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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsLemma: first-person parkour
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etodd
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« Reply #160 on: May 30, 2014, 09:08:31 PM »

Last week was a huge update, so this week is a bit smaller.

First, we're hard at work on the animations. Here are some early WIP animations:



There are also a ton of new player sounds to accompany those animations, but those aren't very screenshotable. Smiley

I also vastly improved the god ray effect from last week, so everything is much smoother. Here's another 4K screenshot of it:



In other news, Geel has been working on a brand new time trial mode. Check it out!



I also launched an Official Wiki for Lemma in partnership with Gameiki this week. It's not very active yet, but I'm sure it will grow as people find more nifty things tucked away in the game.

Lastly, we are in full-scale preparation mode for various game expos and competitions. The first one we'll be at is the Midwest Game Developer Summit in July. Hope to see you there!
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etodd
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« Reply #161 on: June 06, 2014, 09:29:38 PM »

First, a couple project updates. I pre-ordered an Oculus DK2! Come August, Lemma will have Oculus VR support. Huzzah!

I also got a sign for our booth at the Midwest Game Developer summit. Got it from eSigns, whom I highly recommend! Insanely cheap, fast, and high quality.



I am currently scrambling madly to complete a build for the Indie Megabooth submission deadline on Sunday. Stuff that's done:

The beginning of the game (aka the apartment) finally got some textures!



There's even an easter egg... see if you can spot it in the dark:



Another critical new feature is something I call "Rifts". These play into the storyline in a pretty big way:



Lastly, I'm doing a ton of last-minute level design. Here is the "Forest" level that appeared in the demo, albeit completely overhauled:

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etodd
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« Reply #162 on: June 20, 2014, 07:39:31 PM »

Our animator Antonio has been hard at work on new animations. Check it out!



Guys, the level editor is really close to being done. Here's some cool features:

You can link entities together. For example, you can have a door open when the player enters a trigger volume. Or have a light turn on. Or both.



The UI now displays buttons for all available commands at any given moment, and their keyboard shortcuts. Different commands are available depending on what mode you're in, and what entities are selected.



There's also Steam Workshop support! Since each player only gets 1 GB of Workshop space, and our map files were up in the 8-9 MB range, we had to make some pretty big changes to the map format. Geel did some bit twiddling to cut down the map size by 50% (more about that here), then we Gzipped everything for another 50% size decrease.

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etodd
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« Reply #163 on: June 27, 2014, 09:17:51 PM »

Small update. This week was bug fixes and more improvements to the level editor.

In other news, we were grateful to get some coverage from

! Unfortunately the stream highlighted some pretty major issues with the tutorial, so...

Brand new level design!

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etodd
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« Reply #164 on: July 09, 2014, 01:40:02 PM »

Gearing up for Midwest Game Developers Summit this weekend. Tune in next week for my first expo post-mortem.

In the mean time, the old trailer was looking woefully outdated, so here's a brand new one!

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« Reply #165 on: July 09, 2014, 04:03:00 PM »

This is shaping up to be quite awesome!
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etodd
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« Reply #166 on: July 25, 2014, 07:47:24 PM »

What’s that you say? You didn’t even notice the absence of Screenshot Saturday last week? How convenient. Let’s pretend it never happened. Or rather, pretend that it did. Whatever.

MGDS was a huge success! There was almost always a line to play the game, and I got a ton of useful feedback. Here are some pictures:





Most of the feedback was related to level design. I came home with a phone full of “todo” items. Here are some screenshots of overhauled or brand new sections that resulted:







I also did some writing. I got sick of exporting dialogue files from my web browser, so I converted Dialogger to a desktop app using App.js. It’s not maintained anymore, but it was way easier to set up than node-webkit, which apparently is the current standard.



One thing that really bothered me when watching people play Lemma was the fact that any time they touched a wall, their momentum was instantly killed by friction, even though the player character’s friction is set to zero.

I read an article from Mike Bithell about how he solved this problem in his new game Volume. My solution is very similar, but it jumps straight to the correct movement angle rather than incrementing by 5 degrees and re-testing. Here’s how it used to work:



And here’s the new, smoother version:



Another thing I forgot to show off earlier is that now, Joan’s feet move much more realistically when you’re turning in place. I also added an option to display a reticle at the center of the screen, for the purpose of lessening motion sickness in some players. It’s disabled by default because no one has complained so far, but it’s there if you need it. Here’s a GIF showing off both new features:

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eigenbom
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« Reply #167 on: July 26, 2014, 07:07:15 PM »

The feet look pretty cool now. The chest looks a little weird from this angle. I think that's because of two things: (a) the breasts are too close together and shouldn't have that crease, and (b) when I look down my whole head pivots from the base and angles forward and and so I can see my full body, including stomach etc. I imagine some women with really big boobs can't see their stomach but I always imagined your character to be more of a slim ectomorphic type, streamlined for parkour.
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etodd
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« Reply #168 on: July 26, 2014, 07:33:48 PM »

Ah yeah, someone else mentioned the boob-crease as well. I think I can hopefully fix it without screwing up all the blend weights. About them being too close together... I don't know man, I just modeled the shirt on top of a pretty standard MakeHuman model! Smiley And yeah, the breasts are actually pretty small, but the perspective is weird because the camera basically looks straight down your neck. I'll try tilting the head forward more when you look down, but I have to be careful not to put the camera into the environment geometry.
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eigenbom
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« Reply #169 on: July 26, 2014, 07:45:21 PM »

Do you have a 3rd person screenshot of the model? It may be the weird perspective but the chest area definitely looks weird to me.
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etodd
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« Reply #170 on: July 29, 2014, 03:20:24 PM »

I think I fixed it. Here's the old version:



Here's a render with the crease removed:



And here's the first-person view:

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eigenbom
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« Reply #171 on: July 29, 2014, 08:24:27 PM »

Ah cool yeah that looks a lot better. When the head's rotated at the base it'll look different though, so I'll wait to see what that looks like. Maybe a zip down the center could spice the top up a bit?
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etodd
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« Reply #172 on: August 01, 2014, 12:37:28 PM »

I hit a milestone today.

Three of the four levels so far in Lemma (Rain, Dawn, and Forest) have undergone at least one massive redesign in their short lifetimes. This week I finally gave the same treatment to the fourth level, Monolith. It is aptly named. Let me try to convey just how monolithic this level is now.





This is a perfect example of my patent-pending Design by Trial and Error™ process.

When I first designed Monolith, I didn’t know what it was, where it would fit in the game, or what its purpose was. I just kind of made it. And it was shockingly bad.



Now I know the answers to all those questions, but only retroactively. There was never a plan, I just discovered a plan through Design By Trial and Error™. You can do it too! Here’s how:

  • Create something completely random! Make sure there’s no purpose or thought given to how it will contribute to the rest of the game. Just channel your stream of consciousness into the level editor.
  • Realize that it probably sucks, but hold your nose and continue designing the rest of the game around that rotten core.
  • Return to that level months later with the knowledge that it now plays a specific, natural role in the game, but it’s still garbage.
  • Re-design it to fulfill that role without all the garbage.

Every level I’ve built so far, along with every game mechanic and every bit of writing, has gone through this process. It’s a battle-tested, tried and true method of building a game in maybe a single human lifetime.

What am I trying to say? That the first vertical slice, consisting of the same levels from the public demo back in March, is finally up to my standards for the final gold release. I don’t plan on redesigning the current four levels in any major way. The plan I’ve discovered calls for about 16 more levels. If I can crank them out at a rate of 1 per week like this, I might not even have to miss my deadline by much. Ha. Jokes.

What comes next? Here’s a hint:

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etodd
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« Reply #173 on: August 09, 2014, 05:35:03 AM »

This week was a lot of level design. I’m working on a group of “fractured” but interconnected worlds that the player has to progress through.

Here’s a screenshot:



Here’s the thread where I got that rock texture. It’s a gold mine with a bunch of totally free diffuse, specular, normal, and even displacement maps.
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etodd
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« Reply #174 on: August 16, 2014, 08:07:49 AM »

Hello friends. Yesterday I finished the 5th level! It took much longer than anticipated because it’s actually 10 separate maps connected together. It includes some simple but hopefully interesting puzzle mechanics.



It also advances the story through notes and several text conversations scattered throughout.



It’s hard to see in screenshots, but I added a subtle cloud shadow effect as well. It doesn’t respond to the actual clouds, so in a sense it’s slightly faked. Because of that I was able to do the projection easily with a ray-plane intersection rather than a full matrix multiplication. Here’s the shader code, edited for clarity:

Code:
float t = -worldPosition.y / SunLightDirection.y;

float p = worldPosition.xz + t * SunLightDirection.xz;

output.lighting *= tex2D(CloudSampler, p * CloudUVMultiplier + CloudOffset).a;

Here’s the effect in action. It’s pretty subtle and easy to miss.

I already started on the next level. My plan calls for a night scene with falling water, so Thursday I worked on the beginnings of a cute little waterfall effect. It’s just a Blender model with the UVs stretched so that the texture moves faster as it reaches the bottom.

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eigenbom
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« Reply #175 on: August 16, 2014, 03:35:42 PM »

Great progress Evan! Smiley
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etodd
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« Reply #176 on: September 05, 2014, 10:05:05 PM »

I'm taking September off to work for some clients, so Lemma is temporarily on the back-burner.

HOWEVER. Wednesday night a certain something arrived in the mail.



I immediately tried it out with Half-Life 2 and was shocked at the massive improvement over DK1. I was so impressed that I've spent pretty much every waking minute since then trying to get it working in Lemma.



Current status? It's very, very close. The VR itself is 100% functional now, I just need to make some UI tweaks. The Oculus SDK makes an incredibly difficult thing as simple as it possibly can be. For Unity users it's almost plug and play, but because I'm still stuck in 2008 with XNA I had to rip out the Unity plugin and hook it up on my own (similar to what I did for Wwise). I discovered that it's very easy to get a somewhat passable result that's actually incorrect. You have to learn about crazy things like chromatic aberration and time warping to get the best result.

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« Reply #177 on: September 05, 2014, 11:32:46 PM »

Beautiful, I really want to get my hands on this! It seems like it'll be breathtaking with the Oculus.
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etodd
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« Reply #178 on: October 17, 2014, 08:44:54 PM »

Just a quick update this week to confirm that I am in fact alive.



I'll be running a booth, speaking, and participating in a panel at the Ohio Game Dev Expo next weekend! Come on out and hang with us!
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etodd
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« Reply #179 on: October 31, 2014, 02:06:27 PM »

This past weekend I exhibited Lemma at the Ohio Game Dev Expo. It was an awesome time. Extra Life raised over $9,000 for charity (yes, it is in fact over 9000).

The Oculus Rift was a huge hit!



I worked on various improvements right up to the expo. First, some new textures for moving platforms and doors:



This is the first texture I've created that has any kind of directional meaning. The reason is that until this week, I had no control over how the textures mapped to the voxels. It was all procedural. So if I put an arrow graphic in a texture, there was no guarantee which way it would face.

Now I have editor controls to at least rotate and offset the textures, so I can have more meaningful texture design.

Next up, I wanted the menu to be more visually interesting to attract people to the booth, so I spruced it up a bit.



Both before and after the expo, I fixed a ton of issues with the existing levels. I especially reworked Forest quite a bit (once again... sigh...).



Every time I do it, it gets a thousand times better. At some point I have to draw a line.

I'm also still plugging away at some exciting new levels. Sneak preview:

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