Blogs - Nimble-Point

Hello again!

We’ve received a comment or two recently about the lack of creature characters in Buster Ranger, so I wanted to address this here. I also thought I’d give you a quick glimpse of 3 of our current enemy’s creatures. The only reason we’ve not shown them so far is for the same reason we’ve not shown 90% of the game, they’re simply not finished and thus not ready to be shown. Creature characters in Buster Ranger contain more than 60 characters with different and unique features. Here is a few number of them which are almost ready. We know how excited you are as we are. In the next blog we promise to show more characters which are followed by the description in details.

This looks fun, and it is also a nice example of the kind of sketching that works really well to communicate ideas. This kind of concept art does a lot more than just show something: it makes others enthusiastic about the ideas. Nimble Point is where all team members are involved in the core concepts, convincing others that your ideas are good is almost as important as having good ideas in the first place. Several of the devs at Nimble Point are masters at this, so today I would like to show you some examples of how art can be used to communicate ideas. Most of these concepts didn’t actually make it, but the way they were drawn makes me instantly like them.

During in the last 2 weeks we have been quite busy making some enemies to our game, I must say that we are starting to need some ideas for them. They must be foolish and funny creatures. I was interested to know more about how we can have memorable enemies fight in our game. So I found an amazing article with the title “Creating terrifying, memorable 2D monsters “. It was so useful and I recommend it.

Link : Creating terrifying, memorable 2D monsters

-Nimble Point

Buster Ranger: BusterRanger.com

Our site: NimblePoint.com.au

Greetings to everybody!

The Buster Ranger is a complicated and Side-Scroller video game . Having played once you will never be able to cover all the back streets of the world, discover the complicated relationship between the characters, to see the details of the story and the rest important aspects.

Therefore we came up with the idea to create a fantastic motion illustration which will push back the limits set by the game. The motion illustration will help you to deepen into the universe itself and go into details which could distract the player from gameplay.

To be honest this variant existed not very long. After a while, we had a clear understanding of the improvements to be implemented. The artists superseded each other and there was an enormous amount of patterns. We found our personal style and obtained the result we strove after for a long time.

The motion illustration story of Buster Ranger is an independent separate project. It will allow you to have a look at the history of the world from completely different sides: to learn the details of the plot and become a direct participant in the described events by playing the game.

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Until next time, thanks for reading!

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Heya Guys,

It’s time for the first real dev blog post. I’d like to start out by giving an overview of the technology choices we have made so far making Buster Ranger. I won’t be going into details about the tools and process on the art side since that isn’t something I know as much about. This will focus on the development environment, engines, and tools we’ve chosen from a programming and development perspective.

The first thing to introduce is the core tool and engine choice we’ve made: Unity. Before now this may have only been controversial because it did not have a lot of built-in focus on 2D games and Buster Ranger is a sprite-based 2D game. You may know exactly what I mean by “sprite” but in case you do not what I mean is that every object you see in the game is actually completely flat. Any depth is an illusion created by either effects or the excellent art itself. Given that we are very comfortable with Unity from past work – in both 3D and 2D – it was an obvious choice for us. The benefits of building our own engine are far outweighed by the costs. We probably would still be knee-deep in engine programming now, but instead we’ve been able to leap forward with game development and the project is already in a stable playable state. That’s the power of out-of-the-box engines with mature editing environments like Unity. There are other similar options out there – like Unreal – but our past experience with Unity allows us to move so quickly.

This brings up one of the issues we had with the connection between the art team and the development team: how do we get Majid’s sprites and sprite animations into the game? He had already done a lot of work in Spine to create these characters and backgrounds and many of them with complex animations. Would he need to redo all of that work again with the Smooth Moves editor? We decided this was not a good idea. This is an important lesson we learned prior to this project and an attitude we brought with us when we started working with Majid: accommodate your artists. Majid is very comfortable in Spine. That comfort means that he can produce high quality very quickly. If he needed to learn a new system – in this case Smooth Moves – it would have been wasted time because it does not actually provide any benefits for the art process over Spine. Instead we took some time to create a 2-sided tool for bringing his artwork and animation into Unity directly.

One of the areas that I have historically been disappointed with has been how we handle audio. In the past we simply used the Unity built-in audio systems directly and the lack of a higher-level framework felt very limiting. This time around I decided to do some research before putting any audio into the game and ended up picking another system from the Asset Store: Master Audio. One of the cool things about this is that audio clips can be assigned to groups which allows you to control many sounds at once. It provides a lot more options for controlling volumes. It is a tiny convenience since grabbing a random number and choosing a clip based on that is not very difficult but it is these small conveniences which allows us to focus on more core game development instead of engine development. I very quickly realized how good this system was when I was able to fashion together a “voice-over” system for playing our narrator over the game audio in just one day. The sound effects and the music both lower their volume automatically and then come back up to full volume after the voice over is done playing. All this with one function call that our level designer can access without needing to look at code.

I hope this was an interesting introduction to Buster Ranger’s development. What I’d love to hear is any feedback. Leave a comment with any suggestions for future blog posts or if there is anything specific you’d like me to cover in more detail. I’d also be interested in hearing if anyone solved some of these problems in a different way.

Nimble Point

Heya Guys,

For my first post, I thought it’d be great to spend a little time introducing the world and style of Nimble Point’s new game, Buster Ranger. Buster Ranger sends the player on a journey to a Sci-Fi fantasy world. The gameplay is filled with interesting progression systems.

Each enemy has different fighting equipment and mechanism which make it unique. They are equipped with missile, grandee, laser, and very powerful bomb.

Hiroki is an astronaut who is working on identifying new planets for a very important mission at the space base. Hiroki has a curious, hard-working character who is always ready for unpredictable world.

In future posts, I’d like to focus on specific areas of the game. Even though we’re at an early stage there’s already lots to show and we’re looking forward to talking more about it. As we progress, we’ll strive to keep the game’s development really visible, and we’d love to hear your thoughts on it all!

Best,
Foad

Hey all,

Saeed here with our 4 official blog post! This post has been a long time coming. With all of the exciting work going on and work left to do, blogging can quickly fall by the wayside. For that, we, the Nimble Point team, apologize.

I’m the team’s technical artist. It’s my job to make our animator’s art and programming come together in wonderful ways. Due to the vast nature of this topic it’s easy for me to get sidetracked so I will try to stay focus on the basics of the process.

We use an external application called Spine which is a 2D skeletal animation tool by Esoteric Software designed specifically for use in 2D games. Spine is fast and fluid. Its interface is easy and intuitive. It allows for easy swapping of images per bone as well a keyable draw order. Multiple skins allow us to create an even wider variety of enemy appearances without needing a multitude of animation files. Most importantly, the guys at Esoteric Software provide a library of Spine Runtimes that allow for a smooth workflow in Unity. Combined with very regular updates and advanced features like skinning and mesh deformations, Spine was simply the best choice for us.

In Spine, each of these individual part gets its own slot under the appropriate bone. Certain images remain disabled until a specific animation needs them. At this point, the character is ready for animation! Many animations have become standardized: falling, kneeling, getting hit, or being grappled, to name a few. These are able to be made quickly and easily with only minor personalized tweaks. It’s in the characters walk, run, stance, and attacks where the characters personality shines through.

Developing our animations is an evolving process, constantly being tweaked and adjusted. The Spine file calls the events in game indicating when to play a sound, when an attack does damage, when the player can be interrupted, and a whole lot more. Each character design gets better, each character rig gets better, and Spine continues to improve and impress.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

Saeed

We’re incredibly pleased to announce that the Nimble Point site has gone live. To celebrate it I thought I’d write a quick post on who we actually are and what we’re up to. Nimble Point team is a small indie games team based in South Australia. We have experience in game development and animation, and are aiming to build you all a bunch of crazy little adventures to play through and enjoy.

Currently we’re working on Buster Ranger, which is a brilliant 2D action shooter game that we’ll be launching on Nintendo Switch during the first half of 2021. To get more information about Buster Ranger, what it’s about, and why you should support us, read Saeed’s great intro post here, and you can also check out a gallery of pics on the Buster Ranger page itself.

The aim of launching this site is to document the development of Buster Ranger. Art, trailers and other videos, articles about the game’s design and structure will be posted for giving more information about our project. If you like the look of Buster Ranger, you can follow us on Twitter/Facebook for regular updates and pics or even subscribe to our mailing list, and you will be updated with info on demos, beta releases, and the actual release of the game.

The more people play our game the better result we can get, so we’d love you to drop some comments on us as we work! You can even troll us, gently, if you like. We’re keen to get the word out as well and need all the help we can get, so go ahead and spread the word about Buster Ranger if you like our work and want to give us a hand.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Until next time!