Ugly Baby: What’s Taking So Damned Long
// May 16th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // Dejobaan News, Ugly Baby
We’re back on track to create the dazzling 3D shapes that decorated Ugly Baby’s stages for the past few years — while it’s taken us longer than we initially hoped, so many great ideas still reside in the womb that are alive and kicking, and we can’t wait to see where the baby’s future leads us.
The game started out using 3D Game Studio, and we released an early playable version on Steam during the Portal 2 ARG last year. It was the same engine we’d used to create AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!, but we’ve switched to Unity for both Aaaaa!’s sequel as well as Ugly Baby.
Since we at Dejobaan are still unlocking the hidden powers of Unity (Owlchemy Labs helped us with Awesome and F=ma), we turned to Defective Studios to create a prototype that could analyze music and implement some new aesthetics. Based on this, we’re working on the Python end to allow Ugly Baby to recognize different types of music, which will allow us to craft levels unique to those sounds.
So, what are our next steps?
- Step back and pick up Unity.
- Bring Ugly Baby Unity up to where Ugly Baby 3DGS is.
- Team up with a great artist to complete the game.
That is all!
Drunken Robot Pornography is Press Released
// May 14th, 2012 // No Comments » // Dejobaan News, DRP
Dejobaan recently announced Drunken Robot Pornography, and we were met with some fanfare. Over the past couple of days, Shack News, Blues News, and Indie Games Magazine picked up our story. We also received some love on Reddit, in both gamernews and IndieGaming, thanks to user DemanRisu.
We didn’t opt for full press-release distribution. Instead, we hit up most of the indie-friendly sites.
- Ars Technica
- Joystiq
- Eurogamer
- Rockpapershotgun
- Destructoid
- Videogaming 24/7
- Shack News
- Indie Game Magazine
- Indie Games
- Blues News
- Beef Jack
- PC Gamer
About a quarter posted our news, which is good, but we need to up our game!
Here’s the press release:
Dejobaan Games has announced development on Drunken Robot Pornography, a first-person shooter about demolishing titanic, flying robots, piece-by-piece. The award-winning studio has screenshots of the initial prototype at www.dejobaan.com/drunken.
In Drunken Robot Pornography (DRP): You’re a small, fleshy human with a jetpack and a gun, and your opponent is a robot centerfold that dwarfs a city block. The robot — called a Titan — tries to cut you apart with lasers and missiles powerful enough power to crumble the buildings you’re standing on. Pick off the Titan’s cannons, fry away its carbon fiber armor, target a joint, and tear off a claw, leaving it writhing. Your furious opponent spews raw plasma at you, so you shoot up a force field and duck behind it. Who will win? The crowd cheers your intimate-yet-deadly dance.
And if fighting giant robots isn’t enough, you can fashion your own multistory Titans to unleash on other players. Start with a skeleton of titanium girders, then mount pulse cannons and shielding over hard points. Add actuators so your Titan can flex its arms or tentacles, and jets for locomotion. Pick your materials carefully — an aluminum finish may be pretty, but graphene armor will better withstand attack. Finally, fuel it up with isopropanol for speed, methanol for strength, or ethanol, if you just want your Titan to end up really, really angry.
Having introduced a playable prototype to PAX East ’12 convention-goers to good effect, Dejobaan Games projects a 2012 PC/Mac launch.
Three Years of Ugly Baby Screenshots
// May 11th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // Dejobaan News, Ugly Baby
This is about three years of dev screenshots for our upcoming Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby. We are still not finished with it. I will finish it if it’s the last thing I do before my company implodes into an indie singularity.
Thanks to everyone who’s cheered us on over the years!
Drunken Robot Pornography Three Months Ago
// May 7th, 2012 // No Comments » // Dejobaan News, DRP
Drunken Robot Pornography has come a long way in a short time, evolving from a basic look to is present gleaming white aesthetic. We’ve cut a few features to keep the prototype tight — one being the mechanic of disappearing platforms.
Specifically here, killing a Titan caused the platforms the player stands on to start blowing up — players need to keep aware of their surroundings. Seen Tron?
It’s something we didn’t include in the prototype, as we wanted to focus on core gameplay, but an unsteady terrain is still interesting to us.
Coincidentally, Jarrett shared a similar suggestion on Facebook this week.”The floating platforms make for cool potential. My thought is that every time a robot is defeated, not just the boss but the platforms rearrange themselves.” Good suggestion, indeed, Jarrett!
Ugly Baby Going Portable
// May 3rd, 2012 // No Comments » // Dejobaan News, Ugly Baby
Score one for sensational blogging! Ugly Baby is going portable, in the sense that we’re incorporating Portable Python into the current Unity prototype. This theoretically will allow anyone to mod the game.
Over a year ago, when Ugly Baby was just a zygote, some fans had success with modding, and we’re hoping to create a flexible environment that blows that out of the water. Ichiro says he’ll need to continue hacking away to ensure that it works on anyone else’s system.
While Portable Python experiments continue, we’re also working on a way to convert (outside of Unity) the ever-popular MP3 file format to WAV, since Unity doesn’t play MP3s the way we want them. We wrote a utility called “Wavifer” that both converts that (exciting!) and does the FFT analysis so that we get spectrographs to make procedurally generated, music-based things happen.
As a tech side note, the debug panel in the above image (thanks, Owlchemy!) allows us to turn on and off objects, transparent layers, and other graphically based programming pest control. In sum, while Ugly Baby goes through this second period of gestation, we are creating many tools that hopefully make this reincarnated game a success.
A DRP Picture’s Worth a Bunch of Words, Part 2
// May 1st, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, DRP
Continuing our discussion of our first-person arena shooter prototype Drunken Robot Pornography, we discuss here the abstract HUD and the power-ups that affect it and the player.
DRP has a red and yellow column along the sides of the screen, with the red indicating the player’s health and the yellow indicating the jet-pack energy. Titans are huge and fire waves of weapons that require large, quick leaps to avoid. While the jet-pack automatically recharges over time, players with a lead finger will rapidly run out of fuel and fall into the bullets or lasers they want to avoid.
The purple, black and white circular item near the fuel gauge is one of three power-ups that help in these perilous situations. The power-up shown provides rapid fire to pick apart the titans more… rapidly. A jet-pack power-up increases the strength of the boost, and a third, hidden power-up increases health.
These are just a few power-up and HUD implementations, all of which could change post-prototype. Still, it’s exciting to share the development with everyone as it’s happening! Missed last week’s post about scoring? Catch upon your DRP trivia and come back again next week!
Ugly Baby Unity Under the Knife Part 2
// April 26th, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, Ugly Baby
We’re hard at work with porting Ugly Baby to Unity, but we wanted to share our very raw, work-in-progress with everyone. Ugly Baby went under the knife for PAX East 2012, and we’re still refining and perfecting.
While Ugly Baby Unity is not as visually sharp as the original yet, we have a few new effects already in place. The background and other shapes now throb to the music, so players can feel the beat more. Enemies now have distinct paths; we can give them a sequence of areas to move around in that they will follow. The blue and yellow enemy flies in formation until one is shot in the middle, then the others disperse in wild, angled directions.
Finally: File Browser
The file browser is also going through iterations. The silly Ichiro wallpaper may be unlockable content or even DLC — or, perhaps the DLC could be an option to make Ichiro go away.
Generally, our objective is to get to where we were in 3D Game Studio in Unity. We won’t rest from nipping and tucking Ugly Baby until it’s as awesome as these inspirational videos but with its own flair.
A Drunken Robot Pornography Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
// April 24th, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, DRP
While we work on getting a playable form of Druken Robot Pornography for mass consumption, we’re going to dissect the current prototype, one photo at a time! 70,000 PAX East attendees had the chance to play our Drunken Robot Pornography prototype, but we realize that’s just a small sliver of who we want to reach. Framed differently, it’s less than 2% of all active Steam users at a given time or 0.001% of the world population. In sum, we still have tons of fans we want to demonstrate DRP to.
Drunken Robot Pornography is presently a first-person arena shooter. All that’s visible of the player now is a reticle and bullets. As the screen shot indicates, the stage is not, however, devoid of action or visual stimulation.
In addition to the popping stage and enemy design, players may notice the large number on the top. That is the players’ score. The prototype was all about high scoring leaderboards. Players build their score by destroying the titan, piece by piece, and picking up their grey and green gears that litter the arena after the robots blow up.
Take a look at our collection of photos and feel free to ask us about anything you see! Otherwise, join us next week where we’ll talk more about the HUD in DRP!
If Ugly Baby Were a Music Video
// April 20th, 2012 // Comments Off // Dejobaan News, Ugly Baby
In case you haven’t noticed, Ugly Baby is an ambitious project for us. We are still working hard to implement all sorts of awesome ideas that lead to a thrilling first-person shooting and dodging experience that matches with your music and gives an unparalleled sense of flying.
As we dig deeper into research and development, we wanted to pop our heads up and share some visually stunning and inspirational videos that we think could inform Ugly Baby’s final product.
This is not Ugly Baby…
Futuristic looking cities rarely fail to inspire. The design in quite’s “zeo-x-s” comes to life as it zooms into the camera. The first-person POV camera itself rotates, inducing a sensation of motion, while at times narrowly edging by various structures. This video director looks to be a natural Kiss/Hug chainer for Aaaaa! We also like the bright neon colors contrasting the dark tones, here.
At the 1:30 mark, the perspective changes from falling down to giving a sense of flying horizontally towards something. Complicated, polymorphic objects at the 2:15 mark could also be inspiration for Ugly Baby enemies. The central object eventually creates something like a vortex to absorb and assimilate into new parts. The rest of video adds some more brilliant hues, playing with different shapes and camera speeds.
That video from quite comes courtesy of developer and friend Shawn McGrath of ][ Games, who is releasing an exciting tube-based arcade psychedelic trip called Dyad for the PSN. Dyad is stunning visually, and everything happens so fast, that this next video may not show the game properly in all its glory even in HD.
This is Dyad, not Ugly Baby…
Again, Dyad’s speed is worth noting. The visuals are insanely kaleidoscopic, and they, along with the music, react to what the player does.
Backgrounds aren’t the only thing that should dazzle players in Ugly Baby. Youtube user cyclones90‘s video made me think more of enemies in the game, and particularly how their movement can be controlled by the music.
This is also not Ugly Baby…
Enemies shouldn’t probably move like the line does the _whole_ time. But certain horizontal and vertical moments, when in sync with the beat, could be pretty neat.
While a lot of these videos have a “tube” casing to them, that may just be constricting for the stage design of a rails shooter. What if Ugly Baby had stages that took place in the sky, over land or over water?
Also not Ugly Baby
Some concrete, rather than solely abstract, visualized landscapes could give the game a sense of cohesion or supplement a narrative.
But when you are researching generative art and music visualization, you can’t help but be entranced by such images as synthesizerwriter‘s algorithm come to life:
And finally, not Ugly Baby!
On a final tangent, part of me feels the thrills of a first person experience flying/shooting experience could be like a roller coaster ride (set to dubstep or any other beat). Just saying, I wouldn’t mind shipping a game that requires users to take Dramamine to enjoy.