Spring dampers

The latest GearBlocks demo build now has coil-over spring dampers that can be used to build all kinds of suspension for your vehicles!  The spring rate and damping can be adjusted through the part behaviour menu (accessed in the usual way, hover over and hold Shift + E).

I had the physics side working nicely early on, but it took a while to figure out the best way to present the spring / damper functionality to the player, within the constraints of my construction system.  In the end I decided to have two parts, a “barrel” and a “piston” that the player fits together to form the spring damper unit.  Originally I was hoping to provide a pre-assembled unit to avoid making the player do this, but it would have required too many changes to the construction system to allow for “multi-element” parts.  Anyway, this way allows the barrel and piston to be attached in different orientations which is a bonus.

Now, actually using the spring dampers for something useful (like car suspension) might not be immediately obvious, so I’ll make a video soon to go over this.

Ball and Socket joints, CV joints

I have also just finished working on adding a whole new set of connecting joints to the game.  There are ball and socket connectors that snap together and can attach to axles or blocks.  They allow the connected parts to rotate through all three axes, and are essential for building a proper steering mechanism with a vehicle that has suspension, but they have many other uses too.

I’ve also added constant velocity joints, which attach axles together and allow rotational drive to be transmitted through changing angles.  These are useful for building drive shafts for vehicles with suspension, and / or front wheel drive (or four wheel drive).

These parts are not available in the demo, as I’m keeping them back for the full game.  I’ll be doing a video on these too though, to show how they can be used, it can get pretty complex!

Full game features

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on some new features: the challenge game mode and construction damage.  These won’t be in the demo (got to hold some things back for the full game!) but I thought I’d talk about them so you know what I’ve been working on.

Right now the challenge mode just consists of built in saved games that you can choose from as starting scenarios.  The plan is to extend this to add various possible constraints (e.g. a limited part budget) and scoring / win criteria.  Eventually there will be a system where you earn points by completing challenges to unlock later, more advanced challenges.  There’s still a long way to go on this feature!

I’ve also been working on my first attempt at a damage system.  Each attachment starts with an initial “integrity” level based on the material strength of the two parts it joins.  When a construction sustains impact, damage is propagated to its attachments, reducing their integrity level.  Once an attachment’s integrity reaches zero it is deleted, causing parts of the construction to break off.  Note that the parts themselves don’t get damaged or destroyed, only attachments; I decided to do it this way for simplicity.

UI improvements and bug fixes

There are still plenty of new things in the demo though, I have made some UI improvements (animated loading screen, saved game images, and other tweaks), plus a bunch of bug fixes.  I’ll keep continuing to update the demo, wherever I improve or bug fix an existing feature.  I’ll still be adding one or two new parts to the demo as well!

Getting the word out

I’ve now created an Indie DB page for GearBlocks, from now on I’ll be hosting the demo builds there rather than on Dropbox.  I’ve also created Greenlight Concepts and Facebook pages for the game.

• http://www.indiedb.com/games/gearblocks
• http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=415701438
• https://www.facebook.com/gearblocks

I’ve also been playing around with a logo for the game, which was fun I have to say!

Latest build

In the latest demo build, I’ve enabled the new save game system that I mentioned in a previous post.  As well as being able to save your constructions, this also provides a rudimentary way of sharing them with your friends. Saved games are stored as files in the SaveGames directory in the GearBlocksDemo folder (i.e. right next to the executable, you can create it if it doesn’t already exist). You can load up someone else’s saved game by copying their file into this directory.

GearBlocks

Well, my as yet unnamed game now has a title – GearBlocks.  It was quite hard to think up a name that summed up the game in some way, as well as being short, easy to remember, and not already in use.  In the end I had to just pick something and go with it!

Full vs. demo builds

I’ve now set up a simple build pipeline that lets me build demo or full versions of the game.  As I add more stuff to the game, this will allow me to easily exclude certain features or content from the demo.

Build versioning

Builds of the game are now versioned, and the version number is shown in the game.  This means I can release standalone builds of the game on a regular basis from now on, yay!

Phasing out the web player

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/157530041/GearBlocksDemo.html

For now the web player build is still available at the link above.  I think I’m going to stop bothering with it soon though, and just release the standalone version, as there are starting to be too many difficulties with it:-

• The new save game system doesn’t work due to the .NET serialization problems I mentioned in the last post.

• It seems getting the .NET assembly version isn’t supported due to the web player sand-boxing, and I need this for showing the build version in game.

• For some reason Unity is now always building the web player as a “development build”, even when this build setting is turned off.

Save game system overhaul

Over the last week I have completely reworked the save / load system.  Previously I was using Unity’s PlayerPrefs to save game state into, which was only ever a temporary solution.  The PlayerPrefs are only intended for small amounts of player settings data, not for save games.

Now I serialize everything into a single binary file per save game (into a local “SaveGames” directory).  This does away with the old fixed slot based system and allows you to name your save games and have as many of them as you want.

This works great for the standalone build, but the Unity web player doesn’t allow file IO for obvious reasons.  So for the web player I tried saving the binary data into PlayerPrefs (much like I used to do with the old save game system).  This works fine, however the .NET serialization I’m now using doesn’t seem to work in the web player (deserialization fails with a FieldAccessException for some reason).  I don’t have time to look at this right now, so I’ve had to disable save / load in the web player for now.