This talk was presented on Saturday July 11, 2015 at 9:25am in Room 300-D at the Knoxville Convention Center.
Levi D. Smith presented his “Game Development with Playmaker for Unity” talk at the CodeStock 2015 technical conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. The conference was July 10 & 11 at the Knoxville Convention Center.
Covered topics:
Playmaker Basics
FSMs, States, Events, and Variables
Actions
States
Make a light bulb
Controlling an object in a 3D world
Camera controls
First Person controls
Operators
Camera effects
Audio
Make a simple shooter game
View the CodeStock website for more information on the conference.
Swaptroid was a game that I created for the MiniLD #59 event. The theme was Swapshop, where the objective was to create a game using the provided spritesheet. Also, you could make your own sprite sheet and submit it to the website. Then you could swap-in any of the uploaded sprite sheets into you game to give it an entirely new look.
Swaptroid Post Mortem
I had never created a game using Construct 2 before, so I thought that developing Swaptroid would be a good opportunity to learn that game development environment. I decided to just make a game in the style of a classic 8-bit platformer. I decided to use Tiled again for making all of the rooms in the level. I discovered that it was possible to import TMX maps created in Tiled using the tilemap object. Unforunately, the only way to change the image of a map was by base 64 encoding each of the spritesheet images. I also had to create a new animation manually for each sprite sheet for each of the player and enemy characters. After pre-loading all of the sprite sheet information, I was able to make the game change sprite sheets every five seconds.
The objective of Swaptroid is very simple. Defeat the enemies and collect the four items. The enemies just simply move back and forth horizontally. If I was to develop the game further, I would like to enhance the AI of the enemies and add new enemy types. I would also like to add various powerups for the player to collect to expand the player’s abilities.
I was disappointed that with the free version of Construct 2, it only allows 100 events to be created. It really isn’t possible to create much of a game with that constraint. The personal license is $130 and the business license (required if you make over $5,000 in sales on your game) is $430. Construct 2 isn’t a bad tool, but it’s hard to pay for a license when you can create 2D games in Unity3D for free. The only advantage Construct 2 has is the visual scripting tool, however I really prefer Stencyl’s visual scripting interface for creating 2D games.
You are the bartender and must create and serve drinks to your customers. If you make drinks quickly and correctly, you will earn bigger tips. If you make drinks too slowly, then your customers will leave angry and leave you a bad Yalp rating.
Bartender Game Post Mortem
For the MiniLD #60, I created a bartender simulator game. The objective of this game development event was to create a game using any past Ludum Dare theme. For my Bartender Game, I’ll say the theme is “Exploration” (Ludum Dare #16) since I don’t drink alcohol and know little about mixed drinks.
The idea for the game came to me while watching Bar Rescue. I never recalled anyone ever making a game about mixing drinks. It really is a science, with all the different drink components and measurements for each drink, which I thought would work great for a game.
The customers arrive at the bar in waves, and you must make the drink that they request before their “happiness” meter runs out. Right now it’s just a number above their head. The idea is that if you will get bigger tips for making the drinks quickly and correctly (to be implemented). If you are slow, the customer will leave angry and leave a complaint, which will be reflected in you “Yalp” rating at the end of the game.
I created the customer models using Make Human and I created the bottle model in Blender. I used the Playmaker addon for Unity3D for most of the game logic, however I did write a few scripts for handling more complex logic.
I would like to develop this game further by letting the player buy things for their bar using the money earned from tips. I would also like to add many more drinks and more models for the bottles with different texture mappings.
