Current Events > I've been working on a 3d platformer game (in unity)

(+) Yeah! (+)

mostly just a blogfaqs topic where I talk about what I'm working on

Last year I was unemployed for a couple months and got into unity, making some practice games and slowly working on the game I want to make, which is a 3D platformer inspired by Banjo-Kazooie/Tooie games but that takes some inspiration from Metroidvanias. So instead of a hub world where you enter levels, each self-contained level is connected to others by branch paths.

Now, I know that is a huge project to take on, so in the short term I'm just focusing on creating a single level. I've got a decent character controller built using code from this tutorial: https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/movement/

And now I'm working on boxing out the basic structure of the level. A while back when I first started working on it, I built out a simple level using the basic Unity primitive shapes
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/33b3488d.jpg

which was fine, but not great, and fairly hard to make anything particularly interesting. So I decided to build a tutorial level of sorts using Unity's "probuilder" plugin, which is used to make more complex shapes but is still somewhat cumbersome to use

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/6/6c42715d.jpg

Not fully satisfied with that, I took a detour into learning how to build out objects in blender which led me to making a simple character model (it's supposed to be a sloth)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/2/26f383ea.jpg

and I've decided that blender is a much easier tool to use for modeling the basic structure of a level, as well as being a tool that I can eventually use to put in a lot more detail in, if I learn how to use it better. So here's the latest version of the basic structure I attempted to build out in the first screenshot:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/d0f14eab.jpg

the next step will be learning how to add details and texture things, which I know literally nothing about.

Anyway, I'm hoping to keep this bumped with progress and ideas, and if anyone else wants to share tips or anything they've worked/are working on, that's cool too

Another detour I've been working on is working through a Unity learn tutorial on AI, which is solid but not one of the better tutorials I've done.

https://learn.unity.com/course/artificial-intelligence-for-beginners?uv=2021.3

I, admittedly, know next to nothing about game design, as my development experience is almost entirely in the corporate production structure. We primarily made in-house apps for large companies, and/or customer facing websites. That said, I find this very interesting, and I love reading about your progress. I don't know if anything I've said sounds like I could help in any way, but I'm certainly open to contributing, however.

Needs more Pokemon with guns, tbh

StealThisSheen posted...

I, admittedly, know next to nothing about game design, as my development experience is almost entirely in the corporate production structure. We primarily made in-house apps for large companies, and/or customer facing websites. That said, I find this very interesting, and I love reading about your progress. I don't know if anything I've said sounds like I could help in any way, but I'm certainly open to contributing, however.

yeah my real job is as a mobile developer, but a lot of the raw programming skills translate.

Ive also been the sole developer on apps that I built from start to finish so I have some sense of scope management, how long things take, that sort of thing

the pipe dream would be to make something that I can eventually sell and get into game development as a real job, but there are a lot of skills I dont have at the moment, and I recognize that it would take many years to get to that point on my own

the more attainable goal would be to make something that I can use as a resume of sorts to get a job working for a smaller development team

at this stage as far as getting contributions from others I'm just sort of seeing what I can do on my own, and who knows maybe I get sick of this in a month and move on to something else

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/c/c19de99f.jpg

I was curious if it would work so I asked google Gemini to generate guide images for an anthropomorphic sloth character. This is what it eventually came up with after some prodding

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/eac63dcc.jpg

Im not sure how I feel about the ethics of using AI art but also Im not an artist myself, nor do I really think I could be

I want to get into using Unity as well but Im still working on a small Thief campaign, thusly not wanting to divert attention.

The editor looks pretty cool though. Good progress on what you have so far.

I also made a little hut for practice that I'll use as a platform in the intial level, anywhere there's a generic cylinder in the current setup of the level

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/dde32b77.png

Been focusing more on 'creative' stuff lately so I decided to switch over to some more technical/coding. I started implementing a menu and save system. I've already done that in a previous game I've worked on so a lot of it is just copying over work I've done, but in this case it'll be a little more complicated as A) I'm looking to set up multiple save files and B) there will eventually be a lot to save with different collectibles placed in every level.

put in a hub world that you go back to and you can improve as you beat the various levels :)

Please teach pororin how to make a game

Make sure there's a dedicated fart button. It doesn't need to have any gameplay effect, it just needs to exist.

JimmyFraska posted...

put in a hub world that you go back to and you can improve as you beat the various levels :)

the idea is the whole game is a hub world and everything is interconnected

Pororin posted...

Please teach pororin how to make a game

just google how to make game

Trumble posted...

Make sure there's a dedicated fart button. It doesn't need to have any gameplay effect, it just needs to exist.

i've thought about including something dumb like that haha

Will there be boobs or poop humor?

TheGoldenEel posted...

the next step will be learning how to add details and texture things, which I know literally nothing about.

texturing is pretty easy when you get the hang of it. you can do the low poly method of just using colors that sometimes have minor details, or go all out and paint the textures in blender (if you eventually get serious about texturing, I would suggest adobe substance painter which is one of the few adobe software that can be purchased outright)
You can also go very, very far with clever shaders and post processing. So textures themselves can be pretty basic and shaders/post take care of making fake details

if you're looking to learn blender, grant abbitt and imphenzia on youtube are very good places to start.

unity's a great engine, despite their poor leadership.
my tips are to plan before implementing, make use of SOLID (especially the D which is dependency inversion. that should come first), and to really learn the ins and outs of Unity's Scriptable Objects. They can be used as a replacement for singletons, overcome abstract classes downfalls (as in, abstraction can easily get very, very messy) and can be used as event handlers, which comes in handy and has better performance than Unity Events (and more flexible)

I've also been working on a game, kind of a game with two game modes where one is a crazy taxi clone and the other is a crazy taxi meets risk of rain 2 type thing. Not much to show as of now because 3 months ago I completely restarted the project to really get my scripts and renderer stuff set up so they can be more modular/reusable in the future. I made the mistake of going down the Unity Scriptable Render Pipeline rabbithole as well as the "make your own editor tools" rabbithole lmao.

BucketCat posted...

and to really learn the ins and outs of Unity's Scriptable Objects. They can be used as a replacement for singletons, overcome abstract classes downfalls (as in, abstraction can easily get very, very messy) and can be used as event handlers, which comes in handy and has better performance than Unity Events (and more flexible)

oh this is a good tip. I've never heard of this from anything I've looked into, and it seems extremely useful.

it's easy to take things for granted in software.

I'm off on a tangent now because I wanted to implement a main menu screen, but with that I wanted to allow the user to create a save file and thus enter their name. Since this will be a controller-based game, I have to have some way of selecting letters, so I decided to implement an onscreen keyboard. It's something I've worked on before in apps so it's not something that's particularly difficult, and I figure it's good practice with working with UI elements in Unity

(kept the appearance super simple, just worrying about functionality for now)

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/3a556b0b.png

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/4/405514c2.png

practicing textures, I made a little low poly coffee bean that'll serve as one of the collectibles.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/3f9b00cd.jpg

it's a little harder trying to make my hut look decent
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/dfb29d02.jpg

One thing i'm trying to figure out is how it's usually done. I have the terrain of my level all as one mesh and it works for me for now as things are simple, but as I want to add more detail it will be necessary for bigger texture files, bigger than is reasonable if the objects are really big. Does anyone know if there are any solid open source 3D platformers out there that I can take a look at and get ideas of how other people approach this problem?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/acff3805.jpg

that kind of looks like wood now, right?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/c/cbae5acc.jpg

Damn you're way better at Blender than I am. I did a few tutorials (notably Donut and some miniature tuts) and realized 3D art is just not for me lol

Smashingpmkns posted...

Damn you're way better at Blender than I am. I did a few tutorials (notably Donut and some miniature tuts) and realized 3D art is just not for me lol

It feels like very slow improvement at this point

hoping eventually it wont take me 10-15 hours of fiddling to make one dinky object haha

if I ever get to the point I need them, I'm just paying for some ai suited to make 2d monster sprites for my roguelike.

today i spent a ton of time learning to make my own textures, so I made a little leaf

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/dcded1c1.png

that will serve as the roof for this hut I'm spending way to fucking much time on

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/8/88a03871.jpg

and now I'm going to call that done for now and move on to something more interesting for the next few days

took another pass at my character. Went with something closer to that AI image above, something a little more cartoony and exaggerated

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/f/fd95040b.jpg

Add a talking cigarette

making progress

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/d3631137.jpg

is there anything "playable" yet or are you still just working on models/visuals

kirbymuncher posted...

is there anything "playable" yet or are you still just working on models/visuals

Yes, I have a working character controller with camera, along with some basic boxed out levels

right now the character is just a generic rolling sphere; right now Im working on building the character, so I can create some animations, so I can create movement states that trigger the different animations like climbing, swimming, jumping

here's a video showing some of what I've built out so far.

the rolling ball is from the tutorial I posted in the OP. It uses custom physics and is designed to be super customizable. Next step is going to be implementing an animated character

this is basically a tutorial level, leading into the first explorable area

https://youtu.be/j1z_-NVNt1o

getting animations to work is perhaps the hardest part about setting up this character. Everything is so damn finicky I cant come up with anything that doesnt look super awkward

cool demo video

I've never made anything 3D but yeah most of my ideas die in the stage of getting nice looking animations for various actions. definitely the least appealing part of game dev to me

How difficult would those tutorials be for an idiot like me

TheGoldenEel posted...

getting animations to work is perhaps the hardest part about setting up this character. Everything is so damn finicky I cant come up with anything that doesnt look super awkward

Maybe embrace the awkward and go for goofy? Idk

This is awesome mate! I speedran Odyssey and Mario 64 and for the former, I would argue I was actually pretty great at it at one point too! If you get to the stage where you just want people to give their general opinions on how the movement itself feels; I'd be happy to give my feedback as I love how platformers can really spice things up with movement. I would argue movement can make almost any level design good in the end.

kirbymuncher posted...

cool demo video

I've never made anything 3D but yeah most of my ideas die in the stage of getting nice looking animations for various actions. definitely the least appealing part of game dev to me

Really makes me appreciate how much time of game development goes into all the assets and stuff that isnt strictly coding gameplay

Smackems posted...

How difficult would those tutorials be for an idiot like me

I think unity is pretty easy to get started with, but also I have many years of software development experience

maybe try this tutorial and see if its too difficult? I personally think this persons approach is really easy to understand, walking through what every line of code does and even showing what happens if you use simpler approaches

https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/basics/

I prefer it to video tutorials, which is what a lot of resources are these days

Smackems posted...

Maybe embrace the awkward and go for goofy? Idk

Its more that the meshes get all messed up so it just looks bad. Im sure its just a matter of practice

TheGoldenEel posted...

I was curious if it would work so I asked google Gemini to generate guide images for an anthropomorphic sloth character. This is what it eventually came up with after some prodding

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/eac63dcc.jpg

Im not sure how I feel about the ethics of using AI art but also Im not an artist myself, nor do I really think I could be

Use it where it helps.

TheGoldenEel posted...

Really makes me appreciate how much time of game development goes into all the assets and stuff that isnt strictly coding gameplay

I think unity is pretty easy to get started with, but also I have many years of software development experience

maybe try this tutorial and see if its too difficult? I personally think this persons approach is really easy to understand, walking through what every line of code does and even showing what happens if you use simpler approaches

https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/basics/

I prefer it to video tutorials, which is what a lot of resources are these days

Its more that the meshes get all messed up so it just looks bad. Im sure its just a matter of practice

Thanks bud

PiOverlord posted...

This is awesome mate! I speedran Odyssey and Mario 64 and for the former, I would argue I was actually pretty great at it at one point too! If you get to the stage where you just want people to give their general opinions on how the movement itself feels; I'd be happy to give my feedback as I love how platformers can really spice things up with movement. I would argue movement can make almost any level design good in the end.

Oh yeah, movement is critical.

my general idea for how Im approaching this is to implement basic movement, get height and distances set, then use that to build out a basic level (what Im working on now). Then Im going to work on refining movement with things like adjusting acceleration and speed, floatiness, etc

TheGoldenEel posted...

Oh yeah, movement is critical.

my general idea for how Im approaching this is to implement basic movement, get height and distances set, then use that to build out a basic level (what Im working on now). Then Im going to work on refining movement with things like adjusting acceleration and speed, floatiness, etc

I think that's actually a great approach. It's probably what I think Nintendo does super well over any other platforming series. Mario games, at least 64, Sunshine, and Odyssey, have incredible depth to the movement mechanics. At the same time, you can beat any of those games with just the most basic jumping; the games, even at their hardest, don't really make you use it.

It makes it where it almost feels like you have two different games; you play it the first time just doing basic things because that's all the game asks of you, but the incredible hidden depth of these games allow you to really test out the movement by performing incredible skips and tricks, even without glitches that open up the game in a way you didn't know possible. The best part is this depth isn't really hard to access as a new player either once you get the hang of all the mechanics of the game.

I feel like other series either have pretty basic movement (Galaxy included; it's tricks are more centered around abusing the gravity of the worlds than the depth of the movement itself) that don't really allow you to do crazy things or the games require you to do very hard things, which means there is usually a specific way you have to go about beating it.

I don't think that approach is bad; I love games like Galaxy, but while it's the atmosphere and level design of Galaxy that helps it; I think a game like Mario Odyssey is just really fun to goof around and do nothing in for an hour just fiddling around with jumps and speed tech.

PiOverlord posted...

Im going for something more like a Banjo-Kazooie, with a core set of abilities but with more specific moves unlocked as you go

hoping to make it non-linear in that way which would ideally give different options for sequence breaking

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I think a hack n slash would be fairly difficult as those have more of a focus on enemy ai as well as complex combo systems

theres a reason platformers were once so common

TheGoldenEel posted...

here's a video showing some of what I've built out so far.

Reminds me of Spindizzy or something.

PiOverlord posted...

I think a game like Mario Odyssey is just really fun to goof around and do nothing in for an hour just fiddling around with jumps and speed tech.

I've definitely started up mario64 just to aimlessly run around styling in various levels for a bit and then shut off the game without even getting a single star

What's going to be the sloths gimmick ability?

Smashingpmkns posted...

What's going to be the sloths gimmick ability?

Inspired by a suggestion from a friend, the reason the sloth isnt slow is they drink a lot of coffee

so every level is going to have a set amount of coffee beans to collect, which can be given to a vendor in every level who will brew magic coffee to give a new ability

considering a sloth time move that slows everything else down temporarily as well

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

Yeah the thing with a platformer is you dont even need to implement enemies at all, and even if you do you can make do with super simple AI as theyre usually just obstacles or follow patternd

I've finally gotten back into Godot. I started learning at the beginning of this year but I kept getting sick and have been spending more time sleeping after work instead of working on my computer. But I should be done with this tutorial (although I don't really need it anymore, I just want to see it through) and then I plan on starting a random game. Thinking of using some Digimon DS sprites to make a Digimon World type game.