Week 7 -- Cleanup, and a look back

Hey all, the team wanted to push out one last update before the inevitable Mayan Apocalypse. Check out the following video, which shows off all of the features of the game after one term of work.

-Networked Multiplayer
-Animations
-Capturable Points functioning (hard to see currently, but they are!)
-Health Bar
-Gold Pickups
-Gold Counter
-First pass of the Armory menu
-Win/Loss condititons
-Map auto-reset after win/loss



The big adventure ahead for the next couple months will be:

-Implementing a couple more combat mechanics
-Up to eight new weapons and armors, plus their abilities
-An improved environment
-Lots of beautiful sound effects and some sweet music!


Happy Apocalypse!

Week 5 and 6 -- Armory, HUD, Presentations, etc.

Between creating and preparing for a presentation to our faculty advisor, and finals week, its been a stressful couple of weeks for the Bushido Bots team. We have, however, managed to find time to make plenty of progress. Feel free to check out our first 'term presentation' below:



The objective markers, showing who owns the point (background color) and who/how many are capturing the point (colored numbers):

Here's the recoil animation that plays if your attack is parried by an opponent:

The Blade Rush ability animation for the katana:
 Here's a shot of the Armory, where you spend gold on weapons and armor between lives. Take a look at the final selection of weaponry, which is showcased on the left. (The armor on the right is placeholder art)

Here are the various heads that can appear in-game on your robot:

A red version of the bot:


And that's it for this week. We'll be working over winter break so we can make as much progress as possible before the end of the year. See you in a few weeks!

Week 4 -- Foley and Death Animation

Heyo!

This week, we were pretty busy eating turkey and spending time with family. Somehow, we managed to a get a deal of work done.

I've been working at cropping, editing, and tuning up our Foley sounds. We've now got a selection of game-ready sound effects, namely:

• Light weapon whiff
• Heavy weapon whiff
• Light body struck
• Heavy body struck
• Attack parried
• Money spent
• Money earned

Shane has been making animation progress. He's putting the finish touches on the death animation, and is also in the process of creating the parry animation for the katana. He also resized all of his animations to be game-appropriate. That means we'll be seeing them function cohesively in-game in the next week.

Above: Death animation
Below: Parry animation

JT has been making some improvements to the networking code. He's gotten all the jitter out, and now everyone moves smooth as butter. But the exciting news is that we ran a 12-player network test, and there were way less issues than we predicted! This is fantastic news for us, and we're really excited to move ahead.

The plan for the upcoming weeks will be implementing HUD Elements, Animations, Parrying mechanics, and eventually, the Armory screen, where players see the weapons and armor they can purchase. See you next week!

-Wyatt

Week 3 -- Animations and HUD

This week, JT has been working to fix up respawning so it's game-ready. He also got animation working in-game (but they're not finalized!) Check it out:




Shane made the katana this week (which you can see in the video above), added it to the idle and move animations, and made a swinging animation for it.

Finally, after a good amount of discussion, several thrown out concepts, and a lot of experimentation, I've finished the HP Counter and Gold Counter elements for the HUD. They're not showing in-game yet, but trust me: you'll be seeing them work real soon.

Gears are a throwback to Hearts from Legend of Zelda. You have a bunch, and each one is worth 2 HP.

Elements for the Gold Counter. The numbers range from 0 to 9.

And if you're feeling adventurous (and have two computers), feel free to try out the first EVER playable version of our game at the link below. Make sure to read JT's instructions first if you're having trouble starting a match:

1) On one computer, start up a server. This can be done by hitting the "Start Server" button and hitting "Launch".
2) On a second computer, start up a client. Type in the first computer's IP address, and hit "Connect"
3) Both players should spawn! Health is in the upper right, arrow keys move, and spacebar is attack.

Got all that? Take a deep breath, and then click HERE to give it a shot!


          -Wyatt

Week 2 -- Combat!

The first steps towards combat gameplay have been implemented! Check out this video, which demonstrates attacking, death, and respawning.

You can also see that we've successfully pushed environment art from Flash into Unity. Today is a good day!

     -Wyatt

Week 1 -- A First Look

Hello, and welcome to the first EVER Bushido Bots Dev Blog post! This blog is intended to share the progress our all-star team makes over the course of the year towards completion of the game. Hopefully you'll enjoy sneaking an inside look at our development process.

Our character artist, Shane, has created the first game-ready character art, and has now begun the process of animating it. Instead of relying on tweens, he's manually creating each frame. It's a lot of extra effort but it pays off with a lovingly crafted product. Check it out:

Idle Animation

Run Animation

Meanwhile, I made some very basic level art -- just a draft to put into Unity. The goal is to get it in and see what goes right and what goes wrong, so that as little time as possible is wasted having to recreate assets. We're going to see whether the foreground and background layers are working correctly, and mess around with bounding boxes to try to keep players from walking up the walls and into the sky. Here are a few shots of the level:

The Courtyard

The throne is almost done. The room? Not even close.

Doorway Between Hall and Throne Room - First Pass

We successfully got movement and collision working over the network. Check it out:

For next week, we'll be importing our first art assets and animations into Unity, as well as adding basic combat, sound effects, and perhaps a HUD element. We're excited to have finally reached the point in development where planning the pipeline is nearly over and the creation truly begins!

     -Wyatt