Previously on the development of 'My Friend Pedro: Blood Bullets Banans'...

Here's a bit more catching up on what's been going on before the release of the trailer.
I'm using Unity for making the game and was at first a bit disappointed in the level designing tools in Unity... until I discovered I could actually make my own tools! Now, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who thinks "duuh, of course you can make your own tools", but this felt huge for me. Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach him how to make tools in unity and he'll forget to eat.. or something like that.

Here's a little visualization of what I made to help speed up the dressing up of the levels in MFP:


It's nothing too fancy, but it saved me a heck of a lot of time.

It basically checks the size of the bounding object and tries to fit as many wall/floor pieces as it can. For the walls it scales the end bits to fit perfectly to the size. The floor doesn't, mainly because I like the keep the size of the gameplay areas a multiple of a carefully chosen comfortable size. Oh and also because I was too lazy to implement that last stretchy bit for the floors.

There's also a nifty keyboard shortcut for adding windows (small or big) in place.

The main motivator for making this tool was to speed up the dressing of the levels, and having an easy way of trying out different visual styles in different areas. Changing the look of a wall or floor is as easy as pressing a button.

Here are some examples of different visual styles:



Next on the agenda is probably a bit more of 'social-media-type-stuff' like setting up a presskit() and such. Hopefully in a few days I can get on with making the actual game again

Until next time. Toodles!

Looks interesting. The banana leads me to believe the game is bit tongue in cheek?

I'd also love to hear more about that set dressing tool you posted about. I've been wanting to to learn Houdini for some of its procedural level creation tools, which look like what you've built.

I haven't updated the devlog for a little while since I've been off doing some freelance work and been busy trying to get the word out about this game!

So it feels like it's high time to do a little press re-cap
The first website to pick up on the game was actually my favorite Swedish gaming news site FZ.se:
http://www.fz.se/artiklar/nyheter/20151126/slow-motion-vald-vapenakrobatik-och-bananer-i-svensk-indieaction

Later another Swedish site also picked it up, called GameReactor:
http://www.gamereactor.se/nyheter/293603/Little+Big+Planet-avhopparen+bjuder+pa+bananer/

I also did an interview for lv.80, which you can check out here:
http://80.lv/articles/my-friend-pedro-awesome-slow-motion-platformer-shooter/

And last but not least, Indie Game Magazine also wrote about it! Check it out here:
http://indiegamemag.com/listen-to-the-banana-in-my-friend-pedro-blood-bullets/


It's so nice to having revealed the game and seeing people talk about it, and actually getting excited about it! Somehow it feels more like I'm actually making a proper game now

So, now that the initial "marketing-push" has happened I feel like I can go back to focusing more on making the game again. I've been warming up my game-making-muscles with a bit of level design. It felt really good focusing on gameplay again, after having had the focus on the visuals of the game for so long.

I also made another wall and floor theme which is completely "white-box" to be used for making the initial white-box levels, to stop myself from getting distracted from the flow and functional aspect of the level.


Example of a level built in one go.

Currently I'm approaching level-making in two ways. One way is to just start making the level (usually in the middle of the level) and keep building upon it linearly. This way of making levels usually requires me to really 'get in the zone' mentally, and usually gives the levels a better 'flow' feeling to them.

The other approach is to make levels in different "chunks" or "motifs", as I usually call them. This approach is great for when you want to explore a certain mechanic or "hook". It usually involves trying all the different combinations and abuses of the functionally I'm trying to explore. However, putting all of these "motifs" one after another doesn't always equate to a good level. Therefore I like to keep a little library of different motifs that I can pull in to a level that needs some more gameplay sections. Or just starting from scratch and putting together various motifs which might work well together. Keeping the motifs in groups makes them easy to move around to try different combinations.


Example of different motifs ready to be put together to form a level

Eventually I will probably approach level making in a third manner, namely from a visual or "event" aspect. That is, making pieces of level that maybe wouldn't be so interesting if it was plainly white box, but that focus more on the dressing of that particular moment.

However for now I want to keep the focus more on the "pure gameplay" and be sure there's enough good stuff to cover the whole game, and in the process of doing so invent new mechanics to be used for designing levels.

Not sure how long it will be until my next entry. For a while I will probably just be making levels, and not sure how much of that I should be showing at this point

Let me know if there is anything you would like to know more about, or just any general thoughts you might have!

Until next time! Ta!

Hey thanks for playing, liking and sharing your thoughts! :D
Yes, I totally see your point. I hope that the gameplay will be the foundation of what makes this game enjoyable, and the rest will be joyous sprinkles of fun and strangeness on top of it all. I've got some ideas for the story side of things at the moment, but it's all a bit up in the air tbh.... It may or may not involve time traveling...

Another week has passed and progress has been made! This week I've been wearing my coder hat and trying to wrap my head around my previously written code.

The focus has been on small details in the players movement, animation and poses. I've also experimented with a new ability, namely being able to shoot from cover. Check it out here:




After sorting out the major quirks in the players movement that bugged me I moved on to some enemy work.
I always struggled with how to solve the issue of being able to shoot enemies half way through them spawning from a door. However I now believe I have found a fairly neat solution. The enemies now try to take cover in the door opening if you shoot at them before they're fully spawned.



I've also tweaked and added some new animations for the enemies, trying to make them act a bit less... dumb.
They now react when there is a gunshot happening that they can't see, like so:



Next I might do some work on the actual models of the enemies. I've still got loads to learn in terms of 3D modelling and skinning...

Thanks! Yeah, it seems most of the time developing this has gone in to trying to make things look as smooth as possible

Yo, that rolling motion where you roll underneath the table and end up crouching with the gun leveled at the enemy...

 

This looks absolutely wonderful!

Christmas and New Years is over... After eating loads, relaxing and actually taking time to play some games for once it's time to get productive again!

It's been a great week. I've shifted focus from small polish to playing around with some new ideas and features. I've managed to get three rather exciting additions to the game.


First off: EXPLOSIONS!


Because you can't have an action game with out it...
The explosions are mainly based on this, with a few slight modifications: https://stevencraeynest.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/easy-volumetric-explosion-in-unity3d/
It was a great first glimpse in to shader-programming! I've never touched shader code before, but I managed to add a "pinch point" to the explosion, making it "stretch" slightly in it's origin position, trying to stop it from looking too round


Next up: Kicking!


... With the addition of some experimental UI. After making the explosions I made some explosive canisters. After making the canisters I obviously wanted to be able to launch them in the air and shoot them before they managed to land. So, the most fluid way off achieving this seemed to be kicking

With a bit off skills, you could even pull off this kind of bad-assery:



The last but not least addition: A new enemy!


Since one of your main abilities in this game is the ability to roll, it seemed to make sense to have an enemy based around rolling Now, you might be thinking this is a bit out of place from what you've seen of the rest of the game. However, there seem to be a plan slowly growing in my mind to explain and allow for these sort of things to fit in to the game (In reality, I kind of just want to make cool fun stuff and later vaguely try to explain it with some sort of story)

Here's a bonus close up of the little fella:



That's it for now.
Until next time. Have a good one

Wow that's pretty clever! Loving all of this!