A post about how I sculpted the game, from plasticine
Good day to all! I decided to tell the world the story of creating my first mobile game. I did it an hour a day for almost a year and a half.
I play games only on the phone, and, basically, in timekillers, when a non-applicable length of time is formed. Based on their own preferences, the platform and genre was determined. It was decided to make a 2D wall-to-wall strategy with fairly short levels. Slavic fairy tales were chosen as the setting, but a sick fantasy made its own adjustments. It was decided to do the game on Unity, since I am familiar with C # quite well.
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Throughout the development of the most difficult for me was the visual part. I do not know how to draw and do not like. I didn’t want to spend money on art. In general, I decided to make a game of plasticine. In childhood, a lot of time was given to this hobby. And I also always liked the Soviet plasticine cartoons. Inspired by them, I proceeded to the modeling.
It soon became clear that making frame-by-frame plasticine animation is just “hell hell.” The figures retain their posture for only a few seconds, then the posture begins to float. I tried to make a wire frame, but it did not give the desired result.
The wire came across either too hard or too fragile. After suffering about two weeks and not getting an acceptable result, I decided to change the approach. This time I blinded the body parts of the characters separately and sanitized using the engine.
These guys turned out to be:
For animation, I originally planned to use a plugin for inverse kinematics. But, later he had to abandon it, since when animating a large number of units, and at later levels there are up to 500 at the same time, it had a significant impact on performance. As a result, the animation had to be implemented only by means of the engine. Fortunately, they turned out to be more than enough for my needs. Having finished with this, I decided that already at the finish line. After all, there was only balancing. How much I was wrong ...
Having finished with the animation, I estimated the balance on my knee and published a closed alpha on Google Play, giving access to friends and colleagues. It turned out that there is no balance at all. The algorithm for generating opponents turned out to be prohibitively random. That level was simply impossible to pass, then it was passed without any efforts at all. Then I decided to get rid of the random house and balance each level manually. Having thus made the first few levels, I realized that this work would take too much time, and the approach needed to be changed. Having spent a couple of days to develop a deterministic algorithm for generating opponents, I got an acceptable result. It remains to determine the input parameters for each of the 99 levels. Before I was able to finish this, I passed my game once again 30, simultaneously adjusting the prices of pumping, the characteristics of the player’s units, and the opponent’s units. My friends and colleagues helped me a lot in testing. Some of them played the game for several months, and during this time they gave me a huge amount of feedback.
I have it all. I will be glad to hear criticism. Of course, I hope for a constructive.
I play games only on the phone, and, basically, in timekillers, when a non-applicable length of time is formed. Based on their own preferences, the platform and genre was determined. It was decided to make a 2D wall-to-wall strategy with fairly short levels. Slavic fairy tales were chosen as the setting, but a sick fantasy made its own adjustments. It was decided to do the game on Unity, since I am familiar with C # quite well.
')
Throughout the development of the most difficult for me was the visual part. I do not know how to draw and do not like. I didn’t want to spend money on art. In general, I decided to make a game of plasticine. In childhood, a lot of time was given to this hobby. And I also always liked the Soviet plasticine cartoons. Inspired by them, I proceeded to the modeling.
It soon became clear that making frame-by-frame plasticine animation is just “hell hell.” The figures retain their posture for only a few seconds, then the posture begins to float. I tried to make a wire frame, but it did not give the desired result.
The wire came across either too hard or too fragile. After suffering about two weeks and not getting an acceptable result, I decided to change the approach. This time I blinded the body parts of the characters separately and sanitized using the engine.
These guys turned out to be:
- Peasant
- Home-made cucumber
- Overripe Serpent
- Hrenorytsar
For animation, I originally planned to use a plugin for inverse kinematics. But, later he had to abandon it, since when animating a large number of units, and at later levels there are up to 500 at the same time, it had a significant impact on performance. As a result, the animation had to be implemented only by means of the engine. Fortunately, they turned out to be more than enough for my needs. Having finished with this, I decided that already at the finish line. After all, there was only balancing. How much I was wrong ...
Having finished with the animation, I estimated the balance on my knee and published a closed alpha on Google Play, giving access to friends and colleagues. It turned out that there is no balance at all. The algorithm for generating opponents turned out to be prohibitively random. That level was simply impossible to pass, then it was passed without any efforts at all. Then I decided to get rid of the random house and balance each level manually. Having thus made the first few levels, I realized that this work would take too much time, and the approach needed to be changed. Having spent a couple of days to develop a deterministic algorithm for generating opponents, I got an acceptable result. It remains to determine the input parameters for each of the 99 levels. Before I was able to finish this, I passed my game once again 30, simultaneously adjusting the prices of pumping, the characteristics of the player’s units, and the opponent’s units. My friends and colleagues helped me a lot in testing. Some of them played the game for several months, and during this time they gave me a huge amount of feedback.
I have it all. I will be glad to hear criticism. Of course, I hope for a constructive.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/349174/
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