Time for another update! Last month was the last one on University Semester so I had to focus more on studying, doing essays, those kind of things… Now I want to use the recess to learn some new things and keep working on my games.

What I’ve Done

Fortunately, an essay I had was to do something on Unity using 3D, so I decided to tackle an old project and see how it would be like to do a 2D Platformer with 3D Graphics (something like Limbo and Inside), try some Inverse Kinematics and mess a little bit with shaders.

My mind before trying it: I just have to model a very simple character, use Mixamo for Rigging and Animation and things will work out, right?

My mind after trying it: Yeah, right…

The character could perform just 4 simple actions: running, pushing an object, pulling an object and climbing

Working with 3D wasn’t my favourite thing in the world, now I know it will never be. I simply couldn’t time the animations and actions, I think I would need a lot more time to get everything correctly, so I had to get away with a workaround on pretty much all of the actions. For the climbing action, I got away with just teleporting the character when the animation finished, so this is what looks the weirdest.

On the positive side, Inverse Kinematics is way easier than I thought it would be on Unity, I just used it to point the character hands on something that was interactable or making it look where I wanted.

As for the shaders, I still don’t have much idea on how it works, but I made a strange looking one using a tutorial. All in all, it was a good learning experience, if you want to see it, watch the video below.

About my projects:

I haven’t touched them actually, just had some thoughts.

Ghost Game: This was the game I talked about on the last update, now I decided the Human Body will be able to push/pull objects and interact with buttons/levers, the Ghost Body will be able to interact with buttons (not levers as they are heavier), won’t be affected by gravity and it will be able to posess the enemies NPCs.

Midnight Journey: Seriously thinking on studying Game Maker to do this one, I think it will be better, anyway, I want to use the extra time I will have to work on this one, but for the time my focus is on the Ghost Game.

Also, I started messing up with Phaser, it looks like a good framework for developing games for HTML5.

For the next Month:

Well, for the next month I will try to set a simple goal: I want to work everyday on my Ghost Game.

I want to have the first level finished (a tutorial level) and two more levels so the player can use that they learned on the tutorial, this is actually almost half of the whole game.

If I have an extra time besides that, I shall work on learning or practicing something (pixel art, music, Phaser, Game Maker, …) or writing stories/scripts/documents for my projects.

Well, that’s it! I tried to keep it short! See you next month!