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[jamesprimate]

On the subject of jelly water: this is probably some crazy fantasy alien planet or whatever, that "water" could be liquid helium or methane where the viscosity is higher than h20. same with the "rain". in my mind, subtle weirdness is an asset. as long as it looks cool!

i'm fine with the color being weird! alien planet's all great and i'm down for it. but on a purely aesthetic level i think the color being so saturated is at odds with the rest of the game/areas, which is pleasantly desaturated + has excellent color use

also that thing i said about gradient background etc etc

63

yeah totes! i was talking more about the physics. the water color is just temporary, and pretty extreme contrast just so he can see whats going on. In any case, we are looking at a number of regions which will have water elements, and so the color of the water in each will be adjusted to fit the palette of the region, etc etc.

[JLJac]

Update 345

Finally I got to color - I needed to rewrite my way of handling palettes (and thereby also my shaders) so that each palette is its own png. Feels much more reasonable. I think that we can also do gradient changes between palettes using this system without writing a shader for it - the palettes are 32*8 textures, and I think that a palette swap effect could be achieved by just doing copy pixels on the currently active one in the CPU, the GPU wouldn't even know anything was happening.

That said, I'm feeling a bit weird, because everyone has been telling me that performance is super important when writing shaders... And my experience has been that I can get away with anything. Maybe my computer has a very fast graphics card? Pretty much whatever I do they seem to run perfectly fine, the only problem is that they tend to sometimes not work at all, which seems like a different issue...

Anyhow, messed with the palette stuff, and made it so that the palettes contain positions for water coloration as well. I also added an option that the water can be "behind" the foreground, as James requested being able to do puddles and pools without necessarily having the entire level look submerged:



Water colors are still WIP, but at least more reasonable. Creating palettes is for some weird reason one of the most time consuming activities in making this game hahaha! I can tweak those colors for weeks before it feels right - so I'm pretty sure that the water is going to go through a few such iterations as well.

On top of that I managed to make it so that Unity is more comfortable with my shaders - it doesn't give error messages or anything, and it actually agrees to build the standalone! But the shaders are still all white, so that's going to need more messing around.

I've also tried to look into some wave equations in order to make the surface less jelly-like, but it's all written in physics or math language that I'm not really literate in Maybe if I give it a serious go I can achieve some sort of breakthrough - after all I'm not trying to do an accurate physics simulation for calculations or anything, I just want it to look somewhat correct.

Happy weekend!

[aamatniekss]

Damn, that's beautiful.

[rj]

the orange with the water color as it is now is the most gorgeous thing i've seen from this devlog in all of its existence. so, you know, there's that.

honestly i think the jellyish physics aren't a big deal. if you wanna tweak 'em, do it, man. more power to you by far. but it's not a game changer (i mean, it is in the literal sense)

were the bubbles there before? they look great.

41

[cainex1]

I'm kind of leaning towards not having many creatures that are both land and water dwelling - it's easier and feels cleaner to have some separate (vicious!) water fauna that will eat whatever falls down there.

totally agreed! i like the idea of water creatures being so nasty that even lizards are like NOOOOOOPE


On the subject of jelly water: this is probably some crazy fantasy alien planet or whatever, that "water" could be liquid helium or methane where the viscosity is higher than h20. same with the "rain". in my mind, subtle weirdness is an asset. as long as it looks cool!

I had a very similar thought, you had mentioned this world being heavily post industrial with a ruin theme so it stands to reason that there would have been massive amounts of pollution in the environs, and this I think could tie in a more firm water (ie surface tension/jelly, and actual weight of rain drops). Assuming this pollution was of a heavy metallic nature and was supersaturated you would have literally heavy rain and heavy water, individual rain drops with high concentrations of say calcium and iron could be as heavy as hail, just imagine if they were frozen
well, said my peace and BTW the water and interaction looks absolutely stunning so far

[cainex1]

Update 345

physics bubbles... am I seeing this correctly?!
I don't know what to say
just know that I clapped when I saw the screen
Also notice that the cat gives the water a weary eye when close, the expression in your animations is communicative

[coah]

The water is just beautiful.

[goshki]

This water needs a game of its own.

[HellaciousPuppy]

This game looks really great. I love the fluidity of the animation.
How is it done? Is it purely 2D or is it 3D with no shading?
Are the tails triangle strips or a chain of circles?
It's really cool

[Christian]

That water distortion effect...

I don't think I've seen that in a game before.

[oahda]

These gifs are making me utter inappropriate noises at work.

[JLJac]

Hahahaha thank you thank you thank you 

cat gives the water a weary eye

...keep projecting! That's the juice this entire machine runs on!

You guys seem so enthusiastic I'm gonna give you another one today ~

Update 346
Worked some on drowning mechanics, and I'm pretty happy with it! Basically, it's an interaction between two paramaters, Air In Lungs and Lung Exhaustion. The air meter is just an air meter, when it reaches zero you die. At 2/3 air left, the slugcat will give a single bubble, which can be spotted by an attentive player and is basically your cue that it's time to stop doing whatever you're doing under water. At 1/3 air, the slugcat will start to move its arms more and faster, emit a lot of bubbles, move a bit slower, the input direction will involuntarily tend upwards. This is the panic mode, now it's really time to just get up to the surface.

Here's the thing though, when in panic mode, your lungs get exhausted. This is bad for several reasons - when your lungs are exhausted, you take in air more slowly once you've gotten up. If you dive down again with your lungs still exhausted, you lose air faster. Once your lungs have become exhausted, you need to get up, fill the air meter (which is now slower) and then when the air meter is full the lung exhaustion meter will start to tick down. You can see that the slugcat is exhausted because it's closing its eyes and breathing heavily - once it opens its eyes it's safe to go down again.

This sounds complicated, but when actually playing it the implications are pretty simple: go up for air every now and then, and you'll be fine. If you really try to stretch your stay under the surface though, you'll need to stay up longer the next time you get up, to get rid of the exhaustion. This means that if for example some creature is harassing you above the surface, you can't stay away for ever by just popping down and up - if you're down for a long time, you'll need to be up for a long time as well.

If you dive down with fully exhausted lungs, you get only half as much time on the air meter, 4.5 seconds instead of 9.

I have implemented a mechanic which is that if you're in panic mode, and the only input you give is straight up, the air meter will deplete slightly slower. Basically I'm just cutting the player some slack - you're moving straight up towards the surface, it just feels unnecessarily unfair to have you die 40 pixels from the surface, especially as rain world death is a binary switch.

The entire system means that if you're just like, in a pool swimming and diving, it's perfectly comfortable. You can be confident you're not going to die. But as soon as you're trying to do anything under the surface it becomes tricky as you'll really have to work with the swimming mechanics and the air meter. Especially anything that involves swimming in under a ceiling separating you from the surface feels super uncomfortable - which is just the way I want it.

Here's the slugcat almost drowning, but getting up, recovering and continuing its dive.

[JLJac]

Here's how I imagine you're supposed to work with the water - quick in quick out operations taking advantage of the physics and controls, and drowning won't be a problem.



I should really stop swimming around and get to work on making those shaders function

[Christian]

Joar, you're like a game developing machine. It's just awesome and insanely impressive how fast you make progress.

I absolutely love that the drowning mechanic is expressed through visuals and animations rather than some Air meter. The panic is palpable in that first GIF

[oahda]

I might not have gotten that it were drowning from visuals alone without you having told me first, but accompanied by fitting sound effects I'm sure it'll work. I too prefer HUD-less games. Looking great!

Giving me lots of inspiration for how to handle the surface of the water in my own submarine game, not to mention the wavy distortion of background elements. I wouldn't mind hearing a little about the technical details under the hood!

[Jad]

PARTICLES

PARTICLES

ANIMATIONS

FX

I NEED DROPLETS UPON ENTERING/EXITING WATER

[oahda]

... Wow. I was so enchanted already that I did not even notice the lack of those features. But YES. Can't wait for splashes!

[muki]

Best water?

Best water.

Seriously, those gifs got an actual emotional reaction from me. The refraction along the top may be a bit strong, but it's just beautiful! I wish I had half the talent you have!

[gimymblert]

JLJac what are the spec of your machine? which modern game run on it?

[muki]

Flocks of piranhas.

Just sayin'