Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Scene view of the Well

I have been working on the Well for the last few days. It was already in and working, but like every other scene in the game it needs some love and attention to make it more final, more finished.

Here it is (elongated look from the Scene view in Unity).


Yeah, pretty neat eh! This is one of those puzzle to get through type of Scenes and so far in Very Bunny Haha it is the only level where you start at the top and work your way down. Although the trap doors are now fully functional along with the switches, there is no reward currently at the bottom of the well.. perhaps that is tomorrow nights job :)

What you can also see in this view is the way I have tried to make the well look interesting by using various shading shapes. I have even tried to make it look pseudo round by darkening the middle area.

Hope ya like it, it is a jumping players paradise.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Saturday, September 26, 2015

New Very Bunny Haha Apha Gameplay Video




This is my new video. Not a long one as I am experimenting with creating these. Net one will perhaps have some audio from my talking about various aspects of what the video is showing.

Hope ya like the potential here and there is a LOT more to see.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Friday, September 25, 2015

Keeping moving forwards

This is the way to get stuff done. And once it is all done.... Well you usually find more to add, haha!

Still I made a list and today got 5 items knocked off that list.

  • I placed Chucky into the forest, near his hut
  • I redid the top of the Well, not quite complete, but much closer now
  • I removed the scaling Log from the wooden log chopping effect
  • Tested and fixed the Sledgehammer breaking the rocks, and removed the scaling rock from the effect
  • Redid the old signs, making them look shiny and new (like all my new signs)
It was fun and moves the forest forwards.

Here is Chucky :)
The house will be replaced by some unique artwork once it is prepared.

I really dislike the web page I set up last night, but gah! Yeah, it is set up, but man it sucks. I will try to do something with it this weekend, though I am not certain quite what at this time.

Tomorrow I have Webelos woods to help out initially, then some work on my house. After that I hope to get a few more items off my list, and perhaps do something with the web page.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Thursday, September 24, 2015

Basic Web page set up for Very Bunny Haha

Yeehaw!  Only took me several weeks to finally get something set up. I know it is not very good of course, but it is the first place holder look, and most importantly it means that I have a web site project set up in the Editor of my choice, which just so happens to be
WebPlus x5 (I have had this particular version for some time and not really used it much lately).

I will have to set up my Daughter with something similar so she can also add to this Web page with comments, Blog posts and artwork.

Very Bunny Haha Web Page

Ugly I know. 

Here is the page in the editor I mentioned. I love this editor. So easy to use, so obvious and so fast. I can get stuff whether it be menus or youtube videos up in seconds.


I know this editor well as I have used it a number of times (ok, a slightly older version) to edit my main web site at www.sorcerygames.com now for several years.

Have fun out there, and expect more updates soon so show you some of the goodness that is Very Bunny Haha.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

First Video for Very Bunny Haha

I have finally created a video of something from Very Bunny Haha. Yeah about time for sure.

I was working on this aspect of the game a few days ago, so this is the newest addition to the game and I think it is pretty cool as a first pass. I will also try and post more videos on different parts of the game.

Check out the link for YouTube
https://youtu.be/Ka45bePc4Ns

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Thursday, September 17, 2015

New Unity Effectors, Wow!

Today I gave a talk at the Unity Club meeting about the new in 5.0 Physics Effectors.

I have been playing with a Bit because I switched out my own Jump thru platform code with the New Platform Effector I read about in the updates to Unity 5.0. Now was the time to finally play with it.

Surprisingly the update and the removal of my own Jump-Thru code only took a few minutes, which was very nice. Then I did some research and a bit of playing with the other types of Effectors.

I gave my dissertation in about 20 minutes, talking and being very excited about how many gameplay features could be introduced into a game simply by using the editor and it's Effectors.

Here is the list of Effectors and a VERY bried account of each one.

  • Platform Effector: allows me to do such things as Jump-Thru platforms and angled edges and sticky edges etc.
  • Point Effector: This one is pretty cool and allows gravitational effects to go to a point, or away from said point. Pairing several of these together could do some Amazing experiences.
  • Area Effector: This can do easy Wind style effects in an area. Myself I have an idea for a Kite flying game. Pretty neato.
  • Surface Effector: This can do things like conveyor belts, which can be notoriously finicky to put into a game normally.
Ok, so I have not shown you how to use them, and the reason for that is because the info is already out there in both video form and tutorial form. just go search for what you want, knowing what you want is the harder thing though, as the possibilities are endless in my humble opinion.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Buttons where Mouse Clicking now fails

I am so frustrated. I hate spending so much time on something so rudimentary, so base, Gah!

So I have several buttons that form my Main Menu for my game. When I first put them onto the Canvas they would interact very nicely with the Mouse Cursor. They would show their highlight color when the mouse pointer was over them, and along with that they would work when you clicked them with the Mouse Button.

I have attached an OnClick() call to a function for each of the buttons, and as I said that was working great.

Not any more. I have no idea what broke it, or how it could have broken. Well perhaps it was me continuing to develop the screen. In fact I simply altered the Input Vertical to work of the Up and Down arrows.... and erm. I think that is it for the Buttons.

I have spent literally hours on this over the last few days, and look at this explorer bar where I have been searching and reading everyone else's similar (but not quite the same) problems.


As you can see I have been busy. But I have still out found out what has broken the automatic experience between  Mouse and Button. What is also odd is that when I go into my next scene, the Buttons in that scene work correctly. This has led me to try all sorts of copying and pasting to no avail.

For now, I think I will have to leave it for a bit and move to something more productive for a week or more.

Grrrr, Hope your Unity is going better than mine atm,

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Friday, September 11, 2015

How do I miss the Obvious ?

Some times I am surprised by my own idiocy. I guess I could try and cover my ideas with the rational of trying so hard to be creative, to try and streamline the process for a player.

In the end I really need to just see the trees and not the wood. As you can imagine this kind of situation has occurred once more.

Let me digress...

I have been trying very hard to make the start of Very Bunny Haha be as simple and obvious as possible. Trying hard to make it so people can simply get into the game immediately and all distractions and choices are supposed to appear at just the right time, one that makes so much sense I do not know why others have never done it before. To this end I have spent way too much time and brain power trying hard to achieve this end.

A couple of days ago I was chatting with my daughter Leilani about how to synchronize the start of the game with offering a tutorial and how to make this as seamless as possible. When she Whammo'd me with such obviousness, such ease I was.. as I said, Whammo'd.

She said 'Hey Dad, why not have a start menu  for people to just select the tutorial or not'.

GAH! was probably my reaction.

I have spent so much time trying to not have a start menu, that I never ever thought along the way how much easier that could be. Now of course thinking about all the options I need it solves so many for me. such as allowing a player to have multiple save games and being able to load them. Start up a new game from scratch or many many other options that are best displayed as a menu/list.

So my daughter just cut through months of my hard work to find the answer that so many other game designers before me have done.... this one just took a while.

I expect I shall be working on that very soon now. As I have just finished the Inventory selling functionality.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Unity Gui Image Sliced type - not working

This seems so easy. I watched some tutorial on it months ago and implemented my buttons then. Not at first realizing that they did not look as they should.

My buttons have ended up Square at the corners, yet I wanted them nicely rounded. Check out the Square cornered buttons I have.


Searching the web I found lots of people having issues like mine, or similar, only none of the answers seemed correct for me, or I could not interpret them correctly. Then I found this page...
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/874743/9-sliced-image-in-the-ui-46-not-working-as-expecte.html

On there I could see and read that this person had exactly the same issue as me.I had to read it several times before I understood his own answer to the problem. It comes down to a setting in the Canvas itself.. which surprised me as I had been focused in the wrong place... the artwork for my rounded button. Below is a screenshot of what on the canvas needs to be altered. (I clicked on the Canvas and opened the component called 'Canvas Scaler'. In there I have a value of 1. This is BAD. I am not certain why it is bad, but I played with this value and Lo and Behold it rounded my corners.


As you can see that appears to be nothing special, but changing it to a bigger value such as 50 or 100 allowed my rounded corners to show up as you can witness in the image below.

 


Phew, one long standing problem sorted, who's next?

Da Voodoochief

Monday, September 7, 2015

Time for some Hub re-artworking

I have so many things to fix up. tidy up, or just plain write up in this game. However I realized that although I have created so many levels, areas or screens with fairly complete artwork and look. I have one gaping area that has seen no joy since it was created. The funny thing is that it is the second area I ever created, after the gems falling minigame level. Sad to see in some ways so many screens artwork done and the 'Hub' not being finished yet.
In the above image you will see the way the Hub looked this morning. Then I got my dirty hands on it after a chat with my daughter about what we could do with the area. We came to the conclusion I should try one of the ideas and see if it is good enough to go with. Luckily after a fair bit of work we both agreed that this idea was a good one.


In the image above you can see the NEW HUB, though it has been renamed the 'Nexus'. New artwork AND a new name, fancy eh!

We have gone with what we are terming as 'islands'. These islands show what the area is that you can visit through the teleporting sign posts.It is a good way of hinting where you are going and also a nice way to depict the Nexus in my humble opinion.

Hope ya like the modifications to the Nexus, though not finished I believe they show real promise for as we move towards a final look.

Laters
Da Voodoochief

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Unity - Image on canvas not showing up

I have been suffering from a problem where I have set up the canvas to have some buttons on it. that is all well and good and they work fine. Then I decided I needed to ad button help for a joystick control. Well this is where things have gone a bit awry.
 
In this following Image you can see I have pointed to the artwork existing within the Unity Editor, the 'A' and 'B' buttons for example.
Although that artwork exists in the above image, it doesn't show up in the game camera when it should. as you can see in the image below.




Now where the heck have those images gone? I have not altered them in any way with code (like shrink them etc). However if I pause the game and go to the Scene view and look up the canvas... oddly I can see them. So why not in the game screen/camera. Our thought in Unity club was that they were somehow excluded from the camera. But we can not find out how. If you notice in the top image the much Larger buttons have the exact same button help images, and yet they actually work fine.

So what to do about it? I dunno, these problems really distract me, but I'll try hard to move along without this fix I, after all I need to finish up the inventory sell system.

Laters
Da Voodoochief