Game Development So Far
Hey everyone! So this week was a continuation of adding new equipment types and animations:
- New equipment – This week we added a floor mat as a piece of equipment. Doesn’t sound too exciting right? However the floor mat is going to be one of the first pieces of equipment a player would probably want to buy. It will be super cheap and enable a lot of full body and body weight exercises to be performed so will be a perfect first step in setting up your gym. Until now the equipment’s have focused on one type of exercise/animation, the mat will however enable a number of exercise and therefore have a number of animations available to it. This opens up the next level in the equipment/UI/behaviour in the game. So despite its simplicity, the gym mat is going to have a big impact and role to play in the game!
- Animations – The majority of the week was spent defining the dips exercise animation. After sorting out the bench press animation, the next one to sort out was the dip animation. I didn’t think it would take too long as I’d already gone through the process with the bench press. However whereas the bench press animation involved the character staying stationary while their arms moved, the dip animation involves the characters body moving while the arms stay stationary. I thought I had accommodated for this in Blender, but when I imported the animation into Unity the character would just float and move their arms up and down!
Queue 3 hours of Googling and troubleshooting trying to find out what I needed to do differently in Blender. After getting no luck I decided to have a break and come back with a fresh mind. Upon returning I started poking around Unity only to find a tick box for freezing the Y axis… voila! The animation was no working exactly as I was hoping! In the end it wasn’t a big change to how I animate my models, it was in fact a 3 second tick box change! 3 hours to figure out 3 seconds… well that’s game dev!
Other Developments
Alongside the stated tasks I’ve also been thinking about producing more output with regards to passing on my learnings throughout development. When I started in game development last year there was so much that I didn’t understand. Thanks such an amazing online community I was able to learn a lot very quickly. It has always been my attempt to return the favour and pass on as much as I have learnt for any fellow game dev newbs. As I started to get into more of a routine with development of Gym Empire my ability to post learnings reduced, partly due to time but mostly that I wasn’t learning as much new stuff. However over the past few months there have been a few tips and tricks I could have done with knowing. Mostly stuff I wasn’t able to Google too easily. Therefore I’ve decided to start doing some more blog posts and videos focused around these tips and tricks that will hopefully help others. First on the list I think will be focused around using that tick box in Unity instead of burning 3 hours in Blender!
Time Management
I’ve been aware of how quickly the end of the year is coming and I still haven’t gotten anything out for you to get your fingers into! So I’ve decided to have a mini re-baseline and prioritise a slice of game-play for you to get a feel for things to come. The first step in this is defining exactly what I want to deliver as part of this pre-alpha/demo build. I started defining that this week and I’ve currently come up with a 30min – 1hour slice of game-play that will give you an introduction to the game and a starter for how things will feel. This will be a very immature version of the game and will most probably be very buggy. The main priority is for you to be able to give some more focused feedback on game-play mechanics and behaviour and to also give you a little something for sticking with me over the past few months of videos of clients doing weird things in the gym!
It’s still some way to go but my target is to have it to you before Christmas. This decision also redefines the task priority as I have set out exactly what needs to be in place for the demo. Luckily the first set of tasks continues what I was currently working on and that is animation and equipment. The expected equipment set for the demo will be:
- Exercise mat
- Loose dumbbells
- Loose barbell
- Bicycle
- Treadmill
- Dipping machine
- Pullup machine
- Weights stand
- Bench press
- Squat rack
As you can see some of them are already in place. So the focus of the next couple of weeks will be to implement the remaining equipment. So that leads to this week’s tasks:
- Animation: Mat, Loose Dumbbells, Loose Barbell
- Equipment: Loose Dumbbells, Loose Barbell, Bicycle
Gym Empire is now available to add to your Steam Wishlist.
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