Pinstripes

Halifax has a monthly meetup called the "Halifax Game Collective," where local game developers discuss ideas and collaborate on projects. There is a bi-monthly pageant, where members have one month to create and present a game based on a theme.

From January to February, the theme was "Ghost Stories," and I made a game called "Pinstripes." (Here's a clip from the presentation, courtesy of Adam Hartling: HGC Ghost Story Pageant)

You can play a demo of the game here:

CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE COOL GAME

(Please note: the Unity Player does not run in Google Chrome.)

The link above will take you the level I presented at the "Ghost Stories" pageant. Everything you see was made by me, from scratch, in about 30 days; including all art, animations, and programming. (I was also working full-time, so most of the work was done between 10pm and 3am.) This level was made to demonstrate all of the game's content, so the puzzle is fairly complicated, and makes for a poor tutorial.

The controls are:

A and D, or Left and Right, to run,
W or Up to Jump,
Space bar to possess or eject from a host,
E to throw switches,
Shift to walk, instead of run
Ctrl to shoot the guard's gun (This is a bad idea, but fun).

How to play:

You are a ghost, called Jimmy Pinstripes, trying to escape the prison where you died.

You do this by jumping from body to body, using different hosts to accomplish different tasks. Possessing a guard lets you open doors, for example.

While possessing a prisoner lets you use secret tunnels.

Of course, guards shoot prisoners on sight.

And if Jimmy's host dies, so does Jimmy.

Essentially, the game is a puzzle, based on learning a set of rules through trial and error. The rules for this demo level are:

-Jimmy can walk through bars, and falls through grates,
-Jimmy is pushed upward by fans,
-Jimmy cannot walk through bright lights,
-If Jimmy's host dies, so does Jimmy,
-Guards can open doors,
-Prisoners can use secret tunnels, hidden behind posters,
-Guards shoot prisoners on sight,
-Lightning is dangerous.

All of the characters are made from line renderers, which are flat planes that always face the camera. These lines are bound by a script to a 3d skeleton, which allows me to make complex animations. Object rotations are simulated using texture offsets, and depth is simulated using a tint color where necessary.

That isn't a very efficient way to make characters, but I really liked the effect, and I found the mechanical limitations lead to a compelling art style.

I will add a link to the Pinstripes demo on the top bar, and post content updates when I can.

Thanks for reading, happy jailbreaking everybody!

Pat's Dice

Before I finally go to bed, one more exciting announcement:

A while back I made a virtual dice simulator named "Pat's Dice" (After the alchemist character I was playing in a dungeons and dragons campaign.) to teach myself some javascripting in Unity.

It turned out to be quite an undertaking, but having no scripting experience at all I learned a lot of fundamental concepts and started to get pretty comfortable with the process (Though my workflow still involves long talks with my friend Google).

My basic goal was to create a dice simulator that was driven by a physics engine but still perfectly randomized. The dice all spawn with randomized velocity and starting angle, and some custom scripts determine which side is facing up and feed that number into the GUITexts following the dice. Those numbers then get fed into the appropriate totals.

There was a lot of making arrays and parsing strings into integers and back again; but I'm proud of the accomplishment, since mere months ago I didn't know any of those terms. Most recently, along with some spit and polish on the art, I added the most-requested feature of launching multiple dice at once; as determined by the up/down arrow buttons.

Long story short: you should check it out. You can click here, or just click the page link at the top of the blog.

And with that, I'm off to make some pretense that I am not completely nocturnal. Later!

-alex

UPDATE: After some excellent bug testing by my friend Jeff, I have updated the html frame to extend for larger font sizes. If yours wasn't working, try it out now.