CC-005 - Home Run Derpy

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Sirocco
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CC-005 - Home Run Derpy

Post by Sirocco »

So I pulled: 🏪 👏 ⚾ 🍹

And was kinda interested in the baseball thing. Basic setup is you are a bored convenience store employee, and you are playing home run derby in the store. The objective is to knock as much stuff off the store shelves as you can. The number of pitches is limited, and each time you miss a pitch, you have to take a drink, which will make hitting the ball even more difficult :D

I got the skeleton of the project up and running over the weekend, and had balls bouncing off walls, simple friction calculations in, etc. Last night I got the balls colliding with the racks, which will be holding objects (boxes, bags, bottles, etc). These will go flying when you hit a rack at sufficient speed. I'm thinking of giving the player a choice of strong or weak swings. Combining that with the angle of the bat and timing should give the player adequate control over 'shot' placement, with enough practice (and without getting too damn drunk).

There's enough math and art involved to keep me busy for a few weekends. I definitely won't be pulling this out of my ass in one day like I did last time... heh :)

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Re: CC-005 - Home Run Derpy

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Getting a little work done this weekend. I have racks populated with items (at least on the side facing the camera), and responding to baseball impacts. Items flop around, and eventually come to a stop. They will react with the background items and can carom off other racks, etc. Hopefully I can put this one to bed next weekend. I knew it was going to be a lot of work (just like the Vampirate game, a few compos back).
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Re: CC-005 - Home Run Derpy

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Making a proper mess now.
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Re: CC-005 - Home Run Derpy

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Got some good upgrades in tonight. Racks are populated front and back, and are semi-transparent so you can see behind them. The back glass is textured now (with something other than a shitty placeholder) and ball strikes to the glass will leave random cracks. I have to work on masking those. Object physics was touched up once again. It feels a little more cartoony now; I'm struggling to explain the end effect -- it'll be easier to see it in motion.

Balls also have trails now that are properly z-sorted, so you can get a feel for the path of your hit. It also helps the balls stand out against the admittedly busy background.
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Re: CC-005 - Home Run Derpy

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Almost done with the entry. I was hoping to get through today, but strongly suspected I wouldn't ;)

All essential gameplay elements are in, tested, and working. What's left is a measure of polish, and buttoning things up... like putting together the tutorial and game over screens. I'll probably spend the majority of my time tomorrow working up sound effects and cleaning up the placeholder sprites and textures.

Batting feels pretty damn good. It also turned out to be easier than I expected. I kinda feel like I cheated all little at the end... heh. But the goal is to get something out, so I'm not going to complain when something goes better than expected.
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Re: CC-005 - Home Run Derpy

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Drunkening intensifies.
I'm done with the entry... it's all down to random polish now. *whew*
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Re: CC-005 - Home Run Derpy

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Got some fantastic work done today. I still had a lot of tweaking and tuning to do with the timing, and spent a good bit of today cleaning up the textures, adding sprites, and getting sound effects inserted and timed. The drunken-effect with chromatic aberration is more subtle, but when it kicks in can be rather distracting. The batter tosses back a drink when they miss a pitch, and there are distinct "Strike!" and "Ball" banners that appear in case you didn't score a hit.

Not hitting a ball (outside the strike zone) doesn't force you to take a drink, but it also won't increase your score. Almost every pitch can be hit with the right bat angle and timing. You should take a swing regardless -- you've nothing to lose.

Anyway, as I predicted, this was a ton of work. This is a little too much for a compo entry, but with each one I get a better feel for what my scope should be. I think two weekends is my sweet spot. We've blown well past that. Looking forward to packing this one up tomorrow.
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Re: CC-005 - Home Run Derpy

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Just kind of a follow-up for the project:

I had a lot of fun with this one. It was also an excuse to dip my toes into the shader pool, which I've been ignoring for the last twenty or so years. As a kid I used to play baseball incessantly, so this was a cool throwback (pun not intended) to my youth. I was expecting to have trouble getting the feel of the ball coming off the bat just right, but I somehow lucked out and nailed it on the first try. I did some lazy math to reflect the vector based off of the ball's position relative to the bat on two axes, and somehow it magically worked.

I'll never get that lucky again. Fo sho.

The only thing I'd like to have added in was more stuff to knock over on the counters. Alas, by the time I was wrapping things up I was pretty tired and ready to move on. It's a great stress reliever though :D
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