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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsDelve (Top-down miner thing)
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Author Topic: Delve (Top-down miner thing)  (Read 1745 times)
Intrepid59
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« on: August 20, 2011, 02:10:06 PM »

This is my devlog of Delve, a top-down sci-fi miner/exploration game.
It's being made in Construct. I'm hoping that making a devlog will motivate me
to finish this. Finishing is always good.

Here's some brief outlines of what I want in the game;

  -Lots of stuff to mine. Currently, there's 6 planned matrices(Rock, dirt, ect),
   16 production goods and 20 trade goods, along with artifacts and relics. Will change.

  -Rival mining factions! You can trade with them, or fight them off.

  -Building bases. Build em' up, then defend them from your rivals.

  -Equipment. You can equip different fuselages, wings, weapons, armors, power plants, engines, and more!
 
  -Crafting. Lots of crafting. This will be how you get better weapons and vehicles.

  -Research. Lots of that too. This is how you get the blueprints to make better stuff.
   When you research something, you'll get a scan telling you about the item. This leads to...            
  
  -A story. It would be implemented like Metroid Prime did it- Not outright, not forcing it
  on you, but it would be there if you ever wanted to know about it.

  -Multiplayer? We'll see.

What's done right now;

  -Floor generation. It's rough, but servicable for now. Needs a little bit of work.
  -Movement. Nice and flexible, and very smooth. Looks great in motion, and plays very well.
  -Some lighting, although I need to make my own graphics for it.

Close enough to a game, right? Anyway, time for pictures!


Some vehicles, namely the ones I've drawn so far. They need a little polish.
You can even make horrible bastardizations customize them!



In-game, without lighting. Floors are nice and big, and there's 5 different sizes.
They range from kinda big to huge, and I always get horribly lost in the really big ones.
This is the limestone matrix, 1 of 6.


Blue tiles are placeholders. Man, getting the tiles solved
for their correct frames was a huge pain, but it looks fantastic.
Also needs a proper backdrop, so everything doesn't look so floaty.

Same spot, but with lighting turned on.

A little cheap, but it works.
The light is a placeholder, from one of the construct tutorials.
It's going to change.

Something that really bugged me about other 2D miners was that you
could see light sources through walls. Not so here!


Here, you have line of sight to the source. But if it gets blocked...



It fades out. I'm hoping this helps create a feeling of exploration and discovery,
something I haven't really felt with other 2D miners.


That's all I have to show for now. Please keep in mind that that graphics ARE a bit rough,
and I know that. I made them fast so I didn't have to stare at blue blocks all day.

I'm hoping to get a demo out soon, as soon as there's a little bit more substance to what
I have now.

Please, leave a comment or criticism, any kind of feedback is nice  Grin
Thanks for reading!

 
« Last Edit: October 11, 2011, 12:46:31 PM by Auburn » Logged

Intrepid59
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« Reply #1 on: August 27, 2011, 11:48:11 AM »

Got mining laserzzz working with proper tile orientations on destruction now.



But some new problems showed up. Random FPS drops and layout change crashes,
along with the initialiser only filling 2/3rds of the screen on layout startup.

The crashes are interesting, in that I can't consistently reproduce them.
It's pretty frustrating, but I do know that they only started after I added in
the events for the equipment.

The FPS drops also showed me how FPS dependent the game performance is,
I'm really hoping I don't have to go back and revise all the movement events. Concerned


Stay tuned, if I can't nail down this crashing problem, I'll get a demo out
and hopefully a new perspective from someone else can help me locate it.
 

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Intrepid59
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« Reply #2 on: September 30, 2011, 09:59:22 AM »

Getting a job has seriously damaged my development productivity! Oh well,
at least I have money.

I think I might have found out why it crashes every now and again.
I used global variables for all my level generation, and a few of them were shared
with some loading events. Using global variables was a terrible idea from the get-go,
so I rewrote re-worded the level generation, and fixed some flaws with it.

For starters, I made it more versatile, and gave it a more modular structure.
Now I can just drop some new generation method in and have it play nice with
everything else. So, now there can be different methods to generate different,
distinct floors/matrices, and I can just mix n' match methods as I see fit.

The most noticeable thing was getting rid of "arteries". A collection of multiple
tunnels along a single axis, or just single tunnels in a straight line across the level.
It was ugly, but pretty easy to traverse in-game. Debating on whether or not to keep them.

Here's a pic to show you what I'm talking about;

Green lines indicate arteries. These are just single tunnels,
but in larger maps with more rooms they start stacking on each other,
making huge arteries running all the way across the level.

Here's a fixed tunnel, just one generated so I can see how it looks;

There's a little bit of a straight near the bottom, but it doesn't dominate
the rest of the tunnel generation, and looks more natural.


That's it for now, I'll update again once I have more generation methods in.
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Intrepid59
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« Reply #3 on: October 11, 2011, 12:45:13 PM »

I think it's time to stop working on level generation for now. Out of everything
I've worked on, this is the most time consuming. And it's still rough around
the edges. But for now, it'll do.

Got 3 different cave generation methods going on right now.
There's Natural caves, Linear caves, and Artificial caves.

For perspective, the player will occupy a 3x3px square.
Purple and blue stuff is placeholder mining goodies.

Natural is the most interesting;



Only thing that needs to be done with it is make sure it stops spilling
out over the sides of the level.

The we have Linear;



Needs work, rooms are too angular. Another thing that I'm going to do is
make the tunnels node based, like the Natural method. It'll rough up
the tunnels while preserving that kind of smooth, blocky characteristic.

Then finally, Artificial;



Pretty lazy, just copied the Linear method and added some tweaks to
it. But I got the feeling I was going for, which was an abandoned mine
kinda feel, and I think this works really well.

The cool thing about these is that you can mix n' match;

   

First image is an artificial room connecting to a linear room, then the natural
room connects back to the linear room. The actual natural room is the uppermost part.

Second image is a natural room overlapping an artificial room, which is connected
to a linear room, which is then connected back to the natural room.

In other news, I fixed the FPS dependency. Now, I'm going to focus on getting a demo
working, which means finishing up some art and fixing some other things.

Next post should have a demo, stay tuned!
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Intrepid59
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« Reply #4 on: October 20, 2011, 02:02:16 PM »



Yay, demo. This is pretty important to me, because this is the first project
I've ever seen through to a playable stage in it's development.

Not much in here, just shows what I've got so far.
You'll see some green resources in there, those are my first attempt at
putting in collectible mining goodies. Going to look better.

Floors will either be natural, linear or artificial. Definitely some issues
with linear and artificial, they're too big.

Controls are;

 -Mouse to aim
 -Left click to use mining beam
 -Mousewheel to control throttle (No mousewheel? Use W+S instead.)
 -Enter to use telepads (Green ones move up, purple ones move down.)

Here it is!

Alright, in the containing folder, there's 3 files. The EXE, the G1 folder, and an AR file.
Keep those with the EXE. Files will be generated into the G1 folder. If you want to generate
new floors, delete the contents of the G1 folder.

I'm interested in any bugs or crashes you guys find. If you could post about them,
that would be awesome.

Thanks!
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