Firing Pin Games

Firing Pin Games Blog

Beginnings Of Combat

Posted on 25th April, 2014 by Alex Dawon

Hi Folks! I’m back again, this time with a bit more detail on progress. Since the last update freelance work has kept me nice and busy so progress on the new project hasn’t been as much as I would have liked but it’s certainly starting to shape up.

Here’s the latest development diary for the project and following it is a text break down of what I’ve been up to.

Enemies

I’ve now altered the enemies to be loaded from the map XML and only be visible and active when you are in the same room as them. At the moment there is only one enemy type but in the future enemies will be randomly picked based on how far through you are and what type of room it is. The enemies now detect based on distance all-though I have ramped this distance up really high so combat triggers as soon as you walk into a room with enemies contained.

Combat

The main portion of the game I’ve been tackling since the last update is the combat which has been pretty exciting to finally work on. When you walk into a room containing enemies this instantly triggers, I’m not sure if this will be a permanent fixture just yet but my thinking is that it would make quite a good stealth mode.

When the combat triggers it plays a small intro where it pans the camera to each enemy who reacts with an animation then finally back to the player where it fades the world to darkness and shows the combat grid and combat UI.

So far the only actions implemented are moving and over-watch. You can select the action you want from the UI then select the square you want to move to on the grid and hit go to perform it.

The nice thing about the movement gird is that it path finds each cell when obstacles are present so that it knows how many steps it takes to move around that object and any cells not accessible in the movement range will be disabled. This is similar to the grid you can turn on in the PC version of X-Com. In the video I uploaded this doesn’t take into account corners but since recording the diary I’ve actually fixed that.

It’s not a full combat system yet but the plan is to get through it piece by piece and adapt it based on how it feels to play.

What’s Next

Next up is allowing the enemies to make a turn and move in a similar fashion. This will then be followed by implementing the shooting mechanics which should be pretty fun to work on

Until next time!

Alex

Time For A New Adventure

Posted on 25th March, 2014 by Alex Dawon

Hello everyone, it’s been a rather busy couple of weeks since the last update. This update is a rather important update and brings with it a spot of super fun exciting good news and a small bit of not so great news.

I’ll go into everything in far more detail below but the quick and painless version is as such… we are currently postponing development on Will to Survive in order to craft a smaller project based along similar lines, the codename for which is Project Tunguska.

Full details below…

Will to Survive Development Postponed Temporarily

As mentioned above we have decided to postpone development temporarily, it’s really important to note that this is temporary and I can’t stress this enough. The game is certainly not cancelled but we won’t be releasing it any time this year unfortunately. I know some of you will be upset by this and you have my sincere apologies, it wasn’t a a quick and easy decision to make.

Will to Survive has always been a rather ambitious project so the reason why is fairly simple… size and funding. We realised early on after the failed Kickstarter attempt that without any form of funding finishing the project off was going to be quite difficult. Our initial goal was to carry on developing and eventually make a new Kickstarter attempt later on once knowledge of the game had increased. However as the project grew and adapted to certain changes we realised as time went on that even launching a Kickstarter for a small amount to fund an early-access build would probably still not give us enough funds to develop the game properly, we would need more cash in order to secure a bigger team.

For a while now I had been trying to think of a smaller game that we could tackle to release quickly and help fund development but not detract too much from the main project. Up until recently most ideas were too different to Will to Survive, then one day my house mate suggested something that sounded fantastic and we set about working out how we could develop it but still make everything so that it can go towards helping the Will to Survive project as well.

Our main goal in all of this is to develop the new project in such a way that a lot of it will go into further development of Will to Survive, so in essence although development is postponed the project will continue to develop by proxy.

I hope you understand our reasons for doing this and aren’t too disappointed. Our thinking is that delaying releasing a game is better than never releasing it at all.

Project Tunguska

So, what is the new project?

Project Tunguska as it’s currently code named until we finalise it’s real name is a project based along the same lines as Will to Survive. It’s a randomly generated adventure survival game with roguelike elements. Think the Binding of Isaac meets Uncharted.

I won’t divulge too much information just yet but I can say that it will feature the same exploration, interaction and combat mechanics used in Will to Survive as well as some of the survival elements. The great thing about these shared mechanics is that by focusing on a few core mechanics exclusively we will end up with highly polished versions that can later be used in Will to Survive so developing this new project will greatly help improve that in the long run.

We are looking into the prospect of launching a Kickstarter for this game in May/June and releasing an early-access build no later than November.

Here is a sneak peak of what it currently looks like:

A preview of Project Tunguska in action.

What Next?

On Friday all being well I’ll be putting up a new development diary video showing the progress we have made on the engine as well as what we have done on the new project. We’ll be releasing more information about the new project in the coming weeks along with a new IndieDB page for it and possibly a Greenlight page once we have a solid build to show.

Thanks for reading and hopefully you understand why we are shifting our focus and are excited by the new project. Feel free to ask any questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Until Friday!

Alex

Progress Update, February

Posted on 8th March, 2014 by Alex Dawon

Howdy all, it’s been a good few weeks since I last updated so I figured you were all due some progress info, how time flies eh!

Progress is marching on at a nice and steady pace, we could probably do another dev video with what we have done but we’re thinking of waiting until we have the enemy AI stuff working before we do that.

Interfaces

Interfaces are now fully ported, improved and are hooked up to drive the game through events.

Portals

I’ve recreated the portal code which allows you to move between maps based on the other improvements done already and also added Spine artwork which makes portal creation more straight forward. The portals now also use Spine based hit box detection to make them more accurate to interact with. They also now use the same interact prompt as objects so when this gets more advanced you’ll be able to choose actions such as picking the lock or kicking a door down.

Combat Animations

I’ve made a bunch of new animations for Will which are going to be used in combat. Animations such as crouching, aiming and firing along with variations for when Will is unarmed and armed with a pistol, other guns will come later. I’ve learnt a lot through working with Spine and figured out quite a few areas where I can speed up the work-flow meaning I’m now working like a well oiled machine with the entire process so I should be able to build a lot more art in a smaller space of time. Here, have a sneak peak…

Combat Interface

Something else that I’ve tackled has been a brand spanking new first pass interface for the combat screen, it doesn’t have any hooks to the game code yet but it’s ready for when we start on the combat mechanic itself and uses the same event driven UI as the rest of the game meaning it’s extremely simple to have it talk to the main game screen. Here’s a sneak peak at it running in game, note though that it’s all using place holder art for now, certainly don’t take this as any inkling of what it will look like in the end…

A sneak peak at the new in game combat interface.

Enemy AI

And finally Dan has been busy working on the enemy AI, he has them patrolling about and is currently working on player detection and vision cones. They sometimes have a tendency to not stop walking however, so when the code is a bit more stable and they are behaving themselves we’ll look at getting a dev diary up to show you it in action.

Hopefully soon we can start looking at some combat!

That’s all for now folks!

Alex

Finding The Right Path

Posted on 30th January, 2014 by Alex Dawon

Good day everyone!

It’s been a long time coming but we finally have a new development diary video for you to watch, everything has started to come together this past two weeks so we finally have something worthy of being shown. I’ll get into detail about what we have been up to after the video for those who want to read the wall of text that follows.

Path Finding

So this has been a royal pain in Dan’s side over the past few months, after several re-writes on his side of things and a few changes on my side with tile map code and the like he has finally got the system working and in-game. Hurrah! It works really well so far minus a few small issues that Dan is sure to fix later down the line and it really helps when navigating around by mouse/touch input as you can see in the video. For those who don’t want to play using mouse/touch there will also be a keyboard/game pad input system available too. This system will also be used for AI patrol logic and the combat screen so it’s been really important to get this working and working right.

Tile Maps

The tile map system as I said last update has had quite a considerate re-write because quite simply it was a little broken and needed to be fixed to work with the new artwork. I’ve ironed out the last few issues that were left with it so that it is now incredibly precise when drawing and converting from screen space to map space.

I’ve also tackled some of the things I’ve been wanting to do for a while with the system so the draw order is now fixed and allows Spine artwork to be drawn behind height tiles, the combat grid and other elements can be drawn above the base tiles but below everything else, the entire map can be tinted a specific colour which is mainly used for the combat screen and the whole map is cropped to the screen so there is no drawing done off screen to improve drawing on mobile devices.

Combat Grid

Something that needed to be looked into before going head long into tackling the combat was planning the way the combat grid would work and designing it’s aesthetic. This is something else that I’ve got done and put into the game all be it in a basic manner.

Lots More

There’s also been a lot of core code updates happening that don’t entirely come across in the video. We’ve had a bit of a shift around and clean up of the main classes to improve things for what we were doing and for the future as the way I had tackled them was a bit strange.

The intro screens can now be skipped and I’ve massively improved and changed the screen and screen management system which will help later down the line. Spine artwork and the process of creating the art has also improved to allow me to make it quicker as well as supporting future clothing/skin changes. The tile map art generation and map creation has inevitably been worked on now too so we have a solid technique for creating this new style art and getting it into the game.

What’s Next?

Now the path finding is tackled to a decent state Dan is going to be looking at enemy A.I. Logic for patrolling and guarding, line of sight for player detection as well as reacting to the player once he is seen. Hopefully this should be shown in the next development diary and once done Dan will be making way with the combat mechanic… exciting!

For myself, I’m split between making sure Dan has all the art required for the combat screens as well as having a re-write of the user interface system.

Phew, I think that just about covers everything…

See you next time!

Alex

Platform progress

Posted on 21st July, 2013 by Alex Dawon

Wow this weekend has been a scorcher! I’ve still managed to make good progress at least.

There were a few plans I had this weekend, to start writing the Kickstarter pitch and to get some of the other platform builds up and running. The OUYA was a bit of a failure, though everything is building it seems like a monumental hassle to get it put on the device itself so I may leave that platform until after the campaign has begun.

The Android build is looking good however, I borrowed a Samsung Nexus and fixed the resolution issues to get that running at the full resolution of the device… which is insanely high! I think for the final game there will need to be some up-scaling being done. Tiny Will!

The game running at the insane resolution of the Android Nexus Tab.

I also booted into my Hackintosh to try and build the Mac OSX and iOS versions of the Game. The Mac OSX version worked quite well as can be seen bellow however there is an issue with the render targets that I need to look into. The iOS versions worked too but the developer portal was down meaning no device deployment for now. The iOS versions had some issues with resolution which I need to look into but this is all to be expected for a first time build.

The OSX build running on a Hackintosh.

And finally the Linux build, this did not go well at all because the Linux OS failed to boot up properly. All being well some time this week I’m going to look into formatting my laptop and trying Linux on there, I think it dislikes the graphics card installed on my main rig.

All in all, not a bad weekend!

In Game Screens

Posted on 13th June, 2013 by Alex Dawon

I’m a day late on this but as promised here are some images displaying the new tiling world art and objects as well as a glimpse of the player and alien sprites used in the world. These are actual screen grabs taken from the prototype running in 720p on the PC.

It’s all starting to come together which is great and I’m hard at work knocking off the tasks on my check list and glueing all the cracks together to form one cohesive whole, I’ve also registered for development on the Playstation Vita/Mobile. It’s getting rather exciting!… Anyway, have some pretties!

A screen grab of the prototype world as it currently looks.

An in game grab of how the inventory looks with some new item art and overlaid onto the world.

A screen of how the safe house currently looks in the prototype.