Bodybag (The Cleaners) - our #GGJ15 Criminal Resolution Physics Simulator

01/29/2015

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tuism

Global Game Jam is the 48 hour annual Game Jam that happens all across the world with a unified theme. You can play the game here:

Bodybag (The Cleaners) playable link

Bodybag Global Game Jam page

The theme this year was “What do we do now?!”

This was a tough one - the previous Ludum Dare’s theme was, to me, a lot more restrictive, and thus felt more interesting. It’s the old saying of if you tell someone they can do anything, they most likely will end up doing nothing. Restrictions breed creativity.

So we tried to break the theme down into restrictions we can try to apply:

“We” - “It’s What do we do now?”, so that implies some kind of group game - implying multiplayer, which is my personal favourite. But multiplayer experiences tend to not do as well in jam setting (as we discussed in the previous Ludum Dare blog), and we just did one in our previous LD, we also wanted to stay away from that.
A sense of being thrust into something unknown - that’s the feeling those words “What do we do now?” elicit. We wanted to make people feel that panic and confusion.
Not a scripted narrative adventure game - we realised very quickly that the theme lent itself too much to a kind of point & click adventure that would have players solve things by working out contextual puzzles, so we wanted to stay away from that. We wanted to base the game on a mechanic rather than a stream of content.

Bodybag Simulator

The deed is done, the mark is now a body. “What do we do now?”
Now, we call the Cleaners.

Bodybag is a game about what happen after the inconsiderate asshole assassins leaves a messy botched job behind. It’s your job to get rid of the body in whatever way necessary.

It can be played as a 2P game with each controlling a character, or ambidextrously by a single player. This
It’s a physics-based game which we haven’t really had experience with before - No More Boxes was physics but this had elastic bodies and all that which relied a lot more on physics than wrangled quasi-physics.
Not sure on the name 🙂 “The Cleaners” sounds better but a tad generic, “Bodybag” sounds too heavy-handed… But for now this’ll do 🙂
We either overscoped or underestimated the tweaking it takes to wrangle a physics system to do what we want it to do. In any case we had quite a few things that we wanted to include that didn’t get in, which would have been easy to implement, but we were too busy working on wrangling the physics system.
So we didn’t manage to finish everything we wanted to 🙁

Learnt a bunch about physics bodies in Unity, it made me understand why Chariot (that game I learned about over the weekend) made their design choices (round characters, among others). I feel much better equipped to make more crazy physics games now 🙂
Learnt to do level design. Something I’ve generally stayed the hell away from.

Timelapse - 48 hours in 30 seconds:

Team:

Steven Tu (art and level design)
Loet Jansen Van Rensburg (code and physics)
Tim Harbour (Superb score)

Once again, GGJ15 game link:
http://globalgamejam.org/2015/games/bodybag

Play now:
http://www.twoplusgames.com/bodybag

Thanks for your time, hope you enjoy the game! 🙂

AMAZE 2014 Joburg: Hypertalks

10/28/2014

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tuism

A MAZE 2014 in Johannesburg was as usual a mind-blowing event. Gathering indie game developers from all around the globe to our humble city, this the third A MAZE marks two years from the day I discovered game dev as a possible career choice, during A MAZE 2012.

There were many many great things at this A AMAZE, meeting amazing people, listening to amazing things come out of their amazing minds. All of which can be found on the A MAZE Youtube Channel. A week’s worth of amazingness.

Here however, I want to show you the Hypertalks - talks by amazing people to show you that 5 minutes is all it takes to get you thinking. A MAZE had just released these videos (I had shaky iPhone shot versions which sucks, these are much better)

My favourite one is David Hayward‘s one where he plays Super Hexagon while talking about how it’s like his (other) favourite hobby 🙂

Here they are! Enjoy!

rAge 2014 + Debut of Beat Attack

10/18/2014

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tuism

The rAge Expo has always been a landmark gaming event in South Africa, and this year has been no exception. Twoplus Games was there with a gaggle of fellow indie game devs with MakegamesSA and to show off some top-notch home-brewed entertainment!

Dead Run, of course

Arthur Godstruck on Dead Run

We took two games to rAge, and the first is the soon-to-be-released endless twitch zombie-bashing runner Dead Run, which has repeatedly surprised us with how much people love playing it even in an expo environment - see, it was designed for quick play sessions while waiting in a queue, but instead people were queuing up to play it. It brings a smile to our faces 🙂

You can play the Dead Run expo build right here: playdeadrun.com

Dead Run will be coming out soon on iOS (it’s sitting in the approval process which has had unforeseen hiccups), with Android and Windows Mobile to follow.

Beat Attack, the debutante

Pre-apologising to all @MakeGamesSA guys exhibiting with me at @rageExpo 🙂 #nightattheroxy

A video posted by Steven Tu (@tuism) on Oct 9, 2021 at 7:20am PDT

The second game we brought was Beat Attack, a game we had been prototyping in the last month or so. rAge was the first time we had shown it to the public.

Beat Attack is our rhythmic one-button love letter to combo-licious competitive block-matching puzzle games - it was designed because we love versus puzzle games like Super Puzzle Fighter and Puyo Puyo, but couldn’t really find any that worked with my iPad. So we made our own! We also love DDR, and it all just fit so beautifully together. But more on Beat Attack’s origins later. Beat Attack was super well received, the simple one-button competitive play was a joy to show people and just watch them fall into the game, trying to get better and beat their friends’ ass. Which is exactly what we want out of Beat Attack!

You can play the Beat Attack expo build right now too: twoplusgames.com/beatattack

Beat Attack is currently in alpha and is definitely gonna get finished! Stay up to date by following us on Twitter!

Pictures

Here are just some of our photos from rAge, you can check out our full album for more photos!

These bad boys played at least 4 hours of Dead Run, coming back again and again to whack ever more zombies. Kudos!

Saturday’s Dead Run high scores!

The Akatsuki ninja trainin on Beat Attack

A heated conclusion to a heated game of Beat Attack.

Bear Chuck learns Unity

12/09/2021

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tuism

Hey guys!

So Bear Chuck had been quite silent for a while, I’ve been learning Unity with the goal of ultimately porting Bear Chuck over to it because it seemed more robust, especially from the web build as well as cross-platform porting point of view.

If you prefer a TL;DR: Bear Chuck Unity web build! <—- click to play

My Unity learning experience started with me making Jack King to learn the ins and outs of how Unity works, and sure enough, it wasn’t simple. The C# syntax was certainly an entirely different beast from Gamemaker’s scripting. But the interface! What a pleasure to work in! It makes GMS’s interface look like movie hacker stuff - Impractical and blinding.

And then I worked with Loet on Rocket Blocks which became Rocketto, Loet offered to help me with porting Bear Chuck to Unity, so I suggested that we tried a smaller project to see how we worked together. Also it was supposed to be for MakegamesSA’s Comp E, but we didn’t have enough time to hit that deadline. Since then Loet’s gotten busy with other stuff (such is life!) and we’ve decided to put that on hold for the time being.

But that didn’t mean the end of my Unity learning! I took what I’ve learned from Jack King and Rocketto so far and started dissecting Bear Chuck to put it into Unity, also with an idea of a new control scheme (ultimately the controls seemed the most needing-to-be-solved part of the Bear Chuck experience).

What I’ve learned of Unity-fu while doing this:

Go with Unity instead of against it. In GMS I built my own simplistic Physics engine to make sure things conformed to a pixel-perfect system. When I tried that in Unity it was HELL. Unity’s systems are super intricate and Frankensteining my own system meant I ran into all kinds of problems one after the other (just look at the Unity General Questions thread and you’ll see).
The Unity 2D system isn’t quite complete yet. Unfortunately essential functions like IgnoreCollision() aren’t in yet, and that makes things rather dicey. There are workarounds but they’re complex and cause other problems, unfortunately.
Though it is already a ton better than trying to do 2D with Unity before the upgrade!
You can’t reference SpriteRenderer directly without GetComponent. Something to remember.

I had to do a few things to get it to work more like I needed it to - I cranked Friction way up, I adjusted the colliders to be smaller than the blocks were visually, I made the blocks round off to perfect positions at every opportunity possible, etc, and I ended up with something pretty close to the clean physics a block matching game needed. I like the bounciness of it, and I would never have been able to do that with my own engine.

May I present, Bear Chuck Unity web build! <—- click to play

Right now it’s more of a toy for the control scheme. The bear is a ninja. He can telejump anywhere he pleases (click), to pickup and throw blocks as he pleases (click and drag)

I hoped that this control scheme suits the game and mechanic much better and gives it a legitimate home on a tablet. Though I’m not sure if that’s entirely a good thing, to completely aim for touch devices only. I’ve ideas of making this work on a controller, but… one step at a time!

rAge 2013: 15 made in SA games showing!

09/26/2013

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tuism

Every year, I think to myself I don’t need to go to rAge to gawk at the same AAA titles that you can see on Youtube and everywhere else. Every year I end up going because of one thing or another - if it wasn’t me judging the amazing Cosplay for Legion Ink for two years in a row, it was being a booth babe for Otaku Magazine, or organising booth babes for Asus, or whatever. rAge has become an ubiquitous landmark in the geek calendar, and for good reason.

This year’s rAge is gonna be a real special one! Well, every year’s rAge turns out to be special for, but this one will end up taking the proverbial cake. I just know it. I feel it in my bones. Why?

For starters, my game that I’ve been working on Bear Chuck will be playable and on display! And even better, I share the honor with 14 other made-in-SA games! 15 games!! FIFTEEN in total! Even as part of makeGamesSA for the last year, I never realised how quickly we’ve grown.

In no particular order (except of course the first one), here are the 15 made-in-SA games that you can come to check out and play at rAge 2013: