Basic neural propagation pseudpseudocoded

Today I've worked on making up a way to program the propagation of actionpotentials.

I think that every part of a neuron and robot will be a prefab. A neuron will have a soma which takes up one square. This soma will have one to 4 neurites. Each of these neurites are in a sense dendrites, since every part of a neuron can be stimulated and will propagate the actionpotential to every direction. Each square will have one prefab that decides what animation it has depending on what things lie approximately to it.

Each prefab will have a sprite, a position and an animation. It will activate a square if its a wire. If it is an ending of an axon it will activate a square to be filled with neurotransmittors of its sort. If there is a part of a neuron there or a robots "cyborg interface" (the trigger that makes the robot 'fire'), the propagation will continue. This only occurs if the neurotransmitter is the matching sort. This will be depicted with color so it's easy to see the missmatch. Maybe even the neurotransmitters will have distinct shape as well.

The following things I have made in simple pseudo-pseudo code:

Neurons and parts
Neurotransmitters
Bacteria enemies
Heater robot
Laser robot
Pusher robot
Conveyor belt robot
Turner robot

All of these parts use one square and some parts can be on the same square, such as connections that makes natural and artificial synapses.

I've found a skilled game programmer that is interested in the game. Tobias is one of my most skilled programmers I know. I think that delegating the most advanced programming tasks to him will be the best. So I will ask him to take a look at the tower defence toolkit and see if it would suffice. He'll maybe suggest that we write everything ourselves, that would be cool and could make more efficient use of the computer juice in those small tablets and pocket computers.

If we make the decision to make our own thing then we will depend on him allot. So we'll see how dedicated he is and if he'll be likely to continue until the depending work is done. I'll ask him to estimate how long it will take since he is more experienced with this.

I'm also doing research for a gamecompany through my education, and they use unity. Maybe I can ask someone there to get some tips about how to go about the advanced stuff. That would be great.



Until next time I will have talked to these people and structured this all a bit more.


I often listen to Ubiktune releases when I work to get into the working flow.
This time: coda - Minimap

Until next time!
//Tistou Blomberg

Planning code

I have been sick this week.

Next week I will plan the game and brainstorm about how to use the features I've discovered in Unity to develop the game.

When this is done I hope to be able to make concrete assignments. I want the assignments to be formed to the developers skills so that it is not to hard, not to easy and will be a step towards completing the code.

//Tistou B.

Tower defence toolkit free from unity assets store

This week I've worked on understanding the code within the tower defence toolkit. It's written in C# and quite nice for making tower defence games it seems. Our game doesn't need the autoaiming part of turrets and we need neurons which should be able to grow in different directions. I don't know how we should structure our code to best pull this of. In the beginning I thought of using classes but with unity it seems more reasonable to make prefabs that unity uses instead.

I've experienced a difference in coding things from "scratch" and using unity. Unity has so many features that much of the coding isn't needed, I think it can be an advantage to learn more about how unity is thought to be used to make games. I wished that I had played around with it more and been making easier games to get an intuitive feel about unity. Progress is going steadily forward and I can see that the project can be done but I'm not as optimistic about the time. I like that I get more experience about how much time things take, I think that is a good thing to be able to estimate. Especially in the planning/project manager business.

I've also started to make a prototype of the game just to see some results to be able to show to people and maybe motivate some. I've also started to divide coding between people, it's hard when you don't know yet what to code, offcourse. The main thing right now is to plan how the whole game will be structured and get a big perspective which can guide me about what exactly needs to be done.

I will continue on my prototype and focus a lot on getting a perspective on how things should be implemented in unity. I'm not sure about my estimations about time so I'm not at all sure about when we're going to be done, I think it will be done before this summer but I have really no idea. It's till fun and interesting so the development continues! :) Will work 3 days on it next week.


Now I'll continue playing BANG! with my friends.
//Tistou Blomberg

Sorry I forgot to write this post yesterday

Hello!

This week I've focused on writing an essay for my course in linguistics so I've been forced to leave gamemaking this week. I'm sorry for not updating earlier.

When I'm done with it I will have MASSIVE time to make games. So don't be alarmed, I will probably spend like 3-4 days a week on the game at least until january.

Next Sunday will have a post worthy it's weight in gold. How much does a post weigh?

Keep it fresh!

//Tistou Blomberg, a lazy prick

TOOLBELT for unity

Hello hello!

This week I've talked to our new graphics designer. He has had experience working as one so he knew things we needed to know! Firstly he wanted specifics on sizes of sprites and formats. He also proposed that we'll make the game first, and then let the graphers graph away. That way the game wont change into something that requires us to toss away graphics and make new.

windwaker without textures

I, Felix and Svitri has worked on learning Unity and we've come a long way! We might finish in time but the game might be released in february or march at latest.

I've looked at how to think when working in unity, getting the feel of it by just diving into the great material spread all over the internet.

Youtube is a good way to start I think. Just looking up tutorials and follow a really basic one is comfortable. They vary in quality alot. Look out for "Live-shows" just uploaded to youtube, they might be great but also might involve big errors that really don't concern you, and you can't fast forward in case they mention something important that you'll need to know later. So stick to tutorials nonlive, unless you are actually seeing it live and can chat, then it might be great! unity 4.3 has come with a new BIG 2D update but there isn't allot of tutorials on that yet.

So I've looked at 6 great tools to have when working with unity:

1. Unity Cookie , but you can't download the assets for free. I looked at tower defense tutorial which is totally right for this project and I think I'll go through this one first.
2. There is also the videotutorials on the unity website , haven't checked them out but they seem great for beginners, when you just want to learn unity and don't know where to start.
3. And as soon as you don't understand what a function does, if you use Monodevelop (which comes with unity) you can just look up the unity API reference! (It makes alot more sense if you are really looking something up)
4. If you are lucky coder, you might save alot of time and effort by searching for free code examples in the unity community !
5. Forums and the community is big. There are so many questions already answered you can just search and it's probably there. Or you can just ask!
6. There is also the "Asset store", full of assets available to make games. I've downloaded the "Tower defense toolkit" for free. Even though I wont use it in the game, I have learned allot from checking the code and examples to see how you could build a tower defense game. It's like dissecting for science.

So far I've been switching between these tools while working and that has worked well. I think that it's very helpfull to know about these to efficiently make stuff in unity. They are all very different from each other and while they all help with making stuff in unity they are worth to remember at the right time.

So far we have a beautiful main menu made by Svitri, a spawner that spawns bacteria-cubes and lastly a turret that can't aim but is very agile.

Beautiful main Menu

turret

turret "aiming"

I think that one way we can work efficiently is to learn different things, someone does menues, someone does grid and GUI for the levels and someone does the objects, like turrets and neurons and such. That way we can show each other different things and I think that we'll learn and produce faster.

I've also stumbled upon an article about axons and a bit of how they are formed.

Here is an idea: maybe you could lure bacteria and things. Maybe there is bacteria that is attracted to cold, then the player can lure it away by using some kind of heat ray on it's own neurons or something. Heating or freezing an area or pushing out nutrition may be beneficial at times.

I like turtles

//Tistou Blomberg

My first 2D game in Unity

I followed some really basic Unity-tutorials at MyBringBack on youtube and I've learned the basics on how you connect a javascript to your game, applying textures and physics. I will continue with these tutorials and try to make an ugly but complete neuro-tower game wich we can use as an inspiration and prototype to get more ideas and realize and solve problems.

Here is a short video of my first game.

Now when I have the basic tools and know where to get more (youtube, unity forums and unity wiki) it's only a matter of time when we are finished.

I have also spent time on specifying what assets we need so that we soon can put out a list of graphics we need and sounds. So that can run parallell to the programming. I think it will keep the motivation up.

I think we'll put someone on making the menues in Unity so that he'll get expertize and focus on that area.

I've talked to an additional graphics designer and he seem interested. He and some others I talked to really like the immunoloy-idea and want to ditch or tune down on the robots. I do like that idea but it might no be implemented to much since my expertise is about neuroscience and not immunology. I thought about it and if we find somebody who can research the immunology for us it could work. I don't know if those ideas will clash with how I think the gameplay should be for neurons. I think that we'll make the basic game first and put the roboticproduction later, that way any immunologist can see the game and adapt to the mechanics easier. If none turns up, we'll use robots. I also like the idea of connecting a robot to a biological beeing, I think that we'll adapt to that idea soon.


Have a great day!
Tistou Blomberg

Unity the game maker and codeacademy

Svitri noticed that they had a 3hour course in Unity at HumLab, so I took the chance to check it out. I thought it might be easy enough to make our game in it.

games made in unity

Totally worth it!!!

In 3 hours I learned to make a first person game where you could walk around with a flashlight, touch a cube to make it explode and throw around objects on fire. We've decided to ditch construct 2 and use unity as our engine to make the game. Unity works with c#, Boo and javascript so we have decided to learn javascripting.

ugly game with wooden grass

We use Codeacademy, a phenomenal site to learn the basics! Anyone just slighty interested in programming HAVE to check it out. It's very easy to learn. They use gamification and have made very simple exercises which you finish in seconds so that you really feel that progress you make.

writing 34 is very easy

I'm beginning to think that maybe that approach is better than mine for teaching via interactive artifacts.

I scanned through the course and I see that we'll need to learn additional stuff that's connected to scripting for unity, and all that seems very available in the unity community/forums, it's huuuge. I've begun to understand how unity works and the traditions of scripting for unity, so I hope that in two-three weeks we'll have a good structure and maybe even a very simple alpha of the game.

Visual Novel Toolkit Free

Our story guy Hjalmar likes the idea of visual novels so I've found a great (free) tutorial for making visual novels in the unity asset store. He'll be thrilled, I bet!


I've played around in unity and there is allot of free tutorials and templates (in the assets store) which makes the learning process super-effective. I'm so happy for this.


There is still much work needed to be done besides coding and level design:

• Taking ca 30 good pictures
• Drawing ca 10 nice backgrounds
• Drawing ca 60 good buttons and small images
• Animate ca 50 objects
• Recording ca 30 sounds
• Documenting exactly how many of each is needed

I'm going to make lists of what exactly we need and then like post it on facebook or something and see if folks likes the idea of contributing to the game, that would be awesome.


If anyone you know is interested in making games, feel free to recommend my blog if you think it might help.

Thanks for dropping by!

//Tistou Blomberg, human