Trip'n part 1

Well today was a good day! I guess me and the guys in obscure fish were taking the Non disclosure agreement that we signed a little too seriously. We are imitating a real company, not actually making a real company. We were keeping all of our work secret ... but basically the point is that we are able to talk about all the things we are working on.

So I have to go back a bit and try to piece together some of the things I have done so far. But I will start with a little bit of info about the small game side project I did, called Trip'n. It was for the Game Prototype Challenge version 11. The neat thing about this game jam is that there are 2 themes to use in making your game. The theme for the jam was Stimulants and Nets ... quite an interesting mix. At first I thought what in the world could you do with that, then in about 5 minutes I had an idea. In comparison the Global Game Jam 2012 used an image based theme, which I still am not sure how to handle.

Net Section Designs

The design was simple, fly an airplane and avoid nets while using stimulants to speed up and help you transverse levels. The down side of stimulants of course is a slow down period after use, so the airplane slows down after a speed up period. The airplane was originally supposed to be in a cloud funnel like a trippy wormhole, but time didn't allow me to get that far so I ended up leaving the airplane in a box. The nets were designed in reusable sections so that they could be flipped and rotated around in many ways. I also considered making cloud stimulants but couldn't figure out how to make it work so I ended up just making a few pickups.

Trapper Net Section assembled in Unity

I modeled assets for the game using Blender, my new favorite thing, and much like Oprah I can give you this link to download it for FREE! http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

I am new to "the modeling" so making the nets was the biggest challenge for me in this entire project. I went through at least 5 different net models before I settled on one that worked well. The first net I made would have been ok, except it looked a bit too much like a fence. Given the time restrictions I wouldn't have really minded all that much, except the geometry was very bad.

Bad net, 1400+ verts

Knowing that the platform I was targeting was web, and that I would be using many of these nets during runtime, meant that this "fence net" was pretty much unusable. I finally thought up a better way to make a net using large triangular poles. Their geometry overlaps but it looks ok and works fine with many of them in the scene at the same time. I added a push/pull effect to the net to make it less fence like, and there ya go.

Good net, 132 verts

Modeling the airplane was actually much easier and more fun than the nets, although ... well, it could use some work. At the point I thought to myself, hey this looks like a plane, I moved onto other things. None of these models were textured sadly. The nets took so long to make that they ate up most of the time I allocated to making 3d assets.

Unfinished Airplane Model

more in the next post ...