Globehopper post compo release

Note: The game has been updated again since this post. You can always find the latest version at: http://pekuja.com/games/globehopper/

So, a couple of days after the compo, this release makes some of the most obvious adjustments to the game. You no longer jump straight up, but instead forward at a slight upward angle, so you’re roughly jumping at whatever you see on the screen. The camera behavior is now such that it has more lag while you’re jumping, so you get no sudden disorienting twists and turns. I’ve adjusted the gravity and running speed so that you will no longer enter orbit if you run on a small planet. To not make it too slow to run around really large planets though, you can now press Shift to run faster. This will of course make you fall off the smaller planets. Also, to avoid having to look around for the next checkpoint, I’ve added a handy compass arrow that will always point you at your checkpoint. And as a final coup-de-grace, you can now load arbitrary Wikipedia pages at will. Just press ‘T’ and you’ll get a text prompt. Enter a page name and press Return/Enter. You can also still press ‘R’ to load a random page (or just leave the text prompt blank), and Duke Nukem Forever is still on speed dial with ‘F’.

Find the game after the more.

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Globehopper

Gave my miniLD12 entry it’s own page at: http://pekuja.com/games/globehopper/

Globetrotter

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Click the screenshot to play. WASD to run around, Spacebar to jump really high.

So, I’ve got some goals in the game now. And that’s good, because there are two hours left. I think this is pretty much my final release. I’ll probably make a little page for it with instructions and submit the game.

I ended up not using the links between the pages for anything other than determining the planets’ sizes. The gameplay is also very simple. The game picks a planet, and you have to reach it by jumping between the planets. Then it picks another one, until you run out of planets. For Duke Nukem Forever, that’s 110 planets, which takes quite a while to get through. As a final thing, I should probably add a “pick random wiki page” button, or perhaps a way to select a specific page. That’d be pretty nice. Will have to see if the UI work for that would be too complicated. Might be for two hours and no experience.

Update: moved the demo behind the more.

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Wikipedia Galaxy Forever

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I’ve finally got something resembling gameplay. I’ve added this green dude, model courtesy of FroGames ProtoPack to save time and because I’m not much of a modeler or an animator. The dude can run around the DNF planet and jump. If there’s another planet close by, he can even jump between planets, reminescent of a certain Wii plumbing game. The problem is, I don’t really want to pack the  planets so close together. Instead, I’m planning on adding some sort of bridges. Once I do this, I might have to ditch the DNF planet, because it’s connected to all the other planets, which might become a real mess.

My demo is currently almost a megabyte big because I’m using System.Xml and I think Unity doesn’t bundle that with the Web Player, and thus, it has to be bundled with the game. If anyone knows of a smaller Xml library for .NET, please, it would be much appreciated. I only need some very basic parsing functions.

Update: Demo moved behind the more.

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Intergalactic, Planetary

Not much to say about this update, but I’ve got planets now.

Update: Changed my mind, I’ll say a few words. In addition to adding planets, I’ve added free mouse look camera, so I can fly around the planets. I’m also rotating the 3D text to always face the camera so that you can always read it. The planets are actually physics objects, which is not really used, but if they are overlapping each other when created, they’ll push each other away and start flying through the space. And last but not least, I changed the colors.

Wiki space

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This is the first in-game representation of the wiki neighborhood around Duke Nukem Forever. The same method as before, but I’ve tweaked the code to work nicely in Unity 3D, and I’m creating 3D text elements in the space at random positions. There are quite a lot of links on the article for DNF, so this is obviously pretty messy. I’m probably going to try to spread them out more, and of course I still need some representation for the links between pages, although I have to say, maybe it would be pretty neat even without that. Possibly I could use the interconnecting links in some more subtle ways. As for the pages themselves, I’m thinking they might be represented by planets or something in the final game.