GameDev Blog: Goblin Rules Football #30: Tornadoes and Sound (for some things)

In my previous post I said I wanted to make tornadoes for the Golf mode of Goblin Rules Football. I went about and did that. To start, I created a little tornado animation. I’m not 100% happy with it, but at least it looks somewhat like a tornado. Judge for yourself, if you’d like:

It’s only 3 frames. It honestly took me so long just to make that. Something like two days of struggling to get something I thought looked even remotely like a tornado.

Anyway, the way the tornadoes work in the game now is pretty straight forward. If it is raining and there is wind, a tornado will spawn. If the rain stops or wind goes to 0, the tornado disappears. The tornado has a “strength” when it spawns that is based on how hard it is raining and how fast the wind is. Between player turns the tornado moves toward player balls. If it collides with one, it throws it! In a random direction! Here’s a video showing it a bit:

In the above video the tornado didn’t have the ability to move yet. But don’t fret! The tornadoes move now! Yeah, that’s right, the tornadoes move now, and you can see them in action in the video below:

I still want to modify how tornadoes are spawned, their likelihood and where, as well as who the tornadoes will target. That will all be part of the “ritual” minigame stuff I want to add at some point. Right now though I’m nowhere near ready to do so. Partly because it will just take a bit to make, and also partly because I don’t know what those ritual games will be yet. I honestly have no idea. Rhythm games type things? Something on the course that you have to hit/do on your turns? Something else I haven’t thought of yet? Who knows…

One thing you can see (hear) in the videos is that there are (some) sounds in the game! Like GRF, I used sounds that I found in the Sonniss GDC audio library, which you can find links to here. The sounds are free to use in hobbyist or commercial games! Great! Right now, there’s a sound for teeing off, hitting the ball not-off-a-tee, thunder, the ball going in the hole, changing your club (a “rummaging through a bag” type sound), and some nature sounds for rain and clear days. Still missing sounds for the ball bouncing off the ground or objects. No sound for the tornado either (they’re loud I think?). I’ll hopefully get to those someday.

A new version of the “demo” is up on itch now that includes all these sounds and tornadoes and being struck by lightning and stuff! How exciting. Oh yeah, here’s the link.

Next Steps…

The next thing I want to do is either add the ritual minigames for the tornadoes, or to start converting the game to be online multiplayer. I’ve tested the game out as a sort of “local” multiplayer with two player objects that the one player switches between based on whose turn it is. Converting to actual multiplayer will probably be a huge pain in the ass, but hey, I have to do it eventually? I think? Hopefully it all works out. I made sure to mark a github commit as “before multiplayer” as well as creating a local backup zip of the project, so I should be good to revert back if I find multiplayer too much to handle with my feeble gamedev hobbyist brain. Fingers crossed it goes well!

Smell ya later, nerds!