Peter McDermott

  A Frame-By-Frame Comparison of Jab Attacks in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Week one of our six-month game project has come and gone and we are busy building our prototype for Iron Brawlers. I've never built a fighting game and I've never made animations that meet the precise requirements of a fighting game. So this first week, I spent a lot of my time breaking down other titles in the genre, looking closely at the way the talented animators implement the 12 principles of Animation, and some times, break those rules.  We're making a platform arena fighter, so it's only natural that we play a lot of Super Smash Bros. (oh no, how will I ever..) and take the time to learn what makes the game feel so damn good to play. For this blog post, I thought I'd share some of my research into Smash's animations, breaking down an attack frame-by-frame. I'll be using comparisons like these as a reference point while building my own animations for Iron Brawlers. The goal her...

Last week was pitch week for the six-month project. Each of us was tasked with coming up with two unique game ideas that we wanted to work on and presented them to the class. We then started the stressful and emotionally taxing task of diplomatically working out which games we wanted to work on. I’ll be honest, it was a hard week for me, and for a lot of the other students. Everyone wants to make their game, but not every game can be made. So compromises have to be made and people had to rethink what was most important to their development over this project.  For me, that meant teaming up with Dante, Josh, and Christa to work on Iron Brawlers, an arena platform fighting game. I was drawn to Josh and Dante’s pitch because it requires a lot of animation.  I'm also just psyched to build a game where you and your friends can punch each other around! Most of the animations that I have made in the past have leaned towards the realism side of things. Fighting game animation is very ...

So we launched Mower Mayhem and to our great surprise, people thought it was fun! While we didn’t exactly go viral on Itch.io, the response was largely positive with most of our players really digging the retro aesthetic. We even got a couple of let’s play videos by some smaller streamers. It was great to see our efforts in making a targeted game pay off.  Here is the link to play Mower Mayhem: Mower Mayhem by Colaboratory, finndf, yungghibli, Malcjo, TrashCanPete Launching Six Shooter The second game that I worked on as part of our Targeted Game Design assignment was Six Shooter, an early-2000’s-inspired, horror first-person shooter. This game was so much fun to work on. I got to make my game-ready gun asset and all the animations to go along with it. This was definitely the biggest technical challenge I’ve faced as a developer: modeling the gun and hand, rigging the FPS controller, and creating a set of pretty detailed animations.  I also learned how to implement sound effe...

This week’s devblog is a quick update on our latest game project, Mowing Mayhem. Our chosen art style has really led to a quick turn around in asset creation. We've made a tonne of progress in week two, adding environment assets, a character, a skybox, and more to our build. Our progress a week ago looked something like this (I do believe we had grass cutting implemented as well though). Since then, I’ve been building the first character in our playable roster, Woodrow “Chip” Walker. Woodrow is inspired by the classic kiwi farmer, Fred Dag, complete with floppy bucket hat, black singlet, and gumboots. We’re hoping that having a character like Woody will really help cement the game in NZ, and the green recycling bins are the finishing touch. I really enjoyed creating a lo-fi 90’s arcade character. The most difficult task for me was definitely the texturing. My strengths lie in 3D modeling and animation, so getting into Photoshop and painting the textures by hand w...

Over the next 5 weeks, I’ll be focusing on my latest Game Development assignment: to make a game that targets a very specific audience. In my last post, I talked about my brainstorming process for coming up with new game ideas leading up to my class presentation. Now I’m going to talk about how we are approaching the research and development phase for our chosen idea, a game that we are tentatively calling “Mowing Mayhem”. Finn’s idea for our next project is heavily inspired by Sega arcade titles released on the Sega AM-2 Model 2 arcade board. We all felt that Finn’s idea had a real sense of direction: it’s targeted towards a specific group with its mechanics, but also focuses on evoking a sense of nostalgia in its audience. Mowing Mayhem is targeted towards fans of retro arcade games with time attack mechanics. What’s the game? We’re making a time attack, ride-on lawn mowing game, designed in the style of games like Daytona USA (1993), and Crazy Taxi (1999). You’ll play as a luna...

It’s been a week since handing in our final projects for year 1 of Game Dev at Yoobee. The situation here in New Zealand is looking positive. There are only 2 new cases of Covid-19 today and the government has suggested they could be scaling down the National Alert Level system to Level 2 next week. Soon, we might be able to return to campus for daily classes. This week, I’ve been taking some time to reflect on our last project (I’ll be doing a deep-dive into that in a future post), and I’m started to think about our next game. Our first assignment of Year 2 is to make a game that is highly targeted towards a specific audience. 18-25-year-old males are out and ‘horse people’ are in. Some of the most successful studios manage to identify passionate groups of people and make games specifically about the things those people love. A great example that springs to mind is ' Rival Stars Horse Racing ', a game by local Wellington studio, PikPok . They discovered that there weren...

Kia ora, I’m Pete, an aspiring Game Developer from Wellington, New Zealand. I truly believe that video games can be a positive influence on people’s lives. Games have the power to affect players as strongly as a great novel or a beautiful film. It’s hard to explain what gives a game this power, but the games that have stayed with me have all had elements in common: unique art styles, simple stories with powerful themes, unforgettable music, and memorable characters (simple, right?). There's no one recipe for the secret sauce that makes a great game, but I'm determined to develop my own. At this stage in my journey as a game developer, I’ve made a handful of small games in Unity. I’m mainly focused on the 3D art side of game dev, honing my skills in 3D modeling , and 3D animation , but I'm interested in anything and everything related to games. In my final year at Yoobee Colleges, I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to work on bigger projects. The goal of thi...