Tokyo Arcade: First Playable Build

Ok folks, sorry this took me all weekend but it’s been a bit crazy. I’ve actually had this ready since last night but I’ve been tortured trying to figure out how to install a WordPress plugin from the Unity3D company that would make it easier to embed games to WordPress. After a lot of time lost, I discovered that WordPress plugins can only be used with privately hosted blogs

Ok but enough excuses…and on to the caveats lol:

1. This is a very rough first build. It’s got just one collectible item, and well, that’s all. We’re still working on a whole XP system to unlock more collectibles, the gallery and the in-game mail system.

2. You will need to click or copy and paste the link below into a fresh new browser window (that’s because I couldn’t get the plugin working)

3. If you don’t have the Unity plugin already, it’s pretty simple to click to link and it will download for you.

4. Our game is still not optimized for file size so it’s about 25 mb in size and it’s hosted off our own personal Dropbox account….so if you’re on a drippy web connection, you might want to go take a pee while it’s downloading

Ok enough talk, here’s the link:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3801106/Crane%2010-15-2010/WebPlayer.html

Comments and suggestions would be really helpful for us at this point.

 

The Tokyo Arcade Gets Music, Props, and an Environment

Couple of big days and we were able to generate a bunch of the UI and environments for the Tokyo Arcade. It’s getting there! Kyle also did some music for the gameplay scene and Gordon parsed it to play portions according to the various states of the crane. He also put in cool rotational controls to let people view the game box from different angles.

 

a control system to rotate the view into the game box

 

Grant took a bunch of reference images of Tokyo pachinko arcades from places like Akihabara and started to create the interior of the arcade.

 

Japanese Pachinko Arcade

 

The first pass looked a bit too much like a casino so he went back to the drawing board and came back with this little piece of magic:

 

a view out of Unity with various environment props built for the Tokyo Arcade

 

I had some fun building the gallery scene and probably spent waaaay too much time on it. Actually we just wanted a simple interface to let players view all the various items they had collected out of the game. A simple display cabinet would probably have been fine but I was having too much fun with it and modeled out a whole zen garden lol. Anyway, here’s a quick look at it inside of Unity.

 

The scene view in Unity with a gallery containing various items that have been collected

 

I also did some sketches of the typical support staff you would expect to see in a Tokyo Arcade.

 

Greetings from Akihabara Japan

 

These are typical ‘maidens’ that you would see throughout the arcade area of Tokyo, as they hand out pamphlets, promotions, and little packages of facial tissue. We figured a little manga rendition couldn’t hurt. Here she is in both bitmap and then vector forms. Still need a name for her.

 

Manga girl says, 'you have a point there'

 

 

More serious manga girl now in vector art. She'll be our little helper to give instructions and encouragement.

 

Grant then went to work to put my manga girl to life through a 3D mesh with a great animation.

Manga Girl in the Tokyo Arcade Clapping Enthusiastically At Your Success and Masterful Skills Young Grasshoppa

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There’s a bunch more, but you get the idea of how things are coming together. Bottom line is that we’re getting pretty close to finishing up. Gonna try hard to get a preliminary build of just the basic gameplay online this weekend. It’ll still be pretty rough around the edges but at least our fans can have some fun with it. Will probably post it on the Unity forums too. So stay tuned!

-Ed

Tokyo Arcade

Well folks, the week is progressing nicely and we’ve got a bunch of items created that can be picked up by the crane. Oh, and we’ve decided to call the game Tokyo Arcade, in keeping with the Japanese arcade theme. So here’s the basic idea: as you might have guessed, it’s a crane game so the focal point of gameplay will be to try and pick up various items from the box. Of course, that might get boring quick, so we’ll mix items in the box so there are occasional ‘gifts.’ Just to give you some background, a moderate craze in Japan is to try to collect various trinkets in machines that give out ‘capsule prizes’ or ‘gashapon.’

Once you pick up a gashapon in the Tokyo Arcade, you’ll take delivery of a special item in your in-game mailbox. This might range from another item to try to pick up in the game box, or a consumable ‘turnkey.’ So what’s the deal with this turnkey?

 

This is a turnkey, not a turkey

 

 

ya...it's a pig

 

Well, as you collect new items from the box, they will appear in a separate gallery area. We’re envisioning the gallery to look like a bookshelf containing a display of all the cool collectibles you’ve captured. But alas, these are but inanimate objects…unless of course, you can wind your toy and make it move with your turnkey! So if you’ve managed to pick up enough capsule prizes, you’ll have a stash of keys to deploy on your little figurines. Better yet…when you have a turnkey in your toy, we’ll let the player click a button to send an image with a special message to your friends to show of your latest prize.

Here’s an oinker I modeled in about 8 minutes (and it shows).

And here’s a kitty that has an armature in the head portion to bob back and forth.

Kitty animation

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Of course, Grant did many other, more impressive objects. In the meantime we’re off to making environments for the arcade and the gallery tomorrow. If I have enough bandwidth I’ll put up another post with those goodies. And maybe…just maybe, we’ll have enough of this game roughed out by the weekend to put up a playable beta. We’ll see. As always, comments, critiques and suggestions welcome.

-Ed

A Claw Is Born…and Some Game Art

Well the claw aspect of the game has definitely proven to be challenging. We’re using the latest beta version of Unity and the physics are still a bit erratic. Whenever we would move the piston, the individual claw elements would fling themselves out in unpredictable directions. We decided someone might lose an eye playing the game that way, so we resorted to Blender to build out some of the claw mechanics. We started by creating a bone rigging of the claw mechanism and added various restraints to make sure the joints would flex like a real bone:

Then we added a some animations to drive the key bone elements to get the following result:

Crane_Movement

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Voila! a claw is born.

Also spent a bunch of time going through a variety of art styles and themes. It sounds a little crazy, but we’ve decided to go with a slightly retro, Japanese game-show aesthetic.

Here’s some artwork to show you the direction we’re headed.

 

Mister Pinchy and the Claw, depicted as a Japanese cartoon

 

 

The Claw zoning-in on a pig

 

And here’s the texture loaded into the game box.

Crane Game Box Textured

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Next on the list of things to do will be modeling a bunch of trinkets and toys to fish for in the box. We’re thinking we can have a lot of fun with that, given the Japanese game-show theme. Everything from little animals to godzillas and hello-kittys (with slight variations to avoid copyright issues of course ). Will also try to think of ideas to make the crane game even more engaging and fun. Lastly, Gordon is working on putting it all together…the box, the claw mechanism with any items to grab and some kind of scoring system (maybe experience points?). It’s all good.

-Ed

Crane Game Anyone?

Towards the end of the summer, Gordon and Henrik came out and we all headed to the New Jersey shore. Of course, we hit the boardwalk and went straight to the arcades. Nothing better than a good ‘ol fashioned crane game to siphon all your quarters so you could, at the end of a small fortune, get a scrunchy bunny!

It was so much fun that we’ve decided to make a crane game ourselves. It’s just a start but decided we’d target a few platforms. Definitely iPhone, iPad and Android seem obvious choices, but we’re also feeling like a crane game could be great for those couch-potato moments when you’re surfing Facebook and want to get even more vegetative…because thumbing through other people’s walls and friends photos is too draining. Ya. So, we’re thinking maybe Facebook game…we’ll see.

We started off by modeling out a claw mechanism:

 

Here's a first pass claw mechanism using Blender

 

So we started trying to work out the physics of this thing and it’s kind of tough. After looking at a bunch of reference images and videos, it looks like the mechanics of a claw involve a piston in the middle that drives a series of pivots. We’re gonna try and pull that together so we can have a truly physics-driven game. More to come on this one…

In the meantime, we went ahead and cobbled some primitive geometries together for a game box:

Cranebox1

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So we’re plowing ahead!

Next steps will be to settle on an artistic direction that will be fun….carnivals, beach, boardwalk, arcade…all imagery to take into consideration. Suggestions welcome