Unity is Hard...and Art!

Howdy all, Business Lead Sam here with another weekly update.  We're working along on the game trying to get solidly polished levels 0 & 1 ready for next week's demo.  However, somewhere along in this week everything went sideways and we can now walk through walls.

Safe hiding behind this wall.

Or am I?!?!

Fortunately, to combat these wall-walking enemies we're upgrading our arsenal, adding in new types of guns to the game.  Below is a gif of our the new 'Uzi' power up that gives the player a (limited ammo) rapid fire gun with a wide spray to it.  Perfect for mowing down approaching enemies. 

But, as I'm sure those of you who read our last post are thinking, good luck dodging that spray of bullets the next time around ;)

The 'Rewind' Mechanic - Bringing Regret to Bullet Hells

We've been getting a lot of questions here at Time Goobers Zudios about how exactly our core 'rewind' mechanic works, so I'm here to explain it.  At its core our game is a bullet hell shooter similar to Binding of Isaac, but, of course, with a twist.  Every time the player revisits a room all of the enemies in that room have respawned, and one additional enemy has been added - a ghost of the player.  This ghost executes a recording of what the player did the first time they were in the room - all of the players movements and any shots fired are mimiced exactly as they were inputted by the player.  The ghost's bullets will damage both the player and any enemies they happen to hit.

Most players play bullet hell games in a very trigger happy manner, holding down the fire key as they weave through enemy bullets.  We aim to make the player regret this in the most visceral way possible - by having them, quite literally, shoot themselves in the foot.  We hope to add another layer of decision making to bullet hells, forcing the player to think about not only their current situation, but also what happens the next time they have to pass through this room.

Status Update...and ART!

Howdy all, Timer Goobers Zudio's Sam Beckley here with another weekly update.  This week we're still working towards getting a working prototype going so that we can begin "finding the fun." Harry has been getting rooms spawning, David is working on our sound design, Bailey is implementing our rewind mechanic, Sam is adding a basic enemy to our game.  Last but most certainly not least, Yoshi has begun to make art for our game!

Here are samples of three enemies Yoshi has been working on:

Yoshi has also found a tile set for us to use as the background for our game.  While we may expand to include other tile sets later, for now we hope you like this -- you'll be seeing it in every screenshot we post from here on out.  Here's a sample of it:

The Story!

Howdy all,

Time Goobers Zudio's Sam here with another update.  After our weekly Wednesday meeting we've decided on a basic narrative for our game.

You play as codename 'The Janitor', a secret agent that specializes in cleaning up extra-ordinary scenarios -- aliens, teleportation, mind control, giant bugs, you name it.  One day The Janitor called in to clean up yet another biological experiment gone wrong in the basement of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. During the fighting he accidentally falls into a secret cavern below the labs, where he finds a cursed watch that causes him to begin looping through time as he tries to find his way out of the caverns.

We chose this story for two reasons.  First, we think that it is short and straightforward, which allows us to explain our premise to the player quickly and simply.  Second, it allows us to use a wide variety of enemies, power ups, etc. which makes life much easier for our artist and sound designer.  It also lets us use a generic underground tile set for our environment, and some fun underground noises for the backdrop, which we don't anticipate any difficulty in finding and/or making.  This week our artist Yoshi and sound director David will be working on getting some art together, which we hope to be able to show off later this week!

Methodology and Progress Report

Howdy all, Time Goobers Zudio's Sam here with an update on how our first week of development is going and how we're working on the game this weekend.

While we setup the underpinnings of our game we've run into two problems:
1) The code we write now will be the basis for everything, so everyone needs to fully understand it.  We debated writing it all together in the same room, but couldn't come up with a time when everyone is free.
2) While this foundational code is written there isn't much else that can be done in parallel.

So, in order to address these two problems we're doing 'pass the baton' pair programming.  Bailey and I worked on the code first, after which Harry and I worked on it, then Harry and Yoshi will work on it, etc.  This way everyone gets to touch the foundational code and everyone gets a turn at the keyboard.

Things are moving along, slower than we had hoped, but forward progress is being made.  A lot of Unity specific things are being learned, and some truths about ourselves are being learned as well (Harry has an incredibly intuitive sense of Unity's incredibly un-intuitive layout).

But the important part is that we now know enough about Unity to have developed a solid plan for how to implement our core mechanics going forward, which will likely make for a blog post later on.  As we go we're also finding some obvious spots for big improvements (basic things like better movement, a more fluid camera, etc.) that will likely end up in next week's TODO pile.  If you want to dig in further take a look at our Trello Board!

While all of this coding is going on David is coming up with story ideas for us so that we have some general theme that can tie our game elements together and help Yoshi make coherent art.  I'm looking forward to seeing what he produces, and whatever we choose will be posted here!

The Game Idea & Demo Plans

After the Goobers' first full team meeting we've put together a rough idea for what the prototype for our game will be.  We hope to build a bullet hell dungeon crawler, but with a twist.  What twist you ask? Time Travel!  Your character will go exploring a dungeon, searching for a way out.  Doing so will involve going through a series of rooms, often requiring backtracking as the player finds dead ends.  Upon entering a room the player has previously been in they'll see a ghost of their past self moving through the room as they did before.  But when the ghost shoots, beware! Ghostly bullets are just a deadly as hungry bats, and unlike hungry bats, hurting your past self has bad implications for your present and future health.

As the player explores more and loops back through rooms they'll leave more and more echoes behind, adding more and more ghostly bullets.  Smart players will plan ahead, ensuring that they aren't flooding essential corridors with bullets, while trigger happy players will be left dodging walls made out of regret (and bullets).

For next week we hope to have a small demo version with 3 rooms ready for play-testing so that we can begin our hunt for the ever elusive 'fun'.  This demo will have a player, enemies, and up to some capped number of ghosts in each room.  We hope to be able to share this demo with all our fans soon and begin gathering feedback ASAP!

Meet the Goobers!

The Team:

Bailey: Bailey Parker is a senior studying Computer Science. He has no interest in studying games because Apple owns his soul. He is taking the class solely to study Joshan (its not going well).

Sam: Sam Beckley is a masters student studying intrusion tolerant systems for the power grid. He aspires to one day become Homer Simpson and eat donuts while managing a nuclear reactor.

Harry: Harry Cohen is a senior computer science major currently going through rehab after a serious Pokemon Go addiction. Today marks 3 days sober. He enjoys studying Sam from afar. He aspires to some day grow enough hair and buy enough blue dye to be a suitable mate for his lifelong inspiration.

David: David Samson is a combined master student in Mech. E. and Robotics who likes to make games old school. He particularly enjoys developing for the NES in 6502 Assembly. When asked if he wanted to make a silly blurb, he said “No”.

Yoshi: While many consider him to be a small dinosaur, Yoshi is in fact a skilled artist/programmer...or so he claimed. It's been 4 weeks since we last saw Pratyush, alleged computer science major. He claimed to help us with 'graphic design', but hasn't submitted anything appropriate for this blog. If anyone finds him, please tell him he's very close to getting a B- under our strict evaluation standards.

Time Goobers Go Live!

Welcome! If you were looking for cute cat pictures, you've come to the wrong place (probably).  We're Time Goobers Zudio, a game studio made of Johnz Hopkinz students enrolled in Video Game Design Project.  This is our design blog, where we'll be posting progress updates as we bring our baby to life.