Video Footage:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY-MgQJ9OlAhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2vLRCRprAgWhat is Isolation?Isolation is my take on the Metroid formula. I think too many indie games that sell themselves as Metroidvanias don't really understand the Metroid part. There's a lot more to the design and progression of the game than "Sidescroller with interconnected rooms," and I intend to faithfully recapture that design while keeping the core game original and innovative.
Newest updates in most recent postsOriginal Post:
Hey guys, I figured I'd start a devlog for my game, Isolation. It'll keep me motivated and give me a place to record progress as I go. Isolation is a pet project of mine that I've started and restarted over and over for almost eight years now. It's a Super Metroid inspired exploration game that focuses on nonlinearity and atmosphere. After numerous prototypes, I've decided to scale the technical aspects of the game back to give me more room to focus on gameplay and content creation. As such, the game will be tile based and run at a relatively low resolution, which will later be scaled up using a screen filtering algorithm not unlike many emulators. This first post will show some very early alpha screenshots and go over the gameplay elements I've implemented thus far. You can read my old thread for a more technically advanced version of Isolation
here.
This is just a basic in-game screenshot that shows a few things- sprites are shaded and outlined using HLSL, which takes some of the art burden off my shoulders. Tiles are placeholders for now.
This shows ledge climbing working. I want to focus on mobility here, and this is just one ability that facilitates that. You can't hang off ledges indefinitely. Instead, you scramble up them as you grab. You can also vault over 1 tile high ledges to maintain your momentum. Grabbing / vaulting is done with the grab key- I'll get into controls in a bit. Moving quickly and deftly is very important in Isolation, as there are many times where you may have to run instead of fight. More on that later.
Lastly, this shows the very start of combat being implemented. In this game, you'll basically have two modes- mobility and combat. You switch between them by drawing or holstering your weapon. When you're in combat mode, your jump becomes a dodge and you walk more slowly. In mobility mode, your attack is limited to a basic melee strike. Its hard to show all of this with screens, especially with placeholder art, but videos / a demo will come soon.
To facilitate this, I spent some time making a map editor specifically tailored for this game. Here are a few screens:
Rooms are made up of chunks, which in turn are made up of individual tiles. You draw out the actual layout of the map in the editor, then edit the linked rooms individually.
Anyway, I'll have more interesting posts soon- just thought I'd sum up what I've done thus far, and from here out I can post as I add more stuff. Thanks for taking the time to read, and feel free to ask any questions!
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