We are already in 2022, and we continue to do things in order to learn, to understand how to design a video game.

To date, Astrocuco is the result of many intermittent years of learning where the challenge is always the same, to create prototypes of how programming works.

What I have learned, I have managed to master to an acceptable degree the subject of programming, understand concepts of classes, objects and most importantly apply them when writing code, in this case Lua Script. This has helped me a lot to focus my efforts in writing readable, reusable code, where I can understand what it does, why it is done and how to use it.

At this point the future game is about a teenage girl who lands in emergency on the red planet and her mission is to stay alive, initially pending her health, stamina and oxygen. About the character I can say that it represents a very personal aspect of my life with my daughter who today is 18 years old, and somehow I want to capture in the game a very personal situation.

The character initially has two accessories, a helmet and a backpack.  And his life, stamina and oxygen are measured with a Hud system that is positioned in the upper right corner.

The character initially has two accessories, a helmet and a backpack.  And his life, stamina and oxygen are measured with a Hud system that is positioned in the upper right corner.

Although I can model characters and animate them, they would never look professional, so I resort to external tools like Mixamo to animate biped characters and to create them I use tools like Fuse, both systems are currently free.

In this case the head of the character is created with Fuse, and the body of the character has its own story.

The initial character 

The initial character was purchased from an art store and looked very different from what he is now.  The changes arose due to the family situation we are going through and I decided to give her a more human aspect where the model pretends to be my daughter on the red planet (cancer). Then as the model underwent these changes to with the Fragmotion program which is for 3D modeling and where he received a successful head transplant.  The rigging is created automatically by Mixamo and in the process the character is what it is today.

I have to mention that I am not an expert in 3D art and the only tool I use is Fragmotion, where I can create basic architectural and organic models and give them an animation, but I would not have professional results like Mixamo and Fuse (free tools).

The creation process

I am not an expert in this, I have gone through a lot of engines, each one with its pros and cons, however I highlight that Leadwerks engine is just what I need from a technical aspect where my computer runs it very well. ( Hardware from a decade ago ). I love writing scripts compared to visual systems that offer other environments, so this is more for personal taste and circumstances. 

The most difficult thing at this point is to learn something and then put it into practice, for me this is a great achievement because I do not speak English and my learning process is usually complex. For some reason I am going a little slower but consolidating knowledge, making me skilled in this tool.

So it is where for several years I have been trying to make the ragdoll effect, and evidently it could be done, not that it is perfect, but in the end it is a game and I am not creating a simulator of life. But I'm happy with the result, although partly because I would have liked the character to stand up.  I am convinced that it can be done, however I don't want to invest more time in this and rather as soon as possible to have a playable demo.  The problem to make the character stand up has to do with bones, rigid bodies and currently I use SetParent to hook the bones to those rigid bodies, but this prevents to free the skeleton to use it in an animation, the most reasonable would be to use SetPosition, SetRotation, but you see strange effects that surely have a solution, but would involve a process of learning and understanding to achieve the goal to stand up, such as detecting that the character is with his chest against the ground or back and unleash an animation to stand up. But possibly in the future it could be done. 

Doing this part of the ragdoll involves being aware of many things, the most complicated thing for me to make a game is to unite several systems and that all work as a gear in a harmonious way, I always emphasize I am not an expert in this, but I get by with the way I have learned, and something that happens is that when we learn by our means, what will happen is that we learn wrong in a high degree of percentage. 

For example when the character dies, it was a tremendous problem because I could not return it to its initial position, like a checkpoint, and what happened was that I loaded the character on the map. The solution was to load the character by means of script in a global variable, to later eliminate it of the memory but not if before loading it again, apparently what it does is not to load it from the hard disk, but from the memory where the other one was. 

But at the moment for me this is a feat, this works and all my experience is based as a player. 

User-facing parts of the project

When the user launches the application, he will initially see a representative drawing of Mars, with a sign that reads the name of the game. ( Astrocuco).

The interesting thing about this is that I have put a fade in and fade out effect on each scene like this. For example when entering the menu it appears little by little and when leaving it happens the same way.

Subsequently, the menu is passed in 3D, a scene of a place that is intended to simulate a spatial environment of loading and unloading of resources. 

This menu is a prototype of what should be in the future, more specifically in the options section, where initially the player can change the screen resolution, or switch from windows windowed mode to full screen ( It works )

I have to comment that creating the resolution change and all this was a kick in the balls as well as the ragdoll. But in the end it works and that is gratifying from a developer's point of view.

To finish I have to work on gameplay aspects, in the future I need a radar or a compass, also a simple inventory GUI. The idea is to collect certain elements (scrap, Polymer and other things to make things and repair them. I am aware that this prototype is very basic, and I don't know if I really make a game of this, but I have an 18 year old girl who tells me which looks very good, and it usually happens that over the years in my case we lose our ingenuity and see the world as children do not see it.

So my daughter wants to see the game on Steam, would it be possible? I'm very pessimistic, but my daughter thinks so.

So without further ado, we'll see you later.

I would like to know your opinion, constructive and realistic criticism, you do not have to hurt my feelings, I highly value sincerity.