SmileBreaker is a game where you use the paddle to deflect the smiley ball and break the bricks. This was the first game that I developed in Unreal Engine. Please see my Unreal Engine First Impressions post for my thoughts on the development environment. SmileBreaker was developed for the MiniLD #58 and the theme was “Pong”. I don’t find Pong very exciting for one player, so I decided to make a Breakout clone instead which is based on the same basic premise of Pong. The objective of the game is to use your paddle to deflect the smiley faced ball towards the blocks at the top of the screen. As the ball touches the blocks, the blocks will be destroyed. Win the game by destroying all of the blocks on the screen. This game was created with Unreal Engine 4, Gimp, Inkscape, Audacity, and Garage Band. Builds were created for HTML5 which can be played in a web browser and for Windows desktop.
Oiram features classic platforming action, backwards! Record your gameplay, and then play it in reverse for a special surprise! This game was created for MiniLD #57 and the theme was “Reversed”.
In this game, everything is backwards. The ending screen is shown at the start of the game. You walk backwards towards the beginning of the level. The background music is played in reverse. The sound effects are reversed. Avoid or stomp on the enemies, or else you will have to start over at the end of the level. If you make it all the way to the beginning of the level, then you will reach the title screen.
The player and enemy models were created in Sculptris and then exported into FBX format. Using those meshes, the armatures were created in Blender along with the run and jump animations. All of the level design was created with the Tiled editor tool. I used a script in a package called UnityHelper that I had developed which can read in XML files that are stored as TextAssets in the Unity project. The script takes prefabs as parameters, and it will instantiate those objects in the game world according to the layout defined in the XML file that is generated by Tiled. The classic theme was recreated in GarageBand using the sheet music style editor. Then the song was imported in to Audacity where I applied the reverse effect. Audacity was also used to reverse the hopping sound effects as well.
四の色 or “Yon no Iro” in romaji is a game that I developed for the MiniLD #56. The theme for this event was “Pick and Mix”, where you could pick a theme from the given list. I decided to go with “four colors” for this game. The premise of this game is that you are a rabbit who must must make it through the maze to get the key to proceed to the next level. To make your way to the key, you must touch various kanji symbols to change the formation of the level. Every time you touch a symbol, the color of the entire level will change and the formation of the walls will be modified.
For this game, I also wanted to use a Japanese theme. Using Japanese characters in a game can add an additional level of complexity, since fonts are usually stored as a texture. This is fine for most English fonts, since there are only 52 different letter characters (26 uppercase and 26 lowercase). However, Japanese has 46 hiragana characters, 46 katakana characters, and around 2,000 general use kanji characters. This becomes even more constraining when deploying to mobile platforms, where texture storage is limited.
The level layouts were created in Blender, by basically dividing a plane into a grid and then extruding the walls upward. I created four mazes for each levels, and I just disable and activate the level mesh objects when the player touches and kanji symbol.
I started creating the player model in Sculptirs, but it became too difficult trying to make the entire body with that tool. Therefore, I switch to Blender and I was successfully able to create, rig, and animate the rabbit model. The key model was also created in Blender, which is simply a cylinder with three scaled cube objects. Another smaller cylinder was used with the Boolean subtract modifier to create the hole in the key head.
The game features an announcer, which I recorded with my own voice. I used Audacity to lower the recording and add an echoing effect.
The four kanji symbols correspond of four elements of nature. The red theme is fire, the blue theme is water, the yellow theme is wind, and the green theme is earth. I wanted to make it so that the environment changed along with the color. For instance, you would see flames around the level for red, trees and plant life for green, water and bubbles for blue, and clouds for yellow.
