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gameshowtrainwreck · 1 month ago

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A step by step guide to making something with a niche application in Godot 4, as laid out like a cooking blog giving you a recipe (with art elements I've made for it)

A person has to have influences. Not just in who inspires them to create art, but who inspires them in their planning their avenues of attack, their planning, their sheer fuckin' gumption. the utter balls they have to even show up after that nonsense they pulled last week. Nobody has ever said that about me, but life has a way of beating every last ounce of shame out of a person to the point where they feel there is the chance that could happen.

In my case, there are the people i think those who know me would say i would pick: people in game shows, people for whom 'bastard' has been an exclamation of both high praise and low curse. People like Jay Wolpert, for being perhaps the most experimental producer in an especially commercial genre (Whew, Shopping Spree, for attempting to make Trivial Pursit somehow exciting to watch instead of just to play); Bob Stewart, for being the man in the right place at the right time (one of those times was hearing Monty Hall tell him that old man goodson was looking for people); Reg Grundy, the aussie tv producer who would go on research trips to new york, spending the entire week in a hotel room with a copy of tv guide, a pen, and a composition book with a masking tape label bearing the caution of "original game show ideas do not steal" —and i am totally not hating on Grundy for that; IANAL but I've observed enough of it to make the opinion that you can protect how a game looks, reads, and sounds, but games are processes, and the intellectual property system here in the US does not protect the processes of baking a cake/formulating a fragrance/giving away merchandise to members of the general public according to arbitrarily set metrics presented as competitions of skill.

There have been at least two or three court cases where somebody *tried* to sue one show for being "too much like" another game show, but those what weren't settled out of court (most recently Tokyo Broadcasting System vs Endemol over Wipeout being too much like Takeshi's Castle), were dismissed outright (e.g. Chuck Barris vs Haim Saban, over the defendant's I'm Telling being too much like The Newlywed Game. The judge said nobody had a claim on inane bullshit and told all parties involved to stop wasting the court's time). Hell, it's the reason why Words With Friends was left unscathed (and eventually bought out) by Hasbro while Scrabulous had to shut down– Scrabulous danced a little to close of the “reasonable person” argument, in that there were actual ways people *could* confuse Scrabulous for Scrabble in that they used a similar board layout, similar scoring, etc.

But my influences extend beyond game shows, like film director/producer william castle, probably the most successful boilermaker hollywood could ever offer out of postwar america; there was a talk he gave to a college class. even though you might be able to tell in the speech that he felt somewhat disrespected by a class who knew him just from the movies he directed, he gave advice that stuck with me, even if the exact quote has peeled off in a couple of places in my mind from age: 'a producer is someone who is willing to step into any role in a project to see it through to completion.’ and I would say that's not just useful for having an understanding of how it all works, but it is incredibly important for a producer to learn patience, especially for anybody a producer works with. By learning how to edit, learning how to direct, and so on, you have an appreciation for the skills you're only just dipping your toes in; these are people who committed to that particular role and they are no less worthy of the patience, respect, and money that you would want for yourself for this.

Which has been why I've been learning Godot 4. That, and I am both too fucking broke to pay anybody else. Also there's the ifetime of neurodivergent trauma has made hyperindependence A Thing for me. That self-reliance, the rural Appalachian definition of it at least, is a Key Sign of Adulthood, and that an inability to do everything on your own is a choice of slothfulness. I can't ask people for help when I am still trying to figure out what it is I need help with. And if I hate being asked to help with no ready instructions on what to do, why would I want to put anybody else through the same thing?

So I try to learn it all and do it all. It's why a man in his 40s is just starting out in a career that most everybody else in his peer group are developing midlife crises over. It's why a man who has worked what was available hasn't been able to work what he wants to do, and why he still weeps at the end of the day over the years where it turned out he wasn't lazy or flawed or worthless, but had to work even harder just to get the same level of normal everybody else had no trouble managing.

I've also got in the habit of writing the stuff I've learned down, so if anybody else is looking to do the same thing, maybe they will have more time and energy to get to places I've not been able to find because I've had to do this, first.

So, if anyone is inclined/interested in making their own quiz projects, or just having a goofy little graphical element to represent a value within a game they are building, here's the workflow I've found so far for making trilons (the old fashioned flippy boxes like you see on $25,000 Pyramid) in Godot4:

(1) Make a new 3d scene. Add a new MeshInstance3D node to it, Look in the Inspector for the mesh just created > look for Mesh in the first entry > click the dropdown box next to it > select New Prism Mesh. Set initial mesh dimensions 1:0.866:1-- whatever changes made after this will keep things conforming to these initial proportions.

(2) find center mass: adjust it along your pivot axis by half of the height ( 0.866*0.5, or 0.433; look for inspector > transform > position > y-axis), then take that result and subtract the height, divided by 3 (0.433 - (0.866/3), or 0.144 in the same field)

(3) make your initial positioning; depending on where and how you wanna put it, the info i need to display on this is a maximum of three lines of text with some graphical highlights added. A landscape orientation will be what I need here. to that end, i set the rotation on the y-axis field to 90, so that only one face is visible to the camera when seen from the front. The pivot for its initial/"home" position itself will be done later.

(4) size it to spec; because we set the initial dimensions in step one, we can use the scale fields to size it to the specifications and still keep things equilateral. In the layout I've designed, I will need three of these, the faces of which being 295x95 pixels. Each face will need to be able to fit these proportions, so the x axis needs to stay at 1, the y-axis needs to be requested height divided by 100 (95/100 or 0.95 inspector > transform > scale > y-axis), the z-axis needs to be the width done the same way (295/100 or 2.95, next field over)

(5) create the controller; create a new Node3D, set the MeshInstance3D as a child to it. this will be what will have the animations attached to it later on. I renamed mine to 'controller,' because I lack an imagination at three-thirty in the morning.

(6) Set its starting position; change focus from the MeshInstance3D to its adoptive parent, bringing its fields up in the inspector. The default state needs to have one face as the only one being visible. The easiest thing I have found to do, especially considering the animations I need to set for this, is setting inspector > transform > rotation > x-axis to -90 degrees, as the animation player gets a little screwy if it tries to go beyond 360, plus or minus. it's a thing, i don't sweat it.

(7) Create the animations. Add an AnimationPlayer node to bring up the Animations panel, then choose the controller node. This will move the entire mesh by the center pivot we set earlier.

You should notice a key icon in each heading of the transform section of the Inspector, that's for setting keyframes. Go to the Animation pane > click the "animation" button next to the greyed out dropdown box. In the menu that pops up, choose "new animation."

(7b) For this, since I've got 3 faces on this (and it's possible to use more, it's possible to just have one plane, double-sided. I just figured a trilon was as good a starting place as any), there needs to be 3 seperate stops: from the 1st face to the 2nd; 2nd to the 3rd; etc. that's 120 degrees between each stop. For the first animation, I click the key under 'transform' (and it may ask you to confirm that you're starting a new animation track, it's okay). There should be a checkbox with the word 'rotation' and a dot next to the border of the timeline.

(7c) Next, advance the animation shuttle (it's that blue stick that glides along the animation timeline whenever you hit the play button) to the other, accessable end of the timeline (it defaults to one second but you can change it), and then add 120 degrees to the x-axis rotation (should be showing 30 degrees). Click the key again to set the ending keyframe. Godot will now rotate the mesh from the position you gave it to start on to the position you gave it to end on.

Repeat that until you've made animations moving along all three stops. A reset animation will be really handy here, as the default state will be showing a 'blank' graphic I made for this, so any time I need to introduce a new category with it, it will snap back to the ready state.

(7d, optional) I went ahead and made duplicate animations to speed up the rotation to make it seem a little more dramatic as mood dictates-- I went through and selected each animation from the dropdown box, clicked the animation button, and chose 'duplicate.'

it will ask you to give this duplicate a name, and I just attached the word 'snap' to it. I changed the overall length to .3 seconds, and adjusted the position of the ending keyframe on the timeline by clicking on the appropriate dot on the timeline, and changing the value for 'time' in the inspector to the end of the animation (.3).

Will I need to snap-flip whenever an ordinary category is played? Probably not, but I will need that snap-flip to happen if a modifier comes attached to the category (e.g. offering free picks at the board or doubling the value of the pot on a successful contract). I'd sooner have something and not need it as need it and not have it.

(8) Save the scene.

As of right now, I admit this is only half-useful; I have the mechanics but no way of putting graphics on each individual face of this trilon. Trying to set a texture via the MeshInstance3D > Material > NewStandardMaterial3D > Albedo will just use that one graphic and stretch it across the entire mesh.

From what I understand, I will need to build a custom shader that will divide the face into three, and swap the individual graphics out as the state of play and game logic require.

When I figure out how to do that, I'll put up what I did to get there.

For now, have a couple pieces of my poor craftsmanship:

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