About a year ago I wrote an article about the early days of the pinball table, now after several mothballed months it’s done and here is how it works.
A GVMachineController actor is on the map and a kismet node makes sure that the player takes control of it when the level loads. After that, all input is processed by the machine which then adjusts linked actors (changes position, rotation, etc). For example here is how the right flippers are set up:
This pinball-air hockey mashup was the very first prototype I created using Gavit. I worked on it every now and then, pimped the effects, tested Gavit’s new features and so on, until it was worth of a video:
The technical details are discussed in this “behind the scenes” article.
In this post I’ll discuss the creation of the Winter Volleyball prototype.
As I mentioned earlier the base mechanic was inspired by the old DOS game Arcade Volleyball. Back in the mid 90′s I played it a lot with my brother and friends so I wanted to make it a two player game. I had also just added a few features to the Razer Hydra integration which needed testing therefore I chose to base the controls on that input device.
The season lent itself as a visual theme and I started using snowmen as main characters. At first they were just sliding back and forth but hitting the ball with the narrow top of the hat was somewhat difficult. Before going with a different avatar I linked up tilting to see if it’s fun. While it needed some tweaking, at the end this additional degree of freedom turned out to be both intuitive and useful.
Here is my latest prototype, a homage to Arcade Volleyball:
The players use the Razer Hydra controllers: aiming at the screen moves the snowmen, twisting the wrist makes them headbutt.
This project was finished in about 15 days: the core game mechanics and controls took 5 days, asset authoring was done in 6 and I spent the rest on the special effects.
That’s all for now, I’ll discuss the technical details in an upcoming ‘behind the scenes’ article. EDIT: It’s up.
