Dead Metal Punks/Masters - Final

It's over! Dead Metal Punks never got to where I actually wanted it to be and there were a few factors involved in its demise. First off motivation started to really fall the further into the summer it got, a lot of the work basically went unseen/uncritisized which made it much more difficult to continue forwards with the project. Even having a team of 2-4 people would have alleviated most of this since there would be ideas being made and other views on building the game. 

Secondly it got to a point where I felt that I was getting stuck in the one artstyle and this also added to the motivation killing. This was further added to when I would have to put 2 weeks of work aside to do art tests for jobs then come back to something that I felt was growing a bit stale. To be honest a lot of time was taken up by art tests and travelling to interviews/working (Once I had a job).

If I could go back on it and get a small team together and get some funding I genuinely think that the game would have met my expectations, at least the final project is something I will look back on as a great experience and a lot of the modelling knowledge I found has been incredibly useful in an actual workplace.

Onto the final build, I got almost everything done in the final level (Which is really 5 smaller levels merged together) aside from a few bugs and missing sound effects. It was a tougher job that originally expected as a tonne of glitches started appearing when I had to swap between both gameplay modes dynamically. In hindsight I should have just stuck with a single gameplay mode and continued improving that. 

The tank mode is superior in my opinion because the camera controls the pace of the gameplay and the large amount of screen space made for some really nice environments and particle effects. On the other hand I like the character sections for the excuse of creating character models and getting some really useful experience creating rigs and animating. I should have just kept characters for cut scenes or menus though it would have saved a lot of time as the everything needed to be much more complex. The AI was 'smarter', the level design required a lot of blocking out, the characters took a lot longer to make, the environments had to be more detailed and there was a tonne of animation. In the tank levels a lot of these things were not needed because of the distance and enemies like planes not needing actual animation.

Video ( The recording software broke near the end so the victory screen is cut out, I didn't want to risk not having a video uploaded in time) -

In summary, it was lot of fun to create and forced me to explore a lot of things I didn't know about creating games. Even though I know its not where I wanted it to be I am quite happy that it even works in the first place and I know that small game projects are not out of reach as long as I don't get too crazy with what I want to do. Also in the end although a lot of the content never got into the project, every enemy, costume and boss design is concepted to show what it could have been like and there are very few blank holes in that side of things. Finally, this experience went beyond what I thought I would have been able to do in a year and it still turned out much better than group projects I have spent a year on so maybe over the next few years I will actually finish creating a game as a solo developer.

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 17 Listotron + Other work

Finished Listotron's model now and fulled rigged it to fit with the old animations.

Aside from working on Dead Metal Punks I have taked some time to start other projects because I don't want to get stuck in the style and am still looking to improve other aspects of my work. The first is day one sculpt of a FF12 character and I plan on continuing this whenever I feel I need a break from DMP. The second is a painting as I haven't doen anything realistic in a while so I decided to have a go at a vehicle painting.

Dead Metal Punks - Enemy Clarity

To have a little break from modelling I decided to try and implement enemy outlines. It was quite simple in the end as I thankfully had the custom depth channel free of processes so I can just tag all enemys with that and it works perfectly.

At a later date I will add some sliders to the options menu to change the thickness and colour of them so it can be tuned to personal preference.

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 16 Concord Tanks

Created the concord tank model and uv mapped/textured it. 

At the moment I am having a bit of a dilema about creating some of the models. I want to make them look super nice and high poly but the game just doesnt need that high a level of detail on most things and if I did it would be a waste of time and resources. With this and the helicopter I tried to find a middle balance where the models look decent at a close range and work great at a distance (Since this is all that matters in game). 

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 15

Helicopter is now an actual model instead of a dynameshed highpoly. Only gave it two colour varients since they will be less common than planes so it will be less noticable.

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 14

Finished lighting changes now. I ended up adding some very slight fog to increase the depth of distant objects and changed a lot of the interior lighting to give more varity in hues.

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 13

All building sections for the level is done now! A lot of the main structures will be used in other levels with different colours so that should improve itteration time. Now that the final textured assets are in I can give some more focus to the lighting, which is what I will be doing for the next post.

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 12

I had a little break over the past 2 weeks. Obviously this shortens the time I have but I needed a break, anyway after more extensive testing the level layout is working well. In my testing I got to the end of the level at 17 minutes and 36 seconds so this is acceptable in terms of length. 

During the testing I did make a few changes, first Listotrons bullets have a much larger chance of being red and the bounce bullets that appear at 50% have increased in speed. The positioning of enemies in Lily's section have been paced out a little more to stop overwhelming numbers.

Finally I have started proper texturing of assets. First off just to get back into the swing of things I went all out on the shuttle texturing, it still keeps in theme using the greens and oranges common in the rest of the Concord army. It turned out pretty well so I decided on getting a pretty shot of it with ingame background.

I finished 2 other pieces as well. The first is a section of the boss rooms, this will be duplicated and flipped to make the entire boss room symmetrical. The second piece is part of the explosive doors, I will use this in an earlier level too so when it comes to this one the player will know what it does.

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 11

Everything on the level is now populated and tested. For the second Lily section I wanted to use the platforming and narrow spaces to force the player to be accurate, so in this section they are given a sniper to start with and a much smaller number of enemies to contend with. The sniper will instantly kill any enemies but will be blocked by bullets so accuracy is key, unlike the rocket launcher which destroys projectiles it passes through on the way to its target. 

On the return section the player is given a new set of ammo for the sniper and a rocket launcher, the addition of a rocket launcher on the way back will make it a much quicker to get back for the final section of the level. 

Level lighting is also pretty much done now, still need to texture assets though.

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 10

Lily's second section is now finished. Only populating and some pace testing to go and all sections are complete. In this section I played around with some more verticallity in the level design. If the player fails the moving platform sections then they will drop into a lower area that is full of spike traps and will have some extra enemies in it. The only problem with this section is that on the way back the player is forced to do the platform section well, but it's the last level so they should be expected to get things right.

This being completed means I can move on to make some assets and texture all the current ones. It might take a while though in the end, just because I have to model and texture all the enemies as well (7 New in total)

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 9

Mining drone enemies are now finished. They work in a similar way to the helicopters but with some extra complexity. First they move to various locations around the player but do not constantly move with the player like the helicopter. Also they will occasionally boost higher into the air to dodge projectiles. They have a relatively low healthpool of 10.

Now that these are finished Lily's first section has been fleshed out with hordes of them and a few soldiers mixed in. Since this is the final level and it needs to be fast the player is given a rocket launcher and machine gun at the start of the section, a poorly hidden shotgun at the midpoint and an additional rocket laucher at the core.

The amount of Drones makes it still have some challenge even with all this firepower because there is a lot of projectiles coming at the player from various angles. The way back to the exit is a bit less packed with enemies so the weapons the player gained should all be near empty for the next section.

Finally I have started expanding the amount of models in the scenery, these models are basically complete in terms of UV mapping and Lightmapping. Also made some odd materials to make the Powercore look interesting.

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 8

Been a while since I've updated as I have been doing a lot of little things that were not worth a full post. 

First, the major change, is that the entire level is now populated on the tank side and been tested several times using a set of different tank configurations. This level is very difficult but with upgrades I have managed to get through on normal difficulty taking very little hits. Testing this level is taking a lot of time though since there is lots of sections and little bugs that require tweaking.

Some new little bits were added though for quality of life. Since the tank needs the choice to buy lives before a boss I have to put the repair stations infront of said bosses, but if the player survives on very low lives then they are heavily punished in the next tank section. To make it fair, whilst in the lily section the tank finds out how many lives it has left. If it is less than 4 then it's lives are bumped upto that number, doing it this way only helps players who didn't get through unscathed.

This is the first Lily section, a lot of the assets in this are from the first level. This shouldnt be a problem though since they wont be used much in the middle levels. This is timed at around 1 minute per direction, so is about right for what is required. 

To get this section to go backwards I had to delve into using level streaming to add new assets and camera controls when the player destroys the core. This also unloads certain controls that were used to go forwards.

This level has taked too long at this point. I'm not too worried though as I would rather have a well tested and working final level than rush one out that is crap. I should be able to gain a bit of time back on some of the other levels though due to having a lot of the enemies coding out of the way and when this level is finished a lot of large building assets to use in some of the other levels. 

Finally, although this feels like it has taken 4 weeks to get the level to this point thats not really true as I have done other important things that took a lot of time (Making all the tank customisation and adding it all to the save fuctions, etc). Hopefully this level will be done and dusted by the end of this week and only missing a possible cutscene for the ending of the game (That will be done if I have time).

Dead Metal Punks - Tank Final Customisation Part 2

All the coding for the customisation is finished. All 10 additional upgrade effects work seemlessly between gameplay and static versions of the tank. To speed up the process of creation I had every single one activated during inital coding, this made the tank insanely powerful and able to kill almost any standard enemy instantly. 

Some of the cannon types had to have some extra parameters added depending on upgrades too. Mainly it was the gattling gun with the firing speed boost, this weapon was shooting so many bullets that it could also kill any standard enemy instantly. To combat this problem, I made it so when it is boosted the cone of fire is 3 times larger (up from 7 to 21) and reduced the damage by 20%. These two changes kept it more inline with its base killing speed but gives the player a huge cone of bullets that can easily hit more than one target.

Also I have added the enemy spawning to Omegabot's battle. In the end I only used droppods so that no major animation work would have to be done to open walls to spawn tanks etc.

Dead Metal Punks - Tank Final Customisation Part 1

Since I know I need the tank to be at a full power situation to balance the final level correctly, this is the best time to get all of the tank customisation done. In terms of coding its all repeating what I have already done but on a larger scale. To make it so I didn't have to backtrack or waste time during testing I built rough models of all the mods, adding all of them to the tank at the same time made sure that all of the models don't clip anything regardless of what uther upgrades the player has. 

The player will only have a maximum of 3 mods displayed at any one time, each residing in a catagory; Offence, Defence and Overload Weapon (Special). The only things that clip over each other are the Special weapons but since only one will ever exist there is no problems.

 All mods enabled with the Nuclear Morter special.

All mods enabled with the missile barrage special (The special I have had in the game since the begining)

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 7

First off I have changed some visual aspects of the player base as I really couldn't stand the walls. 

Here is some comparison shots of the the before (Top) and after (Bottom), I thought the bright walls were really messing with the contrast of the scene and made things less focused. I would have just darkened them textures but they still didnt look right as they were too chaotic to look correct. 

Aside from that change, I have added a lot more details to the mess on the floor, there are a lot of different decal textures including oil, water, sand, dirt and paint. I have added a light fog to push the depth of the scene and under the central ladder I have added some fake lighting gradients to darken the area (The lighting build always evenly lit that section) which again focuses the scene more. Finally, the spotlights all down the walls are now much sharper and also they contrast better with the slightly blue walls.

Even though the UI is the testing version in the old image the rest is how it looked until the changes.

Since I have all the enemy AI for this level now I went about doing some artistic refinements. The droppod turrets now have a second varient to their spawners that includes a puncture point that explodes open when the droppod crashes through it. This makes it look much better when the droppod is crashing though a building.

Also improved a few lightmaps for the spacestation meshes, there is now no odd black line inbetween some of the meshes so the modular pieces now fit seemlessly together.

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 6 Helicopters,Tanks, Drop pods and new controls

The Enemy Tanks and Drop Pods are finished. In terms of coding they were pretty simple in comparison to the helicopter, but to get them looking like I wanted I had to do some rigs/animations for them. The rigs are set up in a way that will let me put the finished model onto them very easy. Whilst creating these I decided to add more feedback to kills and attacks, killing any of these enemies will cause screen shaking, this has different intensities depending on the enemy and I will be incorporating it into all prevous enemies.

Aside from that I decided to do a complete overhaul of the players tank. I have been having a few issues with in since the early days, sometimes it would skip inputs or not go at the correct speed and just felt very floaty. I have still kept as much of the characteristics of the movement as possible but everything feels a lot sharper and responsive, this means I can speed up some elements of the gameplay without the player feeling that it was the controls fault that they got hit. Furthermore I have made it so the values are a lot easier to manage and are consistent, this will make possible power ups a much more painless process to implement.

One of the best examples of the problems with the old way is, when being fired at from above, if the player needs to swap the direction they are moving to dodge the tank would hang for a second and either force them to jump or take the hit. The direction swap is instant now so this is a thing of the past.

Next, I have decided to increase all of the scrap gains by 10 times. This is because originally using 1 per piece worked, but when introducing difficulty modifers it was difficult to increase or decreare rewards. For example if the player is playing on hard with all modifiers at max then that would be a 250% gain, which rounded up to 3, if they had anything lower than that percentage they would get 2 instead. Also making the game easier (max -60%) the player would still earn 1 as a minimum. 10 is a really easy number to work with on this since all changes will be a minimum of 10%. Also all shop items have scales to equal values.

Additionally, I have changed the rocket special ability to fire from the tank instead of the sky and make the arcs of fire a lot more varied. This was changed for two reasons, first I would be unable to do any indoor levels with the tank as that skill just wouldn't work or make sense. Second, the skill is more rewarding the more risk the player is willing to take now. At a long range it is a huge area of fire, but if the player gets close to something they can get a large amount of damage focused into a 3 second burst. 

Finally, a video showing the 3 enemys complete with sound and the tightened controls. 

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 5

Helicopter AI is now complete. This became a lot easier than originally thought due to it using very similar techniques to Omegabot, still took a few hours to put together correctly though. 

Also I wanted it so that multiple helicopters can work together on screen without stacking onto of each other, I did this by adding height variables into the spawners so I can control where each helicopter is located in the layers. For example, if 3 helicopters spawn, second will spawn 400 units lower and the third will spawn 800 units lower. This means that even if they all decide to go to the same point they will not stack into each other.

In the image is 4 spawned helicopters all manovering independently and firing homing rockets towards the player. These enemies are supposed to be quite rare so they have an intimidating amount of power and decent health. Also to note in this image, I have reworked the rocket trails/explosions to look much better and efficent.

As a little extra from this level, this is the current backdrop with a chunk of the level in the foreground. I know that coloured gas clouds shouldnt really be here but I think it is much more interesting with animated clouds swarming around the starstation. 

There is 2 layers of gas clouds in additive mode so they give a clean look as they rotate around one another and a long distance layer of stars with a moving mask to make them flicker in and out. The spacestation, earth and sun are full models and the earth uses an emissive fresnel layer to give it a fake atmosphere.

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 4 + Greenlight

Dead Metal Punks offically got through greenlight in the last few days so the game can be published on steam!

Omegabots main mechanics are finished. After 2 days of not being able to do anything to do a broken harddrive I managed to get back to creating the bosses. Omegabot is now only missing the spawning enemies because some of them dont exist yet. At the moment I am thinking of just having it spawn enemy tanks and droppod turrets, so that shouldn't pose too much of a headache.

Other than that I have made the character switching mechanic more robust and made it so that it removes/changes aspects of the level that the player cant see whilst in the other section. For example, when in lilys first section it will delete the righthand door that was preventing the player progressing in the tank section. 

The only things left to do before I can show the prototype version of this level are:

1. Helicopter Basic Enemy AI
2. MiniTank Basic Enemy AI
3. Droppod Turret Enemy AI
4. Mining Drone Enemy AI
5. Lilys section testing 
6. Expoding Cores at the end of Lily Sections.
7. Populating Areas

The only difficult part of this could possibly be the helicopter AI and making it follow the player properly whilst weaving around.

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 3

Listotron is now completely working. It turned out to be a lot more work than previously thought as I had to create a lot of extra code so that everything flows correctly. I am an hour over my 16 hour estimate for doing the 3 bosses of this level, hopefully Omegabot is less time consuming. I will show a video soon, but I'll show all 3 bosses in one go to save time.

At the moment Listotron is very difficult due to testing it with the base weapon and no accessory power ups. This is ok for now as I can re-balance the numbers later when I have a something in each power up slot on the tank. After I have finished this Final level to a nice level of polish I will then work on getting atleast 1 power up for each slot functional and balance the bosses with them equipped (Also a better weapon equipped).

Dead Metal Punks - Level 13 Concord Starstation Part 2

After a bit more work on making the level flow a bit more interesting I have started on the boss battle sections. Since there is technically 3 it is a lot of work. 

I started off with the rock paper scissors section and that took a few hours to get working consistently and it now has a fully animated hand doing the movements etc. All it really needs now is nice models for the choice boxes and some sort of defeat animation where it opens the path to the escape pod.

I have also started work on Listotron's battle. This one turned out a little tough as I have to do a lot of small bits to make it work properly and then transfer those functions between 7 different sets of models. At the moment I have gotten to a point whilst testing where the bot will swap perfectly between 2 of the points, so it should be simple enough copying this code to the other 5 sets.