[Dev Log] The Eyes In Search of Paradise

[coughlinjon]

My entry for Wizard Jam X is a nostalgia trip to show my appreciation for this community. I don't have time to make something totally unique for this jam, so I am using Wizard Jam X to expand on some aspects of the Roger Meatball engine (RogerMeatball.com is the flight sim engine I have been developing for the past year) that I need to address anyways; I have treated every Wizard Jam as an emotional carrot for developing a specific set of game development skills, so this project fits with that trend.

 

Pitch

Fly around the world and pick up characters from past Wizard Jam games. Bring the characters to Paradise. Celebrate.

 

Design

You will pilot a large passenger plane in the Roger Meatball engine and fly over a stylized map of the full world. There will be landing strips placed at the home coordinates of fellow Wizard Jam contributors where you may land to pick up the characters from their games. With all characters aboard you will set out for Paradise. To pass the time you can cycle through Idle Thumbs audio content on your radio, and you can walk around the passenger cabin of your plane to say hello to characters (this bit is ambitious, but I love it).

 

Features for this game I can leverage in Roger Meatball?

• Huge world - I don't yet have the tech in RM to do big worlds
• Terrain design - I'm really bad at this right now, but hopefully making the whole globe polishes my skills a bit
• A big, new plane (Roger Meatball only has one plane right now)
• Live radio: most of the hooks are in place, but I haven't finished a radio system yet
• Animated characters in-engine: I have not pulled my full character animations into RM yet
• Moving around the cabin (I doubt I get this feature implemented)

 

I will be streaming development at twitch.tv/JonMakesGames and I did my first stream this morning: 

 

 

 

[z_bill]

Great! We're all wrapping up our oevres. This is so inspiring and bittersweet!

 

How many are in the "Eyes of" series at this point?

[coughlinjon]

  On 1/10/2020 at 6:07 PM, z_bill said:

Great! We're all wrapping up our oevres. This is so inspiring and bittersweet!

 

How many are in the "Eyes of" series at this point?

 

This will be the fourth 

[nkornek]

Love how so many people are paying homage to Wizard Jam for this final jamming.

 

If you need any sprites or anything from past Wizard Jam games I've worked on to include as passengers and stuff let me know. I think I still have those Rich Uncle Cool Uncle Megaman sprites around somewhere...

[coughlinjon]

  On 1/10/2020 at 7:05 PM, nkornek said:

If you need any sprites or anything from past Wizard Jam games I've worked on to include as passengers and stuff let me know. I think I still have those Rich Uncle Cool Uncle Megaman sprites around somewhere...

 

Absolutely! Anything you'd like to consider a character  I also need your home town/country

[brendonsmall]

[Henke]

Very cool!  

 

This sounds fun, and a good re-use the RM tech. Those clouds look gorgeous.

 

I could send you a model of the guy from A Good One, if you want. Do you need him posed as sitting in an airplane seat? Or are all the characters just hanging out in the cargo hold or whatever? Hell, maybe Tennis Toad should come along for the ride? 

[coughlinjon]

  On 1/11/2020 at 5:42 PM, Henke said:

 

I could send you a model of the guy from A Good One, if you want. Do you need him posed as sitting in an airplane seat? Or are all the characters just hanging out in the cargo hold or whatever? Hell, maybe Tennis Toad should come along for the ride? 

 

Yeah, send me whomever you would like. And Tennis Toad is 100% going to be in the game

[Travis]

I've been wanting my Humpty Dumpty French revolutionaries to be in something else!

 

This is my sort of game, for sure.

[brendonsmall]

Hey Jon, I've got a couple of MBs of models for use if you'd like them. Includes my beloved Taxi Cab and some related trappings: 

 

WJModels.zip

[coughlinjon]

This morning I added radio stations the player can tune. 

[keibo]

That is awesome, love that you've added a radio station too!

[coughlinjon]

Hello World for the Catalina I downloaded and started modifying in Blender  

 

[brendonsmall]

Niiiiice!

[coughlinjon]

Meet your pilots

[coughlinjon]

I have decided to rebuild the PBY Catalina model from scratch. Originally, I downloaded a .3ds file I found online, but after toying with its mesh for a while, trying to get something I like and something inside which I can build a cabin, I figured this whole process will go faster if I start clean. 

Here is the nasty mesh I started with on the internet: 

 

And Here is the beginning of a mesh that I'm starting from scratch and building in the way an actual airplane is constructed (more like an extruded tube). I'm not a 3D modeler, so please excuse my poor art, but I should walk away with something that is both easier to work with in game, easier to build a cabin for, and looks more like an actual airplane

 

 

 

I would like to convince myself that I'm only doing this because I will be adding the Catalina permanently to Roger Meatball after this jam (which I will), but the more honest statement is that I would likely do this no matter what because I have made almost all my art from scratch for every WJ project I have ever done. I just can't convince myself to use many assets I download as a shortcut because I think there's something wrong with my brain. 

 

lol See you on the other side of all this modeling nonsense.

[brendonsmall]

wow, the new model does look a lot cleaner. Looking forward to seeing the finished product!

[coughlinjon]

Progress: 

[coughlinjon]

Almost done with the essential modeling

 

[brendonsmall]

[RKSanders]

Looking good! I used to play flying sims all the time when I was a teenager. It's going to be fun to jump in one again!

 

If you need some more characters, here's the player character from my Wizard Jam 9 entry: Shoehorned.

shoehorned_character.unitypackage

 

  On 1/10/2020 at 10:33 PM, coughlinjon said:

 

I also need your home town/country

And I'm in Kansas City, USA.