Hurdles: Week 1

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Here’s a little description of what Hurdles is and a collection of my previous dev logs if you want to read those for context.

Introducing myself:

Hello there! My name is James Thomas Lewis II, but you can call me Jamie.

My game pitch:

3 Kids in a Trench Coat is a cute and kind puzzle game about three kids up to mild amounts of mischief while impersonating an adult in a long trench coat. 3 Kids is a spacial puzzle game where jumps are stacked and taken in turns, so you are deciding when kids should jump or fall to collect collectibles or avoid avoidables.

The goals I set last week:

  • Do my first round of iterating on my kids’ materials.
  • Research lighting darker scenes in Unity.
  • Do my first round of iterating on my lighting with what I learned from my research.

What I accomplished last week:

I made the first iteration of my clay materials in Unity’s URP. I was able to approximate in Unity’s Shader Graph what SouthernShotty did in Blender’s Shader Nodes, using stuff that I learned while watching these two tutorials from Unity (Toon Character Shader, Shader Graph Tutorial). I also exposed one of the shader’s properties, so that I could control the animation of the fingerprints moving around the mesh via C# script, which I was personally really excited about!

While researching how to light darker scenes in Unity, I found these resources most helpful:

I found that most materials on lighting in Unity also ended up talking about post processing, so I decided to add post processing to my project this week as well. Below is a little video going through what I added.

On Saturday, I posted my progress to Twitter, and was disappointed because it the compression that occurred on upload made the video look v bad. The things I was most excited about showing off were my animated mesh materials, and you could hardly see them. I tried posting a number of times on my test account (okay I know I linked to it, but there’s really nothing there. don’t go look at it) and couldn’t get it to look right. I thought I was following these best practices, but I guess I was missing something.

I ended up just replying to myself in thread and posting a link to the video hosted on my website, but I want to figure out a good workflow for posting video captures of gameplay to twitter with tolerable degradation.

Also made made lots of improvements to my website, and started this dev log series.

I had my domain (jamie.games) pointed at this server for a while, but just had this up for a few months. Apple had the nerve to tell me I needed a different website to register for a developer account, so I followed a tutorial for installing wordpress on a server like mine, and now I got this fancy-shmancy website (and Apple finally said yes!).

What I want to accomplish next week:

  • Research optimizations for posting videos in portrait orientation to Twitter.
  • Watch 2 of these movies while inspecting and taking notes on how they light dark claymation scenes, and what they use as in world light sources (my local game dev meetup crew got super stoked about this goal, and suggested a ton of other movies I hadn’t thought of [Wallace and Grommit downward]):
    • Nightmare before Christmas
    • Frankenweenie
    • Corpses Bride
    • Coraline
    • Wallace and Grommit
    • Sean the Sheep
    • Kubo
    • Paranorman
    • Missing Link
    • Box Trolls
  • Import the Trench Coat and try out cloth physics on it.
    • This is to see if physics is even the way to do it. I may end up simulating the cloth behavior in blender just exporting animations instead of physics dictating (and randomizing) the cloth to movement with each jump.
  • Fix animation issue where material continues to animate when floating while falling.
  • Make a cloth material for the trench coat. I may decide to just make it clay too, but I love how some stop motion films make use of actual cloth amidst all the clay (@R25th taught me the word “flocking” [aka the lil fuzzies on felt]. I will make sure I include in my research).
  • Write this week’s Dev Log (so meta, again, are you kidding me?).

Hey, for real, thank you for reading and taking interest in my 3 Kids. You didn’t have to do that. Check back in next Friday for another dev log, and give me a follow me on Twitter for more updates. Also, I’m starting a mailing list. Subscribe below if you’d like!

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