Even though I said Lua… its totally not Lua. We’re so used to Garry’s implementation of Lua (with the c style syntax) that we ended up doing it ourselves. But we kept on going with the customization… so much so we needed to write a custom Notepad++ syntax highlighter and we eventually dubbed it Gadget Script, which is totally cool because now we can fuck with the syntax of the language as much as we want and not have to worry about conforming to any standards.

Nothing to show yet, just blabbering away.

We’re at the tail end of finishing Zinger. I can’t believe we’re the last gamemode to be submitted to Garry, but then again I guess it isn’t that big of a surprise. We have an incredible amount of custom content and we’re also OCD kind of perfectionists. It’s a curse really.

In between our workings on Zinger, we are also revamping an old website and converting it into an HTML5 web app. I don’t want to indulge everyone with all the details just yet, but those of you who use LuaBin will really be excited about this product. It’s going to have a community integrated into it as well… it’s super cool. We’ve already invited a few people into the alpha testing phase and we’ll invite more as we progress.

I’ve also been playing a bunch of games recently, mainly games I’ve owned for a while but never got around to playing.

Oh and I picked up Halo: Reach the other day but haven’t had a chance to play it yet because my Xbox RROD’d right when I put the disc in. No big deal because it’s under warranty. It just gives me more time to catch up on PC games, even though I’ve got a small collection of unplayed Xbox games building up (Reach, Splinter Cell, etc)

Anyway, more to come later…

Theme, Teams & Colors

We changed the team names and colors and got rid of the silly team flags. No longer is it Red vs Blue, but it has become Purple Bandits vs Orange Sandbaggers. Why the change? Well, we wanted team colors to stand out against the rest of the world easier. Naturally, there are lots of red and blue elements everywhere in the environment and on your HUD. So to help distinguish between everything, we made the team colors completely unique.

But our changes are not limited to team colors. We’ve done a lot of color tweaking in these final step with various color matching techniques. We tried to bring everything together by ensuring we had a consistent pallet throughout the game.

Battle Rules

We implemented something dubbed Battle Rules. Its a way to plug new rules into the game. Think of it like a hook system… sorta. Previously, when a player went through a ring, we called the function GM:RingPassed( ring, pl ) or something like that. Instead of hard coding how that event is handled, we now do rules.Call( “RingPassed”, ring, pl ). The Battle Rules system checks whatever rules have been loaded (they could change randomly each hole if we wanted) and lets it do all the work.

There’s events called everywhere, even in some areas we don’t even currently handle. But down the road if we/someone else wanted to make a new set of rules for the game, they could manage that event. Its pretty sweet.

Statistics

After we got the Battle Rules working, it was really easy to pump in the stats system. All we did was feed every event from the Battle Rules into the stats. If there is a stat handler for the event, it manages the information passed. Pretty cut and dry but it allows us to track everything the teams/players are doing and give some cool bonuses based off the collected data.

HUD

We totally reworked the HUD in this version. In the first revision of Zinger we used monotone colors on the HUD… mainly white. It looked good but it just seemed “unfinished”. We went back and reevaluated the theme and began using some earth tones and it really looked good (not to mention the fact we completely redesigned almost every HUD element).

Then we started to look at how the HUD was arranged and it made us wonder… why don’t we just allow people to arrange it how they like? So we did…

Help

We did manage to work in a fully functional help system. Its 3D->2D based, which means you see the tips in 3D but when you read them they show up in a 2D panel. Some tips will purely be 2D, but we tried adding 3D hints all around the game to help new players understand what’s going on.

More information to come…

We’re changing how the inventory is in Zinger!. Its going to be more Worms-esk, which means you can have more than 4 items and you’ll never have to destroy anything. If you pick up an item you already have, it will stack.

Also, you’re going to start with items now. Just some of the basic ones though. You’ll still have to find all the good stuff in crates, but at least you’ll have weapons to use at the beginning of the match.

Oh and by the way, Chad modeled and scripted this sign for mappers to use. The text and text color is totally customizable by the mapper. They can pick three lines of text and each line can have its own color:

P.S. No, that’s not a typo. THERE HAS BEEN AN EARTHQUACK!

I need to start writing more about what I’m working on. People are always asking me and I never know where to begin. Here’s the thing: I’m always working on something. What it is can be totally different each day. Although right now I’m pretty focused on Zinger!. We’re closing in on the deadline for the Fretta Contest and we’re really excited about it. Not much is left, actually we’re just finishing up a few odds and ends.

I’m going to be writing a few articles related to Lua soon so you can look forward to seeing those. Actually I’ve already started… I just need some spare time to finish the first one (work has kept me so busy lately!). Technically I shouldn’t even be writing this now, I should be writing those… GOTTA GO!

Work! Work! Work! We’ve been busy on the newest installment of Zinger! designed to be a contest entry for the Fretta Contest.

For those of you who played the original, there has been some changes to the gameplay. We haven’t discussed much of the gameplay in the contest thread, so let me go over what we changed and why:

Teams

 In the original Zinger! it was 1 vs. all. This was fine and we had great fun with it, but most of the time people teamed or paired up and beat the crap out of other people. Which again was just fine, but it normally pissed said people off because they didn’t have a chance in hell of winning. The other problem was as much as everyone wanted to mutilate others with their weapon arsenal, they had to focus on getting to the cup first or they end up losing anyways. So now, with teams, you can work together by helping one guy get to the cup while you collect items to protect him.

Asynchronous Turns

Many of you are probably thinking “wtf does that mean?”. Basically it means everyone has a turn at the same time, you’re not waiting on each other. Once you hit your ball, the game waits for you to stop moving then its your turn again. You don’t have to wait in a queue for your entire team to go before its your turn again. Why did we do this? Simple answer: Speed. In the previous Zinger! you spent a lot of time waiting for your turn to come around, which led to a lot of down time. We wanted to remedy that. This accomplished two things: a) less waiting around doing nothing, and b) increased the speed of the game dramatically.

Rings

We wanted to give the mappers the ability to create a less linear hole. Instead of just starting at point A and trying to get to point B, we added in a feature to move the players around in all different directions. Basically there are a set amount of rings the mapper places on each hole; your team needs to go through each ring before you can finish the hole and sink the cup. This added in another element to the teamplay environment: working together to activate the rings as fast as possible while making progress toward the cup.

Randomizing

No longer do you have hole 1, hole 2, hole 3, and progress through in the same order each time you play a map. Now, all the holes are randomized and played in a different order. We’re also considering randomizing the rings, as in, let the mapper place 8 of them but only spawn 4 random ones.

Tee Off

The mapper also has the ability to create more than just 1 tee per hole; actually we’d prefer they make 2+ tees. 2 of the tees would be picked at random and assigned to each team. Once the hole starts, teams tee off player by player. Once the last player has teed off, the tee is removed.

This should shed some light on what we have planned. Remember, this is all preliminary and we reserve the right to change anything/everything before the official release.

Everyone loved how it turned out and asked me to add more of a “game” to it; which I eventually did. There are several puzzle-quests the players are put through (yes its multiplayer), but I didn’t spend any time in the video demonstrating them. Maybe I’ll show them in another video (if anyone is interested)

P.S. Click here and watch it in HD

Sorta neat looking back and seeing what I’ve done and how I don’t even remember doing it. I made some tutorials for Garry’s Mod 9 for basic posing, some pretty crappy wallpapers, and even a few comics.

I didn’t save all the files… a lot of them were crap. I did find this picture which reminds me I need to update it to use the new Gecko binary module:

I wrote this code up a few months ago. I will continue working on it but as of right now I have more important things to do (Gear, website, stuffs). So this is sorta on hold, but I mess with it on occasions… you know… make sure it knows I still love it.

I think the character creation turned out great. I spent a long time on it so… you know… it better be good or else I’d have to kick my cat. And we all know I love my cat.

There are actually many more animations or “actions” not shown in this video, and they are really easy to add. I basically created an animation class that does all the heavy lifting for me, so I just need to supply it with what sequence I want to use and other minor variables. Good shit!