OMG Pirates!

http://toucharcade.com/2009/11/19/omg-pirates-coming-from-zombieville-usa-creators/

Shamelessly plugging our new game coming out soon!

 

OMG looks awesome !

insta-buy as soon as it hits the store

 

Plug away!

I just saw it on toucharcade and promptly came over here to post, I guess yah beat me. Keep up the work man!

- Matt

 

Can you tell us about the making of the game. Do you use the sprite manager class, orthographic camera, character controller ?
I want to know your technique. Thanks

 

We didn't use sprite manager, we used mostly skinned meshes and cutout alpha shaders (with the occasional alpha blended element like the HUD or drop shadows beneath characters. Animation is achieved by sliding/rotating body parts around like paper dolls in our 3d app, like Zombieville. This affords us with a high degree of fluidity without the need for enormous memory-hogging sprite sheets. However, when we need a character to strike a pose that cannot be achieved simply by rotating parts of a single drawing, we re-drew the character, cut them up again, and swap to that texture at runtime. The player uses over a dozen such distinct drawings (poses) which we can swap to as needed, and then apply further animation from there. The end result is a smooth and lively style which we're pretty proud of.

Orthographic cameras were not used, but rather a perspective camera positioned very very far away with a narrow FOV. This gives a nearly orthographic look, but with a subtle parallax effect on foreground/background elements that we get "for free" simply by positioning things on different depths within unity. Its pretty much a more elaborate version of how we achieved the style in Zombieville.

 

OMG Awesome! Looks fantastic! Can't wait to buy it.

 

So you create a 3D mesh of the characters with a cutout shader and rendered out the poses then used them like a 2d sprite. Thats pretty cool!

 

Now that is how you do it, sweet animations.

 

Looks really great. Nice weight and balance in the fighting anims. That's always really hard to get right.

Looks like another winner!

 

Looks fantastic! Congrats on another sure-fire hit. If this doesn't take off on the App Store then complaints about luck-driven success are surely validated

 

How do I cut off 3d meshes off a 3d model? And what do you mean you did the cut off and meshes in the unity 3d app?



I don't even know what I'm asking is the correct game development terminology
:? Just messing around in unity as a hobby and curiosity

 

What sort of production stats are behind the game as it appears in the video (months of development, hours/week, number of developers and roles, etc)?

 

Mika Mobile is Kelli Noda and Noah Bordner - we're both animators primarily, but I (Noah) handled the code, design and effects work on this project, as well as a fair amount of the artwork. It took about 6 months at a fairly relaxed pace, or roughly five times longer than Zombieville. We don't expect it to do five times as well though

Since a picture is worth 1000 words, here's a screen grab that should better illustrate how our environments and characters are constructed...

 

man I'm jealous of people who can be designer and coder at the same time, a rare mix me thinks

I can code, but will never be able to do art like this, which looks awesome btw!!!

And thanks for sharing pictures, it really is so much easier to visualise things especially for code heads like me

 

Wow! Looks very awesome! I am jealous of your team's artistic talent! Very good job. I hope this does as well as it should in the App store!

 

Ok, you have an animated character with meshes and when you change pose, you say than you change texture. Do you change texture on the same meshes or do you swap with an other prefab (construct with new meshes) for other poses ?
thx for answers

 

Brilliant work! You've been tweeted.

Looking forward to play it.

 

First congratulations on what looks to be another well done game. I look forward to picking it up.

Second I would like to thank you for being so forthcoming about your development work flows.
very much appreciated

 

Here I did a tech interview with Kelli and Noah on Zombieville... goes into the process

http://www.thecareergamer.com/?p=513

Really looking forward to this one as well Noah.

~t

 

We change textures on the same mesh, although you could do an entire model swap if you wanted (we do this only for when enemies are killed). When we built the main character, I laid out the texture's UV in such a way that each body part had a fair amount of empty space to work with - so the "leg" polygon was big enough to accomodate a bent leg, an extended leg, etc.

We then set up a link in our 3D app between the X-scale of an empty node, and the current texture being displayed (you can do this with set-driven-keys in maya). So if the X-scale of this node was 1, we'd see texture 1, 2 would display texture 2, etc. This allowed us to animate our texture swaps within maya, rather than having to hard-code each transition, or use hundreds of animation events.

Once the relationship was set up in maya, it was simply a matter of setting up a similar relationship within unity (if transform.scale.x == 1....), placed in a LateUpdate function so it would be applied after any animation, but before the frame is rendered.

For deaths we chose to do a full model swap because the character is suddenly made up of more pieces than they started with, so it was just easier to make that a different model instead of trying to stuff all of those individual pieces into the same textures they use when they're alive.

 

Can you explain how did you use a texture responding to another texture via colliders? Did you use mesh colliders? :?:

 

As pictured in that screenshot on the first page, the ninja is using a character controller (the pill-shaped wireframe).

 

Dude! This looks awesome!
Can you tell a bit more about the rig you did in maya? Did you use skeletons or just plain parenting?
I am always having trouble importing the animations from Maya, especially for fast moving objects, they seem to be almost always messed up when I bring them to UT, what did you do to get over that obstacle?

 

I'm not 100% sure but I would assume he used the same method as zombieville by rigging it with bones in maya. just as he uses this same method for the GUI. I haven't had any issues getting maya rigged/animations into unity. I think a couple of the biggest things is to make sure to bake the IK and only export the bones and mesh, depending on your method of setting up animations in unity. 1 file or separate anim files.

 

The rig and most everything else do use skeletons, primarily because this project was started before automagic batching was introduced to Unity iPhone, so it was a necessity to keep draw calls down.

There are a few things that can cause animations to be messed up when importing them. If you're segmenting up a single file into multiple clips, be sure to give those clips some breathing room on the edges. For instance, if you have a clip that starts on frame 21, and frame 20 has a wildly different pose from frame 21, it can "bleed into" the start of your clip. I always bookend my clips with duplicate poses to avoid this issue.

For extremely fast moving objects, like single-frame jumps from position to position, you can do a few things, like scale the animation to be slower in maya, and then speed it up in Unity, so you can add more fidelity to the curves. If you want a change to be truly instantaneous, its better to break an animation up into multiple clips - if you tell an animation to just play, it will cut instantly to the first frame with no interpolation, which is sometimes desirable (we did this for basically every pose change).

 

Thanks for the tips.
Can’t wait to play the game the trailer looks amazing!

 

<bows down unworthy>

AWESOME! And major thanks for sharing the screenshot. That really helps me wrap my head around how you built your project in Unity.

I am in school right now as a budding 3D animation and Game design major and have been glued to our Unity and Maya lab trying to recreate what you have done in Zombieville USA.

I love your work and hope I can get up to your caliber someday.

Can't wait to buy this upcoming game and convince my friends to do the same!

 

When does it come, when does it come ?

 

Out now!

Awesome stuff. Really destroys the conventions of what you expect out of a "Unity Powered" game.

 

hahaha this is simply great

Very good work guys!

 

Thanks, glad you're enjoying it!

(came here to bump my own thread but you guys beat me to it

 

I have been playing for about 30 minutes now and can't put it down. Very nice work. I love the new control scheme - fits perfectly with the game. Boss battles are fun and difficult, and pirate deaths are satisfying. Only level 11 now, so I will provide a little more feedback when I finish the game.

 

This looks great good job!

 

amazing work!

 

Beautiful animation as expected. Is this game really hard or do I just suck?

 

Clearly steps the iPhone gaming to a new production quality level

I wouldn't be surprised if we saw OMG Pirates screenshots in Apple ads.

 

Been playing the game for a bit now. It is very well done, and fun to play.

I have an issue with the controls though, and that's that the special button should be on the other side of the screen, diagonal from the movement pad. Its current position makes it difficult to line up and use your power with the same thumb, and leaves you vulnerable for that split second, which is sometimes all it takes...

 

Congratulations!

I just played it right now. Very addictive game play and animation. I love the combos in the game and the level up features!

Beautiful artwork!

 

Overall very nice! My personal preference would have been to keep the movement to two axis (I have a hard time lining myself up with badguys in the pseudo-3d world, and the iPhone doesn't make for the best of joysticks) but that may stem from not playing enough of this style of game, ever.

On a similar note, I'm having trouble getting the combos that consist of a "wait" to work correctly. How long exactly am I supposed to wait? Periodically I get the one where you jump up and hit people from the air, but can never do it on purpose.

 

Those wait combos take practice. I pretty much got it down to where I can keep doing those 10 times in a row. The jump slash I had to use on this one boss to win. I just kept doing it over and over so that the boss couldn't hit me.

 

Jump slash (you mean green-red, right?), yeah that one I have no problem with and at first loved it, until it I realized it was pretty much the only combo I was using (Well, other than red-red-red and green-hold).

 

yeah green red. The other combo I use is red red wait --> red

reminds me of street fighter

 

I still can't get any of the wait combos to work on purpose, and when they do work I'm almost positive I haven't been doing what's supposed to be the actual code for it.

 

It takes a little practice to be able to do exactly what you want, when you want, but its definitely possible. I think the waiting dynamic may be more familiar to players of Devil May Cry, which uses a similar system and rhythm to vary their combos.

 

Playing now, and must say, it's fantastic work! Fun, gorgeous, fresh!

Cheers to all involved!

 

Excellent job guys! The game is awesome, congrats.

 

Finally got it to work, and now it's pretty easy. I'm trying to come up with a way that the game could make it easy to explain to new players. Maybe let players click on the moves when they're looking at the move screen, and have the buttons flash at the rate necessary to make it work?

 

A free version of this app, OMG Pirates! Lite, is now available. If you haven't played it yet, check it out! If nothing else its a decent example of what you can do with "2D" in Unity.

 

Hi Noah, I really appreciate your work and collaboration in this forum. OMG it's just awesome!

I'm still a bit confused about this "Zombieville/OMG" approach, I understand each character is a skinned mesh.. but how do you start building them in the 3D software?

is each body part just a textured plane so it's like a collection of planes? do you use IK animations?
after importing to unity.. the textures are combined in just one or there keep being multiple textures??


I'd really like to learn how the workflow works..from the 3D software (maya??) to unity... I would appreciate if you can post some very simple files (the rabbit you used for that batching test for instance )

I've been using SpriteManager but I really like those extremely fluid animation you can get with your model... without mention the performance... so good.

Thanks.

(feel free to check out this game I developed with SpriteManager, latest release preview: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?s=0540d23e2341f912e9454cf0191e64b3&p=860803#post860803)

 

Thats an interesting question. Im surprised they did a 2d game using Maya. Interesting development process indeed. Its kinda disappointing there was no response for this.

Anyways, I love OMG Pirates. It is one of the games I use as reference when making my app. Which brings the question, how did you script the combos?

Probably should PM you Noah to see if you can help.