DevLog #5 - Fatigue, Trello and Drug Vats

While fatigue is a mechanic in Pit Fighter Tycoon, it unfortunately affects me as a human as well. The gap between DevLogs is due to exactly that; so I’ve written some thoughts about that elsewhere.

Planning for the Future

Along with a planned return to monthly DevLogs, I have created a Trello board, where you’ll be able to see what I am working on at the moment. You can find that here!

I’ll be using it to keep track of everything as I move towards the next major milestone – Feature Complete!

Building Some Drug Vats

When I initially announced this project on Reddit, there was a significant amount of interest in how I learned to make the game itself. I’m hoping to shed some light on the art and UI side of things in this blog! If you’d prefer to not know how the game works, maybe skip this one.

Everything in the game has been built in Unity. While my art tool of choice is GIMP2 – as it is free to use (and superior to Photoshop for pixel art, in my opinion anyway).

This is the Training Interface, it’s currently a work in Progress so colours and design are subject to change.

Work in Progress!

Most of the art here is placeholder for now. However, on the left side of the UI there are a series of Drug Vats. These will allow the player to prescribe drug regimes to their slaves, potentially killing them. I’ll write more about the mechanics when they are finished in the next DevLog!

Each of those vats is a UI object within Unity, which contain a number of image objects within them. At the top level, they just have an empty shell, which is done so that they scale properly with different screen resolutions. However they consist of a number of sub-objects, which is where all of the art is.

Nesting objects underneath allows you to easily manipulate it

Through trial and error I’ve found that using the Stretch setting along with anchor points seems to work best for UI Scaling.

The UI will appear over the top when the mouse moves over it.

This game is very UI heavy, mostly due to the nature of it's genre. There's never a single 'right' way of doing something, just more and less appropriate/efficient ways.

Before creating nice looking art, you need to figure out the size and composition of the final image so that it actually looks right in the game itself. So, start with a rectangle, or square and place it directly in the scene. You can then figure out what size and shape your art should be.

The chair down beneath the drug vats started life as a maroon rectangle, then I began figuring out the shape and shading.

Once you're happy with the composition, then you can make it pretty. Still has some distance to go I think!

The drug vats themselves also started as a plain object, so that I could quickly and easily mess with composition.

Before and After!

The biggest technique for adding depth in Pixel Art is Dithering. You can read a solid overview on that here: Spriteland.com

Derek Yu also has a fantastic tutorial on pixel art, here: Makegames.tumblr.com

I’d strongly recommend making use of layers as much as possible. It allows you to break a complex object, down into more easily completed parts. You can also take bigger risks, as you’re safe with the knowledge that you can turn off a layer that simply doesn’t work with the image. It will also leave you better prepared for breaking up an art asset in the game itself.

The individual parts of the drug vat look like this:

Explosion view

The background and liquid within are separate objects within the Unity Hierarchy as well, which will allow for a simple visual effect of the tanks filling up. It really all looks quite different when it's disassembled!

That's it for this Blog! Next time I will explain the mechanics of training itself, and how they impact the game. In the mean time, why don't you check out the Trello Board here: Trello.com

Burnout - Recognising when it happens

I have recently been through the process of burnout, or development fatigue. I thought it might be helpful (or instructive) to share my own experiences with this, so that you can avoid the pitfalls I’ve clumsily stepped into myself.

This is something of a well-trodden topic when it comes to Games Development, and I think the process of building something as enormous as a game lends itself to these problems.

Why does it happen?

It happens with surprising ease. In my case, I had a very distinct milestone; Steam Greenlight was announced to be closing, and I had long ago planned to get my game through it. For all of Greenlight’s flaws, I was keen to prove (really just to myself) that the game was interesting enough that people would vote it through.

It was now a race against time to make the game presentable, and hopefully get some people interested.

I began to work at a feverish pace, spending every waking moment that I could doing art and code, building UI’s, and adding effects. I smashed my way through task after task, and the game was completely transformed in a matter of days and weeks. It was amazing to look at all the changes, and I was loving the work – it was all consuming.

I don’t think I spent any time with my wife for at least a month, in spite of working entirely from home. In hindsight, it was pretty horrific. As a solo developer, isolation is a common issue and it’s an easy trap to fall into.

At the time, I felt unbreakable. But I am certainly not.

Like this shitty movie I guess?
(Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbreakable_(film)#/media/File:Unbreakableposterwillis.jpg)

Recognising Burnout

When development began at the start of 2016, I formed a company in order to deal with contracts, ownership and any division of profits. In hindsight, this was a really good idea – as it forced me to keep accurate records of the time I spend working.

Every hour that I have invested into working on the game is recorded. At the end of the project I’ll be able to tell how much time was spent coding, designing, animating, polishing and testing. I’m also a big believer in only recording the hours I’m actually working, as opposed to Hours I intend to work, where I might go get a coffee or procrastinate on the internet (read: browsing reddit).

Due to time keeping, I was able to create this graph which tells a pretty clear story toward the end:

Pictured: Things not going to plan.

A large spike (aka. preparing for, then going on Greenlight), followed by a decreasing amount of work hours, and in turn, more time spent procrastinating. At that point in time I was still trying to work every hour possible, which is bloody stupid in hindsight.

Another factor is efficiency. Sure, you may throw every hour you can at a project, but are you actually working effectively? Tasks I began working on started taking much longer than predicted.

I easily get absorbed into my work, so seeing a graph highlighting my growing inefficiency really drove the point home.

How am I Dealing With It?

Holidays. I decided to go outside for a while, on the other side of the planet. Going forward, I’ll also ensure that my life is not just consumed by development as a boom/bust cycle is unhealthy and inefficient. I’m sure that development will progress more slowly, but my quality of life (and hopefully the quality of the work) will be a lot higher.

Pictured: The Outside world (your results may vary).

TL;DR:

Track your hours and ensure you maintain a solid work/life balance. Focus on efficiency instead of hours slammed away, and ensure you’re actually enjoying the work you’re putting in. Sure, it’s sometimes tedious, but if you’re hating it – it’s time for a break!

Why would you do this?

Four months ago I quit my stable, well-paying job as a sysAdmin. I planned on using the savings I had been building up for the previous 7 years to support myself, all so I could pursue a dream.
So now at 30, instead of buying a house with my wife like a responsible adult, we've moved in with my parents and I've been working full time on a video game about pixelated humans beating the shit out of each other.

What would drive someone to this sort of madness?

My first PC game was DOOM. I was too young to have the coordination to use all of the controls, so my brother would 'drive' and I got to press the 'kill button'. 

I think I came to the realization that I.T was just a job, and games were exactly what I wanted to do with my life when I was travelling through Canada & the USA in 2013. Visiting Montreal, I was excited by the fact that I was in the same city as Eidos, Ubisoft and Bioware. 

Pictured: Canada. 

By Jonathunder - Own work, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5185607

It made me realize that I didn't want to just play games, I wanted build them. Unfortunately I didn't know the first thing about coding.

So, I decided to figure it out.

I started with GameMaker: Studio. In hindsight the language was pretty easy, but at the time it was probably the most frustrating 3 months of my life. I built some simple prototypes, then I decided on making ultra-violent 2D shooter that focused on blasting through walls and ruining buildings. It took a bit less than a year to build it in my spare time. 
One day I will totally finish that. Maybe.

At the end of 2015 I switched to Unity, learned C# and started building a new (far better) game. That game is Pit Fighter Tycoon. 

If I make money from it - awesome. If not, well... At least my young nephews think I'm cool.

I've always wanted to answer the question of 'Why are you making this game?' with a long explanation about how I'm following through on the dream design-document of my childhood. But, it never really works out like that.