Showing posts with label 7dfps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 7dfps. Show all posts

Friday, October 19, 2018

7DFPS x PROCJAM, 20-28 October 2018 (make a first person game in 7 days) + (make a proc gen thing in 7 days)


For the first time since 2014, the #7dfps challenge is starting tomorrow. If you're not familiar, it's a week-long jam to make a first person game that tries to do something new.

Past alumni of 7DFPS include high-concept gun games like the original Superhot prototype as well as Receiver, but of course you don't have to do any shooting or violence for your first person game. Make a first person whatever-you-want.

If you need help getting started with making a first person game, even if you've never made an FPS or even a video game before, then here's a great free step-by-step tutorial with video examples on KO-OP Mode's "Make Weird Stuff in Unity" workshop page.

For a bit of historical perspective on this, also check out the 7DFPS video keynote from 2012, where a baby-faced JW and other game industry folks beg you to do something new with the first person format:



This year, 7DFPS also falls on the same week as PROCJAM, a community jam to make something that makes something (procedural generation)... they have their own list of talks, tutorials, and resources to help you make a proc gen thing.


Maybe this is a good time to make that procedurally generated first person game you've been dreaming about it? It seems the gods will it so.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

7HFPS: "Harriet"


For 7 Hour FPS, I imagined some sort of Tribe-ish Mechwarrior game where you're a Harriet pilot ("Harrier + Jet") and you fly around shooting homing cluster missiles at things, deforming the terrain to make new skiing slopes / carve new lines. But in my early control tests, I decided the "piloting a death robot" fiction wasn't really helping / wasn't terribly interesting, so now I'm ditching it. I'm not sure what to do with this, now, but I think I'm leaning toward a game about the undesirability of godhood / immortality, and maybe I'll polish it up for 7 Day FPS in that direction.

Similar first person games about movement / hopping / surfing / skiing: Perfect Stride, Purity, the endless CS / TF2 surf maps, the notorious Tribes series... typical first person movement just seems so terribly boring in comparison.

In other games, surfing / skiing is a byproduct of messing with the engine's friction implementation and using strafing / jumps to build-up momentum. It's kind of fascinating, to realize that these player communities have invented a new way of walking, a sort of expressive movement without strategic or instrumental purpose -- a type of dancing, maybe?

Play prototype #5 here (< 1 MB, Unity web player): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/19887116/harriet/web5/web5.html

In Unity, my implementation is really simple but it works: just a standard terrain collider and a rigidbody-powered player capsule with a low-friction physic material. To help prevent a tunneling / falling-through-the-world effect, I also set the rigidbody to "Continuous Dynamic." Everything from there was a lot of testing and tweaking.

The biggest technical problem, though, is something I have very little control over: uploading data to the Terrain object causes framerate hitches. Generally, it seems like modifying the texture blend splats is very cheap and performant -- next, editing the TreeInstance array starts getting expensive after you have a lot of trees (~10000+ trees), and editing the structs unfortunately does not refresh the tree renderer, so you're stuck with having to insert a whole new array every time -- but by far the most expensive thing is modifying the terrain and deforming the heightmap / geometry. I think the possible workaround here is to use some sort of "cell approach" -- make one big mega-terrain from dozens of smaller stitched-together terrains. If I pursue this prototype further, that'd probably be the first thing I look at. The alternative is to make my own terrain system, which sounds like something that's not worth it.

Monday, July 2, 2012

A short history of non-monoplanar first person movement.


I'm working on a new game that reuses a lot of Souvenir's code, so lately I've been doing more research into non-monoplanar first person movement, meaning you're not limited to primarily moving along the X and Z axis / traversing across a single, fixed, designated "ground" plane.

Traditionally, "noclip" flying / spectator modes have been the most common form of non-planar first person movement. However, I'm not a fan of it as a movement mechanic because you're always "right side up" above a ground plane. Your idea of space never really changes because that's not the point.


Shattered Horizon (2009) was a multiplayer FPS in space, where astronauts shoot each other while hovering around asteroids. From what I can grok in gameplay videos, players can rotate and hover freely, but they almost always maintain the same common "ground plane" as if there's a "right side up" in space. Common map layout terminology and directional lighting also reinforce the idea of a "top" of the map.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

7dfps, halftime report


Hey! I've been chugging away on my 7 Day FPS entry, "The Leaden Circles," a single player squad FPS based on Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway. I was planning on cross-posting all my updates here, but I decided it would've been too much, so read all my daily dev posts over there.

I also want to draw your attention to some other entries I've been watching:

"Table For One" tasks you with being an utter glutton, re-imagining Dinner Date as a physics puzzle with a playful Natural Selection-ish skulk cam perspective (best. view model. ever.) because hey, don't we see with our mouths sometimes? The current build is absurdly difficult, at least to me, so I hope he makes it easier!

"Europa Concept" looks like some sort of high fidelity sci-fi survival thing about crash-landing on one of Jupiter's moons (Europa is one of Jupiter's moons, right?) and managing your inventory and crafting and shooting, or something. The developer's quite a Unity veteran, so I'm sure this'll be pretty slick in the end.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

7dfps: The Leaden Circles, prep

(I'm making an FPS in 7 days, as are many other designers. This is cross-posted.)

"One feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air."

Mrs. Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf about a rich white lady in 1920s London throwing a party for a bunch of random acquaintances she doesn't really care about. She does it because she likes the attention and it's good for her husband's career.

It's also about a smart-ass white dude coming back from India who judges everyone.

It's also about a depressed World War I veteran who's going insane, hearing trees sing in ancient Greek. It's also about.... well, 20 other people.

It's not an easy read on the first try. Virginia Woolf wrote it in a "stream of consciousness" style, meaning you go back and forth between different characters' heads, often without warning -- sometimes several times in a paragraph. Sometimes you're reading what he thinks she thinks he thinks, as filtered by her (?!) but trust me, it's rewarding. Part of the idea behind making this is that hopefully it'll make the logic and systems governing the book (novels and narratives are systems!) more apparent.

Now, most of the different book covers feature a portrait of some random lady on the front... which totally misses the point. My favorite version is the one above, Wassily Kandinsky's Akzent in Rosa (1926). Sure, the book is about a Mrs. Dalloway, but it's also about consciousness, some kind of unseen universe on the edges of human comprehension.

My plan is to adapt Mrs. Dalloway as "The Leaden Circles," a single player squad shooter with a stream of consciousness mechanic, kind of in a Space Hulk format. You'll ping pong between the different characters, chaining together thoughts, memories, and feelings -- and to win, you have to get this rich petty vapid white lady to feel something deeply profound at the end of the day.

I'll be using Unity, C#, Maya, Audacity, Photoshop, and source material from Virginia Woolf, CGTextures, FreeSound.org.

Let's do this, and good luck to everyone!