Anarchy Templating Utility App Idea

Today I have come with the idea to create a Templating utility app for Project Anarchy.
It have to automate a bit part of the c++ coding and setup needed to add a new element to your project.
And have to be open source so everyone could contribute and or customize it for his need.

It will automate the creation of Runtime Classes and vForge Plugins

• Entities.
• Components.
• Custom Shapes
• Basic Extensible Custom vForge Editor.

For runtime classess it have to:

• Create class cpp and hpp files
• Create selected includes and basic class structure and rtt.
• Create some common empty function es dispose initialize and think functions.
• Add import/export function statements for static/dynamic linking.
• Generate the var table from provided vars and visually edited parameters.
• Create a version aware serialization function at least for simple serializable vars.
• Generate the swig template for lua scripting.
• Be faster than actual coding.
• Be faster than copy pasting operations and not rely on them itself.

Ideas about possible realization

A c#/c++ application with windows form interface to be integrated in vforge.

• It could use c# T4 templating engine using both provided tt files and custom ones.
• It operates under vForge without the need to switch applications.

Another feature could be to read visual studio uml models.

• Probably not available in Visual Studio Express.
• Visual studio Uml tool could be better or worse than custom made winform ui( I don't intend to make a full uml tool but just a very simple interface in winform).

A second Idea was about a plugin for some kind of opensource uml tool es StarUML

• Free Uml tools are more accessible than Visual Studio Pro.
• possibly people have to learn another tool.
• Another API to learn for me to make the actual plugin.

Please add your considerations and needs as a comment.

44 Magnum Smith & Wesson Model 29

44 Magnum 3d model Game Ready

As It's hard to continue to run my personal project and i'm struggling to get some time/money to be able to continue them without a budget I decided to sell some of my 3d model stuff.

I updated this model to test it with modern physical based shaders.
Renderings are realtime with image based lighting/reflections.

this is the Smith & Wesson Model 29 the most famous 44 magnum revolver or also known as 44 Remington magnum used in  films like "Dirty Harry" and "Taxy Driver" .

Described by Clint Eastwood as "the most powerful handgun in the world and will blow your head clean off"

Download 

The 3d model in various formats can be downloaded following one of these links.
3D Export  Turbosquid
Price is set to150$.

When Shit Happens To Slow You Down

In those last days I haven't posted anything as I had a technology blackout.
Probably due to thunderstorm or just bad luck.
I had to stop working for those few days.
Christmas release is almost gone in my sweetest expectations and my moral went down.
These things happens and probably this teached me something important.
Some Internet detoxification once in a while is a good thing to understand how much time we lost online.
So for the next weeks I decided to limit completely my internet access on my work Pc for most of the day.
Can you suggest me some software to do it?

Concept Art Part 4 : Basic Enemies second Iteration

I changed all them many times made a lot of variation just to choose this three.

I don't know if they are the best ones, but I'm quite happy with them as I can just figure out their next step.

Probably all will get changed quite a bit when I will estabilish the final style, then I may do the next iteration directly in 3d.


The knight alike for now has been cut out as it isn't in line with the game setting at least not in its actual state.

I will try to put it back on track as the drill was cool in the end.

It would be interesting to make a serious attempt to develop a medieval fantasy game soon or later.
I really appreciated some armors from Infinity Blade and would be great to have the possibility to work on something as good.

Concept Art Part 3: First Basic Enemies Sketch

Smaller than their master, these enemies will be characterized by different color schemes according to their hazard and will be equipped with different types of weapons.

For the armored one I immagined the classic iron, silver and gold version.

I'm not convinced about the drill.

I definitely want to include in the game, but probably not on this character.

For the Eyes and pupil I will try other solution with different shapes and properties.

Slow Progress Part1 : Wrong Expectations and Failure Management.

Where Time Goes

It's said that mostly we do 80% of progress in the 20% of the time spent on a project and 20% of the remaining progress in 80% of the overall time spent.

It is indeed a very realistic estimation of what really happens at least in my experience.

An optimal solution could be to skip that bad 20% of things, but normally we spent more time on them as we wrongly get those tasks too much importance, so we generally don't really like to cut that part of the project.

What Comes First

For learning purpose it could be good to exit your comfort zone and do first things that challenge you the most, but to gain the right momentum it is better to start with things you just know you are good at.

Challenges are what make you feel great when you get through them, but they can also bring you down when they reveal to be harder than what you had expected.

Hard To Guess

Expectations are generally what really bring us down as for everyone on this earth it is very hard to do a proper estimation about how hard a task will be and how much time it will require. Expecially when you are scheduling your own time.

Autofail Mode.

How many times we built some safe net to let us  fail without too much remorse.
How many times we set out failures in advance and just prepare exuses for them.
Productivity is always mined by bad habits feed by excuses.
Bad expectations, make we doubt about ourself and our skills and make us more prone to build further excuses and so more bad habits.

I Believe In Good Lies

Mostly we need excuses to perform bad things,but we also need them quite often to mantein a good and productive behavior, maybe built cheating our brain to believe some good lies.
Some of our beliefs may indeed have a desirable placebo effect.

I Will Start It Next Monday

Sometime could be good to understimate a task and set a tight deadline as it makes you don't lose your time as people generally tend to start taking things seriously just when the deadline is next or in the missed milestone crunch time where they go pratically crazy.

Failure Master

Said this probably the greatest thing one can learn from the life is to manage own failures.
To understand the lesson behind a failure and that the failure was just another step towards our goals.

Teamwork could sometime break a bit some of these bad patterns or at least could dampen the personal self destructive "Autofail Mode" behaviour.

Concept Part 2: Sub Boss

The enemy sub-boss begin to take some shape.

He need a further dress up with accessories and weapons to define better his character and the siluette.

I also have to add more asymmetric elements.

I want to set the game in a low tech industrial/mining enviroment with some steampunk elements.

I thinked to give this dude various kind of weapons and if time will let me to do it, he will maneuver some big machineries.
All this to deliver some epic boss battles with a strong 80s and 90s arcade game taste.

Weapons will include throwing any kind of enviroment objects and tools, explosives like bombs and dynamite, but also flamethrowers, nailguns and some advanced mechanical weapons.

Concept Part 1: Initial Sketch

Quick initial sketch of one of the enemies in the game.

I'm not totally convinced about it.

It is just a first try.

I want also to try different overall proportions especially shoulders seem to be too high I want to give him a bit of neck.

I probably need 2 version of this character:

• A unique recognizable character that will take part to some special challenges as kind of sub-boss.I planned to make it almost twice the size of the  player and will have unique face , animations and sounds.

• A generic reusable version the same size of the player to use multiple times through  levels.I thinked them as the minions of the big one.

Doodling with Alchemy

Today I decided to do some concepts unluckly I was not so inspired so I started to do some sketches in Alchemy for just an hour of warm up.

Alchemy is a completely free drawing application.
It is indeed a great program when you look for some ideas as it features many tools to generate shapes in a procedural way that speed up the process of putting something very quickly on the canvas and modifiers that distort and modify your own drawings.
Looking at the generated canvas you can try to extrapolate some interesting concept from the mess.

You can read more about all its features in the alchemy official site.

Generally humans are very good to recognize faces so 80% of the time you will spot various kind of faces and most of the time very stylized ones.

This sometime distract me a little when I want to do a very different kind of concept so today I just started with the pressure brush and basic mirroring without other procedural generators or modifiers.

This one I colored (always in Alchemy using a palette from http://www.colourlovers.com/) is a possible enemy for my game.

I'm not totally happy with that concept as I was torward a very different style , but it could be a starting point to run some concept evolution iterations to come with something better.

Another thing I noticed today is that I really like to draw robot things...it is something to remember for a future project.I hate to admit it but everytime I start to work on something I begin to lose interest in it and start to think at thousand of other things I wish to do ,this time robots but can be whatever else.

I'm writing this blog also in the hope it helps me to remain on track.

Hoping to make some progress and show something more related to Anarchy the next time I'm going back to work.

Prototypation Art:The Character part 1

Meet the Engineer Prototypation Character

I choose my reference character to be 3 head tall and sized as 2 vertical grid cells. It have to be able to jump / climb / vault over 1 grid cell sized obstacles.

The character I have In mind was a building site worker.

I downloaded a really well made model of the tf2 engineer from Tommy Tallian collection of low poly tf2 characters http://tommytallian.blogspot.it/p/low-poly-tf2.html.

I had to made it 3 heads tall then rigged and skinned  it with bones to animate it.So say welcome to the "Midget Engineer".

The model is very low poly(around 400 poly) with a really small and optimized texture.

Those are more Nintendo Ds ish kind of specs for a 3d model, but it doesn't matter for a prototypation model.

Plus i can subdivide it few times to  generate some kind of fake lods to test on devices different polygonal budgets

Prototypation Art: The Construction Set part1

The Construction Set Basics.

To be up and running as soon as possible I'm making a prototypation art kits.

Kits can be reused in many project, but in this case I' will make one from scratch for blogging purpose.

Most of the gameplay mrechanics I want to prototype come from 2d Tilebased Arcade games so to make a good 3d conversion I have to stay in the quad grid realm.(convert some mechanics to esagonal grids Is also an option I want to explore in a later prototypation stage)

Unit Setups

Can be wise in this situation to choose a smart unit size you can easely snap on in vforge and in your 3d application of choice and easy to calculate by mind.

Generally you can save a template for your 3d application to recall the setup you have choosen for your project.

Prototypation Setup

My Project rig

For initial prototipation purpose I set up a scratchpad project it will be common to every future project I will do.
Every project will have it's own Perforce Workspace but shares the same Depot so could share part of the files with the scratchpad project.

This is probably not the most advanced of setups but it may work in my case.

Starting with an unmodified Project Template.

The Infamous Project Template

The first sentence looking at Project Anarchy's Project Template is "I don't need all these things, let's cut everything out".

It is indeed an early optimization.
To who don't know how bad it is, trust me when I say, it is the mother of every other bad things a man can do to loose his time and a time bomb you set to explode at  a random time during a project.

I'm totally going to use the unmodified Project Template!!!

Some good reasons to use Vanilla Project Template:

All About This Game Development Blog.

The "Big" Announcement.

For my first Project with Project Anarchy I decided to start from very classic and well known arcade game concepts, mixing and matching them a bit and let experimentation do the rest.
This trying to come up with something quite fun with a level of challenge that could please both casual and hardcore gamers.

I will further develop some of these gameplay concepts as part of a collection of few little games.
The first release is planned optimistically for Christmas and other chapters will be available with updates.

All these games will be based on a common theme, character and modular content, to get the most out of every art asset.

I will try to take a dev log on this site and give it equal priority over the release as I hope you will enjoy both the game and the journey to make it.