wow, 7dfps was awesome

In seven days we managed to put out an action fps in unity called transaparencies. My original idea for a 7dfps game was a first person take on Hotline Miami's gameplay, requiring a seemingly top-down view in fast improvisation, which ended up in first person with transparent walls to see the whole level. We ended the week with 7 weapons, 2 enemies, and 20 levels, and an almost bug-free finished game: http://7dfps.com/?action=games&id=78. (try and beat it! It's hard!)
The transparent walls were the first issue to deal with. I had imagined custom shaders that rendered things behind walls completely differently so the room you were in was obvious. This was way beyond me, let alone in just 7 days. The simple solution was semi-transparent walls with a solid coloured floor, in very blocky shaped rooms and corridors. Something behind one wall will be shaded by the wall a little bit, and something behind two walls shaded twice as much. With the floor plan obvious, it was actually pretty easy to see your way around the whole level.
Our team started as 2 coders, plus one artist, plus me. The two coders were unfortunately completely occupied and couldn't help. I ended up coding the whole thing myself, something very new to me. hjaarnio worked specifically on art assets. Though most of his days were busy, in his free time he modeled, rigged and animated the two characters. Souler did the concept for the second character, though we didn't have time or spare triangles to accommodate all the details in his awesome drawings. In order to keep the game's visuals less simple, the levels had no detail to them; extra geometry would only add confusion to the already confusing transparency. Even the doors and teleports added later were simple rectangular prisms. So though I had come into this planning on doing nothing but art assets and working with someone else coding, I ended up writing the entire thing myself, something I hadn't even thought in my ability. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.
We are going to continue to develop this game. First and foremost, the AI needs a LOT of help. There is no node system. There is barely and randomness to their behaviour. They're not all that fun to play against in some cases. Other additions to the game will be something like turrets, and harder to kill boss-like enemies, maybe a few guns, and definitely an FAQ on guns and gameplay. We are going to continue our group development of other game ideas (you can read about a few that we've started on our website) but should start the upgrade of Transparencies soon-ish. As always, you can chat with us at #fuzzy on chat.freenode.net (IRC).
IDubbbz's gameplay video review of Transparencies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7OoeAhg-CE

7 hour fps challenge, and the current 7 day jam

This year, 7dfps  added a new, short precursor challenge: make an fps in 7 hours, as opposed to the usual 7 days. We had to try.

We ended up creating the game locusts. We couldn't manage finishing it in 7 hours. Locusts was created in 14 hours total, after several complications. But it was fun. For the most part, coding it was completely new to me. I had to learn a lot as I put it together. Most of the code would probably turn your hair grey, some parts of it, like the enemy attacks testing to see if they hit the player, are complete workarounds ignoring the actually useful systems I learned about later. The last 2 hours of dev I was simply trying to fix my horrid script that ended up allowing the player to kill enemies, but only on the order they spawned.

I'm glad we participated in the 7hfps, if only to learn and not repeat the mistakes during the valuable 7 days we have now.

One of the things we learned about was communication. We have 4 members of our team working on our 7dfps game, transparencies. Hjaarnio is making art assets in Blender, while BeardlessOne and SomeKittens are writing scripts. I'm jumping around between both sides of development. We aim to make an fps that plays like a top-down shooter, inspired by Hotline Miami. The walls are transparent, to attack enemies with planned out timing, thrown weapons stun enemies, ammo is short and you've gotta move quickly. Progress is going good and I can't wait to see what everyone else has been working on.

To update what we've been doing:
Some Kittens is still fighting comcast to actually install the internet he was supposed to get from them a long time ago.
Fried has been making awesome music and concept art for impforest.
I have been turning said concept art into 3d for impforest.
Our new member, AssortedTrailmix, is a unity coder and is currently developing THWAP.

Impforest is going to be on the pre-development shelf for awhile, there's a ton we need to make, do, and think about before we start putting it together. It's gonna be a big game.

frusration-style learning

So I've started learning unity, both to speed up the process of THWAP (the art assets are pretty much complete) and to gain new understanding that'll help even on the art side of projects.

The learning process has been frustration-style. Trying, failing, looking looking looking, trying and failing again, until i get something right. There's all these little things in unity that you just have to know, and I haven't found a good source for all of those little things explained at once in a good way. For instance, in order to actually play the animations you imported, you have to change the animation style from default. This is because of the new way unity animates things, the default doesn't actually play imported animations as far as I can tell. (I'm happy animating in blender).

I also managed to crash Unity, the engine itself, with a dumb while loop. And the whole time I was trying to fix it, I thought the bone scaling in the animation was crashing it. Or the mousedown. Or maybe because the .blend file was 666 kb. Who knew, it was the dumb while loop with no end!

And just for fun, here's mob1, terrified and leaning backwards on the floor because i haven't restricted the axis of the lookat yet:

Welcome to Fuzzy - Teh_Bucket

Hi, I'm Teh_Bucket, the artsy half of Fuzzy Games. My brother and I have finally started to work towards our dream of creating video games, starting with TWHAP. A few years ago I finally began learning to use Blender with the help of countless tutorials and helpful IRC'ers. Since then I've been doing all kinds of independent study, including the failed game project Wule, a conversion mod I tried to do all on my own. Other one-man projects are on my youtube channel.

In Fuzzy Games, I hope to create much better things by focusing on what I do well and leaving others up to the rest. Instead of throwing together a glitchy mess like Wule, I will be working with SomeKittens, the code side of the team to create games altogether better. We are also working with other artists to do small jobs such as concept art to improve the overall quality of the art I'll be making.

THWAP is a project we started because our original idea for a game was way too large to work with. A minimalistic fast-paced fps with a specific set of renewable weapons, THWAP will be a free-to-play game that will hopefully get our name and reputation out. I decided to go simple with the graphics. Characters are largely geometric, with simple, mostly IK controlled rigs, and are entirely shadeless. Screenshots can be found here, and just for fun, here's me screwing around while procrastinating animation :P