Sci-Fi 2D Action Side Scroller WIP

[Thatimster]

Sci-Fi 2D Action Side Scroller/Platformer (unnamed for now)

This will be the main thread for a sci-fi 2d action side scroller that I will be developing over a long time.
I will add a relevant name once the game has gained some real weight (mechanically + visually).

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Why I’m making this game
In my spare time i’ve tried to make lots of games but usually there is a couple bugs or just a lack of interest that will eventually stop me from working on it and the project will end up in the back of my hard drive somewhere with all the other neglected games. Apart from the various demo’s I release (via youtube) I have only completed one game I made for BGMC11 which is a little sad :(. So I thought I’d make a thread here to keep myself motivated and stop neglecting any more games as well as to get feedback on what you guys think of it :).

Style
The overall style of the game will be fairly realistic (visually) however the movements/animations (mechanics) will be a little bit more cartoonish/fantasy based with more ridiculous super attacks etc.

Concept
This will be a fairly small sized game, maybe something similar to the levels of Mario, nothing huge.

Your character is a future sci-fi soldier in a mech-suit, which gives him extra strength, resistance against most bullets, and increased jumping (compared to a normal human). Like a normal sci-fi game you will be fighting robot creatures, whose attacks/abilities will vary with each level. Your task is to stop the ‘evil scientist’ from dooming the earth/space station to complete nuclear annihilation.

The character is melee based so he will have some sort of futuristic hand held weapon, this is mainly to stop the player from just shooting from one side of the screen and killing everything.

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Updates
Updates will not be very frequent (daily) but should be weekly/fortnightly as time is a very large obstacle when it comes to game development and I have to juggle multiple items such as school, tutorials and now, upcoming exams. With that said I hope I will be able to keep this thread alive and come out with a finished game on the otherside :D!

Additionally I will try keep the most recent updates on this first post.

Thanks for reading!

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First update (concept):
Recently I’ve painted all the elements of the character in gimp, trying to make the character 100% 2D (with a rig), however this didn’t look very good especially when turning from side to side so I decided to use it as concept for the 3D character I will be modelling in future updates. (in game armour will probably contain some sort of glowing element)

(character weapon is still needed)

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Recent:

Download is now available!

For direct download check here
To leave feedback check here

See page 3 for the details :D!

[bluexray]

Looking nicely done great work with the player model so far

[Thatimster]

thanks, glad you like it

Update 2 (model):

I found some spare modelling time during the weekend and began modelling the hi-res version of main character which will be used for baking normals + AO on the low poly in game character.

(Arms + head still needed)

Front:

Front/Side:

Back:

[bluexray]

Nice, love the design, good job

[Thatimster]

OK, after quite a bit more tweaking managed to put together the arms, I am using the “glove” method for the hands mainly because it is less bones/tris and also because as it is a 2D-ish Game + the character will be fairly small, therefore not requiring extra detail in the hands.
Although using fingers for the hands would look better (since its the hi-res model), it would later prove to be a hassle when trying to bake to a finger less model.

total of 12803tris / 6344 verts so far.

Only the head left

[thelaurent]

Looks good, love the style. That geometry around the biceps looks like its adding up, are you planning on using a normal map?

[Thatimster]

@thelaurent

Looks good, love the style. That geometry around the biceps looks like its adding up, are you planning on using a normal map?

Yeah, the geometry does eventually add up and I haven’t even got a head which usually has the most, however as I mentioned before this is the high resolution model, which I will be baking the textures, AO, and normals from to a much lighter mesh (hopefully no more than 1000 verts).

[Thatimster]

Finished the Head + Neck and joint into the original model, wasn’t sure whether to use hair or not (as shown in the concept).
What are your thoughts? hair or no hair?

Model (hi-res) is currently at 12044 verts / 24013 tris.

Comments appreciated

[MarvinCJames]

Your character model looks very good

[BluePrintRandom]

From the look of it, you could bake most of that detail onto a lower poly mesh

Nice work

[thelaurent]

looks good! I dont even know if you need hair, maybe you could do short hair with texturing, like a buzz cut almost, but I think it looks pretty good as is

[Thatimster]

@MarvinCJames

Your character model looks very good

Thanks, Glad you like it :D!

@BluePrintRandom

From the look of it, you could bake most of that detail onto a lower poly mesh

Nice work

Yes, I’m planning on doing that for AO, Textures and normals.

@thelaurent

looks good! I dont even know if you need hair, maybe you could do short hair with texturing, like a buzz cut almost, but I think it looks pretty good as is

Yeah thats what I was thinking, possibly on the edge of skinhead, like the movie elysium, hair would probably be an issue when it comes to baking and would just get in the way so I might leave it out.

[Thatimster]

Ok and after a long week of delay I have been finally able to get back to modelling + texturing the player
The UV unwrapping wasn’t much fun and a lot of it had to be redone separately, which took a while but apart from that most of the texturing is finished.

Still to do: Model Low-poly model and bake AO, normals and textures.

Again I would like some feed-back on the style of the model, whether or not I should have glowing strips between the armour plates? Glowing anything seems to be a big Sci-Fi thing, but I’m not sure whether this would fully suit the character.

Like this:

What do you think? Yes, no? why?

Comments/critique appreciated

-Thatimst3r

[sandboxer_lm]

You could make his “backpack” glow. I think that’ll look cool…like kinda energy cell

[Thatimster]

Ok, as suggested I decided to use a glowing element instead of black fabric material, I also modeled the low poly character, baked all the different maps (AO, NOR, DIFF, EMIT) and wove them together in gimp (apart from the NOR map).

I then fully rigged and weight painted the low poly model for animating later on.
So all in all a fairly productive day.

Hi-res: 12044 verts
Low-res: 736 verts

[Thatimster]

Managed to get the 2D movement going and some running + idle animations working however I wanted to finish all the other animations (jumping, wall sliding etc.) before posting some game footage. Meanwhile I have also been looking into using python for creating explosions within the game.

After a lot of trial and error it turned out that the 2.71 version of blender was a bit faulty, but in the end I managed to come up with a nice ‘spark’ explosion:

The game should hopefully contain many other types of explosions as well, at the moment I think I’ll focus on trying to finish the player animations, since the explosion has proven to be such a big distraction.

[Thatimster]

Player movement
***Finally after a week of debugging, animating and programming I have managed to put together the basic player movement for the character. This includes:

-Running/movement
-Jumping
-Crawling
-Ledge Climbing

While it looks nice and simple there is a scary amount of python behind each action contained within one giant script which later I will separate into modules.

Regarding the explosion I also added a nice feature that scales the sparks based on the distance from the origin of the explosion.

I also completely re-rigged the character, with an easier to use rig however proper weight painting has not been applied just yet.

Now onto the proof of progress…Animated Gifs

Running:

Jumping(with impact animation calculated by ray)

Crawling (replacing the players physical representation)

Ledge-Climbing (this was the biggest hassle, is calculated using rays as well)
animations could use a little bit of tweaking here and there.

Thanks for reading, comments/critique is always appreciated!

-Thatimst3r

[firefox.jco]

Great animations! Surely this will be a game I will play !!

[Thatimster]

Awesome

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Weapon Model

After some speedy sketching in paint I managed to come up with a weapon for the player to use, I then used Gimp to create the Energy crystal in the middle of the weapon. The whole thing weighs in at 575 verts and uses one 512x512 texture for most of the weapon.

-Thatimst3r

[SolarLune]

I think the guy’s chest is too large and thick, and his arms are too short. It’s still pretty nice, nonetheless. The running animation looks pretty smooth, and the ledge climbing looks pretty nice (though that sliding looks kind of problematic). Nice work, nonetheless!