Wow  
Those environments look so good! Especially love the hell plants. And the color schemes for each of the environments are amazing! Will they have some kind of day/night cycle?

[Update 208]

Update 208
Ok, so here's why it's not a good idea to promise things in advance... You know those things I wrote about last time? I did some of them. Nothing new to write

Actually what I've been doing is making the pup an object that exists consistently between levels. Like, its position is saved when you exit a level, it can follow you to the next level, etc etc. It's also capable of some very abstracted movement when off-screen.

Generally if there's anything I'm not extremely happy with in my game it would be how inactive the world is when off screen. Everything just goes into stasis, and is basically just saved as coordinates to later be loaded. This is because the game engine was originally written for a single-screen, multiplayer game - and when you maneuver between rooms it basically starts a "new game" for each room you enter. It has gotten a little bit more dynamic, and at least there is a pretty decent illusion that the entire world exists simultaneously, but part of that "each room is a new game" skeleton is still around.

Maybe I'll write a little engine that's capable of moving off-screen entities around and even have some very basic interaction between them. It's just a question of whether the current illusion of consistency is solid enough - it might be to a player that's not actually aware of what's going on under the hood.

Dude, it's just flickering rectangles... What's the game part? I can't even jump, just move side to side (sometimes).

[Update 207]

Hahahaha! In the next shrek movie my characters will be featured, promise!

awwww you held that little guys hand awwww

This game is becoming a very strange mix between ultra-violence and a hand holding-simulator! The project is officially out of control...

If the hand holding pup only takes one hand, can you still hold stones and spears with the other? How do you juggle between throwing the pup or throwing the spear?

I've been thinking about this, and while it would make sense to be able to hold a spear in the other hand, that would kind of make you question why you're not able to hold a pup in each hand - and then you would be able to carry all three of them around, which wouldn't be as fun gameplay-wise, as you pointed out. So for now holding a pup in one hand takes up both of your hand slots - that's not set in stone though. If it's just too annoying I might allow you to carry a spear or something simultaneously.

Thank you everyone for keeping my motivation up

Update 207
Made a new version of the pups' path finding, that works in one single calculation, contrary to the ordinary path finding which ticks along in real time as the game is running (to save framerate). The one-shot path finder will be used for when you exit a level, and the pups following you to the next level need to calculate if they are able to follow you, and if so how long it will take them to reach the short cut.

This path is saved as an array of all the tiles the pup has to pass through in order to get to the exit.

I also plan on saving the time when a pup is offloaded. That way, if you exit a level while a pup is running towards you, and then quickly re-enter before the pup has caught up, I can calculate how far along its route it will have gotten, and load it on that tile. That way I can fake some activity going on in rooms you are not currently viewing.

The lizards should probably get some similar treatment. Right now they're just re-loaded in the same general area where they were offloaded, but not much else is saved. Except their health, of course. Ideally I'd want to be able to exit a room, as I see that a lizard captures a pup and start off towards its den. Then return to the room, and have the lizard and the pup re-loaded, with the pup in the lizard's mouth, in a reasonable position you might expect it to have reached in the time it was off screen.

Gah, today I totally broke my rule of "write what you have done, not what you plan to do"... But well. Planning to do those things is the reason why I made a new path finding function for the pups today. More to come, stay tuned.

Aaaaaah! 
Fixed it! Strange though, it was broken on my phone but not on my computer... tried a new host, this is definitely the last time ever I try something new!

[Update 206]

Should've left yourself better notes!  

Heh, actually I don't comment at all... This is just a two week project anyways, why bother

this game is fucking amazing, one of few games i am actually genuinely looking forward to playing, massively inspirational as well thank you for making this game man

Thank you! Remember that it's extremely difficult and frustrating though

Update 206
Finally have something I can show:



Not much to add really, this is what I've spent the last couple of days doing. We started out with the pups just looking like squashed versions of adults, now most of the sprites they're compromised of are unique and not shared with the player. Other than that they work pretty much exactly the same, just simplified.

You can pick one up on your shoulders - the animation solution might be a little wink to the puppies in cave story. The one sitting on your shoulders doesn't affect your movement at all, which doesn't really make sense, but I have to go with the less frustrating solution sometime, don't I? You also have both hands free.

When you have a pup on your shoulders, you can "pick up" an additional one, by just grabbing it. The pup will run next to you, and you can pull it up ledges etc. This is what happens when I have the black pup on my shoulders and the yellow pup attached to my side, in the gif. This pup will also weight you down, and make climbing and jumping slower and less effective.

This last mode also works for stunned/dead pups. The idea is that when they're sitting on your shoulders, they are holding themselves in place, but if they are unable to do that you can still drag them along in the second mode. If you for example drag an unconscious pup with you, and it wakes up, it will jump up on your shoulders shortly if that spot is free.

You might notice that the pups cut into each other a little bit - some of their sprites are below the other pups, some in front. This is an issue when they grab free sprite channels, because they all want to have channels as close as possible to channel 400 or something like that, which means that the first to spawn gets 400, 399, 401 etc, and the next one gets 395, 406, etc. That's pretty easy to solve, I'll just have to get around to it.

Also the framework for pups holding flies/objects is in, and if you throw them at a fly they catch it and eat it. While the player can carry two objects, a pup can only carry one at a time.

[Update 205]

Can't record video

@artemi, yeah, we're on the same page then!

Update 205
With the pups' behavior somewhat done, I've started to look at their appearance. Picking apart the two year old animatronic doll of the player character in order to adapt it for smaller size is very interesting. Honestly I had forgotten my solutions for many of the problems, and now have to discover them all over again. Also it's a challenge, because now we're down to a size were every pixel counts, and things like pixel displacement because of sprite rotation can have a huge impact on the general appearance.

[Update 204]

@ Bandreus, thanks! It's really nice to know that someone likes the project enough to know as much about it as you do Right now I don't really remember how the lizard prioritization works, but I know it's based on distance somehow. However it doesn't do the distance calculation every tick, so sometimes a lizard can actually ignore a closer player. I think the system has a little commitment, like if it has started hunting one player it will continue for a while even if another player is closer. This is because otherwise two players would too easily be able to game a lizard by standing on each side of it, and quickly approaching it one by one, keeping the lizard bouncing back and forth without being able to decide which one to pursue.

You should be able to throw pups at flies to catch them.

This goes straight in the game. Excellent idea.

Update 204
It's really interesting to try to create intelligent behavior, because it certainly puts things in perspective. With a loooooot of work I've managed to lift the pups' intelligence level from -say- beetle, to -say- fish or perhaps chicken. Creating a system like this makes you realize that the intelligence of an average mammal or bird is truly staggering. The intelligence of that super slow guy in the back of the classroom in middle school is incomprehensible vast.

Still, it's a weird chimera of intelligence levels. It's more stupid than a chicken in regards of being able to understand what jumps it is able to make, but on the other hand it can flawlessly solve mazes that would be a challenge even to a human.

The lizards had the huge difficulty of them not being able to turn in corridors, making path finding at least four times as difficult. But other than that I think the pups have a more complex AI. The fact that they have to be able to flee as well as pursue added an entire dimension.

Having a game AI flee away from a particular coordinate is a lot more complicated than having it pursue a particular coordinate. The reason is pretty simple - because if you just back away from it you will almost always end up in a corner.

When trying to get to a coordinate, the question of where you want to go is obviously answered. When fleeing away from a coordinate, you have to figure out where to go instead. This new "defensive destination" (defensive because it's not where you really want to go, it's just where you want to go right now in order to put some distance between yourself and the coordinate you're fleeing from) has to have a few parameters be correct. It has to be in a direction which is away from the thing you're fleeing from, it has to be a place you can actually go to, ideally it should be a place which offers further fleeing possibilities, ie not a dead end.

Luckily the pups' AI doesn't really have to be perfect, it just have to look like behavior that is somewhat reasonable for this particular imaginary creature. They will run into dead ends etc, and when a lizard is very close they go into panic mode and just run away from the lizard, whether that'll get them into a corner or not. As I said, they're fish smart, not cat smart. But because of their complex way of handling information on other creatures they still manage to surprise me some times.

I did a test where I stood on one side of a divide with the pups, like this:


That's a lizard down below!


I jump across, but the pups can't. They're still in "follow mode", so they'll try to figure out a way to get to me.


After a while of thinking, the path finder gives them a path and they start to move. They have still not seen the lizard.


Because the path finder is aware of the level layout, but not the lizard's position, it gives the shortest path, which happens to come across the lizard. When they see the lizard their internal image of what creature is where is updated, and they flee back into the corridors to the right. In a normal game situation they would have pretty much no chance from here on, but for testing purposes I held the lizard in the courtyard to see how the pups would react.


With their internal maps containing the information "there's a lizard in the courtyard" the next round of path finding tries to avoid tiles close to that area. The next attempt at approaching the player gives a much longer path around the top of the level, but still a path that takes them to their destination.


Sadly, this won't help them much. They just die and die and die and die and die. The game is very hard for you, and you're a much more able creature, with a much more powerful brain behind it. The pups can't do half of what you can, they're extremely stupid, and they don't have the advantage of seeing the entire level as you can.

They're truly pathetic, so I'll just have to hope that looking at them will induce the desired protection instinct haha! At least I'm proud to have taken them to a level where they not (very often) literally run into the gaping jaws of a lizard.

In fact I don't think the AI will show much in the game - you can carry one pup on your back, and grab one with your hands, and move around that way, so you don't really have to rely much on them moving around on their own. When it comes to actual game play, I think you'll not even bring them to a level where there are lizards, but rather have them wait outside for you to hunt. Or back in the shelter, hehe.

But it was a lot of fun to program Not implying that I'm done 

I think your art is very good, but some parts of it are a bit problematic. I love the portrait. I have trouble with the backgrounds.

Slightly harsh feedback on the levels (Again, I really like the style, just trying to help. Also, if you have some cool thing such as old-console-specs or something that I don't understand going on, I apologize) :

The background walls have more detail and contrast than the actual collideable terrain. This makes the whole image rather busy, there's a lot of big areas of harsh repeating patterns that hurt my eyes. The characters/game objects have the same amount of detail, contrast and hue as those patterns, making them blend into their surroundings.

As the backgrounds have about the same level of contrast and detail as the terrain tiles, and they also have about the same lightness/hues, it all becomes pretty flat - it's hard to tell what's terrain and what's backdrop.

I'd reduce the number of colors in the bkg to 2 or three, that are very close to create little contrast. Then I wouldn't fill entire areas with repeating patterns, rather I would use small details here and there (eg the outlines of just a few bricks, to show that "this is a brick wall", similarly as you've done with the rock pattern on the foreground tiles) mostly next to walls. And most of all I would keep the terrain apart from the background either by hue or lightness - dark foreground and light background or vice versa.

I've been doing some boxing as a workout, and they way a left-right usually goes is that the backwards motion of the left shoulder after the jab is the same rotation/motion that drives the right shoulder forward. Basically you're just rotating your torso around some point inside your stomach, and the withdrawal of one shoulder is the same motion that pushes the next one forth - that way you can use the abs on both sides to power each punch.

The animation is really nice though! Problem with such a realistic style is that it makes people expect all the motions to be spot on real.

@artemi, actually I think of it the other way around - single player is Canon, and the rules there are the official rain world rules. Multiplayer sometimes deviates from that, because of Fun. I also expect the player to play single player first, then multi player.

The single player rules of friendly fire is that everything hits everything, whether you like it or not. RW doesn't have a health meter for players, just dead or not dead, and stunned. Rocks stun you for a while, spears kill you. Note that in single player none of these effects are wanted, as the you are on the same team.

In multiplayer you can switch spears off, which means that rocks still hit, and spears still hit lizards, but spears don't hit players. This is because the insta-kill spears tend to makes competitive games rather short, but you might still want to be able to use them on lizards. That's not Canon, it's just Rule of Fun.

@bandreus, this is yet another game vs simulation situation. As you say, it would make logical sense for them to pursue pups before players. On the other hand, from a game perspective, you want to be able to lure them away from the pups. If they follow a pup, you have an interaction between two AIs that you're not able to change, there's no "play". If they prioritize the player, you can save the pups by playing well - your actions matter.

Maybe the best balance would be to have them prioritize players and pups equally. But I really like your suggestion of having them differ depending on color as well.

@Dayvi, the consequences are not that grim, the "punishment" is only very temporary (the pup being stunned a little while) so in this case I don't think it's very unfair. If you hit them with a spear though...
 

Why would you stick to one gender per tribe?!

From my understanding, most human populations tend to include people of both sexes...

[Update 204]

Hm, that's very interesting. The very first thing that went through my head reading that was "if not for mistakes, then what should I punish the player for!?" 

In one way I think you're right. In one way I think you're not. It's interesting. I guess it is, as all design choices, a good or a bad design depending on what you're designing. If I we're making a futuristic racing game, that was all about the super smooth, trance-like flow of gameplay, I would totally agree with you. Then it would be all about designing an experience around the player, and that experience should be as slick and enjoyable as possible, with no weird annoying things happening such as mistakes having consequences.

Now, on the other end of the spectra we have dwarf fortress. I've always thought DF is kind of awesome because it isn't a slick gaming experience. Misunderstand me right, horrible UI is horrible, and would be better if improved. But the difficulty curve, the unforgivingness, is really appealing to me.

For two reasons - the first one is what I believe is the reason it is in DF, in-game narrative. Mistakes are stories. Losing that one goblin somewhere in your fortress, and have him trash a lever or whatever which in turn floods everything, is a story. It's punishing a mistake, and according to the "slick gameplay" philosophy shouldn't be there, but if it wasn't there wouldn't be a story.

The second reason is the sense of world it creates. A "don't punish mistakes"-game world is a show put up for the player. It might be a good show put up for the player, and some games should be like that, but it will make you feel like the world is an illusion only for your eyes. An unforgiving world, like that of DF, has much more of a sense of existence of its own. It's "Welcome, fool, let's see how you can handle this world." There are rules, and interactions, and the game doesn't care about what might be better for the player, much like our world doesn't care about what we would prefer. Gravity will do its thing, even if you, the "player", makes the mistake of stepping off a cliff. DF giant alligators will destroy doors, even if it floods the player's fortress. Rain World rocks will hurt creatures, even if you might not want to or might have made a mistake.

A world like that feels like it exists, it's not just a show for the player's enjoyment.

RW is a little bit in between, I guess. It's very good that you brought this up, because it forces me to think more about it. Is RW a play for the player, or a pre-existing world that the player is allowed entrance to? I have actually battled many design choices directly related to this, most notably the linear/open world decision, where I went with the open world. Still there are a lot of show going on, such as whenever you enter a room in that open world there just happens to be a lonely fly that's on its way to the closest swarming area, for your conviniece to follow. Maybe I should abolish those things as well, go all the way to the "simulated world that you're allowed in"? Or maybe I should drift more towards the middle?  One thing I'm pretty sure of though, is that in RW, if you throw a rock at a creature, that creature is hurt whether you want it or not...

Update 204
Making lizards see pups was surprisingly easy. I contemplated making a custom-tailored solution for pups in the lizards AI, but I'm happy I didn't. Instead I created a "pupsAndPlayersGlobalList" which has all pups and all players in it, then did an automatic replace everywhere in the lizards AI code changing "playersList" for the new one. Voilá, the lizard booted "brain ghosts" for all of the pups, spotted them, kept track of them, hunted them, and even carried them back to their dens more or less flawlessly.

One intersting feature is that a player can tug at one end of a pup while a lizard pulls the other. I think I'll keep it, with some adjustments, it has some really intense visual/emotional qualities to it.

@Aik

Alright, so we're both agreed that it's a problem that the stories produced in the video game industry are told from a too narrow (white, male, hetero) perspective?

You say the solution is to take in more people who are not white, male, hetero and have them tell their stories. I agree, that would be cool. The problem is that you solution is also suspiciously comfortable for males in the industry, because it places the responsibility of change elsewhere. "It's their fault they're not here changing things, so we'll just keep going until they start to change things themselves."

I think it's not unreasonable to demand of people to sometimes create stories told from the perspective of someone who isn't exactly their demographic. There are tons of games that have animals/robots/aliens as protagonists, and it can't reasonably be argued that getting in the head of those creatures is a smaller leap than casting a female or a dude of another ethnicity than your own. It can be done.

Also it is largely done in other media, such as literature. There is a lot of literature with one or more protagonists that don't exactly match the demographic of the author. On top of this, female creators generally tend to be more prone to creating male characters (eg Harry Potter) than the other way around.

Stating "males create from a male perspective" is a description of the problem, not a defense.

It's also probable a lot of "Smurfette" syndrome stuff is the result of males making games from their own perspective. I'm in a family of all brothers, so literally my mother is the only female in the house. For me to make a game with all males and one or no females is just me making something based on what I know.

YES, it is the result of games being made from a male perspective. And that is the problem. Not a valid defense of the trope. This is also what smurfette and miss male have in common, the male perspective.

It's not a problem if some stories are told from a male perspective, but it is a problem if all stories are. Because of several reasons that I think are not that hard to figure out. 

It doesn't matter much, but it still rubs the wrong way. The message would be much easier to accept if it was presented more as Female Gamer Trying to Fix the Gaming Industry, rather than Internet Feminist Trying to Fix the Gaming Industry.
She uses a lot of language and jargon that resonates with her fellow internet feminists but doesn't resonate at all with, I'd say, a large number of gamers.
(I don't mean to denigrate with the 'internet feminist' thing, but feminists I've encountered on the internet have a vastly different style from the feminism that I've encountered elsewhere)

Even though she puts in frequent disclaimers that what she is criticising is one aspect of the game and does not necessarily make entirely bad and such ... I'm not feeling it. Like - I know it's true, but I don't think she seriously thinks so because she seems to have judged them entirely on that one element that she needs to make her point rather than from her genuine feelings while playing the game. I feel that she's extremely uncharitable.

This particular episode wasn't so bad, but previous episodes have really turned me off, and I generally agree or at least don't object to most of what she's trying to say.

Basically, I wish someone else had started this conversation.

You feel that she probably feels a certain way about video games? That doesn't seem very relevant to the validity of her arguments.

Who decided that she has to be a fan in order to have opinions? It's not unusual for males to criticize typically female spheres of interest, such as "the fashion  industry is superficial, stupid and environmentally/ethically questionable" without necessarily stopping to think "but am I a true fan" before speaking. The idea that criticism is only valid from the inside is pretty crazy, IMO. Does that mean that I can't criticise the talibans, Nintendo, the NRA, the German government, etc etc because I'm not a member?

I think the discussion was much more interesting when focused on the actual topic, so maybe we could get back to that?  

[Update 203]

Update 203
Pups are now hit with rocks and spears. A grim feature, but it had to be put in. I'm thinking about whether they should survive a rock to the head... I'm leaning towards a 50/50 chance of survival. You shouldn't be throwing rocks at them anyhow.

I like that, but I'm having a little bit of trouble reading it. My first interpretion was that it's a top down isometric-ish perspective, where a robot is walking next to a high wall. The darker things are pillars supporting the wall, and the light part down-left is sunlight, making the medium shade a shadow from the wall.

But, maybe you meant it as a side view, with some kind of forest in the background?

Idk, maybe you should give it just some little detail to make it easier to read. Here's a line going along the (percieved by me) wall. If you actually intended it as I see it, this could be a suggestion on how to make it clearer. Otherwise, it might show how I saw it, which might be fun.

Eh... If she made a 25 minute video about video games, she is probably interested in video games.

If she likes to play them is something different, and not very relevant. I for one haven't played through a game in  years, but no-one would question my claimed interest in video games because I'm a guy.

Also, her personal interests have little to do with whether her arguments are valid, no?

I don't know anything, but I would guess that the game industry targeted at young men have more money flowing through it than the game industry for 40 years old females. If you were to just chop up the big chunk of money that goes into "making games" every year in slices for each target demographic, you'd probably get a young/male skew, don't you think?

If that is the case, it's a little bit problematic to say "both of them exist, so why the criticism on games for dudes?" Because existing isn't binary, and while both do exist one exists vastly more than the other.