Brute Force NFT Games

Oof that’s an old image I had to reuse! 3D clouds yikes.

So this one is going to be talking about how I did the spide… tongue swing in Crumble! I’ve already talked about it in an 80lv interview I did last month, you can read it HERE.

I’m going to try and expand on that now that I have some time, so here we go:

The tongue mechanic

To move at fast speed or to cross long gaps, our little blue ball uses his tongue as a grappling hook.

In Crumble, it is the main movement mechanic and can be used to fast travel across levels if executed well! Unlike Spiderman, he doesn’t tether to a faraway point, only to a short to mid-distance tree or structure! This allows for better movement and velocity control.

Another point that makes crumble unique is that you don’t need to aim to grapple, only the general direction of the camera is used. It takes some time to get used to and learn instinctively where it’s going to tether but I prefer this casual approach.

Where to tether?

The first thing we need to evaluate is where does the player can use his tongue. Some games choose to have fixed points in the world where the player can hook to, and some others like Spiderman 2 where you can web swing from every tall building in the world.

I chose to have it tethered to anything in the world except some high wall to prevent the player from exploiting the mechanic.

So I tried to make the tongue swings feel natural and minimized the use of visual feedback for it, it’s not yet perfect as some demo testers don’t know that they can tether without any feedback indicating them they can. But I think if you give enough time to the player to learn the mechanics with safe workshops they can adapt easily.

To anticipate where the player can use his tongue I shoot sphere casts from the player’s position.

And as a side note here is the direction of the sphere casts for Crumble 2D sections:

A bit of explanation on what’s going on here.

To create an ideal raycast for our tether, we need to preset directions for it. I created a tool in Unity to help me configure all the different directions and put weight on it. In my case I want the player to tether first in front of him then up then on the sides. The first raycast to touch any authorized physics will return true and will be the one used to create the tether point.

In the code we need to know the rotation state of the camera to rotate the whole system, the quaternion povQuat gets the rotation of the camera.

The ray is the direction “rotation” at the player position, multiplied by the camera’s rotation.

With all that information you can now cast a sphere with (the direction of the ray cast, the radius of the sphere, the output of the sphere cast, the distance of the sphere cast, the layers to interact with, and whether or not to ignore triggers).

In Crumble, I help the player identify where he can swing by moving a flying white and blue circle in the air. But if you want to do a game like bionic commando you can constrain the tether to where you point the camera.

Constraining the tether with physics

Now we need to create the rules to constrain the player’s movement around that hit point.

For this I use a spring joint, this is a very useful physics behavior inside unity and is more than enough to constrain the player.

Here are my settings:

The sprint joint is instantiated the moment the sphere cast hits.

Then you can configure it the way you want.

Put the attached rigid body of the physics you’ve hit and put it in the connected body inside the spring joint. If you want to make a 2D grapple you can skip this and make your own constraint behavior.

Player swing movement

This is the hardest part of the process, now that you have a point your player …

Crumble Digest #01

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| Crumble Digest

Here is my first digest of what has been going around the development of Crumble in the last weeks!

LAVA LEVEL

The lava level was redesigned a bit, I even made a new custom lava shader that reacts to the environment pretty well and a script that simulates physics over water or lava material. (This will be covered on the devlog)

Here is a sneak peek of what it would be like gameplay-wise:

ROCKET LEVEL TRANSITION

This one I’m pretty excited about, I took inspiration from how Spyro handles level transition and did my own with a rocket. So there is NO loading screen and it’s all smooth from level A to level B!

You can rotate the rocket with the joystick if you just want to fly among the clouds.

This was challenging to make with additives scene loaded in async inside Unity but I finally got it right. This will also be featured and explained later on how to load level in async while keeping important data such as the player or the score!

Here is a simple curvature shader that deforms geometry based on camera distance. It’s very common use in mobile endless runner games.

TONGUE HOOK REWORKED

It was a popular demand from demo players to have the hook mechanic reworked a bit and so I did 2 important changes.

First of all, I added a preview of where the feedback of the tongue might snap-on, to help the player navigate and react correctly. This may be hidden further on as you progress through levels.

And the second change was the mechanic itself. I added more raycast to be sure the player doesn’t miss one possible spot and made it more responsive to the player inputs as well as more permissive.

Here is a video of me testing the changes:

FARTING MUSHROOMS

No one asked for it, but you get it anyway. You now have the possibility to squish the mushrooms in Crumble to make them… fart!

It might sounds familiar because these are the same mushrooms as in Sheep It in the 44 LDJAM:

WHAT’S TO COME?

I am working on polishing everything I already have for a special Beta release of Crumble for very close people!

Right now I am polishing the start menu and I thought of something very original and immersive; you will have a menu in space with planets in the distance which will be the level selection and when you choose a level, the player will jump inside the rocket and prope himself to the selected planet! As you can see I’m taking this smooth gameplay very seriously, I want the player to feel immersed in my world and to find a deep connection with the arcade gameplay I’m offering inside a beautiful world.

I have a special mention to make for my Gamejolt page for Crumble: https://gamejolt.com/games/Crumble/413270

You can follow the development of my game there as well!

Don’t forget to wishlist the game, if you want to help me that’s the BEST WAY:…

How to Roll a Ball – Devlog#09

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| Mushrooms, Origin Story

How to roll a ball in your game, like the unity roll a ball standard asset, but better!

The standard asset

Jokes aside, Unity offers a really good starting point for you to make your own rolling ball game.

It comes with the standard assets pack with any 3D Unity project, you have a prefab of a ball and couple of useful scripts to help you move it.

Now I’m not gonna talk about it because you can find plenty of resources and information in the Unity manual.

What I’m gonna talk about is how to make it more juicy and responsive to the player inputs.

If you haven’t read about my early devlogs about physics I strongly recommend you to:

Devlog about Physics optimization

Devlog about Jelly Shader

Movement

For any platformer movement is crucial, metrics are very important and need to be controlled via scripts to adapt to various situations.

To move the ball in the direction you want (in front of the camera) you use the rotation of your camera:

The reason why you use rotation instead of direction like in the standard asset is that you don’t want to go up or down as well, so to prevent slowing down your ball when you’re looking at the ground you use the Y-axis rotation of your action camera and assign it as an angle to the inputs.

If you don’t have a world up like in space, for instance, you will use the direction instead.

Something to implement as well as a script to lerp the Player’s rigid body drag to its velocity. So when you go faster you get less resistance to the air and you keep going faster. It makes the player feel the acceleration and doesn’t feel like a rigid max speed value.

You can use lerp too instead of a curve in the editor.

Here’s the difference without and with:

Another small thing that I thought about in Crumble is a script to slow down the player speed if there are no inputs registered. So the player won’t slide off the platform or won’t overshoot a distance because he was too slow to give the right inputs. A simple condition with input == 0 and a velocity lerp should do the trick.

Camera movement and player animations play a great deal in the feel.

Jumping

Jumping should be fun and consistent.

The first thing you need to do if you use gravity is to increase the value by times 2 to 10 because you don’t want the player to feel like it has no weight.

The perfect jump for my game was to have a very quick boost upward and have a small window of low gravity at the end so that you can decide where to go.

To help with that you can lerp the jump force with time and a curve:

This will change the way the jump will behave based on the shape of the curve.

The vector up is there because I wanted to have a use for wall jump in the game even if it’s not the main feature because of the chaotic nature of the physics.

Here is the code for it:

It uses a wall angle float to check if the normal hit raycast is above, so you don’t wall jump on a too steep a wall.

Feedbacks

Now, this step seems superficial, but it is very important to give your game good feedback to the player.

Simple things you can add, vibration if your game supports the gamepad (it should)!

And again Lerp saves the day. impulse magnitude is the collision force of your character.

You can add visual feedback such as trails and jump Fx like the one I have on the upper gif.

And don’t forget to add a nice sound effect to it.

Extra Things

I’ve noticed that the player complained about the camera behavior in Crumble’s demo and I changed it to not collide with physics but only to hide it!

This can be done via shader and raycast. (I will do a devlog about it too)

I’ve added an effect of speed when you reach a certain speed, the effect …

Crumble Digest #02

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| Crumble Digest

Second digest of Crumble, so what did happen the last couple of weeks uh?

Grass Shader Polished

Now the twitter embed is white, so cool!

So, the grass shader was polished to work on any surfaces and with any rotations so that means that I can put this on anything I want now!

I used a triplanar solution with 3 cameras following the player to get that effect in space.

You can see a more finished result here:

Trail Optimized

I realized 7 months later that the way I was doing decal and trail renderer was VERY badly optimized and I was actually instantiating a lot of particle emitters when the player is on the ground. I removed it and made my own particle emitter, and it only uses one emitter for the whole effect. It was a bit challenging to make it rotate depending on velocity and object initial rotation, but it now works like the old one but better!

I have 300FPS in the editor while playing and can play the game at 60FPS on my 12yo computer.

So the next demo is going to be smoother and playable with old computers I hope (not too old).

Mini planets

I’ve been working hard on making the hub world/Main menu and it’s getting there, not yet finished because I wanted to add so many new features.

I added custom gravity and some little planets to explore and roam around. Don’t get too far because you might not come back because of low gravity and infinite space and all that.

This is what the menu looks like right now, if you select “Level Selection” the rocket will launch and get to the planet in the background which is the new way of selecting levels!

Level Selection

So this is still a work in progress, but it’s getting there.

You can select different levels and the planet will rotate automatically, it will give you a nice visual representation of what the theme of the level is, if it’s in the jungle or in the lava, etc…

Here is some progress on it:

I made sure to be able to rotate it with either a click of a mouse or a move on the joystick.

Featured

I’m happy to say that Crumble got featured on the exploration page of Gamejolt!

I’ve gotten more than 2000 followers from it, so that’s very nice to welcome newcomers and to show them the world of Crumble and what the game is going to become! Visit the gamejolt page of Crumble if you have time, it’s a very nice community!

I also got my game featured on IndieDB, you can see the entry of my game here.

And we’re at more than 1.3K followers on Twitter which is amazing to me that the game got so much attention so fast! It really motivates me to keep working harder and better on the game and perhaps on a new game after this which would be a dream coming true, being independant and living off my games!

As always don’t forget to Wishlist Crumble and if you already have, please share it with your friends and family, it’s a game for everyone!…

Origin Story – Devblog#12

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| Origin Story

I wanted to expand on my tweets about my previous projects so here is the 12th devblog about my secret origin story!

In the beginning, Drawing years

I actually wanted to work on video games art after my 18 birthday and I didn’t even know how to draw or anything. The only software that I knew back then was Blender and I wasn’t really good at it.

So I went to Isart digital my first year then LISAA in Paris for 3 other years.

In the first 2 years, I learned a lot about traditional drawing and art, and I made a lot of progress.

You can visit my old portfolio website where I used to post my work: Portfolio

I have made quite a few drawings:

I did digital drawings too but I never had time to really get into it and I don’t really like it either:

Learning Game Dev

Fast forward 2 years after that now I need to learn how to make video games using the software. I learned more about Blender, 3Dsmax, Unity, and Photoshop. By the end of my learning years, I learned about scripting in C# which was easy for me because I already knew a bit about C and C++.

The first game that I made was with a group of 5 people including me and we had to do a 4 versus local players beat them up in 6 months. It was very intense for me even though it wasn’t the final year I really gave everything into it trying to learn as much as I could.

I did a lot of drawing for it too!

Here is my 2nd-year demo reel:

Last Year

The 3rd year I did a game jam with someone else, and we did this game in 1 week.

I still very much like this game and play it from time to time.

You can watch full gameplay of it here:

Comparing this to the polish and physics of crumble:

For my final project, I worked on a VR game with 5 other people. It’s 4 people versus the guy in the VR who is the king of the castle trying to either defend his gold or himself in 2 different gameplay modes.

So I did all the scripting and fortified my understanding of C# and Unity with the implementation of VR. I had a lot of fun doing a bit of 3D modeling and 2D textures. I wish I had known more about shaders when I did this project because a lot of problems came from there.

And here is my final demo reel at the end of my year:

The bedroom project was a remake of an old project I did when I was younger:

The after

So after that, I got an internship at Spinbot working on Squadd.io battle royal and Lordz.io

And during that time I participated in my first official online game jam, the 42nd LDJAM, and made Crumble in 72 hours! Which got amazing feedback and visibility.

Even after doing it, I didn’t think about making a real game out of it!

I made a second game jam 1 or 2 months later:

I’m still amazed we did it in 5 days and I couldn’t even work on it all day because I had to go to work.

you can see a video of the full gameplay here:

Some months later and I’ve made a second LDJAM called Crom:

Now that we’re getting close to the present time, I went and started the Crumble project. I was determined to finish this game and sell it.

A few months ago I made a third entry for the LDJAM with “Sheep It”

And the full video if anyone has 13 minutes to spare:

And last but not least, the last game jam that I’ve done is Avion. 2 days to make this and it was a blast, so much that I’ve decided to integrate the gameplay to a level in Crumble that will be in the new demo!

And the full video if anyone has 6 minutes:

Conclusion

And now I’m here, still working on Crumble and wondering what will I do next …

Crumble Digest #04

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| Crumble Digest

Another week another digest!

Crumble New Demo is out

Maybe you haven’t heard about it but the new demo is out and I’ve been receiving a lot of positive feedbacks on it!

You can try it out and wishlist the game on Steam!

So let’s list out all the new features that have changed or are new in this demo.

The player movement and camera

The player movement was tweaked a little to be more responsive and to fit the action style platformer I have going on. The camera was pulled back too and is wider so you can see more of the environment you’re supposed to jump on.

The character is almost always in the middle of the screen as opposed to how it was on the gif before.

The new Character look and the collectables

The Main character has changed skin and is cleaner, the shader will change a final time to include the new one I’ve been working on for the multiplayer unlockable skins etc…

I took an approach very similar to what’s been done in Slime Rancher on UE4.

For now those blobs are for collectable and weird turbine spinner thing only.

More Tongue Action

In the new demo there is a lot of tongue parkour in the second level.

This was a good opportunity for me to test the skills of new players to the difficulty of mastering the hook mechanic of crumble and I’m glad that a majority of the players who played it were able to use it properly.

Although there are still a too large number of people who feel that it’s too hard to use and a bit awkward. So being the last feature of Crumble that needs tweaking i’m going to spend a large amount of time trying to implement ways to ease it for the player.

The avion part

I was a bit anxious to see how players would react to it, since it’s way different from the original Crumble but it worked fine. The major problem for a lot of people including myself is that it’s too boring and dull, so I might need to add explosions and multiple planes to jump on 🙂

All the extra fluff and stuff

Of course there are some other useless stuffs you can toy with in the demo such as the rocket loading screen that you can rotate with your joystick, the planet level selection that you can rotate too, more options in the menu and best time saved!

Compared to the first demo it’s really a BIG change, and it’s available for mac linux and windows.

What’s the next milestone?

So I have one last demo to launch before the full game, it will include the local multiplayer and (maybe) a giant boss fight. So with that you will have the full unlockable skins system and the final hub world look.

Right now I’m working on something really exciting, a 2D crumble!

This will be part of the gameplay as a linear feature, you’ll have to hope in grass portals to turn into a grass ball. or a mole.

As for the timeline of things, I think I can spit out the new demo in 2 months, so early december. And the final release of the game will be after new year, I really want this project to be 1 year long, but I know I might overshoot it to make it “perfect”. Let’s hope I get really productive towards the end!

Conclusion

Thanks for sticking with my updates and giving me feedbacks on the new demo. A lot of new people got interested into the development of crumble with the new release of the demo so that’s nice to see. I’m finishing a lot of big features that took me ages to think about, and only started to have fun with all of them in various new levels.

Thanks for reading!…

Palely – Digest#05

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| Palely

Another week, another game!?

Palely – LDJAM45

Last week I participated in the LDJAM 45, the theme was “Start with nothing“.

Here is the page of Palely’s entry.

and Here is the itch page.

The pitch of the game is basically creating objects out of letters forming

And then being able to destroy the same object for more

It was pretty ambitious for a 72 hours jam but with the help of 3 friends of mine we were able to finish it in time.

We tried to keep it interesting with puzzles to solve and a progression to

Obviously, we didn’t make an object for each word of the dictionary but we made quite a few and we tried to keep it in the Moebius-esque style.

Speaking of Moebius, during the jam I made this super cool watercolor shader for every asset we had. Here is a closer look at it:

It has a custom everything, moving colored shadows and holding the ink apparition effect! Add it to the shaders devlog queue!

If you can’t play the game yourself you can take a glance at a gameplay video I made for it:

Some Crumble news

2D Crumble

In the last digest I showed you a glimpse of what a 2D crumble could look like and I just finished the mechanics for it:

It’s going to be part of the levels and will be a fresh game experience of the same level design.

Character Skin

I’m currently implementing the coop/party game features, and for that, I need skins to differentiate players. It has always been part of my plan to have them act as a sort of achievement/reward system for the player, meaning when you unlock a steam achievement for instance you get a skin. For now, I have up to 30 different unique skins that aren’t just recolored default ones (Maybe I will do it for the default coop skins, who knows). I have reached out to a couple of other game devs I know and some agreed to let me use their character as skins which is super cool!!

For instance the developer of Bokube and his rabbit:

You can even switch skins without going into the menu, just by pressing bumpers on the side of your controller. (I’ve yet to determine where to have it on the keyboard)

In other small news, I reworked the tongue/hook mechanic the last time to clean the math, etc… and followed some recent outputs from demo players to remove the weird loading visual feedback for hooking.

1 Wishlist = 1 Happy Crumble…

Crumble Digest#06

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| Crumble Digest

Long time since I made one, I bring you some crumbly news about the game! And if you don’t follow my twitter, you can read here some progress on Crumble.

2D Crumble Implemented

The big progress is the 2D mechanics that’s been completed and implemented in the first levels, here is a video showing the transition:

And here a more polished version of it:

I can tell you that making those special levels are a real-time sink but the effect and gameplay are worth the effort.

New Skins

The balls from Fling to the Finish join the battle!

It’s really heartwarming that some good game devs want to be a part of my game in some way and I find it very fun to do. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you want to have something related to game dev as a skin in Crumble, I would love to add new friends to the growing collection.

Vine System

I made a cool Vine system inside Unity to have some life in the level designs + it can be useful for the gameplay when you want to cross gape etc…

I made some dynamic platforms with it!

Coop Progress

The main features for the Party-game/Versus mode is done but it still needs to be refined before the last Crumble demo:

There are 2 types of games you can play as of now; Racing and Survival. Racing is self-explanatory and Survival means you are 1 Vs 1 or 1 Vs 3 and the guy with the cannon tries to explode the others while they try and survive the longest. The better time wins 🙂

New Music Progress

I never talked about it anywhere except Twitter but I’m finally making soundtracks for (each) level I was a bit skeptical at first when learning the best way to approach this but finally I’ve come around and made some samples:

These are just a few of many, and unrefined for now. I’m still trying to search for the best sound and theme for each group of level. But it’s definitely more enjoyable for me to work on levels and test them when they have that OST made specifically for them.

Also a big thanks to my followers on Twitter, we are now more than 3K which is very big for a small dev like me. So I made an announcement for the Nintendo Switch release of Crumble:

Don’t forget, 1 Wishlist gives you 1 Virtual nonredeemable Crumble…

Crumble Digest#07 + Release Date

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| Crumble Digest

As I’m nearing the end of crumble development I can already give you the expected release date of the game: December 04, 2020!

Release Date

Crumble will release on December 4th.

There is a possibility that the date might change in the future, but I’m confident I can make it.

The price will be 15$/€ with a 15% discount for the week of release and the Switch port will come out a few months later.

The development of the crumble is not yet finished, some big chunks of levels are missing and I’m working hard on it every day and night to bring it closer to completion.

Overall Visuals

I am very pleased by the recent completion of all major visual aspects of Crumble. The demo only has a few levels of the 2nd world which I call the mountain/forest world and I’m eager to let everyone play the other worlds in the full version.

Completing all of these new levels will be the last thing I will need to do before finishing Crumble.

Boss Content

The last month I have worked on implementing a boss for each world with varying mechanics.

In order: World 2 with a bunch of flying snakes that you will have to ride to your rocket,

World 4 in a stormy level where winds can push you off platforms or help you cross large gaps,

World 5 on the lava surface which is so hot it can crumble under you if you stay too long.

These special levels will challenge the skill and patience of the player and are a treat for the most experienced.

I’ve worked on a new lava shader that can turn solid and liquid depending on the player’s movement, I’m sure a lot of game devs following me would be interested in me sharing this kind of shader but it will have to wait until the end of Crumble production before I can share some game dev insights.

I’ve skipped a lot of Crumble digests so if you’re not aware I have released a new demo a few months ago including 4 levels, a leaderboard system, an infinite runner level, and some general optimizations!

I received amazing feedback from the steam summer festival, a lot of people who played the early versions of the demo came back and enjoyed it a lot more this time around. There are still some features I need to tweak like adding a free mouse aiming for those on PC who would want to aim straight where they want to grapple.

Overall, I have a very good feeling about the release and the future reception of Crumble and I am looking ahead!

1 wishlist on Steam = 1 smile on my face…

Image effects shader – Devblog#08

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| Image Effects

Today I’m going to write about Image effect shaders, this might be the most effective and visible of them all. It is used as a way of post-processing rendered images.

Hehe I hope you like what I did with the title image.

The basics

Post-process shaders are a bit different than regular shaders, because they need a script with an OnRenderImage function to work !

So let’s see what is the basics script that can run a post-process effect:

This simple script will take the material you give him and then draw the shader effect on to the “source” and render the output “destination”.

If you have multiple effects to draw on screen here is how I do it:

You will need what I call a temporary RenderTexture to share the information.

This works on every graphics API I use (DirectX, Opengl, Vulkan)

Now you will have something like this:

A blackscreen yeah !

Now the only thing we need to do left is writing down a post-process shader !

Simple image effect

I will demonstrate how to do the black bar cinematic effect:

This is the cinematic black band shader.

This is the script controlling it.

An important part of the shader is this: Cull Off ZWrite Off ZTest Always

Most post-process shaders will contain these states.

The shader work is in the frag part, we get a _maintex which is the Screen. Then we split it in 2 bands and offset it by a float _BandsWidth .

And finally we multiply it by a color (black in this case) and returns it.

The script has a Coroutine called “Fade” and we can use that to lerp the bands, so it can appear and disappear smoothly.

The result will be as follow:

And with little additions and some more maths you can have something with more peps than just 2 bands:

Don’t forget to put the blit script in last position on your camera, so it renders last.

Fading with a mask

This is even easier than band masking, fading is used each start overs in my game and helps the transition between scenes.

This gets the screen _Maintex and a _PatternTex that will be used as a mask (remember that to mask something we need to overlap a color on top of a screen, white or black).

And we lerp it with a float value _Cutoff that will be managed via script.

For this one I used tweening, but if it’s not your thing you can just as well use a coroutine like up above.

The beautiful result in a loop:

The mask is barely visible but it fades the screen from bottom to top really quickly. In this one I also used a raycast to determine when to trigger the fade in and a distance to lerp it.

The new post-process stack tool

Before doing your own shader, you should check out if it’s not already in the unity pipeline.

It really is a great tool and I use it for everything (Bloom, DOF, Color grading etc…)

You can search for it in the Unity Asset Store at “Post-processing stack” and it’s free.

Conclusion

It got big really fast, I think I covered the basics of image effects. Don’t overuse them as they can be process-consuming like a blur shader.

Use the Post-process stack when in doubt.

This will be the last devlog about shaders for now as I want to go deeper into the script/3d art part, so you can expect some on how I did the tongue hook in Crumble and maybe more on physics.

Some asked me about a marketing and communication devblog but since Crumble isn’t even out yet I don’t feel comfortable telling you what I still don’t know too much about.

Don’t forget to wishlist Crumble, if you want to help that’s the BEST WAY…