fish folly

.vscode/settings.json

@@ -1,6 +1,8 @@
 {
     "cSpell.words": [
         "ABSM",
-        "Fyrox"
+        "Fyrox",
+        "navmesh",
+        "ragdoll"
     ]
 }

src/_posts/2024-03-13-how-i-made-a-game-in-fyrox.md

@@ -0,0 +1,114 @@
+---
+title: "How I Made a Game in Fyrox"
+date: "2024-03-13"
+description: "This article gives an overview of the development process of Fish Folly game."
+categories: 
+- General
+meta:
+  - property: og:title
+    content: How I Made a Game in Fyrox
+  - property: og:description
+    content: This article gives an overview of the development process of Fish Folly game.
+  - property: og:type
+    content: article
+  - property: og:url
+    content: https://fyrox.rs/blog/post/how-i-made-a-game-in-fyrox/
+  - property: og:image
+    content: https://fyrox.rs/assets/fish-folly/fish.gif
+---
+
+This article shows the overview of the development process of the [Fish Folly](https://github.com/mrDIMAS/FishFolly) 
+game using Fyrox Game Engine. It does not go into development details very deeply, though. The current state of the game is 
+something like this:
+
+<YtVideo url="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mxcSnWft0gQ" />
+
+## Idea and Assets
+
+The idea of the game was proposed by [@erlend](https://github.com/erlend) back in the April 2022 and it should be a FallGuys-like 3D 
+platformer with multiplayer support. I started working on it in May 2022. At first we thought about the visual style of the game 
+and decided it to be close to Fish Games series. Erlend purchased a 3D model for the main character:
+
+![fish](/assets/fish-folly/fish.gif)
+
+The next part was to find a good set of tiles for the game levels, and we found an awesome pack of tiles and various 3D models for
+the environment by Quaternius ([Ultimate Platformer Pack](https://quaternius.itch.io/ultimate-platformer-pack)). It fits nicely in the
+visual style of the game.
+
+## Development
+
+After these preparation steps were done, I started coding the game. The plan was to make an MVP in a few months, but... the universe had
+other plans. As you may noticed already, the development of MVP took almost 2 years. This mostly because I'm the lead developer of 
+Fyrox and when I see something missing or broken in the engine, I usually go and add/fix stuff. And don't forget that I had a full
+time job back in the day, so it was hard-mode development difficulty from the beginning. The first version of the game with 
+minimal functionality was done in a few weeks. It was a simple character controller, with a simple map and a few bots running into
+nowhere:
+
+<YtVideo url="https://www.youtube.com/embed/DrugAFKi-GQ" />
+
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRE5g57aZEg
+
+By the end of the June 2022, [@Hyeve](https://github.com/Hyeve-jrs) made a cool map using Quaternius tile set:
+
+![fish](/assets/fish-folly/map.png)
+
+This map was tweaked by me in the final version of the game, the most part of it remained unchanged, I just added more traps, cannons,
+spikes, etc. In the beginning of the July 2022 I've added a simple AI to the game:
+
+<YtVideo url="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YRE5g57aZEg" />
+
+It was dead-simple - bots run on navmesh straight to target, jumping when they see a gap in front of them (more on that later). It was 
+kinda working, but the chances of finishing a map by any bot was very low. The navmesh was "drawn" by hand:
+
+![navmesh](/assets/fish-folly/navmesh.webp)
+
+Since the game is FallGuys-like, there was a key part that is still missing - ragdoll physics for characters. This took me a lot of 
+effort to add it to the game, since I never did it previously:
+
+<YtVideo url="https://www.youtube.com/embed/RuoLInE34dM" />
+
+It is kinda buggy, but sorta works. Looking ahead, it is worth to mention that this ragdoll physics was one the trickiest part of the
+entire game to make working properly. Ragdoll principle is very easy at first glance, but it requires a lof of manual work for fine 
+tuning. In general, ragdolls are just a set of rigid bodies linked with joints with various constraints (you can read more 
+[here](https://fyrox-book.github.io/physics/ragdoll.html)). I even added a special Ragdoll Wizard to the engine (you can see it in action 
+[here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxSlqGhCxYc)). After the initial ragdoll support was added, I switched back to the engine development and 
+released four (!) versions of the engine (you can find blog posts [here](https://fyrox.rs/blog/)). As you can see, the entire 2023 was
+dedicated to the engine development and the game development was on-hold. 
+
+In January 2024, I decided to continue the development, just to have at least some project on the engine more or less finished. I started
+by improving the player's control, improved ragdoll physics a lot and made a [Web-version](https://fyrox.rs/assets/demo/fish_folly/index.html) 
+of the game. You can still play it, but it is very outdated by now. Unfortunately, the latest version cannot be run in a web-browser,
+because it uses standard TCP sockets for networking. 
+
+At this time the game still didn't have a multiplayer support. By that time, I had very little expertise in making multiplayer games.
+I talked with people, read some articles and decided to implement client-server architecture with listen-server approach. Transformation
+of the game to client-server architecture was quite painful. There was a lot of trial and error before I found the right way of doing 
+things. 
+
+At first, I separated game code into two parts - server and client sides. Server side does the heavy lifting - it runs the entire
+game logic, simulates physics, sending messages to the clients, etc. Client side on the other hand is very lightweight, it can be considered
+as a simple "player" for commands that comes from the server. It just sets positions and rotations for scene nodes, controls sound sources... 
+and that's pretty much it. 
+
+The first version of the multiplayer support was finished by the end of January 2024 - and it looked like this:
+
+<YtVideo url="https://www.youtube.com/embed/b8Fs9fF6AJ8" />
+
+As you can see, at this time I also made a simple UI. This UI was made in the new UI editor, that was implemented not so long ago. Since
+this point in time the development was quite rapid. The entire February and the beginning of March 2024 was spent on adding missing game 
+features. I added leaderboard, improved bots AI, added more traps, added award scene, added sounds and music, fixed a lot of bugs. 
+
+Bots AI was probably the second non-trivial part of the development. Bots are using navigational mesh of the level to build paths to target.
+Since the path contains a lot of gaps and traps, some avoidance algorithm should be added. I ended up with something like this:
+
+![bots ai](/assets/fish-folly/bots_ai.png)
+
+The three vertical lines in front of the bots are ground probes, that checks if there's a gap that can jumped over. It is based on simple
+raycasting. The green box is used to determine if there's a trap in front of the bot. If the bot "sees" the trap, it just goes backwards. 
+It works kinda ok with rotating traps, but not for stationary spikes.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+The development of this game was a lot of fun, I learned a lof of new stuff. If you want to add your map, some game mechanics, sounds, or
+anything you want you can do it in the [game's repository](https://github.com/mrDIMAS/FishFolly). This project was made by the effort of
+many people, and you can become one of them.