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[Spydog]

The art style of this game is gorgeous. I haven't been on TIGSource in a very long time, but I remember seeing this game a year or two ago and thinking it looked fantastic. Glad to see you're still working on it! 

[tortoiseandcrow]

Not an egregious art-style breach, but I wonder if you'd be better served with semi-transparent flat coloured sprites overlayed with a sprite with more varied sizes of spore particulate. I'm not entirely sold on the black/gray colour, either. It looks like a fairly traditional smoke-bomb effect, and less like organic matter, which seems a little out of place.



Perhaps less relevant commentary: That anti-gravity stem feels kind of odd and counter-intuitive to how one might otherwise expect it to move, but is not necessarily bad, and the spray implies to me some sort of count-down (which might not be your intention).

I'm super in love with those papery shards floating in the air. Those are a really nice touch.

[Mark Mayers]

RW has always been 3d, or at least faux 3d:

No wonder it takes you a bajillion hours to render things, James, hahahaha.
Looking really cool though

Also, have you ever looked into some type of occlusion culling system between layers?
It might help with rendering + performance in general.

Does every layer render simultaneously?

[Crabby]

maybe make the bud that the stem comes from look a little more like a flower bud, and change it to a more natural color. Then I can see it as a spore bomb.
Idea is great! Just needs a little tweaking visually.

[charliecarlo]

I think it's meant to be fungus spores.

[Crispy75]

Does every layer render simultaneously?

The layers are assembled in the level editor separately, but they're composited and packed down to a single image with a depth channel and an occlusion mask for the foreground IIRC.

[Crabby]

I think it's meant to be fungus spores.

Yeah, but I still think a little bit of texturing could go a long way.
Just looks bland.

[Rojom]

I think the particle effects look good, but it's missing an initial explosion effect. The particles appear a little too abruptly and from too far away, so it looks kind of bland.

As for the upright fuse, I like it. I'm imagining the fuse to actually be a thin tube that the spores are escaping from, which pushes it vertically. Kind of like a wacky waving inflatable tube man thing:



If that's the intent, then maybe a gentle wiggle of the fuse would do some good.

[ProgramGamer]

[JLJac]

Yeah, the puffballs can be used as a smoke screen:



It's sort of doubtful how useful that'd be though, as they make a sound when they pop so a lizard that isn't aware of you would be made aware by you throwing it. Maybe in some situation when hunted by a lizard you could plant one and take to a side corridor to confuse it, but that's a pretty specific situation. Any little advantage you can get, though!

However, that's not their main purpose  Sorry about being secretive, but we're down to the last 3 regions and want to keep some stuff for you to find out by yourselves!

[jctwood]

These puffballs brought back huge nostalgic flashes of playing with these mushrooms which burst in a puff of spores...

[ProgramGamer]

Those mushrooms are called "vesse de loup" in french. Also, their literal English translation is puffball... :|

[tortoiseandcrow]

Congratulations on being down to the last three regions! That's huge!

[JLJac]

Thanks thanks! Backer creature list is looking good too, 60%-ish with some of the worst ones behind us

Those mushrooms are called "vesse de loup" in french. Also, their literal English translation is puffball... :|

These puffballs brought back huge nostalgic flashes of playing with these mushrooms which burst in a puff of spores...

Hahaha yeah, me too! It was modeled after that species ~ in swedish we call them "smoke mushroom", but puffball is definitely better! I suspect this is a case of co-evolution where the mushroom has adapted to the adolescent homo sapiens' scientifically proven preference for kicking things that are round and white on grassy fields. Seems to be a european thing though, James claims not to have been massacring these when he was 10, and if you're 10 and not massacring these that means they don't exist on your continent.

[Schoq]

I was afraid of stepping on them because my brother said getting the spores in your eye makes you blind

[charliecarlo]

WOah!?
What's the deal with the low-res rainbow?
WIP something?

[Ashedragon]

WOah!?
What's the deal with the low-res rainbow?
WIP something?

I'm pretty sure that has to do with a visualisation of that dead creature there's vision cone.

[chriswearly]

WOah!?
What's the deal with the low-res rainbow?
WIP something?

There's code in the game written for the Lizards' field of vision. In the normal game you'll never see it, it'll just be abstract code. But for the Devs, they have other code that visually renders the "field-of-vision" code so they can see how the Lizard is behaving with the environment. Hence the cone of rainbow.

[Crispy75]

Could you show a link to that Community or tell the name please?

Probably Shadertoy https://www.shadertoy.com/

[JLJac]

Nah, they generally use textures. I've been looking but couldn't find it Can't remember if it was some tesselation technique they used... Something in my memory is about fractals, but that might just be because I don't know how tesselation works haha!

Aside, sorry about the slow devlogging pace lately! James hit me with a put together version of the new region, and now I'm working on getting the Rain Deer to path properly between rooms, and as always when doing this inter-room movement it's a total mess and I have to spend basically a day bug hunting. After this one there will only be one more creature like that though, the rest will use the trusty old shortcut system! In other news the region is AMAZING, definitely the best one yet as for basically everything! Really stoked about this one!