HTML templates and other silly things.
The official website of Dastardly Banana Productions.
I’ve been testing some weapon models and environmental effects, so I figured I would post some videos of what’s new. Namely; a couple new weapons and a new desert environment, intended for a super-secret future project.
The weapons are a MAS-36 (bolt-action rifle), Spas-12 (shotgun), and M79 (grenade launcher).
I’ve been working on the graphics for CubeShooter 2 quite a bit recently (in the Unity 3 beta), and one of the farther along scenes is the Sky Temple. We showed off this level at the BUG meeting a couple weeks ago, although it was a quick demo just to show a bit of graphics (we spent most of our time in other scenes to show off cube AI and the weapons package). You can also see an earlier version at this blog post, although it’s hardly recognizable.
This is part of the Ruins planet for CubeShooter 2, which is themed around sort of Greek-style architecture. There are going to be several levels in the Ruins tile-set, all with very different visual styles, and this level is supposed to be the high-contrast sky level. The point is for it to have very stark lighting, the effect of proximity to the sun (as a single light source). With that in mind, most of the visual aspect of the level comes from the contrast and lighting rather than color (since it is primarily black and white).
I haven’t been modeling much for it, though, since the layout/necessary models aren’t finalized yet (I’ve been working instead on tweaking the render setting and lighting). It’s amazing what can be done with lighting, particles and post-processing effects: The base of the scene is actually the same as in the post linked above, but the style of it has been changed drastically.
P.S. stay tuned to see what level I have been modeling for.
Updated RPD model
I just made a new RPD model for the weapons package. I’ve needed to model a LMG for my game for awhile, but hadn’t really been able to get it right. I had a specific request for an RPD in the comments so I decided to take a crack at it, and it took maybe 3 hours.
The hard thing about these LMGs is the exposed bullets coming out of the magazine and feeding into the gun- I had to animate them as if they were being pulled in as well as make a script to make them disappear as the gun’s ammo decreases (it would just be goofy to pull off an empty clip with bullets clearly visible on it). I wasn’t sure going in if I could get it to look right, but it works pretty well. The script basically has an array of all of the visible bullets, which I unfortunately have to drag into place in the script, and it goes through them and deactivates them as the ammo count of the gun becomes less than the number of bullets visible. Then when you reload it waits for a certain amount of time and them makes the bullets disappear, so that when lined up correctly with the animation the magazine will go off-screen empty and come back into view full.
You’ll be able to buy this model, along with the other ones I’ve shown, pretty soon once we can get the site ready for it.
Here’s a short video showing it in action with the bullet feeding, animations, and shell ejection (The framerate is a little bad due to the capture, so the animation looks a little off)-
And some renders from cheetah-
We’ve been throwing around Ideas for specials weapons to put in the next CubeShooter, and one of the ones I had wanted to make for a while was a Black Hole gun whose projectile implodes into a black hole and sucks everything nearby into itself before exploding. I’m actually very happy with how it came out, especially the graphics since I didn’t expect that I would be able to pull it off.
The effects come from a couple things. In addition to the particle effects in the middle there are several lights, one point light and several spot lights. The spot lights are physics objects attached to hinges so that they move around and cause the flashing effect. I also made the explosion go into the render settings of the scene to turn off the ambient light and turn up the fog effects to make it more dramatic.
P.S. This weapon will probably be one of the extras we put up for download for people who donate, in addition to other free models and things (even if you donate now you will have access once we put up the bonus content).
The second update for the weapons package is live, and this one’s actually pretty interesting. The last update was mostly behind-the-scenes things and bug fixes (nothing new for the user), but this update is full of new things! I’m probably most excited about the changes to reload speed; now the reload animation is dynamically changed to take as long as the reload time that you set on the weapon, where before you would have to modify the animation itself to change the reload time (which was extremely frustrating working on CubeShooter and was an embarrassing problem in the package) We’ve also got some nifty stuff like bullet penetration and bullet-hole decals.We even made a custom editor which searches through any scene and allows you to add our newest scripts with ease. This second update allowed us to expand on the project rather than just fixing it, and it’s just the start for what we have planned!
The most important thing about this update is that it is the first time Nathan has been able to work with us fully, doing about half the additions in addition to recording the video tutorial.
So I have been extremely busy recently, so it has been hard to get updates out. I was in Europe for the last two weeks (unfortunately in the middle of the whole ash cloud fiasco), and coming back to school has meant a lot of make-up work. But we came back with a new “employee” (my brother) who has a lot of ideas and some invaluable experience for pathfinding.
We’re in the planning stages for two possible games in addition to the inevitable CubeShooter sequel (which might have some very interesting new additions). All three games should have some interesting technology in them, which well make them more time-intensive (and our barely-in-the-plurals staff doesn’t help).
Our first priority, though, remains the weapons package, which we will be updating and expanding as soon as possible. In addition to some technical improvements I want to add a couple new weapon types to round out the selection. Also, I want to make some fancy demonstration weapons (including a gun which shoots black holes).
So please bear with us, and I look forward both to releasing some updates for the weapons stuff and revealing some of the other stuff once we get it started.
A couple (relatively) important bits of news today:
-First, we’ve updated the leaderboards for Cubeshooter Arcade, adding the ability to track high scores for the past 7 days or 24 hours. This will hopefully encourage people to play the game more as they have to opportunity to take a place on one of these new leaderboards, since the all-time leaderboard generally requires quite a few tries and a fairly significant time investment to top. So far the results have been encouraging, our first day with the new leaderboards having an abnormally high number of players and some pretty impressive scores.
-Second, the weapons system (no, we still don’t have a name for it) is almost ready for a Beta release; the demo scene and the basic functionality are complete so after a few bug fixes the only thing between our package and an open Beta will be making the tutorials.
Get ready to shoot some virtual guns!
-Finally, I just got around to making a youtube account for us and finding a decent screen-capture software, so there should be some videos up in the foreseeable future (as well as some tutorials once the weapons package is ready). As far as the screen-recording software goes I’ve been leaning towards iShowU HD, which works well enough but requires me to use FinalCut for editing the videos (which has been a nightmare so far, the video needing to be rendered before I can even see it due to some import/formatting nonsense). The other one I looked at was Camtasia, which only resulted in disappointment and an alarming amount of spam from them in my email. While the editing and such was fine, for some reason the mac version of Camtasia doesn’t seem to let you define the recording area beforehand, instead requiring you to crop it in the editor. Overall iShowU seems more convenient.
To summarize, new things are coming/came a couple days ago but didn’t get mentioned/ are in the process of becoming ready to come to the site!
