Original Games, Age-Old Challenges
Tonight, on the ferry, I modelled the horrible little doghouse that Pug is forced to live in. A basic crate with a piece of plywood thrown on top to keep the rain out. Never fear, however! One of the objects of the game is to find items within the back yard that Pug can use to upgrade their doghouse with!
I also modelled the gate. Pug’s hope is to find items that will allow them to open the gate to explore the outside world!
I’ve been spending a lot of time brushing on my Blender skills (especially the new Blender 2.8), watching lots of YouTube videos and generally just trying to come up with an MVP layout of the back yard of the house where Pug begins their adventures.
I forgot how much fun it was to build low poly models in Blender! It sure takes a lot less time to build a 90 meter long picket fence in Blender than it does in the real world!
I’d done quite a bit of (albeit amateurish) 3D modelling for another 3D project in the past, and my go-to tool was Blender (version 2.79).
I thought for Digger Doggy, Blender might be a good tool to re-acquaint myself with, at least for decent-enough looking “programmer art”.
Even though it’s been over a year since I did anything with Blender, and decided to leap into the new Blender 2.81 (a huuuuuge upgrade), I’m happy with the results.
One of the coolest things in modern 3D graphics is the ability to use what are called ‘shaders’ to affect the look of graphics elements on-screen.
I’m currently messing around with different shader settings in Blender to see if I can come up with an acceptable toon shader to get the look I want for Digger Doggy.
So for the last couple days I’ve been dabbling with using Cocos Creator for Digger Doggy.
I’d used Cocos2D-X for games in the past and quite liked it, which is what Cocos Creator uses ‘under the hood’.
After almost immediately finding a fairly critical issue with Cocos Creator’s IDE, seeing so many typos and poor translations in the documentation (it’s owned by a Chinese company now), the scripting language is JavaScript, and just having a general feeling of unease using the IDE, I’ve decided to stick with Unity3D … for now.
Right, I’ve decided to try out Cocos Creator. I’m doing React and React Native development right now anyways, so how horrible can it be, right?
Oh yeah, Tiled! I forgot about this awesome tool for isometric and orthogonal tile maps! I used this tool a few years ago for some prototypes and quite liked it.
Got any other suggestions? Hit me up at @kerfufflemonkey
Game ideas are easy! What’s hard is the actual execution. How do you go from “Hey, I have an idea! I’m going make a game to fire small avians with a slingshot at structures that pigs have built” to actually holding that game in your hand and turning young children against bacon for life?
I find the hardest first step of game development not the game itself, but what game tools to use. Unity3D? Cocos2D-X? Unreal? Godot? Or native?
A lot of the decision comes down to the targeted platform. Most of my games are done for the mobile market, so that narrows down the field a lot for me.
Cocos2dx Tweeted at me to give Cocos Creator a try. I have done a couple games in Cocos2d-x before (Kitty Pops is a good example of one of my games in Cocos2d-x), but Cocos Creator moved to JavaScript-based (ewwww!) scripting.
What do you think about Cocos Creator? Let me know at @kerfufflemonkey
Welcome to Digger Doggy! This is going to be a rambling almost-stream-of-consciousness devblog regarding A Pugz Life: Digger Doggy, an exploration game featuring a yet-to-be-named Pug.
Pug is a young and curious pug, starting off in their back yard. The player gets to move Pug through the back yard environment, exploring and digging, finding treasure to further their adventure.
I’d love for you to come back and check her occasionally to see how things are going, or follow The Monkey on Twitter at @kerfufflemonkey for semi-regular updates.