• ProjectsWIP
  • Project UCG - An action packed twin stick shooter with RPG elements.

Playing the game with a controller 🎮

MikeCL Great, your game is taking shape 🙂

I'm just concern about flame thrower, does these bots are made with wood ? Paper ? Or recycled valueless dollar bills 😛
Just for the sake of realism, fire may damage them a little bit, or more if they have some rubber parts, otherwise, fuel would just burn until exhaustion and leave some burnt marks.

    JusTiCe8

    Thanks! The mechanics are getting there.

    Not sure I'm aiming for full realism. Gameplay comes first. I see what you mean, though. But looking at this example
    It's a mix of materials, sure. But in general, it seems to be burning pretty well.

    The flamethrower does not deal that much damage in general, but as the bots keep burning for a few seconds, they take some extra damage. So it becomes more efficient to kill the bots quickly by combining the flamethrower with the machine gun.

    Uragun : is this a future yourself already releasing your game or someone else got pretty much the same idea ?

      Mechs used to be a pretty common game/shooter trope/subject.

      JusTiCe8

      Not sure how to take your comment. Uragun looks great, though 🙂 . However, besides having mechs and being top down.. Our project will look and feel different (the only thing you've seen so far are prototype placeholder graphics and a couple of concept tests) and have other player objectives and focus.

      Of course, we have taken inspiration from games we love. I would say there are other games we come closer to than Uragun if you can see past the mechs and top-down angle. And we don't only look at one game. We have several we draw inspiration from. (the first devlog talks a bit about it). I'm sure the same thing can be said about Uragun. I could compare that game with ten others and have the same comment. Not to take anything away from the Urugun devs, they seem to have done a great job. I'm tempted to try it. 🙂

      The point is, There are always other projects to draw inspiration from. These days, nothing is 100% original (even if we try our hardest to be). People can always find other games and make comparisons (like the other day, someone compared our game with Brotato, which I've never seen before it was mentioned).

      And who knows, since we haven't shown the final art direction yet, There might not even be mechs ( mechs are cool though 😃 )

      a month later

      So I started the process of bringing over the game to Godot 4. A bigger pain than I had imagined 😅. The conversion tool did a lot of work, but some things got broken and must be reworked. Good time to do it now, though, before the project grows too big.

      A workflow question to you devs out there. How do you work on iterations of meshes and animations? I'm trying to find a good way to iterate on 3D assets. I find it a bit tedious currently going back and forth between Blender and Godot as I might have some scenes organized in a particular way. I want to speed up that process. Does anyone have any good advice? Or perhaps a good paper written on the subject (preferably Godot workflow related)?

      • DJM replied to this.

        MikeCL ive got the same issue. making small adjustments to an animation requires most scenes to be completely rebuilt. very annoying.

          I read you can now import .blend directly to Godot but I've never tried it. Maybe you can update all your 3D assets to .blend and thus keeping your scene organization the same. I'd make backup before doing it though.

            DJM Yeah, that is also pretty much my experience. Need to investigate this. I'll do some tests and research as soon as I have the project running in G4. I'll share any findings I come across.

            Gowydot Interesting. I wonder how robust importing blend files are at the current stage. Is this the preferred new method for importing going forward?

              MikeCL

              Just quickly tested. The .blend importing seems to work ok for simple object with animation. The problem is it didn't import texture so I had to save texture separately and material override it. You'd also need to delete light and camera for your blend file.
              Godot 4.01 rc2 / Blender 3.4

              Maybe someone with experience can provide better info on the workflow. Right now though I'd probably only use this feature for simple object like blocks of buildings or something like that.

                Gowydot The .blend importing seems to work ok for simple object with animation. The problem is it didn't import texture

                I mentioned problems with importing .blend files. It was the materials that were transferring badly. It's not quite clear where they're coming from. As far as I understood, the import is done through conversion to glTF.

                As far as i know, anything that goes beyond a single principled BSDF can't be imported into Godot automatically. Instead you have to recreate the material inside of Godot

                Found this on Reddit, tested and it seems only base color is imported correctly. I guess we have to wait for improvement.

                I don't think there is any hope to have a nice importer which will do all the process for us "magically", mostly because imported assets can use many thing the game engine doesn't handle at all or differently (for instance z/y axis, pivot point, even units use in models or some materials), there is not a full match between a 3D model and the engine "picture" of it and it's way to manage things.

                Unless someone made a blender plug-in which use the exact same way of doing things as Godot, we'll always have to rework the model ourselves to make it fits in Godot, or if you work with artists who knows how to do things right to make import process as painless as possible.

                I remember my days dealing with models for GTR2, rFactor or Kerbal Space Program (Unity), I never rely on models and how they were done in 3D modelling program and fixing standard issues after each import (size or pivot point usually), then added material one by one to match what was expected.

                And animations, skinning mesh or other advanced features add a lot more concerns and additional work !

                  JusTiCe8 I don't think there is any hope to have a nice importer which will do all the process for us "magically"

                  Totally agree. The problem with texture transfer is common to game engines and simulation software. Especially transparent materials. I wouldn't count on being able to have a good universal material converter in the foreseeable future.

                  GodotBeginnerRich Thanks! It's not on Steam yet. But the plan is for it to be at some point. We will probably create a Steam page for the game once we start implementing more proper graphics (and have a proper name for the game).

                  a month later

                  The game is now running on Godot 4, finally! There are a lot of improvements to the engine, for sure! However, I'm surprised they chose to call this production ready. There seem to be quite a few bugs here and there that are engine related (that I even submitted to the GitHub issues page). Considering how unstable it is, I would still call 4.0.x to be in beta. And probably 4.1 to be what 4.0 should have been. Ah well. I'm happy I made the upgrade. Progressing with the game can continue. Let's go!

                    MikeCL However, I'm surprised they chose to call this production ready.

                    I don't think they've ever phrased it that way.