision to make around LOD in the game. Since the camera is fixed, we have been building all of the artwork around the pixel density of a typical HD screen. Although it may seem like a lot, this doesn’t give us a ton of detail to work with so we are learning quickly how to maximize detail with a low pixel count. Each world unit accounts for 64×64 pixels, which is the size of a single platform on a level. As an example, the character is roughly 1 unit wide and 2 units tall, which only gives us about 128X64 pixels to work with. We played with the idea of scrapping the fixed camera with screen wrapping in favor of a dynamic camera and a much higher pixel count, but ultimately realized that this would greatly sacrifice the speed of the gameplay and the size of the levels.

As for now, it is full steam ahead on the current low pixel-count art style so stay tuned to see our techniques for making the most of it! By the end of this sprint, the demo level should start feeling a lot more like a world than it does now with all of the placeholder art.

 

Animation

Animations are getting quite a bit of an overhaul as well! We have about 90% of the character animations implemented in the game in a very early state, and plan on implementing first passes of the ones we are missing. Along with this, we have developed a new process to begin adding “character” to our animations to give the character a bit more life. This coming month, we will begin storyboarding much more intricate character animations to go along with our art style and fast-paced exaggerated gameplay. We are excited to see what we come up with and hope you are just as excited to see the process and how we develop our game world!

 

Thanks again to everyone that had a chance to play our game at BOGS – you guys are amazing! As we continue along the process of making this very early build into a full game, we cannot stress how important everyone’s feedback is to us. Please don’t hesitate to comment here or send any suggestions to info@humongousbone.com; we discuss ALL feedback together and implement the vast majority of it as features. YOUR ideas could end up being in the finished product and we hope they are. Until then, stay tuned on our website and social medias for continual updates.

Love ya.

 

-Humongous Bone

 

New year, new game. Its 2019 and we are finally getting our shit back together! In recent weeks, our game has been reaching first playable status with the vast majority of mechanics in place, and first pass / early representation of game art and animations implemented into the engine. A lot will change as we show the game and play test, but we finally have something to show and gather feedback on…and your first opportunity to do just that is at Ohio University’s Business of Games Summit on February 22nd!! Get pumped, and get reading this fresh monthly recap.

Mechanics

It may not have been very noticeable in previous screenshots, but the laser sight used to aim did not previously wrap around the screen while aiming. This past month, we worked on fixing that in an attempt to move ever closer to getting a feel for how the game plays. While this seems like a minor addition, it has large gameplay implications since we are driving for gameplay that revolves around baiting your opponents into up close and personal combat. When seeing a laser pointed at your character, it is natural to avoid it because you are in immediate danger of being hit. This will drive where you move your character, and give players more of an opportunity to make plays around this mechanic.

During recent tests of mechanics, wall hanging has been turned off since it was triggering too often in its “first pass” state. This past month, we iterated on it again and it is now much closer to its final state of functionality meaning we can test it more rigorously and design more interesting movement around it. Vaulting off of a wall hang? Aiming and shooting while hanging? Jump kicking from a hanging position? The possibilities are endless!

Art

The platforms that you see in the above images, and in many of our other blog posts were supposed to be a first pass of the final platforms used across all levels and worlds. This was at a time when body switching was not initiated by players, but happened to everyone on a global timer. These platforms were meant to carry player colors through them to visually show which new character you would be controlling, but since this is no longer how switching works, we elected to create different platforms for each world. Below are examples of how the first world’s platforms may look:

 

Animation

Along with art and mechanics, we have been in iteration mode in the animation department as well! After implementing animations in engine, we noticed that certain animations like the recoil and damaged animations are not very noticeable when performing other actions. Because of this, we have been iterating on these to give them a bit more “oomf”. Keep your eyes out to see examples of these soon!

 

As the groundwork has now been laid, we are very excited to keep building on this game and get it to a state of releasing it to the world. The first step towards that goal is to gather as much feedback as possible. That being said, come see us at the Business of Games Summit (linked in the first paragraph) and play our VERY early version of the game! Games can’t be made without help, and we would love to hear what YOU have to say about the game. See you soon.

Bone out.

-Humongous Bone

 

WE HAVE A NAME FOR OUR GAME!! Sorry for the caps lock but it seemed necessary…please meet our next game, “Switch, Pit, Win!”. Belated happy holidays and a happy happy recap! It has been a busy time of the year with the holidays, but the team has managed to (relatively) keep our stuff together well enough to keep things moving. Hopefully we can start holding our promises of making these updates a bit more consistent and predictable, but alas the recap!

Mechanics

Now that most of the core gameplay mechanics have been implemented, we have been spending time on polishing those mechanics and thinking of how they work with all of the other systems in the game. With this comes new functionality for aiming as well as shooting that should make a fast paced game such as this feel much better than before.

In previous builds of the game, projectiles would physically travel through the level similar to a game like Battlefield. This may seem obvious, but this type of projectile is very different from McCree’s revolver from Overwatch, for example. Our new iteration of projectiles is more in line with McCree’s revolver, being a “Hit Scan” type of projectile rather than one affected by physics. This means that instead of traveling through the level, the projectile is deemed as either a hit or a miss depending on where the player is aiming at the exact moment that the trigger is pulled. This should make for a much faster paced and much more responsive feeling game.

Along with this new way of handling projectiles, we thought that the aiming system needed a bit of an overhaul as well. We previously locked the aiming at a few defined angles since aiming and moving happened on one joystick, and aiming seemed a bit difficult without a bit of assist. Although this seemed correct at first, our new approach for projectiles demanded a new way of handling aiming. Being locked to a few angles seemed bad because of how easily players can change direction, and being able to aim at a full 360 degrees seems to feel much better.

One final change was made to quicken the pace of the game, which was removing the button for reloading. Instead of having to press a button when in range of a recharger, you may now simply walk into range and start recharging instantly!

 

Art

We have continued shaping the game world with concepts and finally have a first logo iteration to show off! Along with this we have begun reshaping our first world platforms to more accurately match the world aesthetic, and created concepts for the round win screen and what switching into your opponent’s body might look like. These concepts should continue to shape the game world for you, and give you an idea of how and where you will be fighting. Check out this awesome art below:

Animation

Animations have been in progress as well as we continue to improve our previous animations, as well as ensure all character actions have an animation attributed to it. Animations that are more noticeable like the running animation have been iterated on quite a bit and are close to completion, where animations like the player damaged animation and primary fire animation are being iterated on more to ensure the movement is crisp an noticeable. Most of these animations were not previously implemented in the engine, but all animations currently created are now visible in game! See them in the engine at work below:

Along with all of these awesome assets which have been created and implemented in the past couple months, we are working on plenty more this month. If you are in the Southern Ohio area, check us out at the Ohio University Business of Games Summit on February 22nd! We will be showing our game for the FIRST TIME, and hope to have a playable demo which exemplifies a first pass of the full game. Until then, we are hard at work to ensure that the game feels good, and looks great. Until next time…

 

Bone out.

-Humongous Bone