GiantBombers - An Open Source Windjammers Clone

Hello fellow duders! I attended a game jam last month and made a wind jammers clone in 8 hours! It is absolutely not perfect as I have never played the actual windjammers game, but I watched enough of the crew play it to get the basic idea.

The old windows build is available at http://shaneobrien.ie/gamejams/DGCDec13/WinterJammers.rar. It is two players only and requires two Xbox 360 controllers to play.

You can find the github project at https://github.com/ShaneOBrien/GiantBombers

The code is hastily written and far from my best work, I will be working on tidying everything up and adding more features as well as changing from 3D to proper Unity 2D. Feel free to fork the project and make any additions / changes and I'll try add them back into the project. All contributors will be made note of in the main directory on the project.

Let me know what you think =D

Very nice, I will check this out when I get home from work!

mind posting screenshots for those of us at work and unable to download?

It's purely programmer art at the moment, partially because I made the game in its current state in 8 hours and mostly because I cannot art at all...

If someone wants to volunteer to make character sprites that'd be awesome =D

Art

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bomb-squad-6871/bombjammers-the-gb-crew-in-windjammers-update-1466914/

I hope this appears on Unprofessional Friday at some point. I bet looking at a fan Windjammers clone that's super early could be fun.

I haven't played it and I won't be because I don't have folk to play it with but I'm curious, did you get in all the things with catching, throwing, special moves, charging, etc?

I have catching and throwing in, the speed of the disc is increased based on how fast you pressed the throw button, no special moves or charging yet. Throwing shouldn't be difficult at all, special moves will require some research but shouldn't be too hard.

@fattony12000 said:

Art

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bomb-squad-6871/bombjammers-the-gb-crew-in-windjammers-update-1466914/

Holy cow! That would be great to get full on sprites of the crew going!

@finstern said:

@themasterds said:

I hope this appears on Unprofessional Friday at some point. I bet looking at a fan Windjammers clone that's super early could be fun.

I haven't played it and I won't be because I don't have folk to play it with but I'm curious, did you get in all the things with catching, throwing, special moves, charging, etc?

I have catching and throwing in, the speed of the disc is increased based on how fast you pressed the throw button, no special moves or charging yet. Throwing shouldn't be difficult at all, special moves will require some research but shouldn't be too hard.

@fattony12000 said:

Art

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bomb-squad-6871/bombjammers-the-gb-crew-in-windjammers-update-1466914/

Holy cow! That would be great to get full on sprites of the crew going!

maybe @fobwashed can give you a hand with sprite work?

@mrfluke: As much as I'd love to, I've got way too much on my plate to invest the amount of time that'd be required to do this =[ This community is pretty damn talented. I'm sure someone else is available to step up to the challenge!

You maybe want to speak to this guy? http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/i-m-pulling-the-trigger-on-this-giant-bomb-windjam-1458269/?page=1

I can do nothing but encourage these ventures! Good luck.

come on ... im sure you find a way to make your day like 5 hours longer! ;)

Are we finally on the cusp of a Giant Bomb themed game? That'd be my dream come true. I'd also like to say how much I love this community. So many talented and awesome people in one place. I really do hope things come together.

If you need some music for it i may be able to help out.

To see the crew play a game of WindBombers, choosing themselves, even if it's a horribly broken mess - that would be magic.

And we could finally get that dog to do something!

That would be great,

Would love to hear what you come up with, I'd imagine it would be the GB tune with a windjammers/ general neogeo remix.

Holy crap! A "Let's Make a Game GB Project" that's actually working!? Sign me up!

I can code and make some simple 3D models in Blender if you need any.

@rxanadu: Feel free to fork the project and see what you can/want to add! I'll probably be switching over to Unity 2D if we can get some 2D art, I only went with 3D initially because I knew what I was doing with it for the game jam.

Unity 2D as in 2D Toolkit, or some older version of Unity I'm not familiar with?

Also, you know Unity 4 has native 2d support now right?

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/08/28/unity-native-2d-tools/

@planetfunksquad: Yeah, I'm talking about the new native 2D stuff, shouldn't take long at all, all the current scripts should work in theory as everything is already locked to a 2d plane. But I need to figure out colliders and physics which in Unity shouldn't be too difficult.

Oh man, I really hope this turns into something good. A Giant Bomb themed Windjammers clone developed by the Giant Bomb community sounds really appealing.

If anyone wants to try their hand at making 2D art, I managed to rip a scene and break it into layers in photoshop for reference, you can grab the scene here: http://www.shaneobrien.ie/prog/giantbombers/WindJammersArt.psd

I've blown it up to 1080p using the Nearest Neighbor resampling option so the art will look at least that good in engine at that resolution and should scale up/down pretty well.

I've been going through the scripts and cleaning up the code, but I don't know what does what. I'm currently going through the PlayerController script, and I'm trying to make the code more portable. This includes placing repeated code in their own functions, reducing the size of other functions, placing comments where explanations are necessary, removing unused variables, and replacing hard-coded values with private variables.

For example in your diveClamp script, you have a lot of values for clamping where the player can dive(?). Speaking of which, I'm not quite sure what the sphere is used for in the game. I assumed it was the player's hand, but it didn't function that way when I was testing it out with my controller.

I also noticed the situation with the ball "disappearing" numerous times. This could be due to your constant use of collision detection rather than trigger detection. The "ball" is colliding with both the trigger on the player and the character controller when it's caught by the player. When that happens, Unity's built-in physics tend to go wonky, causing events such as the disappearing ball you commented on earlier.

I absolutely adore the sprite visuals. I'm a production artist by day but I've been wanting to get back into game-making... I could commit to 8 hours a week on UI art and sprites, if you need me. I would stick to the look and feel of the original game/the posted image above.

i want some real hideous poser-level models of the bombcrew STAT!

Need hot collabo.

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/i-m-pulling-the-trigger-on-this-giant-bomb-windjam-1458269/

Oh man, YES. Daz3D studio is free these days I believe.

Wait so was this the one on UPF the other day?

Yup

time to find and download the latest build!

Unless I'm mistaken, I think the one on UPF was made by @icyeyes.

We need to somehow get Lang to buy this...

@thunderslash: Yup, you're right. I think it was called windbombers or something.

Correct! It wasn't the game in this thread.

Well I got to live and see the day..

Nope. @thunderslash & @flstyle are right. "Giant Bomb Jammers" was made by myself with GameMaker, but I'm working on porting it over to Unity. Unfortunately, it's not currently available for download, but I hope to get an updated public release out as soon as possible.

Ah ok thanks! I was probably gonna end up messaging you as I remembered your name being mentioned as the developer. Anyway I am very keenly looking forward to you getting it released :D

In the meantime I'll play Bubble Tennis which is not quite as good.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=41509.msg1033989#msg1033989

That's a really neat game. I wouldn't consider mine better, just different. The "passive slap back" makes it more like Sanrio World Smash Ball. While the "grab and hold" mechanic of my game, makes it much closer to Windjammers.

And ruin it? NOT ON YOUR LIFE.

Out of interest I work for YoYo Games shhh what's making you move from GameMaker to Unity for such a small 2D project?

@icyeyes: by "buy" I generally mean "hire you."

I also prefer the term "Langify" to "ruin"

@rmanthorp: Porting it to Unity is definitely unnecessary, I'm even a little tempted to not, but I'm primarily doing it as a learning exercise.

I've been using GameMaker for many, many years; I believe since version 3 or 4 from way back in 1999! However, as great as it is for fast 2D development/prototyping, I've been moving towards 3D for most of my projects. I still use GameMaker (version 7) for simple prototyping and stuff like this, but I feel that GameMaker: Studio is starting to lose what made the program so useful and popular in the past.

@icyeyes: That's cool to hear. No - I understand. We get that a lot and honestly, I understand where it comes from but with Studio our plan moving forward is to maintain the rapid prototyping while offering a larger suite of 2D development tools - we are trying to strike a balance and it's tricky. Thank you for your honest opinion :) Game is awesome btw! Can't wait to see more.

And indeed, it was magic.

If only Vinny could have been there..

Yes both games are very different, I prefer the Windjammers feel of yours so looking forward to playing that.

I'm just now getting into chiptracking, so I may be able to throw in some music later on.