Progress check

Hey everybody!

Not much happening at the moment, I'm still behind of schedule and battling with the battle system and trying to find the power to win the battle. Last week we had at school our first seminar, which are held to check if the students in our class have made progress with their final projects. Me and Henna talked about our game, showed the game as it is now and for comic relief showed the same two videos of our amazing horse that we published here in the blog also. :)

All and all I think it went well, but at the same time I'm looking at the calendar and I have to admit that March isn't that far away. The code isn't magically going to write it self, and I have to do something about it. Even though you're doing something you love, and most of the times I enjoy writing code, but when it's something you just HAVE TO DO and you have to literally force yourself to sit down and start typing, well it sort of takes part of the fun out of the equation. Once I get myself sitting by the computer, everything kinda flows naturally for that session. But it seems to be the same fight to get started every time.

Don't get me wrong, I really really love that I'm capable of making games and hopefully will be able to do it for a living some day. If I could travel back in time and meet my 7 year old self at my childhood home playing games on Commodore 64 with my friends, I don't think there is anything I could say to myself to convince that little kid, that he'll be making games some day!

Well, before this gets too deep, I wish you a good night. Sleep tight. Watch out for the big-ass bed bugs... :D

Amazing new enemies! Gotta see this!

Ladies and gentlemen!

We would like to proudly present two new variations to our notorious arch enemy, the Angry Horse! Come, and see for yourself; first off, we have the Flying Horse! But watch out, for he is the master of aerial combat!

Our second addition is the terrifying Expanding Horse! His mad moves have driven many to dark abyss of insanity!

Are you brave enough to meet them?!

Feature 1 link

Feature 2 link


Regards: Henna

Theme music whiiiuuu

So our friend finished making us a theme music 8) Listen to it here:
http://soundcloud.com/ifinland/imind-discovery

Err, yeah, we are progressing... slowly... and, stuff...:D

Code code code!

This weekend has been sleeping, cleaning and coding for me. Couple of weeks ago we made a new timetable and I decided to follow it better than the previous one. But once again, even though trying very hard, I didn't manage to do everything I planned for this week.

The thing about coding is that it is difficult to estimate how long writing a specific part of code takes. Some times coding goes smooth as silk and some times you bang your head to a wall for several hours. This weekend it's been 10% silk and 90% banging. The most frustrating part of coding is the moments when you can't figure out why the piece of code you just wrote doesn't work, even though you are so sure that it should work!

Basically coding is solving a problem after another. The trick is that not all the problems are of same difficulty. Some problems are easy to solve, and you can do them at first try, without any difficulty. Then there are problems you can't solve right away, but you need to learn some more about the language or software before solving them. Then there are the worst kind of problems, the ones that you will take several hours to crack, or in worst case, you can't find a solution at all...

As difficult as coding is, I must say that one of the best feelings there is, is to find a solution to a really tough problem. That feeling is one of the things that keeps me going until this game is finished!

Boss

There it is, as promised. It´s kind of a unholy thingy spirit demon... I tried to take some inspiration from buddhist mythology, and wanted to give it some color. Imma gonna do some particle cloud where it´s gonna sit on the game, hovering around and...stuff.

Cheers!
Henna

Long time no see...

Hi there...

I'm terribly sorry I haven't updated in a while. But then again, I haven't been working on anything new until recently 8) I'll post a picture of a bossy boss monster tomorrow, because I left the file on school computers.. heh.

And, we got someone else to do the music for us, so you can expect something quite different from the last one... :')

That's pretty much all for now, check back tomorrow for a pic 8)

Henna

Youtube video added

Hello hello!

So, for couple of weeks now I've been practising making music with FL Studio, and got the first bit of music together yesterday. I'm not sure yet if this one will be in the game or not. I would like some feedback about the music, but remember that it's the first ever song I've made with FL Studio, so be gentle and don't just shout at me that it's crap. I'm sensitive, you know... :D

Henna took some pictures from the levels, and with them and my music we made a short video that can now be seen by clicking this link: RPG (work in progress) screenshots & sample music

Remember to tell a friend if you like our project!

Have a nice evening everybody, I'm very happy now, we have autumn holiday next week, so lots of free time! Bye, bye!

Arranging the mushrooms

It's Henna again. This month I'm using to finishing the playable areas. That means a lot of stuff that need to be adjusted and moved to their places... ehr... mushrooms and plants and doors and graves and much more... corals and crystals... I feel like laughing and falling apart the same time :) And I still need to model some more stuff.

I've done some quick lightmappings with low settings, but the final bakes will be done on school computers, which have unity pro. Oh, normal maps, I so miss to see you.

Have some pictures. Bye.

The sound of music

Hello!

Some kind of milestone has been reached now, though it isn't that shocking or amazing. I handed the project files to Henna for her to make some bigger graphical adjustments to the game. I had the files for couple of months after Henna made many levels in the summer. While Henna works on the graphical side of the game, I turn my focus on the music and sounds.

The sound effects of the game will mostly be from freesound.org, so we won't have to record too many sound by ourselves. I'm hoping to make the music myself, I have already started working on the title screen music. Music is overall going to be classical RPG music, lots of piano, violins and drums. I'm really excited about trying to make the music, I already have some melodies done on my computer, but I hope that I won't be too hard on myself. I have a habit of being really negative about my creations and hopefully I know when the music tracks are good enough. Maybe I'll get something finished soon, so that I can link some music here?

This is a milestone also in our working habits. Since the start of the school after summer Henna and I have been working mostly at school together. This changed last week when our internships continued and we will be working in different projects. The game making will be happening separated on our spare time at our homes. Takes a little bit of getting used to go back communicating over Skype, e-mail and Dropbox.

Well, I think that's about it for this time...

Bye, bye!

Pictures...

It's Henna again.

I was supposed to update this blog few days ago, but I didn't because I was lazy.

Here's some random pictures of stuff I've been doing:

Kyran's sister in progress

Kyran's home needs some artsy stuff

It's a sword. With a red jewel! 

It's a gun.

Cheers!

You have spoken: Kyran

Hello!

The voting is over, and clear majority of the votes, maybe 60 % - 80 % went to the name Kyran. So, as we promised, we will from now on call the main character of the game Kyran. I'm happy about the choice, it's a good name for the character whose figure is now already very familiar to me from the hundreds of times I've started the game to test it.

I think that we will use this kind of voting or other interaction also later in our game development and also soon as we have some bigger gameplay elements to test, we will use your help to test things. I hope that at the latest we would have something to try by Christmas, I really really hope so.

The coding of the game is going slowly but steadily forward, latest additions are the different facial expressions of Kyran to indicate players health in the lower left corner, easier code to move player between worlds, pausing everything in the world when in menu and I also fixed couple of bugs in the first puzzle. Even things are progressing quite nicely, I must admit that I'm a little behind of the schedule we posted here earlier, but I'm not too worried about that.

Have a nice autumn evening everybody, I think I'll watch an episode or two of MacGyver now...

Cheers, Mikko.

Naming the Main Character

Hiya, It's Henna again.

Today, I shall bring you our main character! Here he is:

Now, I would like YOU guys to name him. I have 5 different possible names for him, and all you have to do, is to choose the one you like the most. Please.
The names are:

- Derain
- Regis
- Eton
- Falk
- Kyran

To help you decide, I'll tell a bit about him; He's 23, and he has little sister of age 16, who's cripple. His passion is art, and he always carries a sketchbook with him. He earns his living by selling his works.
He lives a carefree live, but is always there for his sister. He's friendly, but likes to spend his time alone.

So, comment here, or to FB, where Maikki just might put this up. Yay :)

"UGH"

Thoughts of the moment

Hello.

We worked for couple of days at school with our game this week. We didn't achieve anything gigantic, but it was fun to work with the both of us in the same room for once. The whole summer went by with us working apart, and it's much more effective now to work together where you can discuss stuff about the game while we make it. Next week we will have also couple of days at school completely for the game making.

There's not really much in my mind at the moment, I'm a little bit tired now. I spent about 5 hours in car today, I was at my nephews birthday party. He turned 6 and he's really a big boy already. The day involved eating, playing mölkky and chess. Joona kicked the shit out of me in both mölkky and chess. I'm not sure who getting older I can blame for this, Joona or me? :D

Well, it might be time for this old man to prepare for a good nights sleep, we have my favourite kind of classes at school tomorrow. We are drawing, and I'm crap...

Good night people!

Story and GUI-plan

So hiya again. It's Henna here, and I'm updating about some progress on GUI and the story.

We really hope we have the time to make a small story arc to our game, and we have it all planned out by now. Of course I won't be telling you the whole story, but I'll tell you how it starts:

(Shieet, our main character doesn't have name yet, so let's just call him MC for now. You know, like Main Character.)

MC sits on the ground, with a magnificent landscape of fields and ocean before him. He's got a pencil and a sketchbook, and he's drawing the sight. After a while his sister slowly walks next to him. She is a cripple, and she can barely walk with her cane. She has a present for MC, for it is his birthday. MC opens the present, which reveals the most beautiful book, with ornate details. Yet when MC opens the books, he learns that it's empty. He looks to his sister with a puzzled expression, who then explains, that she thought he could use it as a sketchbook. MC then wonders about how could have she gotten such a book, for he has never seen anything like it. She tells him, that a travelling merchant came by a few days earlier, and because he seemed to be very tired, she invited him to have a rest at her house. There he then told her about his travels and adventures across the land, and when he finally was about to leave, he gave her the book, as a thanks for the hospitality.
MC looks concerned  at his sister, who seems a bit sad. After a while she confesses, that she feels rather disappointed that she could never travel and see other places. MC feels sorry for his sister, and promises to fill the book with stories and pictures, and then return the book to bring joy to her. With that promise, he decides to leave for a journey, to explore the world.


That's the beginning for our game, and the reason for why everything happens. We've actually written that same shit many times already, but all for different purposes. I hope that's the last time... <_<

As for how that story manifests itself in the game, we have planned to do all the "cutscenes" with just simply coding the characters to move and by dialogue. So yeah, I'd say our story is pretty much dialogue-driven, because that's something we maybe could achieve, and isn't over our capabilities. IF I have time, I would love to do a few short real cutscenes, with blender, but they'd be really simple and short (like an introduction-style animation, when a new character appears), because I think animating isn't my strong point...

And, then the GUI. I made a quickie design on how the player health stuff thing might look like.

When not in combat, that part with the "attack" and "skill" and stuff wouldn't show. Meh. I still have a lot of buttons and bases to make, and some of them I've already done.

It's a good thing we're gonna have time to do this at school, starting tomorrow, with classes meant just for these final projects. With the release of Guild Wars 2, I really, really haven't been ?able? to do anything else besides playing on my free time...
Bad me.

Ugh, I guess that's all, finally.

Cheers! HL

Main character troubles

Hello!

Second week of school is now behind us, and we have been making our game little bit at lunch hours. This week we imported our new main character to Unity and our game. There was some trouble with that, when we noticed some graphical issues in the 3D model. First we thought that it was something conserning my laptops graphics card, because it worked fine on Henna's desktop computer. I took the model home and tried it with my desktop, but it still had the same graphical issues. When we looked into it at school again, it seemed to be an issue with the lights in Unity, so it seems it will be ok. Phew, good that it's fine.

I haven't done much else, I tried the new model and animation in Unity, and I now have to modify the moving code to fit the new more complex animations and add code to figure out what to do when several buttons are pressed at the same time. At this stage our hero does all kinds of wacky stuff when you try to move it around, the new animations are not working fine at the moment because of the simple code.

In other news, we have now a serious rival for our game making in our leasure time. Guild Wars 2 came out yesterday, and it will seriously compete for our free time, Henna more than me I think. Well, she worked really hard last summer, so I think she has earned the right to kick everybody's ass in virtual battlefields of Tyria... :D

Have a nice sunday everybody, see ya!

Plans for the future

Hello.

So today me and Maikki had a very serious meeting. We discussed about our game, and planned ahead a bit. We even scheduled our jobs until new year. We are sure we forgot some things, but at least we do have a schedule now.

From now on we are planning to update this blog every week. Until now I have been doing our main character. His animations are soon finished, and we are going to test them at unity next week. He still needs some more texturing, but I think you can see him pretty sooon. We even might have a little suprise for you concerning him, but later.

Maikki is sitting next to me, but he doesn't wanna write, so I act as his hand instead. Maikki says "balalagglbagalalaa!!!". No, but seriously, Maikki has been testing our early version of skill tree. It gave him a lot of trouble, but now it is working! Now he will start working with improving the battle system and other stuff mentioned in the schedule.

And here's the magnificent schedule!

And.... When I have been too frustrated with animating, I have been drawing the main character's faces to be used on the health meter. It was fun! Yay for bloody men.

Bye bye, for now! 

First WIP pictures!

I'm so excited! O_O Whee!

Okay, first of all, I'm gonna tell you about the game, the visual side of it, to be exact. I'm gonna do all the things you SEE in the game, while Maikki does everything you DO in the game, yay! We are aiming for a handpainted look with our game. Yeah, it's fantasy, but not like it's gonna scream it to your face. We'll be using mostly diffuse and normal maps with our environment, with a few exceptions. Subtle specular maps will be used only for main character, weapons and enemies. I'm going to paint all the textures myself, except for sky textures, which are from cgtextures with a small modifying. I tried to paint them myself first, but then I went "aaargh" and decided to help myself a bit.

We began working on this game about four months ago, just before the internship-stuff started. Since then I have been working on the props for the game pretty much everyday (Almost, I swear!), after the work. That has been pretty much modeling and texturing for four months, this and my internship combined. But I've enjoyed every second of it! My goal is to make ALL the playable zones more or less ready before the schools start next month, so that I can give the project for Maikki to start working on properly. After that, I'll start doing all the other stuff required... Main character has been started, and finishing him will be the first priority next month. I'm so looking forward to animating him...not. After that, I'll turn my attention to enemies, npcs, weapons and all the 2D-stuff required for inventories etc, desingning quests and dialogues... More to follow on all of those, when their time comes! But now... some WIP pictures of the zones! 8) Even Maikki hasn't seen most of these, ever! x)

At the moment we have 15 different zones to play, and I'd say we're gonna have at least 7 more. I've still got a lot of props to make, to eveeerywhere! ^^

Some of the textures, particularly the terrain textures, still need some tweaking, but that's not high on my priority list right now. After the schools start, me and Maikki will have a lot to design. I have been sketching out how the character leveling, progression and skills work, but that's gonna need some heavy testing...and testing. And crying probably. I'd say that's gonna be one of our biggest challenges. As what comes for performance, we are running just fine for now. I've tried to make props share textures as much as possible etc, but much to my disappointment unity indie doesn't do static batching (I'd like that a lot!) and occlusion culling, so we might have to ponder about that problem too in the future.

And for last, meet our dummy, Mr. Pink-eyes the T-pose. For now, he's doing the job of our main character, doomed forever to kill the same creature over and over again, to test our battle system. Well, not for forever. He's gonna retire to be an npc when the real main character takes his place 8)

Cheers!

First Words

Okay, let's get it started! This is a blog about our final project, the ending climax of our three years of studies in Sataedu vocational school. Who are we? Well, we are Dual Pistol, a game developing team made from two differently gifted individuals: Me, Mikko Lasonen and my classmate Henna Leppänen. We noticed our different skills during our studies and decided to make our final school project together, so we could both do what we know best and are good at. We decided to go with the Dual Pistol team name, because obviosly there is two of us, Dual Pistol sounds pretty cool and Henna came up with this excellent logo where the pistols form two letters "L", which comes from our last names. Our game is still unnamed, but it is a RPG-game made with Unity Game Engine. We have already started making the game and have put several hours in many areas of developement. The final scale of the project will be determined by how much we will have ready for spring 2013, when we are supposed to return it to our teachers. Henna will be doing all the art, images, 3D-models, animation and other artwork, but she will be telling more later herself. My work will be in making the game do different things when the player interacts with our game world. This will happen by me writing thousands of lines of codes in Javascript, making links between different game objects and starting the game several hundreds, maybe thousands of times to test my code. Sounds very interesting doesn't it? Well, that's what I love to do! I will also be responsible of the sounds and music in the game, hopefully I will make most of them myself, we'll see. I'll add more stuff later, I think that this is more than enough words for the first blog text. Thanks for reading!