Saturday, December 31, 2011

Super Mario Unity3D Land - Final Update


     The second and final update on super mario unity 3d land is here. Before I get to the details there is some stuff I need to talk about. In the last blog post I said that this project would be a mario fan game. However, as time went by I realized that working on a fan game is a waste of time. It is better to spend that time working on my own original game, which I will be starting on very soon.

This little mario project was more of a prototype to test out the various things Unity can do, and pretty much unity can do anything any game can. 

    Anyway I have updated it and made a new video. A lot of new things have been added.
The first video was just testing out animations and character movements. This video is basically testing out everything else. 
   The stuff that is being tested out in this video are  GUI, Collision, Destroying game objects and AI.
These are just some very short simple basic test, nothing fancy.

Testing out all these features gave me a much better understanding on scripting and using scripting to create the game.   I should know everything I need in order to create my own game now.

so here is the video, I hope you enjoy it. 



   Thats it, no more updates for the mario project, however from now on I will begin working on my original game. I will update the blog on progress for the game in the future, but first I have to actually start working on the game. :)


Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Super Mario Unity 3D Land Project

     Hi everyone, I have finally started my first Unity game project. This game is actually going to be a fan game.
Its Super Mario Unity 3D Land!


So the purpose of this fan game is to better familiarize myself with the Unity Game Engine. Its going to be a practice type game. I wanted to start off with a completely original game but I realized that I need more practice and should not hurry into it that quickly.

Anyway I have made a video demonstrating Super Mario Unity 3D Land. So far all I have done for the game is
-Create the 3d Mario model and some other models like pipes (you can see pipes in this video)
-Rigged the Mario Model and created animations for it.
I have made four animations for the Mario model, one of them is an Idle animation, which is the animation that plays when the player isnt moving in the game, the second one is the run animation, which is the animation that keeps playing while the user holds down a key on the keyboard to make mario run, the next animation is the Jump animation, which is the animation that will play when the player jumps in the game, and the last animation is the Shoot fire ball animation, which is the animation that plays when the player hits the key to shoot a fire ball.

The Animations are pretty badly done, once you watch the movie you will be able to tell, marios run animation makes him look like a running ostrich in space.
Also you will see that the mesh gets a little messed up when an animation plays, it kind of stretches out of place.

Anyway I will be updating the game a little bit at a time and upload a new video to show the new features.
This video is Demo One, and in Demo One I am just getting the character controller to work, getting movements to work, shooting fireballs, and getting animations to play from user input from the keyboard keys. So when the user holds the up arrow key for example Mario should move forward and play the running animation as well.

so heres the video:
The music used for this video is from Super Mario Galaxy, its the main menu theme.



My goals for this fan game is to gain more experience from the unity game engine and learn more about game development. Also I hope to create a Good/Playable Mario game, well hopefully it will turn out good...

In my next update for the game im still not sure what im going to do next, I might try testing out things like collision or adding a HUD/GUI. Ill decide later.

Thats all for now. More Soon.



Sunday, December 25, 2011

Testing character controller, movement and jumping in Unity3d

   Snowconesolid here, today I just thought I would share a little demo I made a while ago in Unity. In this demo I am just testing out Jumping and moving a 3d character model. There are no animations given to this 3d model because when I made this I still did not know how to animate. This was made at the same time when I was going through the tornadotwins tutorials. So in this video you will see that very statue-like gameplay I was talking about in a previous blog post. But, animations are not the purpose of this video. This video is just showing how a simple platforming type game would look like. Also Jumping and moving around is not the only purpose. I wanted to test out importing your own 3d models into unity and then giving them a character controller. At first I could not figure out how to add character controllers to my own 3d models, and when I did they would be really messed up, but finally I got character controllers to work right.



Also I have updated the 3d character model seen in the video, now its has colors and ready for animations. This model will be seen again in a future game I plan on working on.

My first game "Worminator" Carnival Style

     After about month of learning and working in unity3d I finally finished my first game. Thanks to the Tornado Twins I have been introduced to Game development and familiarized greatly with the Unity game engine.

Who are the TornadoTwins? The TornadoTwins are these awsome game developers that teach people Game development. Their Youtube channel has a whole tutorial on making a simple third person game, and other things as well such as a dubstep. These tutorials are great and go over almost everything you need to make a third person game. Throughout the tutorials the TornadoTwins teach you how to create a game called "Worminator", which is a game where you play as a worm and just move around and shoot turrets. The whole Idea of this tutorial is to teach people how to use the Unity engine and its features.  If you really want to learn game development but have know idea where to start or are a beginner I highly recommend you start off with the TornadoTwins third person game tutorial. Even if you have no experience with anything game dev related such as level design or programming, the TornadoTwins tutorials will really get you started off in a great direction.

 Its a 29 part series and after watching all of it you feel like you actually learned a lot about game dev and can just finally start on your own game idea that has been in your head forever.
The Tutorial is very easy and clear to follow. So I highly recommend you check out their youtube channel.


There are a lot of documentations and tutorials for Unity3d everywhere, on the unity website there is even this whole ebook that teaches you how to make a third person game. While all of these are also great places to start off, they can be a little more time consuming and not as enjoyable to go through. The TornadoTwins youtube tutorials is where I started off and after finishing it I feel much more comfortable working in unity.

Anyway I just wanted to show off my version of the worminator game. So I have made this little youtube video just playing around in it. The worminator game has been made by a lot of people now, and its really interesting to see everyone elses because everyone started out with the same game, but in the end they all made the game a little bit differently, but of course the same concept, same idea.  

Sorry about the parts in the video that cut from one scene to another. I am using the free version of Fraps so I can only record 30 seconds per video. So for this video the gameplay is split into different parts.


Thats about all. Special thanks to TornadoTwins for starting me off with game dev.
I will probably begin working on one of my first real games soon now. I already have an idea for it. The next game will most likely also be another "test game" because there is still a lot I need to learn about unity. So I will make this game to continue learning, but of course this time around I will be working on the next game on my own. I will talk some more about this in the future though.

 Happy Holidays. 


Friday, December 23, 2011

Animations for Character Models in Blender

     In my last post I said that I would post some animations I have done in blender for the next post, which is this post. Confusing...
In game development I believe that animations are very important. Animations are what make the game feel more alive and real. If there were now animations for 3d game characters then all the games would be pretty dull. Basically the player would just be moving around a statue like object that always stays in the same position. So animations are very nice to have when it comes to games.

However, before any animations can even be created, a skeleton needs to be built inside the 3d model. This is called Rigging. Basically you are adding bones to the skin, which is the 3d model. In blender they are actually called bones. Once a skeleton is added to the model, its fun just to move it around in all kinds of funny positions.

But anyway here is a video of some very simple animations I added to some of the character models you have seen in the last blog post. Enjoy the music I have with the video to :) (Gerudos Vally)






The first animation is the rigged One piece model I posted in the last blog. This was actually my first working animation. Its suppose to be a walk cycle, or I guess a run cycle? well im not sure, it looked like a mix of both of them. This animation is not very good, but hey it works. I have improved since this one.

The second animation in the video is an animation of the female anime type character. This animation was much more smooth and better than the one piece animation. It is a run cycle.

The last animation is actually two animations put together. I split them later on to animate separately in the unity game engine. I made this weird robot type character with a red afro and gave him an animation for Idle, which is when the player isn't doing anything, they are just standing there, and the second animation is suppose to be a short walk cycle.

In blender Animating is actually very simple. Its pretty surprising at how quick you can actually create simple animations like the ones I made in the video.
In a future blog post I might make a video demonstrating blender animations inside the unity game engine.
Thats all for now folks. Thanks for reading.

Oh yeah about the statue idea. Don't get me wrong, a game where the player takes the role of a statue and lives in a world filled with other statues sounds very awsome. It needs to be developed!

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Early 3D Modeling in Blender

Hey everyone Snowconesolid here again. Well I guess I will always be here because its my blog and Im the only posting the blogs, so I guess it was pointless to say that I am here...

Anyway, back on topic. Today I just want to share some of my early work I have done in blender. I started learning blender a while back now and these are the models I made when I was just learning how to use it and its tools that it comes with. Pretty much these are just my practice models. So these models are not the best ones and they are not really original because I used a background reference to create the models, which is actually a great way to begin 3d modeling if you are just starting.

So anyway here are my very first early models made in blender.
Before you check them out I would just like to say that since the time I made these models, when I was just a new blender student about almost 2 months back I have greatly improved in 3d modeling and have created many more other models that look much much better than these. Also my newer models are much more original, they are fully my own ideas and look much much better than what I use to be able to do. Also I feel very comfortable with blender now and I know a lot of its features and just how to use the program overall very quickly and easily. So if you are new to blender you will be very surprised at how simple it is to create pretty much anything you want in it once you understand how to use its features. Anything from Character models to weapons or objects can be created very quickly once you know your way around the program.
So if you are new to blender and feel a bit discouraged with the program don't be. Once you get to know the features and some of the basic key-board shortcuts you will feel like a very professional 3d modeler :)

Anyway enough of the boring wall of text. Here are the models!

Can you tell who this is suppose to be? If you are a fan of Futurama then you should be able to tell. At least I hope so, if not then my modeling is not so good.
Its Bender, the robot from Futurama. When I first started out I wanted a simple character to make. so I choose bender. Bender is basically just a trash can shape with arms and a head.
I like to call it Bender Blender!


 Later on I decided to add a little color to my Bender Model. As you can tell this is not the best texturing but its not bad. Gold Bender.



Here is a Monkey Tower I made. Im not sure how I ended up with this, but originally I was trying to make a checker board typed object. It somehow turned to the monkey tower. 
 Here is one of my first Human type 3d models. This is actually suppose to be based off one of the characters from the anime One Piece.
 Over here is the same model, except for this one I have added a armature, and that basically means that I gave this 3d model a skeleton so that I can be able to animate it and move it around instead of having it stay in its current position forever like a statue. Ill get more into Character Rigging and Animating later on in future blog post.
 And here is probably one of my best looking models I made when I was just starting blender. I used some 2d image I found as a reference for this one.
 Later I decided to make it a little bit more original and add some very basic colors to it.

 Then I decided to make it much more original, so I created some clothes for the model. It looks a little difficult but actually creating clothes and extras for your 3d model is very simple. 


 After a while of practicing I decided to create my very own character from scratch. I wanted to make something very simple so I decided to go with a sack boy like look from Little Big Planet. I also created some extras like a sword and Skull type shiled/mask.
 Later I just added some textures to it to make it a little more interesting.

 And Then I decided to just play around with it, so I went back and just edited it and created this armor like uniform for my character. Theres a  bit more to this character actually, I was planning on using it in a future project, but then decided to do something else. I will talk more about that in the future.

Thats pretty much it. Once again these are just some models I made a while back as practice when I was learning how to use blender. Also you might have noticed that all of these models are very blocky looking, and thats because they are all low poly models. I actually prefer low poly models because they kind of have that actual video game look to them unlike the more realistic models you see in most games today like the Uncharted Games. Don't get me wrong games with realistic models are awsome and look great. However, I believe that low poly models have a lot of advantages to them. Also low poly models can look very nice. In blender you can actually make a low poly model and then smooth it out so that it does not have that block/box appearance to it. After smoothing things out the model looks much much better, I would say about ps2/gamecube type looking models after smoothing everything out.

In the future ill post some more 3d modeling that I have done, some that look much more improved over these ones.

In the next blog post I will probably talk about animating in blender and skeletons and show some animations I have done and also upload some videos.

So thats about all for now. Thanks for reading.