Brute Force NFT Games

How to Roll a Ball – Devlog#09

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

No Comments

| 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

No Comments

| 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

No Comments

| 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

No Comments

| 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

No Comments

| 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

No Comments

| 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

No Comments

| 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…

Curved Water Sea shader – Devblog#11

No Comments

| Water Sea

To popular demand, today I’m going to tell you how to achieve this flat style water effect with a bonus curvature thrown into it!

The earth is round

Straight to the point, the curvature effect is in the vertex shader and isn’t a post-process effect. So if you want to have that in your game you’ll need to have the following lines of code inside every shader you want to display on the screen.

It is a pretty popular effect that you can find on casual endless runner mobile games such as subway surfer

On a side note, I think that special effects and shaders in mobile games are a good source of inspiration and are generally very effective

This allows the level designer to snap pattern pretty easily in a straight line and then have the effect wrap the vertex and hide what’s behind. So you can have a nice little runner without the pattern popping problem which was the original intent for my jam game Avion

Here is what you need in your shader:

So having that will bend anything according to the material properties, but the _Origin variable should be updated every frame to the position of your player or camera and you could just make all the properties global or make a script in your scene that will change the property of every material using the same shader like so: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Shader.PropertyToID.html

And then you can set whatever position you want to that ID.

You can see some cool exaggerated effects from it:

This is all made using a simple subdivided plane, you can use the unity plane.

Another cool thing about it, is if you have every object in your scene with that shader and you add one mesh without it, it will appear as if the object is moving down because the water is moving up. I’ve not yet implemented it as a mechanic in the game but it’s cool nonetheless.

The Depth

To make a good water shader and give it substance you’ll need to add depth to it, this is a very popular technique so I’ll go over it quickly!

This will give you a nice depth to your water and you can fine-tune the effect with the _DepthMaxDistance. And a very cool thing you can add is the color lerp which let you choose what color will be drawn beneath the sea.

The Foam

The obvious thing after that is adding the foam based on the depth texture.

I added couple of lines to the previous code. We’re just getting a different output from the depth using saturate and step which will translate into nice smooth shapes. Then we add a little distortion to it to add variety.

Again you can have a color added to it _FoamC but I just went with white.

Wave Displacement

Now we’re getting to the interesting bit of how to make actual waves and there are couple of techniques you can use to generate waves be it procedural or with textures.

I found this tutorial that explains both sine and Gerstner waves: https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/flow/waves/ /!\ Big brain maths /!\

Here are my Sine waves:

Modifying only the world Y-axis of the vertex so it’s 2D as opposed to the Gerstner waves that move in 3D.

And here are my Gerstner waves, from the Gerstner big brain maths tutorial:

Some bonus footage:

I think the latter looks way better and it’s more alive. But you can still make a great water shader with sine and a custom texture just like I did.

Some things you can add to that displacement to really make that water pop:

I use the vertex color data to lerp the color of the waves depending on world height. And then You can use this to do all sorts of things like make the foam disappear between waves etc…

In my game Avion, I use the height trick to flatten the water just underneath the plane so when it collides it’s not going into “fake” waves.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed the read, I love making shaders that take part in the gameplay and I had a blast making a prototype of it in …

Sky and Fog Shader – Devblog#06

No Comments

| Fog Shader

Today we will talk about a calm and soothing topic, the sky and fog shader in Crumble. I wanted to split it into 2 different devlogs but I realized I can’t talk about them separately. So, first of all, we’re going to enjoy sharp flat clouds!

Skybox Shader

You can read a very interesting devlog about that here http://vfxmike.blogspot.com/2018/07/dark-and-stormy.html

You can also download his project, it doesn’t really look like mine but it’s a very good starting point for anyone wanting to make a moving skybox shader.

I won’t explain what is already explained by Mike because he describes it in detail and knows way more about this.

So, what is the difference between the example I’ve shown you and a traditional 6 sided skybox?

The traditional way of making a skybox is to texture the UV of a cube-like so:

Without tools, it’s very tricky to make them by hand because you have to deform each side to simulate the roundness of the sky. You typically project the output color of the inside of a sphere to the UV of a cube. This is a great way to have a cheap static background with large-sized textures.

The skybox made by Mike is called a procedural skybox,

just like the one you get by default starting Unity. It lacks a lot of features but it’s also a good blank canvas if you want to add procedural clouds to it.

you can get the shader here: https://github.com/TwoTailsGames/Unity-Built-in-Shaders/blob/master/DefaultResourcesExtra/Skybox-Procedural.shader

Looking at it, it looks way more complicated than it needs to be, also the skybox shader for Crumble doesn’t need to calculate light for clouds and such, so it’s easier.

The cloud formation is made from simple scrolling textures and the use of every channel. Different colors scroll at different speeds and by clamping the overall value of the output, you get those “blobby” looking clouds. Just like a lava lamp would react, and that’s exactly how we made the 3D clouds in the scenes.

I couldn’t find a cool video to explain how it works so I made a quick one myself:

Fog Shader

Now let’s talk about the fog shader, we actually use several patches of fog to achieve the style in Crumble (and because of transparent shaders and whatnot). The global fog shader we use is an edited version of what Keijiro did for his kino shader suite. https://github.com/keijiro/KinoFog

What it does is that instead of having a bland filter for the back of your scene, you have a dynamic fog that interacts with your skybox. The only thing I had to change was the script for the fog shader, Kei Jiro made it so it reads the pixel from a traditional 6 sided skybox. But if you’re using exactly that, then it’s perfect for you. You can even use it without changing a single line of code for your procedural skybox, you only have to use a blank cubemap and change the tint value to match your skybox.

One other thing I modified for it to make this gradient effect, instead of having a 1 output value, I changed it to 0.2 only. So now the mountains in the back blend with the skybox and are perfectly readable!

Vertical Fog Shader

One of the first shader I wrote for the game which actually exists in the game jam version of the game. It’s a very easy one to do from scratch and there are a lot of informations about it on the net.

There are a lot more I’ve added to it than just a fog shader, so I’ll keep it for next week.

Conclusion

I hope you appreciated and read the links in this devlog, Skybox and fog shaders are fun to experiment with and really give a unique look to games.

Next week I’ll expand on the vertical fog shader we have in Crumble that plays an important part in the game over.…