An older perspective, or The One Where Rachael Realizes Her Mistake

The first person look for this game is awesome, if you're on a large screen. 

Sub-Zero Squirrel Games, LLC

February 16, 2016 - Little Rock, AR, USA

After spending the last couple weeks working on bringing you a first person version of this game, which we love (see our previous blogs), after trying it out on a couple of mobile devices, we realized that we were heading down the wrong road.

Do you need glasses?

I do. I've needed them for years, and do wear them. But that's beside the point which is that in this perspective view, that the TFOS get smaller the further away you are from them. Of course, that is the very nature of perspective. However, when you couple that with the small screen of the mobile devices, you might as well hand the player a microscope to use along with their phones. Aside from a few professional labs, and high-school science classrooms across the nation, there aren't microscopes readily available, and I doubt people are going to bring one with them while sitting on the train going to work, although I very much would like to see that happen. I imagine it goes something like this:

"Excuse me, Mam, are you playing Teratrons From Outer Space on this train today?"

"No, I'm researching a cure for cancer, why do you ask?"

"Because I'm trying to play TFOS, and can barely make out what I'm looking at, can I interrupt your research?"

"By all means, please. I'm just wasting time; you're the real hero here!"

So what do we do now?

Rest assured, mobile gamer. This game is for you and that is our target. While we don't want to throw away the work we've done here, we want to make this a enjoyable experience (sans microscope). Luckily, we've been using version control, and can go back to an earlier iteration. Joe's going to refine the 2D layout to allow us to use more of the screen. Meanwhile, I'll diff the code to see what I've changed since we took off on this foray into perspective.

And all the work we've done in the last couple weeks? That's not time lost, per se. Of course, it does move us back a little, but not that much. March 1st may be out of reach, but not completely. I've managed to quash a couple bugs in the meantime, and we do want to branch this project off in the future, so the work Joe's done with the 3D modeling isn't going to go to waste.

That future project? XBox/PS/PC, of course. During early development, we added controller input. This game is actually a lot of fun with a controller or keyboard and/or mouse. The 1st Person perspective also plays really well on the larger screen space, and we also get a lot more freedom with textures, particle systems. and other performance concerns. Also, that gives us a chance to explore some new mechanics as well! You can get some of the early Prototypes from our website:

http://SubZeroSquirrel.com 

under the Deep Acorns Tab. There's a forum called Untitled Space Game. For Windows only.

Next Up: Meet the Characters in Teratrons From Outer Space 

Until then, Stay Frosty,

~Sub-Zero Chuck

Cockpits (Nothing Dirty)

     As you all know, from our social media prolific lead developer Chuck, we have decided to take the Teretrons into the 3rd dimension.  Now, we decided to do this for several reasons which I won't go into here (If you want to know read his article: http://subzerosquirrel.blogspot.com/2016/01/a-new-perspective.html .) So, the questions I asked myself as I started transitioning from a top-down 2d game to a first person 3d layout, were "What shouldn't I see?" & "What should I see?"

What I shouldn't see:

     A frame.  Meaning that in a first person view there would be no frame, no screen that you look down on your world like a god ( I don't know if your god has a frame he or she looks though, but mine does with a score, extra lives... you know the works.) No, I have to see through the eyes of man, and that means I can't just be hangin' out in space.




What I should see:

     A cockpit, and glass, and controls, and displays, and PRETTY LIGHTS!  Almost all of these were sorely missing in our first attempt. Our current look, while pleasing in it's own way... is also sterile and flat.  There is also a lot of screen space wasted.  Waste not, want not right?  The only control that seemed to fit on the screen was the fire button.  The rest were just placeholders, and none of the other options I tried were much better.

My first attempt at a cockpit:

It was really just and chair and a control panel.  Here I was just working with space.  I played for a while with adding and subtracting different components, trying to figure out what was actually necessary.  I didn't like my first chair, so that went.  Chuck and I both thought the control panel got in the way too much, so... gone. I finally added everything to the ship design, and condensed down to a more minimalistic design:



This is the state of it as it stands now. I think I will add yoke controls to the left and right sides of the screen, and move most if not all of the UI elements to look like they are projected on the glass, on the sides of your cockpit glass.  Tune in for future installments of me rambling. :)

Screen Shot Saturday

The Makeover Continues:

We were so happy with the new look of the game in perspective rather than ortjographic views that we both spent a large portion of our days bringing it to life.

Today we added:

• Nebulas
• A flowing star field
• A big spinning moon
• A negative graphic for the ship since you'll be sitting in the cockpit from this forward
• a few tweaks and whatnot. 
• Angled up the Teratrons so that you can actually see them, and they don't look so FLAT anymore.

Joe's been busy today building you a nice cockpit to sit in. Once he gets that in place, we can rework the GUI elements to better align with the new interior. Maybe he'll share that with you guys later!

So there you go, our Screen Shot Saturday submission. Keep looking for updates.

Stay Frosty,

~Sub-Zero Chuck

A new perspective

The 2D grid just started to feel... flat

During the process of building this game, we initially discussed how we wanted to present it, and we decided on a 2D presentation, because this was after all a classic color match puzzle game, right?

I can't begin to tell you the hours we've spent looking at this game, and playing it, over and over again, and again, adding features, getting rid of "unwanted features," and simply looking at it.

When we finally moved from PC design and testing, and started to port it toward mobile devices (which was our intended target in the first place) we noticed the screen seemed kind of empty. 

Take a look:

Notice there's some informative stuff on the left, very little info on the right, a handful of ships in the middle, and a bunch of just space. 

So, Joe and I had a convo that went something like this:

Chuck: Maybe we should consider cutting the top and bottom borders out, so we can zoom in on the play field a little?

Joe: That destroys the look I had in mind when I created the frame.

Chuck: True, and I do like the look, it just feels empty.

Joe:  It's supposed to be a heads-up type display.

Chuck: It's really a heads-down display, isn't it?

Joe: You got me there.

Both: Why don't we go more first person, like from a cockpit?

Both: We're geniuses!

I may have paraphrased and embellished a little. But the gist is we decided to try it out. 

Will the 2D mechanics hold up?

It was a little sketchy at first, and I had to do a little not thinking about it for a couple of hours before I could brain it into existence. The answer came to me when I realized that we've already done this for the MotherShip levels.

In the main level, the Teratrons were just floating in "Universal" space, but with the mothership, they're attached to the wings of the ship. I already knew how to handle that, and now I know how to handle this as well. Attach all the interacting game objects to a primary object an voila!

It really only took changing and adding about 20 lines of code to bring it all together, and there are of course some new bugs that were introduced by this change, BUT, I think we can fix those pretty easily. 

What's next?

Joe's going to spend some time reworking the GUI elements, and I'll keep pounding out code to bring it all together. We're going to have to spend some time reworking animations, but I think it will all be well worth it.

What do you guys think? Comments are welcome.

Stay Frosty, 

~Sub-Zero Chuck

All the tweaks in the World

All the tweaks in the world...

January 26, 2106 - Little Rock, AR

Last night I spent  couple hours reworking the Phase Defense reaction. The Phase Defense was developed by the Teratrons as a way to protect themselves against the human attacker (you!).

They place these machines in their ranks, and make it so that they can inhibit your progress until they pretty much force you to set one off. 

Beware though, when you do, they get phase shifted, and can no longer be hit by your light bombs, for about 10s. If you fire a bomb toward them, it will simply go through them to the next un-phasedTeratron and move themselves down in the rank toward an attack. 

While this seems solely a defensive measure, the wise pilot can find ways to take advantage of this moment to set up chains behind the whacked out aliens. 

Oh, and if two phase engines are within reach of each other, they will start a chain, causing even more of the pesky TFOS to shift out of play. But, it's not quite right yet...

...and that brings us to tweaks.

Timing is everything in this game. So we've got a lot of work to do on getting it just right. It seems that we've completed a LARGE portion of the primary work to be done in this game, and now we have to try and balance it, here is a list of just a few of the many variables we've set up to allow us to tweak:

• Advance time  - The amount of time between successive new TFOS showing up on the grid
• Advance Time CoEfficient -  A multiplier to adjust the advance time over time. Smaller than 1 will make it faster, greater than 1 makes it slower. 
• Grid Size and Starting Rows - These settings allow us to change the number of rows and columns in the grids, and well as how many are at the beginning of a stage, and how they fill the screen.
• Special Spawn rates - a fractional chance of the system creating a special item during an advance. The current special spawns are:
• The White Ship
• The Special Weapon Bonus
• The Time-Warper
• The Phase Shifter
• The Special Weapon Fill Rate/Max - What's needed to fill a Bank Charge
• The Special Weapon Bank - The max number of charges you can have ready 

Of course there are many other tweaks to make, such as the length of certain animations and timers, then number of extra lives you start with as well as your chances of earning additional 1UPs.

So, there's still a lot of work to be done, and we're working every day and night to get you this game. We're almost certain you're going to love the final product. Take a peek now if you haven't already:

http://www.slidedb.com/games/teratrons-from-outer-space

Stay Frosty,

~Sub-Zero Chuck

Custom Explosions for them darned TFOS

Custom Explosions for the Teratrons

I took of an hour to do some other stuff, but I've been working all day on these new explosions. 

Joe had gone through and made a custom explosion animation for each individual ship, which results in a ring of fire. 

Mechanim is the best way to handle image swap animations in Unity, but I had already built my prefabs, and along with their code and event handling in some combination of Mechanim and Legacy animations. 

Well, THAT had to go!

When I moved Mechanim to the right place on the GameObjects hierarchy (the root), I lost the animations that were built for the child objects, which meant I lost the hover animations built for each one.

So I rebuilt them, well, at least three of them, the primaries Red, Blue, and Yellow are re-finished.

We also wanted to replace the standard asset explosion that ships with Unity for something a little more custom. So, I started playing around with Particle Systems.

I won't bore you with those details except to say I found a really sweet effect when I changed the shape of the emitter to a 3D cube, so check out how the two play together! 

As always, we invite you to try out the latest alpha version of Teratrons From Outer Space on Android devices. Here's a link:

https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.SubZeroSquirrel.TFOS

Stay Frosty,

~Sub-Zero Chuck

Starting a dev blog - Late in the game, but let's do this!

January 23, 2016 0715 (GMT -6)- Chuck Stanley

Good morning blog readers. Today is my first dev blog entry since the beginning of time and what came before.

Today I'm going to grab the latest assets Joe made for us, and attach them to the game. We've got new explosions for things, so there's less generic going on and a lot more other fun stuff to see.

- Remove the generic explosion from the project pretty much altogether
- Replace with animated explosions created by Joe
- Add a custom particle system to accentuate the explosions.

Let's see how it goes.

First, I'll need to have a look at the animator for the gameObjects and do some frame swapping... I'll get back to you on that in a bit.

It looks like my project update from Joe has finished, so I'm off to work.