Posts related to game development at Dust Scratch Games.
I announced last week that “True King” will be exhibiting at GDEX (Game Developer’s Expo – https://www.thegdex.com/ ) on the weekend of October 12 – 13, 2019 in Columbus, Ohio. That’s in 2 weeks! And it will be the first public showing of gameplay outside of Michigan!
… well, I hope it’ll be playable by then.
GDEX 2019 looks to be a fun time in Ohio!
The WordPress interface says I’ve published over 200 articles on this blog. Cool!
In the past couple of months, I’ve updated the website for “True King” to be a bit more up-to-date (the first time I’ve updated it since 2017). Notice it contains a new video, private to YouTube and only available to view on the site, giving a glimpse of the current state of the game’s environment. I’ve tried to push the site to Google’s indexing system, but unlike the past, I notice Googling “true king game” doesn’t bring up my game in the early results, one of many issues that will no doubt affect the game when it eventually releases.
But today, I want to focus on new developments I’ve added to the game: a character-creation system at the beginning, and an internal ‘cutscene’ system that takes place during gameplay.
A screenshot of the official website for “True King,” as of 2019/08/25
After further optimization testing, I felt I had enough content to write a new blog post, to follow up the original article from earlier. The big reason is because the results I came up with were wrong, due to a major flaw in my testing environment. This article will cover physics colliders parented to other objects, dot product vs raycasting, and a little bit of multithreading in Unity3D.
A lot of random-looking dancing objects. This is harder to compute than you think!
I had a great time this week, having been given the opportunity to present a talk at IGDA – Ann Arbor in Ypsilanti, Michigan this month. I’ve been attending their meetups for over a year, and they consistently get a great turnout and great discussions. This time, group was a good size, the audience seemed interested, and I didn’t mumble as much as I tend to. Of course, the talk was about “3D Cel Animation.”
But with many developers and programmers in the room, they brought up some suggestions to optimize how I check which ‘perspective’ of a character should be shown at a given frame. A common suggestion was to use “dot product” at a low-level instead of relying on “Physics.Raycast.” Even years ago, this had been suggested to me. I had fears about its’ efficiency, but after a few one-on-one discussions, I agreed it might turn out to be more efficient, and it wouldn’t be hard to implement.
I felt like such a fool. For 5 years, I’ve preached the brilliance and simplicity of my design! Was an alternate solution so obvious, and really better?
So I gave it a try. And the results surprised me.
A visual comparing “RaycastAll,” “Raycast” and “Dot Product” as they relate to knowing what orientation a character is in.
As I write this hours before New Year’s Day, it’s raining outside. Weather has been unusual this season: snow came much earlier (cumulating on the ground in November), but then went away during a warm spell, making this the first non-White Christmas I can recall near Windsor, Ontario. 2018 has come and gone.
Around this time last year, I remember writing I would have a playable version of my indie game “True King” by the end of 2018, no matter what. I’m actually not far off from that goal… sort of. While the game is far from finished, it IS playable, at least for the first few minutes of gameplay. And I owe a lot to keeping my New Year’s resolution from last year.
Juggling so many things… well, it’s never boring!
