The Kitchen Sink: A Preview of What’s To Come
No, Food Fight isn't dead! The third alpha release is still being worked on and it's looking great:
This screenshot of the Kitchen Sink map is a preview of what's to come in alpha 3.
This upcoming version will have the following changes:
- New 1v1 map: The Kitchen Sink.
- New Units:
- Headbutting Broccoli
- Ketchup Squirter
- Unit sound effects!
- Projectile graphics for the Just Water unit.
- Navigational mesh path finding.
- A title screen with accompanying menus.
- An in-game menu.
- Ability to select the ant lines.
- A scripted tutorial level.
Wow! That's a lot of new stuff and a ton of work! Once that's all done, the game will be quite presentable.
The First Food Fight Trailer
I was playing around with Garageband and iMovie this morning, and decided to make a short trailer for Food Fight.
As far as game progress goes, I'm working on implementing the settings menu so that the game can actually be configured in the next alpha release. The third alpha is about 60% done, but there is still plenty of work to be done.
The Ketchup Squirter
Today, I modeled the Ketchup Squirter unit (pictured below). Just a bit of animation work, and this new unit will be in the game!
For those who don't remember the Ketchup Squirter:
This confused condiment is a recent addition to the Junk Food arsenal, as evidenced by his confused, childish face. Looks can be deceiving, however, as the Ketchup Squirter, when massed, can deliver tremendous damage from range. This salacious squirter has sacrificed health for damage and speed, and is easily destroyed when out of position or without help from his delicious friends.
Ants and Broccoli
It's been a few months since I last posted an update, but don't worry, Food Fight is still being worked on! I just got out of the habit of updating the site when I was working thirty hours a week and taking three classes. A lot has happened since then.
Detailed Ants
No longer are the ant lines ... lines. Now there are actual ants scurrying across the screen to gather resources. Below, the camera is zoomed in so that the ants are rendered with full detail.
When the player zooms out, the ants get replaced by simple decals to enhance performance (also, the water resource Yikes! cube has been replaced by a watery sponge):
Headbutt Broccoli
I finally got around to creating the Headbutt Broccoli unit that was sketched out back in January. During a Diablo II LAN party, I was one of the first characters killed off, and decided to spend the rest of the party animating this little guy. I'm quite satisfied with his slow, powerful, movements in-game. I just need to implement splash damage to make him effective.
Also, unit description tool tips have been implemented (pictured below).
Other changes of note:
- Sound effects for the German Sausage and Enchirito units are nearly complete.
- Redesigned the creation of factories so that the player now clicks the building slot to get a list of factory options instead of getting the options at the ant hill.
- Added resource gather rates to the top of the heads up display.
- Added several command line debug options to assist in testing (such as multiplying the speed of the game, or loading a map with certain units already spawned).
- Several code refactors that improve either speed, portability, or flexibility.
Escapades of a Newbie Sound Designer
Last week, I thought it'd be fun to record some sound effects for Food Fight, and I purchased a well reviewed dynamic microphone. This weekend when I finally got the microphone, I was fairly excited to try it out. That was when the adventure began.
First, it turned out that the microphone cable was too large to fit into an ordinary sound card. I should have read the description more closely; it turned out that I also needed a 1/4" to 1/8" phone cable adapter. A quick trip to Radioshack resolved this issue, but then I found out that my Macbook Pro only had a line-in port that expects signal strength between -10 and 4 dBm. A typical microphone outputs somewhere between -56 and -40 dBm, and so of course the Macbook Pro couldn't record any sound.
My next trial was to bring the microphone to a friend's house and try it in a mic port that expects a lower signal strength. This had the same failure of a result; it turns out that the microphone I got outputs about -70 dBm, and requires a pre-amplifier in order to be useful. In fact, it turns out that a dynamic microphone is better for live performance, and not studio recording. I've definitely learned to invest more time in researching things I haven't a clue about in the future.
A pre-amplifier is now coming in the mail, and so we'll see if some sound effects can be made next week.
In the meantime, I've come up with a list of features that can be expected in the third alpha of Food Fight:
- New Units: Headbutting Broccoli and the Ketchup Squirter.
- The ability to select ant lines.
- Box formation for units.
- A title screen with accompanying menus.
- A scripted tutorial map.
- Sound effects.
- An accompanying game configuration program.
- Ability to play the game with DirectX instead of OpenGL on Windows.
Food Fight Alpha 2 Released!
The second alpha of Food Fight has been completed. The game can be downloaded for Mac OS and Windows below. Linux users will have to download the source code and build it (until I find a way to make a portable Linux binary).
Download
General Instructions
There is no installer. Just extract the archive and run the game by double clicking the program file (foodfight.app or foodfight.exe for Mac and Windows respectively).
The game defaults to a windowed resolution of 1280x768. This can be changed for finding the .foodfight/foodfight.config.json in your home directory, and editing the width and height values in it with a text editor. Currently, I don't recommend running the game in full screen mode (it may work but I haven't tested it).
On Windows, you may get an error message when trying to start the game. If that is the case, please download and install the Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable.
How to Play
- First, the most important control: To quit the game, you press Cmd+Q (Mac), or Alt+F4 (Windows/Linux).
- The camera can be moved around with the W, A, S, D keys and rotated with Q, E.
- You play as the green player, and the camera will not start with your base shown. This feature is scheduled for a future alpha version.
- The AI player rushes you, so get over to your base and start creating ant lines fast! To draw the ant lines, click the ant hill, and then right click all of the Yikes! cubes (which are placeholder graphics for resources) and building slots.
- Place a factory on a building slot by clicking the ant hill, and then clicking the only button available under Actions. Then click the building slot. This unintuitive user interface for placing factories will be redone in future alphas.
- There are three units: German Sausages, Just Waters, and Enchiritos. German Sausages and Enchiritos are cheaper units of the Health Foods and High Fructose Corn Syrup categories respectively. Just Water is very expensive (100 water per unit), and should only be used to disrupt enemy ant lines.
- The only way to disrupt ant lines as of this release is to Shift+Right Click them with a Just Water unit selected. This unintuitive control will be revised in later alphas.
- To win, you must keep the enemy's ant lines disrupted for a full sixty seconds.
Best of luck! Any questions, comments, or concerns are greatly appreciated.
System Requirements
I don't honestly know. The only hardware I've tried it on is an AMD Phenom II quad-core with an ATI Radeon HD 5700, and an Intel Core i7 dual-core with an NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M. I'd be very interested to hear what system configurations the game works on.
The AI Builds Units!
An old high school friend came to visit over the weekend, and we spent several hours playing Civilization IV when I should have been doing homework. So after a week of getting nothing done on the game, I finally sat down and got the AI to build units.
Below are two screenshots of some battles taking place with the AI player. Currently, I don't think it's possible to beat the AI; it will always build more units. When I build five units, it builds about twenty-five to counter (and probably uncovers another negative resources bug in the process).
The Mean Monday
Over the weekend, I had finished all of my class work early as I expected to be working all day today. However, I woke up with quite the cold this morning. So instead of going to class and work, I stayed home and worked on Food Fight all day; from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. with a short half hour lunch break.
I'd like you to compare the video from yesterday's update with the one below, and be amazed by the progress one solid day brings.
Today, I accomplished the following:
- The German Sausage unit is now in the game, complete with animation and an icon.
- Units now automatically attack when a hostile is in range.
- Units no longer overlap after being produced at a factory.
- Units stop if they can't move all the way to their destination (most of the time).
- There are now script-able victory conditions! Currently, the only condition is that if a player does not have any ant lines for sixty seconds (give or take based on the number of units that player has available to recover with), then that player is defeated.
- Unit production can now be canceled, and successive unit types are now clumped together in the queue.
- Several bugs have been fixed.
All that needs to be done now for the release is to finish implementing the AI player, building the binaries for Mac OS X and Windows, and releasing. It is very possible that this release will come before March 14.
Early Gameplay Video
Below is a video of Food Fight being played as of today. You'll have to forgive the placeholder graphics and clunky unit movement (the latter of which I intend to fix for Alpha 2). Also note that the AI player is being commanded to build units by the human player. This is because the AI hasn't been programmed to actually build units yet, and I needed this functionality for testing.
I've fixed most of the bugs from last week's play-testing, but I've also discovered new ones. This has been preventing me from working on the AI, but I hope to get more done on that this week.