My name is Daniel Beaty, and I’m the one who has written every blog post for Team Autonomous, thus far. The point of this blog post is for me to share a little bit about myself, so lets get right to it.
I was born, raised, and still live in a town located in the Deep South called Albany, GA. I was home schooled until my 7th grade year. That is the year I started going to a public school. Talk about a massive wake up call. Going to a private school really opened my eyes to how the world really was. By that, I mean I realized how sheltered I had been. I was exposed to things that I knew about, but really didn’t have much experience with. For example, cursing was widely used, which is probably no big surprise or a big deal to most of you, but to someone who really hadn’t been exposed to this kind of environment; it was like hitting a ton of bricks. My mind was just flooded with all kinds of perverted talk and such.
Growing up, I really enjoyed creating things, so I was naturally drawn to things such as Legos and eventually to video games like Roller Coaster Tycoon. I started with games like Mario, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Frogger, and Golden Eye for the N64. After my brother bought a PS2, I really began to notice how much I enjoyed playing First Person Shooters. I really grew a liking to the TimeSplitters series. The multiplayer and single player in those games was just the best, in my opinion. To this day, I still play Time Splitters 2 and 3 from time to time, which I can’t say for any other game that I started playing 10+ years ago.
As I grew older, my obsession with video games increased. This obsession finally led me to wanting to create video games. I first dabbled in video game development with a program called FPS Creator. At the time, it seemed to be an amazing tool, and I really enjoyed messing around with it. I finally got bored with FPSC and went back to just playing video games.
A few years later, I graduate as a home schooler. Yep, I went back to home schooling in 10th grade. This was due to financial reasons that I will not discuss. Before graduating, I had already picked out a dream college. It was a college called Full Sail University. FSU is primarily known for its excellent filmography degree, but I wanted to go there for a different reason, to learn how to develop video games. FSU also has excellent online programs, so I decided I would give the school a shot. I started in the online program of Game Design back in July of 2011, and I am glad to say that I haven’t regretted that decision thus far. I have learned a lot so far, and that is one reason why I am already developing games with a team using the Unity 3D engine.
Are you a game developer or ever-dabbled in game development? Please share with a comment below.
Take it easy,
Daniel
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Thursday, August 23, 2012
History of Project NUTS
In today’s post, I would like to give some history on the team’s current game. We have code named our current game Project Novices Unite To Sprint or Project NUTS for short. The NUTS part coincides with what our team is about, which is for Novice to Unite, so we can Sprint. Or in other words, novices unite to gain more experience with Unity and game development, so we won’t be novices anymore.
For our first game, we wanted to start with something simple. We didn’t want to be too ambitious. We didn’t want to make a new groundbreaking FPS or MMO like all the twelve-year-old kids out there. We wanted a simple game that wasn’t too difficult but wasn’t so easy that it didn’t give us a challenge. We decided to make a running game inspired by the game Cube Runner, which is a simple 3D vertical scrolling game where the objective is to avoid objects, which are randomly generated, for as long as possible. We didn’t want to just copy and paste Cube Runner, so we decided to put our own spin on the game.
The first thing we needed to decide was what the theme of the game was going to be. We decided on this. The player controls a Bionic Chicken who is running from a mob of zombies in a graveyard. Great! Now we have our theme, so what about the gameplay? Our initial design was for the chicken to have two meters, HP and energy. The chicken lost HP when he hit an object, and he gradually lost energy due to him running. So not only did, the player have to avoid obstacles, but he also had to collect batteries or else he would run out of energy. Also, the chicken moved at a default speed that could only be changed by the water and oil pool objects. Water slowed the chicken down, and oil sped the chicken up. This was a simple design that we were happy about, so we began production on the game’s first prototype. The first prototype would just include the necessary scripts for the game and placeholder objects.
Due to team member’s schedules, progress on this first prototype was slow. After about a month, we had maybe 50 – 75 percent completed. Then progress went to a stand still when we discovered that Jay, our project director and programmer, had to leave the team. Luckily, we were able to find replacements quickly, but unfortunately, they didn’t work out, which I discussed in the previous blog post. One really big change came out of this though. One of the replacements, Andre, pitched the idea of having a mechanic called Zombie Threat instead of HP and energy. Essentially, zombie threat is the HP and energy mechanics combined. You hit an obstacle. You gained threat. You also gradually gained threat because you were running out of energy, so you had to decrease the threat by gathering batteries.
Zombie threat was a great and fresh idea, so we decided to roll with it. While we ended up not using the original idea for zombie threat, we did mold the original zombie threat mechanic to what it is currently. Zombie threat is a meter that increases and decreases when the chicken’s current speed goes below or above the default speed, respectively. So hitting a water or oil pool would affect the chicken’s zombie threat level. We also decided to re-add the energy meter. The energy meter gradually decreases, which the decrease rate depends on the chicken’s current speed. Also, the chicken will lose a good chunk of energy when he hits an object, because he has to use energy to repair himself.
Once again, we thought this was a good design, so we started adding in these changes. As soon as the mechanics were added, a big problem became immediately apparent. The chicken rarely, if ever, gains threat. We had a hunch this would be a problem before the new mechanics we even added, so we had thought of some solutions beforehand. One of the solutions is to allow the player to control the chicken’s speed, to a degree. Allowing the player to control the chicken’s speed actually helped us out with two problems. The first one is obviously the zombie threat meter problem, and the second is the player having difficulty avoiding objects when the game gets to a certain difficulty level.
I haven’t talked about how the game’s difficulty works, so I’ll go over that now. The difficulty system has always been the same. The game starts out easy and gets progressively harder. The game gets harder by spawning more obstacles for the player to avoid, more water pools, and fewer oil pools. At random intervals, the game’s difficulty will decrease significantly, but it will continue to increase afterwards. This is to give the player some breathing room. After playing at the most difficult level for a while, he can take it easy for a while when the game’s difficulty gets easier. And this is where the second problem appears. When the game is at it’s most difficult level, the player can avoid objects but sometimes it can just overwhelm the player, so to fix this, we allow the player to decrease the chicken’s speed to give himself more time to avoid objects. The chicken still gains threat when he goes slower than the default speed, but the player can also make the chicken go faster than the default speed. So the chicken will lose threat. The player can only make the chicken go three speeds; default, slower, and faster. This solution helped immensely with both of our problems. We are still working on how the chicken will gain threat, but it is definitely a lot better now than how it was before, when the player couldn’t control the chicken’s speed.
Now, this brings me to the last mechanic I will discuss today. We are in the process of implementing an ability system. Essentially, the chicken has three types of abilities: Mobility, Defensive, and Last Resort. Each category has its own set of unique abilities. The player can choose one ability from each category to use in the game, so while there might be 5 abilities per category, the player can only use one ability per category at any given time (kind of like the perk system in CoD). The ability system, like many other systems in the game, is a work in progress.
I hope you enjoyed learning a little about the history of Project NUTS. Until next time.
Take it easy,
Daniel
For our first game, we wanted to start with something simple. We didn’t want to be too ambitious. We didn’t want to make a new groundbreaking FPS or MMO like all the twelve-year-old kids out there. We wanted a simple game that wasn’t too difficult but wasn’t so easy that it didn’t give us a challenge. We decided to make a running game inspired by the game Cube Runner, which is a simple 3D vertical scrolling game where the objective is to avoid objects, which are randomly generated, for as long as possible. We didn’t want to just copy and paste Cube Runner, so we decided to put our own spin on the game.
The first thing we needed to decide was what the theme of the game was going to be. We decided on this. The player controls a Bionic Chicken who is running from a mob of zombies in a graveyard. Great! Now we have our theme, so what about the gameplay? Our initial design was for the chicken to have two meters, HP and energy. The chicken lost HP when he hit an object, and he gradually lost energy due to him running. So not only did, the player have to avoid obstacles, but he also had to collect batteries or else he would run out of energy. Also, the chicken moved at a default speed that could only be changed by the water and oil pool objects. Water slowed the chicken down, and oil sped the chicken up. This was a simple design that we were happy about, so we began production on the game’s first prototype. The first prototype would just include the necessary scripts for the game and placeholder objects.
Due to team member’s schedules, progress on this first prototype was slow. After about a month, we had maybe 50 – 75 percent completed. Then progress went to a stand still when we discovered that Jay, our project director and programmer, had to leave the team. Luckily, we were able to find replacements quickly, but unfortunately, they didn’t work out, which I discussed in the previous blog post. One really big change came out of this though. One of the replacements, Andre, pitched the idea of having a mechanic called Zombie Threat instead of HP and energy. Essentially, zombie threat is the HP and energy mechanics combined. You hit an obstacle. You gained threat. You also gradually gained threat because you were running out of energy, so you had to decrease the threat by gathering batteries.
Zombie threat was a great and fresh idea, so we decided to roll with it. While we ended up not using the original idea for zombie threat, we did mold the original zombie threat mechanic to what it is currently. Zombie threat is a meter that increases and decreases when the chicken’s current speed goes below or above the default speed, respectively. So hitting a water or oil pool would affect the chicken’s zombie threat level. We also decided to re-add the energy meter. The energy meter gradually decreases, which the decrease rate depends on the chicken’s current speed. Also, the chicken will lose a good chunk of energy when he hits an object, because he has to use energy to repair himself.
Once again, we thought this was a good design, so we started adding in these changes. As soon as the mechanics were added, a big problem became immediately apparent. The chicken rarely, if ever, gains threat. We had a hunch this would be a problem before the new mechanics we even added, so we had thought of some solutions beforehand. One of the solutions is to allow the player to control the chicken’s speed, to a degree. Allowing the player to control the chicken’s speed actually helped us out with two problems. The first one is obviously the zombie threat meter problem, and the second is the player having difficulty avoiding objects when the game gets to a certain difficulty level.
I haven’t talked about how the game’s difficulty works, so I’ll go over that now. The difficulty system has always been the same. The game starts out easy and gets progressively harder. The game gets harder by spawning more obstacles for the player to avoid, more water pools, and fewer oil pools. At random intervals, the game’s difficulty will decrease significantly, but it will continue to increase afterwards. This is to give the player some breathing room. After playing at the most difficult level for a while, he can take it easy for a while when the game’s difficulty gets easier. And this is where the second problem appears. When the game is at it’s most difficult level, the player can avoid objects but sometimes it can just overwhelm the player, so to fix this, we allow the player to decrease the chicken’s speed to give himself more time to avoid objects. The chicken still gains threat when he goes slower than the default speed, but the player can also make the chicken go faster than the default speed. So the chicken will lose threat. The player can only make the chicken go three speeds; default, slower, and faster. This solution helped immensely with both of our problems. We are still working on how the chicken will gain threat, but it is definitely a lot better now than how it was before, when the player couldn’t control the chicken’s speed.
Now, this brings me to the last mechanic I will discuss today. We are in the process of implementing an ability system. Essentially, the chicken has three types of abilities: Mobility, Defensive, and Last Resort. Each category has its own set of unique abilities. The player can choose one ability from each category to use in the game, so while there might be 5 abilities per category, the player can only use one ability per category at any given time (kind of like the perk system in CoD). The ability system, like many other systems in the game, is a work in progress.
I hope you enjoyed learning a little about the history of Project NUTS. Until next time.
Take it easy,
Daniel
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
A Novice Beginning
Today, I would like to share a little bit about how Team Autonomous was formed and how we got to where we are now. I should let you in on a little secret first though. We haven’t always been called Team Autonomous. Initially, we just called ourselves the Novice Game Dev Team. Yes, I know that is a pretty lame name, but it really conveyed who we were and what we were about.
Three months ago, we started out as a team of novices who just wanted to develop a video game with Unity 3D. There was Jay (the team leader and programmer), Daniel (Game Designer), Ben (lead modeler), and Bucco (modeler). Progress was very slow at first due to people’s schedules, but things started to move forward faster after a month or so. Then at the end of June, things went from great to bad. Jay told us that he was going to have to pass off the lead to myself, Daniel, and quit the team, due to him starting college soon. Luckily, Jay wasn’t a douche and didn’t just leave without helping the team transition to a new leader and find his replacements. Within a few days of finding out Jay was leaving, Jay had found a replacement programmer, Andre, and composer, Brandon, for the team. We also needed a replacement Concept Artist, but those seem to be hard to come by. At first, both of these replacements looked like they were going to work out, but after a few weeks, they both just disappeared and all attempts to communicate with them were futile.
After realizing our new programmer and composer were gone, I started looking for replacements for the replacements, on the Unity forums. Within a week, I was able to find our current programmer, James, and composer, Trevor. So far, both of these guys have been great and we have made a tremendous amount of progress on Project NUTS, our current game that we are developing. Because Novice Game Dev Team was a lame name and we were in a sense a new team, I decided to change our name from that to Team Autonomous. Also, the name didn’t seem to fit the team too well since some of our members were not novices. So there you have it, a brief history of Team Autonomous. In the next blog post, I will go over the history of Project NUTS.
Have any questions, comments, or would like to share an experience you have had while working on a team? Please leave a comment below.
Take it easy,
Daniel
Three months ago, we started out as a team of novices who just wanted to develop a video game with Unity 3D. There was Jay (the team leader and programmer), Daniel (Game Designer), Ben (lead modeler), and Bucco (modeler). Progress was very slow at first due to people’s schedules, but things started to move forward faster after a month or so. Then at the end of June, things went from great to bad. Jay told us that he was going to have to pass off the lead to myself, Daniel, and quit the team, due to him starting college soon. Luckily, Jay wasn’t a douche and didn’t just leave without helping the team transition to a new leader and find his replacements. Within a few days of finding out Jay was leaving, Jay had found a replacement programmer, Andre, and composer, Brandon, for the team. We also needed a replacement Concept Artist, but those seem to be hard to come by. At first, both of these replacements looked like they were going to work out, but after a few weeks, they both just disappeared and all attempts to communicate with them were futile.
After realizing our new programmer and composer were gone, I started looking for replacements for the replacements, on the Unity forums. Within a week, I was able to find our current programmer, James, and composer, Trevor. So far, both of these guys have been great and we have made a tremendous amount of progress on Project NUTS, our current game that we are developing. Because Novice Game Dev Team was a lame name and we were in a sense a new team, I decided to change our name from that to Team Autonomous. Also, the name didn’t seem to fit the team too well since some of our members were not novices. So there you have it, a brief history of Team Autonomous. In the next blog post, I will go over the history of Project NUTS.
Have any questions, comments, or would like to share an experience you have had while working on a team? Please leave a comment below.
Take it easy,
Daniel
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Hello World
Hello World,
We are Team Autonomous.
We are a small indie video game developer who uses Unity 3D to help bring our
games to life. The team currently consists of four team members. First, we have
Ben Columbus who is our 3D modeler and artist. Secondly, we have our newly
obtained programmer, James Nash. Then we have our, also newly obtained, sound
designer and composer, Trevor Gast. Lastly, we have yours truly, Daniel Beaty
the project director and lead designer.
Now that you
know a little about the team, let me share with you what we are currently
working on. For the past 2 months, we have been working on a little game we
have code named Project NUTS (Novices
Unite To Sprint). The first month and a half saw very slow progress on the
game, due to team member’s schedules and unforeseen circumstances. Luckily, we
have made a tremendous amount of progress on the game within the past two to
three weeks. This is primarily due to us obtaining our new programmer, James.
But what is
Project NUTS exactly? In simple terms, Project NUTS is a game about a Bionic Chicken
running from a hoard of zombies. The chicken can move left and right and use
abilities in order to avoid dangerous obstacles; like gravestones, trees, and
water pools that slow down the chicken. The difficulty increases as the game
progresses; however, there is a zombie threat meter that is constantly
increasing and an energy meter that is constantly decreasing. Once the threat
meter reaches 100% or energy meter reaches 0, the game ends.
What is the purpose
of Project NUTS? The purpose of Project NUTS is to allow anyone with any amount
of talent, skill, and experience in game development to develop a game from the
ground up using the Unity 3D engine. So we are not only learning how to use
Unity, but we are also learning about video game development in general.
What is the
purpose of this blog? Basically, we just want to keep people, who are
interested, up to date on anything we are working on (which is currently just
Project NUTS) and to share our development experiences with the world, so one
day we may post on our blog to update everyone on our game and the next day we are
sharing what we learned, experienced, or anything else we think maybe
beneficial to someone out there.
With that said,
I hope some of you will follow our blog and Project NUTS, because some excited
things are about to happen with the game within the next few weeks. In the next
few blog posts, you can expect more info on Project NUTS’ gameplay, where the
game was one month ago, where the game is now, and where the game is headed.
Take it easy,
Daniel Beaty
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