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[DarkWanderer]

I wonder if the leeches should have a lurking state, where they are more hidden, so you never know if the water is safe or not.

This is a good point. Are leeches always going to be hovering right around the surface of the water closest to the player? It doesn't seem like the player would even have a chance to venture far into water without immediately being weighed down by leeches. Maybe there could be a few more sluggish ones around the surface, & when they get their first bite the rest of the swarm is made alert to the player's presence in the water. All of the sudden a mass of writhing silhouettes appears from the pool floor ascending towards the player's location. Currently I wouldn't even think of water exploration knowing a mass of leeches is already prepared to sink me.

[Crispy75]

I wonder if the leeches should have a lurking state, where they are more hidden, so you never know if the water is safe or not.

This is a good point. Are leeches always going to be hovering right around the surface of the water closest to the player? It doesn't seem like the player would even have a chance to venture far into water without immediately being weighed down by leeches. Maybe there could be a few more sluggish ones around the surface, & when they get their first bite the rest of the swarm is made alert to the player's presence in the water. All of the sudden a mass of writhing silhouettes appears from the pool floor ascending towards the player's location. Currently I wouldn't even think of water exploration knowing a mass of leeches is already prepared to sink me.

How about this:

Leeches have a ticking countdown for their Max Speed, Vision Range and Flocking Adhesion (for want of better words). This means their "dormant" state is slow, dumb and wandering.

On sighting prey (player, bat, etc.), those values get incremented. So long as a target is in sight, the leeches will get faster, get better at following targets (and will encourage surrounding leeches to find targets), and will clump together in a feeding frenzy. When the prey goes away, the swarm slows down and dissipates.

This could lead to nice environmental puzzles and manipulations.

eg.

You want that spear sitting at the bottom of a pond, but there's a frenzied swarm of leeches snapping away at some bats hovering over the water. Kill the bats, retreat to a safe distance and let the leeches calm down, then dash into the water, get the spear and get out again before they get too vicious.

[jamesprimate]

Yeah how about releasing a terrarium screen saver before the end of the game
Free asset on unity to do that painlessly:
 https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/770

html5: http://gfycat.com/DeadlyBaggyBluefintuna

I want a screensaver of that

I LOVE THIS IDEA!! Great suggestion!

I wonder if the leeches should have a lurking state, where they are more hidden, so you never know if the water is safe or not.

This is a good point. Are leeches always going to be hovering right around the surface of the water closest to the player? It doesn't seem like the player would even have a chance to venture far into water without immediately being weighed down by leeches. Maybe there could be a few more sluggish ones around the surface, & when they get their first bite the rest of the swarm is made alert to the player's presence in the water. All of the sudden a mass of writhing silhouettes appears from the pool floor ascending towards the player's location. Currently I wouldn't even think of water exploration knowing a mass of leeches is already prepared to sink me.

ah yes fear not! we've only been showing clips of the leeches once they are aware of your presence, as otherwise they are below the surface doing their thing and hard to make look good for the camera. unless they know where you are they just happily swim along and maybe hunt a bat or two.

also its not like the leeches are insta-kill! they are dangerous, but if you learn their behavior you can quickly, carefully swim through them (at some risk of course.) They wont be in every body of water either, just placed as hazard elements for rooms or if for some reason we want to limit a players time spent in a certain body of water. take this room for example:



the leeches only have access to the center tank, so in addition to navigating a series of underwater tubes without drowning, AND wall jumping challenges while racing the rain clock, you also have to deal with the possibility of falling into a vat of leeches which would slow you down further.

We're trying to avoid things like "dont fall into the spikes" and instead go with hazards that, while dangerous, you still can wriggle or fight your way out of.

[gameaddictwn]

Are there gonna be any boss creatures (Like momma lizard or something) in the end game?

[DarkWanderer]

Dude that level screen looks awesome James So how would rain work for subterranean regions? Would the whole area flood?

[Backterria]

Just love it!Excellent artstyle!

[chriswearly]

Dude that level screen looks awesome James So how would rain work for subterranean regions? Would the whole area flood?

I'm presuming that while there are Rooms underground that would be flooded almost completely, in the same way pipes brought the water down there they can also direct it out. So, there could be giant ponds/ a lake as a surface Sub-region that the water gets redirected to?

And if that's not how it works, then here an idea Joar

[tortoiseandcrow]

Loving the level design ethos. The binary logic of spike pits is way less interesting than these dynamic situations you're building in.

One thing's really bugging me visually though: those beautiful terrarium spaces where you have fully enclosed water sometimes seem to have stuff like plants or pipes somehow "in front" of the water. That seems "wrong" in comparison to the more aquarium like logic that you'd expect from a cross-section of water. Seems like anything in the water should be in the water, y'know? Same thing with the brown rocks at the bottom and the pipes in the side. It seems like the water would look more natural if it butted up against the outermost perimeter of whatever geometry its in, rather than the innermost, if that makes sense?

Sort of like this:

[JLJac]

Hi everyone! I'm up and at it again!

@cwearly1, woooooooow  Thanks so much for the awesome work! That wiki is looking ace! I hope we'll be able to provide you with some more content to fill it with soon, hehe!

@tortoiseandcrow, yes, I agree very much on this. In the version from which the screenshot is taken, 3 layers of depth were allowed to render in front of the water, since then I've changed it to only 1, getting rid of most of the plants that show up in front of stuff. Other than that it's just about messing with the level renderer until the RNG decides to not place any plants in the first layer. When it comes to the brown color, that's because there's some light down there ~ we've talked about this and when we pass over the rooms again we'll make sure to get rid of that, but there's a lot of rooms so stuff end up lagging behind. But yeah, the idea is that it should be very dark down there, to further create the impression of a cross section rather than water being held in by a magic wall.

This is a very awkward situation graphically, as it's a prime example of 2D/3D colliding and not making sense together. But as I think James have mentioned this "water contained behind terrain" thing is going to be pretty much exclusive to this area, so we basically only have these 20 something rooms to handle making me think that we can try to mess around with the level renderer to solve the individual cases rather than try to come up with some huge universal solution.

[chriswearly]

@cwearly1, woooooooow  Thanks so much for the awesome work! That wiki is looking ace! I hope we'll be able to provide you with some more content to fill it with soon, hehe!

My absolute pleasure, sir! And yeah, now that you're better (woo!), bring on the new stuff! :D

[JLJac]

Update 374
Mostly maintenance work today ~ worked around some weirdness between shaders and futile unloading textures, and added the ability to place leeches in the world text file, enabling James to get to leech placement.

Other than that, some deep diving in the lizard AI. Sometimes I do some sort of aimless problem solving, where I just put the game in some situation and see what problems I can spot. When I spot them, I try to hunt them down and fix them, and in that process I generally spot around 6 200 881 more, so it's generally a process that can just go on for however long I allow it to.

This session I messed around with lizards looking for dens. For some reason they all started searching for dens immediately on spawn, even though they were literally crawling out of one, and I didn't like that as the den search is an expensive path finding operation. On top of that they also searched for a new den every time they entered a new room, which seemed pretty unnecessary. So I restricted that some, and noticed that the den finder wouldn't find a den that had the same coordinate as the creature searching, so I fixed that. And then I noticed that this new special case fed the critter a den position that had some nonsense tile position info as well, making it impossible to get to the den, so then I fixed that. You get the idea. This sort of stuff is not the most exciting, but by just combing over the game like this again and again I'm able to untangle it, make it run smoother and generally work.

In slightly more fun news, I added some water light flicker under water as well - thought it was missing below the surface:

[chriswearly]

Woooow, those are some of the smoothest swimming leeches I've ever seen!
Also yeah, the reflective light underwater was definitely missing, good addition.

[DarkWanderer]

Joar would you be able to answer my question about how rain would work in subterranean regions? Would those areas progressively flood, forcing the player to seek shelter as the water is rising, all the while they're constantly facing the risk of drowning? I'm really curious now as to how the mechanic will be implemented for these unconventional level types. 

[Christian]

On NeoGAF someone commented:

I really hope these guys put as much time into designing the levels and objectives as they have into the animation and game engine.

Perhaps Joar/James, you could talk a bit about how you go about designing the gameplay elements and level design? How objectives might work?

[jamesprimate]

Joar would you be able to answer my question about how rain would work in subterranean regions? Would those areas progressively flood, forcing the player to seek shelter as the water is rising, all the while they're constantly facing the risk of drowning? I'm really curious now as to how the mechanic will be implemented for these unconventional level types. 

I think thats basically the idea, though any "flooding" would be somewhat superficial. There are some strict limits to how dynamic we can make the terrain using the current engine and toolset, so were just going to have to make it work as best we can. I think with some time spent, the effects will be pretty cool though.

Joar and I have talked about it, and it seems like there are a couple of ways we can do "rain kills you" underground, flooding being probably the most compelling of the bunch. Since we'll be doing a few non-standard environments, it stands to reason that each will probably have their own slightly different environment-specific way the rain kills you: perhaps flooding for underground regions, some combination of deadly wind and rain for aerial regions, crashing waves and surf for watery regions. Regardless, they will basically behave like the "rain killscreen", just with a different flavor of buildup. I think thats something that we'll want to do once the world is more stitched together, as it will probably mostly effects, shaders, dynamic lighting, screen shaking, etc.

On NeoGAF someone commented:

I really hope these guys put as much time into designing the levels and objectives as they have into the animation and game engine.

Perhaps Joar/James, you could talk a bit about how you go about designing the gameplay elements and level design? How objectives might work?

Hah, thats a pretty dang huge question! I guess one of the most important things for me when trying to conceptualize the world / level design is trying to keep the balance between the open world "terrarium" aspects and the need for, uh, actual gameplay. Like, sure there are platforming challenges and puzzle-esque rooms, but its not "stage 1 complete! now go to stage 2!" sort of thing. What we'd LIKE to do is make the game playable however, rewarding whatever way you can survive within the game mechanics. Like, you could run around the map and follow the various trails of breadcrumbs, or you could just get really good at hunting bats and finding shelters and both would be totally valid ways of playing, each with their own narrative path.

Another thing we are trying to do is keep "fetch" style gameplay to an absolute minimum. With platformers, if you want to move a character around an open map there has to be a touch of that, but we want to keep it very organic. So, ideally what we'd like to do is have the progression be mostly skill level based. I dont mean "level 21 slugcat", just that as your knowledge of the world and your skill with the character improves, more areas open up to you, you know this or that trick to getting to a higher ledge, or have learned enough about how some challenging creature blocking a path behaves to be able to navigate through it. So an experienced player starting a new game from scratch would have access to a much wider area of the world from the get-go.

BUT... honestly this is just game design philosophy rambling at this point. We have it mapped out on paper, but until its actually implemented and plays well, its all subject to change. Right now we are just finishing hacking together the terra firma of region 2! Our idea right now is to get 4 regions assembled into a nice large chunk, see whats working and what isnt, then plan it from there.

Hope that sort of answers your question!

[JLJac]

The rain is actually a timer and a game over screen, there's no way to get around that haha! I do try to work with it cosmetically, and maybe I'll do something context sensitive for underground areas making it look more like death by flooding rather than actual rain fall - buuuut it'd be a cosmetically different game over screen, not really different in terms of game mechanics.

When it comes to priorities, the chosen path here is prioritizing creatures and creature interactions rather than rain stuff. The rain exists as an important background motif in the world, but is not really a prominent mechanic, if that makes sense. That said, I wouldn't rule anything out. Theoretically we could do rising water, for example. But in order to have a flooding room that looks really good there'd have to be some actual water physics going on, and that seems like it would be the main focus of a game (McMillens "Spewer", for example) rather than just a side feature.

So, yeah, I'll try to make the rain and water stuff cool, but it's not my main priority - I'm more interested in creatures.

As for level design / objectives, that's as much James' desk as it gets, and I don't really have anything to add to his answer. We're really just starting to get a feel for it - James is slaving away with the level editor and is getting close to finishing a second region (if finish is the word, we'll probably re-visit pretty much everything as the actual big world starts to come together). There are pretty significant differences between how the first region he made played and the current one, so things are moving quickly and changing fast right now. The first region is obviously a bit of a special case by virtue of being the first - it's more of a canvas to try the brushes on so to speak. So yeah, as James says, when we have 3 or 4 regions playable we'll know way more about that stuff than we do now.

Update 375
Spent the morning making a dev tool that has been a long time coming - a "accessibility visualizer" which is basically a flood fill using a selected creature's movement specs. You select a creature, say Blue Lizard, then you click a tile, and it flood fills out from there to everywhere that is reachable from the original tile if you move as a blue lizard. I think this will come in quite handy, as you can now get a very clear visualization of whether certain areas in a room are reachable to a certain creature, and even get a hint of what to change in the geometry to open it up. Often quite minor changes enables the creatures to reach much larger areas.

With this new tool, some of the lizards' stupid movement restrictions became too jarring, and I had to spend some time with that. So now lizards can move diagonally between tiles if necessary, and also drop down to surfaces that are not perfectly below the drop point. This latter change means that a lizard can drop from a platform to a platform below it that is aligned with the above platform, if that makes sense. Like, steer back in under it's previous position a little bit while falling. This opens up quite a lot of new terrain to them.

Lastly today, I started on a new creature - the first backer suggestion actually! It's a snail inspired creature, which we though would work well with this watery region we're working on. Don't know exactly what it'll look like yet, but the basic framework is up.

It has become quite a process to create a new creature! It's almost 15 minutes of work to just introduce the  concept of a new creature to the game, with all the components that need to connect. But, once that's done, the modular design pattern I've got going seems to be working (I've really only gotten a glimpse of how usable it is today) and things start moving very quickly as powerful chunks of already written code are set in motion. Exciting stuff!

[Christian]

Playable alpha "soon"! 
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WiOfkCnorFM

[gameaddictwn]

I just got a e-mail saying the alpha is being sent out to early access backers  :-*I knew that my $25 would pay off 

[hypedupdawg]

Joar, those leeches look amazing! I love the fact their red colour is only revealed in flashes at the surface of the water - the rest of the time, they blend nicely into the "living environment" feel of the game.

I don't suppose there's a chance you'd consider another round of backing, to allow us latecomers to get our hands on the alpha...? Becoming more and more gutted that I missed the kickstarter 

[chriswearly]

Lastly today, I started on a new creature - the first backer suggestion actually! It's a snail inspired creature, which we though would work well with this watery region we're working on. Don't know exactly what it'll look like yet, but the basic framework is up.

Ok, I have some ideas for this Snail creature if you're interested in hearing!

1) Slugcat can pick up and throw the Snails like rocks
2) The soft body is edible
-- So, either when the snail is picked up, it hides, and Slugcat has to break open the shell to release the body, or Slugcat can simply slurp the meat
-- Also, once the body is eaten, the shell (shell pieces) can again be used as a projectile

Here's a mockup I made:
Big + small version? Also I'm thinking 3 antennae because alien