Archive:
I’ve been umming and ahhing about what to do as the third mini-game. I want another arcade game, that’s recognisable to “players of a certain age”, but it needs to be fairly simple. I’m supposed to be content complete by New Year, and that’s 10 weeks away, so I can’t burn another month on it… When I borrowed Jeff’s Camel Font, back in [[Week 67]], I kept coming back to the Atari version of AMC. What a damn fine-looking game that was. Those display lists really were singing. So, that’s the one. I can make that shiny, and it’s not too complicated mechanically.
Made a good start on it: I have all the gameplay framework stuff in, a new level, a decent first pass at the lighting and the two key materials: one that emulates the display list for the sky box, and another that does the scrolling floor. They were good fun to do in a material. The skybox is a smooth gradient, stepped, eight times, with each step used as a mask against the next one, before they’re all mul’d together. The result is pin sharp, and much nicer than if I’d done it in a texture. The floor’s a sine, stepped, with a UV panner for the movement. Looks fantastic when the camera’s depth of field is doing it’s thing.
Keeping the colour consistent all the way to the horizon was an interesting problem. If the floor is unlit (with a smidge of emissive) then there’s no problem. But unlit doesn’t get shadows and reflections. If the floor’s lit, then the further away it gets, the more of the sky box (blue) and ambient lighting (white-ish) it picks up, presumably because of Fresnel. But I landed on a nice trick, I flipped the problem. The floor is actually white, the ambient cube in the post process volume (and the main directional light) are both purple. You can see that the floor still gets a smidge of the sky box toward the very far end, but it’s much, much better. Another one for the toolbox.
Got the ship flying about, the camera in, and the camel kinda setup to move and shoot things.
I thought I was being clever; I bought the camel off the Epic Marketplace, and it definitely saved me time modelling and texturing, but tweaking the anims has been a bit of a ball-ache. Ended up making a control rig, and then spent the afternoon trying to work out the simplest way to use that to bake out sequences that I could then apply additively, on top of the pre-existing walk animation. I got there in the end. Turns out, you can play any animation asset directly on the default slot, from blueprint, and UE “just works” and blends it in. No complicated montage setup required. Epic clearly use that for something, but it’s a new one on me.
You can bounce off the camels! The camels fire bullets at you! The camel dies when you shoot it! It’s nearly a game.
I think I’m basically there. Added audio to All The Things, some more VFX, tweaked the ship handling, fettled the bullet homing values, and knocked up the UI. Only thing missing is the background music.
I didn’t rip the original sound effects from the Atari version, nice as they are, but I’ve done a passable impression of them thanks to BFXR, a super handy little tool that spits out 8 bit sound effects. I’ve used it in one shape or another in all my games. Anyway, I’d bet a quid that someone’s going to adjust their glasses and bring up the fact that the audio isn’t correct.
S’funny, but having spent a week with AMC I’m already thinking of directions I could take it. The core’s incredibly simple, but it’s still a solid basis for a cracking little shmup. Guess that’s on the “One Day” list…
It’s official, I’m sliding into working over the weekends…
Spent a few hours on the Intro Sequence. I’ve done all the character animation, including the facial stuff, and finalised the timings of all the camera cuts, and spawns. I’m really happy with how it looks when the engine’s at full-beans. Not checked the Switch or Steam Deck, yet, but I suspect the lack of depth of field is going to be an issue. Fingers crossed.
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